To quote a fellow reviewer, Katalin Varga is a bleak and beautiful
film. Just the way I like them, too. Written and directed by English filmmaker
Peter Strickland, funded from his own bank account and filmed in Romania with
Romanian actors speaking Romanian. Technically this could be another fine film
for inclusion in the much-vaunted Romanian New Wave.
It's a slow telling of a woman's
quest for revenge nine years after she was raped but it's really not the rape
revenge film you're thinking of. Not least because you don't see the rape and
the revenge is not sweet or bloody. You do see, however, plenty of atmospheric
shots of the countryside, close-ups on troubled faces, meaning conveyed with a
nod or a slight movement and plenty of interesting back story inferred rather
than explained explicitly.
Newcomer Hilda Peter as the
eponymous protagonist carries the entire film on her delicate shoulders but it
should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Strickland's followup,
Berberian Sound Studio, that the careful use of sound effects and score is the
main star of the film, serving to subtly drive proceedings and create an air of
foreboding around each moments.
Don’t Talk To Strange Men is essentially a British public service
announcement for young girls of the 60s, and a warning for their parents,
originally released as the B-movie to Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
It doubles as a very good thriller produced on the outskirts of the social
realist movement of the time. The idea of seducing young girls anonymously and
the frank look at the effect it can have on previously sensible teenagers is
one that is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s but modern cinema could
never play things quite so subtly. Director Pat Jackson benefits from a really
tight script, on the nose performances and impressive cinematography from Jack
Cardiff, to produce an all round gem of a film forgotten in time.
The Big Easy
was Jim McBride's followup to his Richard Gere starring reimagining of Godard's
Bout de Souffle and boy does it fly in the face of expectations. A New Orleans
set neo-noir should be hot, sweaty, sordid and a little bit mystical,
essentially everything that Alan Parker's Angel Heart would be the following
year but with this Dennis Quaid starrer you're left with a wise-cracking buffoon
whose occasional Cajun accent is suspect at best and the only thing hot and
sweaty is the chemistry between the sheets he shares with Ellen Barkin and a
movie which aims for light hearted entertainment at all the wrong moments.
Otherwise it's a very ordinary story of heroin and crooked cops that telegraphs
its ultimate villains from the opening scene, one that could have been set in
any major American city such is the magnolia nature of proceedings. It
will surprise nobody I’m sure to note that Hollywood took note and made sure
that Jim McBride didn’t have much of a directorial career after this.
