Martyrs

Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs arrives with a fearsome reputation, and even before the credits we’re in shock.

As a young girl, Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) has been kidnapped, tortured and abused. It is emphasised that this trauma is physical and not sexual, but it is physical in the extreme. and on her escape Lucie is clearly an unreachable and isolated individual. The doctors and psychiatrists at the institution that takes her in cannot contact her; in the end they rely on another patient, Anna (Morjana Alaoui), who seems to have gained some level of trust, to make contact with her.

We jump ahead 15 years and witness a happy nuclear family life. Mom, Dad, two grounded and intelligent kids, all sitting down to a chatty and natural Sunday breakfast. When there is a knock at the door the Dad answers, only to be presented with a hooded figure holding a shotgun. He dies immediately. The killer enters the house and sets about slaughtering the rest of the family. As the hood falls down we realise (for – odd as it may be to say this – she’s a strangely and uniquely attractive girl) this is the grown Lucie, and she is convinced that these are the people responsible for her horrors as a child. It is an extraordinary scene, utterly chilling in its relentlessness, a young woman filled with murderous determination but at the same time wracked with doubts and fear, shooting and reloading, fumbling with dirty bloodstained fingers at the cartridges.

When she is finished she calls Anna to tell her what she’s done. We are just 10 minutes into the movie and have hardly had a single frame without blood,

As Lucie waits for her friend she hears a noise and is thrown into a paroxysm of terror. There is something other than her in the house, and it terrifies her.

When Anna arrives there is an extended period of intense recrimination. As she tries to come to terms with her freind’s actions, Lucie continues to be tormented by the cruelly disfigured woman whom only she seems able to see. From this confusing and chaotic mess there is no release. Anna is forever trying to make sense of things, but Lucie’s actions become ever wilder and more unpredictable. She hits and stabs herself, crashing her head repeatedly against the walls and driving a knife into her flesh. We wait in vain for a bloodless moment.

Something has to give, and it does, at precisely the half-way mark. The screen blackens and the movie awakes into a new story line that even the most jaded cinephile will not have expected. And at this point, Martyrs decides to become not just horrific, but an actual physical test in just how gruelling cinema can make life for its audience. Alarmingly, and as I sat there hands held up ready to admit defeat I did not imagine I would be saying this a day later, it is worth the effort to watch.

Martyrs is three films in one. Firsty it is a thriller from the Audition or Old Boy side of the tracks, a sticky and spiky slice of unrelenting in-your-face grimness, chock full of unflinching detail. Second, it is a ghost story with the same dislocated sense of reality as, say, Ringu. Although it doesn’t take too long to realise that the monstrous creature haunting Lucie is her guilt and shame manifest in the form of a ghoulish female victim, for a brief period it is genuinely unsettling and eerie. Third, it’s something else, possibly a sophisticated flight of fantasy, or a bizarre brutal romance, but one thing it’s not is Torture Porn. It is sad to reflect that in all the tens of thousands of words written about the film since it’s stunned reception at Cannes, the obvious and most often cited reference points are Hostel or Saw. Sure, by Haute Tension out of Baise-moi; a nod towards Wolf Creek and Ichi the Killer, granted, but it’s as far away from Eli Roth’s and James Wan’s pathetic efforts as they are from Babe and The Railway Children.

It helps that the performances (Jampanoï’s Lucie is as uncomfortable a depiction of madness as, dammit yes, Forest Whitaker’s Amin in The Last King of Scotland) are exceptional and grown-up, but there’s so much more to it than that.

There is no titillation in Martyrs at all, no clever-clever ways to kill or dissect people. In many many ways much of the horror comes from Anna’s attempts to undo the nastiness. It is, no less, a sly criticism of (Hostel in particular) the laziest of such efforts. As the brutality goes up a notch in the last third the camera lingers on the violence and dares to say that it is bored with it. After a 40+ minute scene at the start, we descend to innumerable vignettes of blandly repetitive cruelty. The images fade in and out. This isn’t pretty, but it isn’t fun either, it isn’t entertainment. Laugier is goading us into thinking this is a good thing. It’s as if he’s saying he’s destroying this person by degrees, why would you think this is a good thing if that was all there was to it?

When the unexpected pay-off comes, Laugier takes the seriousness of his argument to another level, even going so far as to claim a near-spiritual tangent hidden away in there, a whole world away from Hostel’s risible ‘for kicks’ MO. This is not to say that it is necessarily successful, and for some a high-minded treatise on suffering, art and other states, may seem a step too far, but when it comes, it’s hard to doubt the film’s scope and ambition. For a brief moment, Martyrs really does just about manage to have its cake and eat it. There is, and I’m sorry if you can’t believe it to be so, a greater meaning here, something actually beyond what is presented. Ultra-violence with a purpose. Shit, whatever next?

CODA:

Much much interest in this post today, whch I’m flattered to see. As you’ve taken the trouble to come along (thank you) I would recommend the Divinations review of Martyrs to be found here. Not only is it considerably more elegant and erudite than mine own, it also goes beyond my effort into areas that I would have only managed to spoil. Please click on…

Cheers.
a

Looking For Eric

Richard Thompson sang, “There’s a love you can’t survive / And it burns you up inside”. Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) has bought into this philosophy wholeheartedly, despite his heartache lasting 30 years, and now, weary and run ragged by life’s endless obstacles he seems a broken and dispirited man. Small wonder then that he steps fully formed and real into the latest Ken Loach film, the master of grimy social realism plucking another beaten-up loser from the gloomy milieu of modern life and giving him a good kicking to make a point.

Like Peter Mullen in My Name is Joe, or Bruce Jones in Raining Stones, Evets is painfully perfect, a wrecked and dented little soul beset on all sides by the iniquities of pretty much bloody everything that hoves into view. He has a crappy job as a postman, a tip of a house and two reckless and seemingly lost stepsons who treat him with contempt. But his deepest scar is for Lily, the girl he panicked over and left all those years ago, and whose memory he keeps in stasis buried in a trunk filled with too-painful-to-touch memorabilia.

What he manages to snaffle, unbelievably, but probably due to one too many sneaky tokes on his kids’ weed stash, is a little bit of advice from King Eric himself. Cantona. Ooh, and indeed, ahh. Yes, that Cantona. Appearing in his room as he contemplates darkly on where his life has taken him, little Eric is suddenly presented with his hero, King Eric. Cantona becomes Eric’s confidante, his guide, a trusted friend and teacher.

At first, Eric is bemused and worried (”I’m still getting over the sardines thing” he groans, referring to Cantona’s famously obtuse and baffling comment to the press in 1995 when asked for a quote following his kung fu kick on a racist fan), but gradually the idle idol wins him over with some genuinely touching aphorisms; when Eric contemplates suicide, he firmly but clearly states, “we always have more options than we think”. When asked if his first love might hate, or worse, feel ambiguous towards him, Cantona looks into his wine glass and answers in French. After much pleading, he tells Eric, “the noblest vengeance is to forgive”. Eric takes this to mean that Lily may have forgiven him, but we know that it also means he must forgive himself.

Cantona is brilliant in this sidekick role. He chivvies Eric along with flair and brio, never once losing his mystique as the unknowable thinker, but also managing, in one fantastic moment of pure comedy genius, to puncture the pomposity just enough to ground him for a moment. Talking about the pain of the nine month suspension after the kung fu incident, Eric thinks it’s about time he showed his hero a little sympathy: “sometimes we forget you’re just a man,” he says, with genuine concern. He is met with that impassive gallic slab of a face; “I am not a man. I am Cantona.” The timing before he cracks into a smile is the best you’ll see in the cinema all year.

I could have watched this odd little double act for hours, but, as with Mike Leigh’s conscience wobble in the middle of the otherwise sublime Happy-Go-Lucky, where he suddenly remembered he needed to ’say’ something and so veered off on a ten minute schtick about homelessness, Loach also wakes up and realises that fuzzy and funny comedy romance isn’t going to be enough. And so, off we go, but with less restraint than Leigh, into a long and ultimately quite grim treatise on gun crime in Manchester. This injection of plot is so jolting it manages to derail the film for almost a third of its length, and is, for a period, genuinely distressing. Obviously, it’s a subject that should and must be discussed, but it slams into the wonderful first part of the film so hard as to leave you seriously disoriented.

Ignoring a few almighty plot holes with a casual wave of his hand, Loach tacks on a feel good coda, but it doesn’t really restore the movie back to the simpler and more engaging story of Eric rediscovering his purpose. It’s odd that just as the audience think they might have found Eric, and enjoyed searching for him, the director seems so eager to punch them into submission with rather too much of his accustomed and probably predictable social commentary. And if that isn’t the ending you wanted or hoped for, well, don’t blame me.

Terminator Salvation

At a splodge under two hours, Terminator Salvation (you don’t really want a précis, do you?) is striving for the lean actioner tag. Lots of bang for your buck, speed, noise, the whole nine yards. I think we all know what we’re talking about.

What you actually get is Arthur Dent’s cup of tea from the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; a movie that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper film.

It’s hard to deny that it has many things going for it: a proper and, let’s call him determinedly focussed, star (Christian Bale); a long-standing franchise to hang its shit from; a gazillion dollars’ worth of top-notch CGI; a loyal fanbase, and…the most bafflingly inept, bloodless, soulless and downright hopeless direction imaginable. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fucking mess.

McG (McG, fercryinoutloud) helms the thing like a child throwing toys around his backyard. He chucks items and people about with happy abandon, creating admittedly some eye-popping images (although, ILM and the many other visual effects organisations, really get that nugget of kudos, surely?), but what he manages to create isn’t an interesting, challenging or even fun take on the man vs machine story. No, it’s a bucket of pebbles with ideas written on them, shaken up and down to see what flies out and what makes a noise.

McG (I’m not going to be able to write that anymore now, sorry) is the man who managed to wibble away so uselessly on Charlie’s Angels, if you care to recall, so he really knows how to fuck things up. Given the keys to the kingdom and allowed free rein, he pisses the whole thing up the wall like an unloved ginger ASBO lacking his Retalin shot.

There is no structure, no helpful narrative, no style or finesse, no consistency. Brief, flat, uninflected reactions between so called characters move the story along a little, but it’s essentially one slam-bang action sequence after another. The interaction between actors is executed in the same way that children make their GI Joe or Barbie dolls talk to each other before segue-ing to the next mud fight; yada yada bang bang.

Throughout, I felt insulted. The audience I watched it with was similarly dislocated and hostile. People talked constantly. The laziest parade of uninterested punters ever trooped in, barely looking at the screen it seemed, some almost 40 minutes after it started. When the expected boxes were ticked (the sadly predictable litany of, “I’ll be back,” or “come with me if you want to live,” and “there is no fate but what we make,” trotted out as supercilious bullet-points) it raised a titter. But this is the cinema of ‘They Will Come’. It is a triumph of expectation and arrogance.

A smug and ignorant waste of time.

Drag Me To Hell

Where were we? Oh yes, Lesbian Vamp-…no, not that. That was awful; I mean, I could tell what they would have liked to do, and all, but it was just painful. Sorry, I know I’m unpicking an old thread here, but it’s important. LVK failed badly, to some extent because it was colon-cloggingly shit from titles to credits, but mostly because it didn’t understand the genre it was trying to parody (and that is such a high-minded term for what they ended up doing). If you don’t actually ‘get’ that which you want to go after, you’ll never manage it. There is a moment in the film where the fat one is sat there, covered in goo, trying to espouse this clunking po-mo drivel about the whole vampire mythos, and it’s supposed to be funny and erudite and cutting, and it fails utterly. It’s not even particularly ham-fisted. It’s just wrong. And if you get that wrong, then you have no right to be there.

Now, what the clueless idiots should have done, was save all their money and had a big night out watching Sam Raimi’s rollicking ride, Drag Me To Hell. Had this come out 9 months sooner, that first film would never have been attempted. Drag says more about horror, and with more passion and more…dammit…authority, than pretty much anyone (including your Rodriguezes and Yuznas and early Peter Jacksons) can manage. He grew up in the fucking briar patch, man.

Drag Me To Hell (what a determinedly B Movie title that is) opens in a storm, and more or less continues in that vibe until the very end. A cursed boy is, well, dragged to Hell, and then the title (in mahoooosive white on black ) thunders onto the screen behind the earth-moving soundtrack. Aaaarrgh and, indeed, Grrrrr! Bathos intervenes, and our next stop – of course – is a bank, where pretty loan manager Christine (Alison Lohman) is in the hunt for a promotion against her creepy co-worker Stu. Her boss says she has to toughen up, so she does, by refusing to grant a mortgage extension to hideous old hag, Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver, spectacularly gross and over the top). In her despair and growing disgust at the young woman’s hardline, the crone curses Christine with an ancient spell, totemising a button from her coat, which will in three days lure a violent demon towards her, which will drag her, you guessed it, to Hell.

I know, I know, enough with the Hell dragging. We get it already.

So, obviously, you won’t need to be told that for the next three days Christine’s predicament gets worse and, with each attempt to extricate herself, she just hauls herself further and further into abyss.

And, yes, you’d be right. That is just what happens, but it’s the way that it’s done which so thoroughly entertains. Raimi hasn’t done this knockabout horror for ages, but he’s not lost an ounce of his verve and dynamism. The trick is that he knows his roots, he knows what works. He understands what his audience are expecting, and manages to give them it and so much more besides. I would think that the last time I winced and laughed all at the same time and in such doses, was the last time I watched Evil Dead II. Raimi is great at the horror, but he’s great at the gags, too, and when he’s really on a roll the horror is the gag. The gumming scene alone attests to that, but there are many more examples, my personal favourite being the perfect illustration of what not to do at an open casket wake.

His medium is always going to be the pitch perfect physical comedy. If there’s such a thing as slapstick horror, then this is it, but what lifts this to be something really special is the extraordinary way in which he can invest the most mundane objects (a handkerchief, a slice of cake) with nail-splintering tension. Alison Lohman helps hugely, of course, in fact all the crew here put in smart, knowing performances (Clay Dalton’s baffled rationalist boyfriend is so splendidly sensible) and play it straight almost up until the end. Joyously, there is just enough time for Christine to pull out an almighty Grand Guignol grave-robbing faux finale, rammed with thunder and Ash-like posing, backlit by the lightning. She doesn’t quite grunt, “groovy”, but she’s not far off.

Raimi is clearly a huge fan of legendary horror movie Night of the Demon, for it is referenced constantly, and the climax of the film is almost a steal. But, look, if you’re going to have the shit go down backed up by a booming great orchestral score, then there can be no finer homage to make than to Tourneur’s awesome 50s classic. It just puts into extra relief how the guys who made Lesbian Vampire Killers never had a bloody clue.

The posters say that Drag Me To Hell is a Masterpiece. It’s not, that accolade belongs to Night of the Demon, but it is a masterclass, and as a companion to that earlier film, it’s very nearly as worthy as it gets. And that’s saying something.

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Angels & Demons

In true Miley Cyrus style, 7 Things I Hate About You.

you’re vain…

I tried many times to get this point across to people about Dan Brown’s book, and Ron Howard’s subsequent film of, The Da Vinci Code: for me, it’s never really been about the subject. I couldn’t care less, I really couldn’t, about the Holy Grail or The Knights Templar or Opus Dei, or any of that stuff. It’s all about the telling of the story.

And in that, we’re failed. Palpably failed. But already, I know I’ve lost them, the fans, the Brownites. The shutters come down; you’re branded some sort of snob, a sneerer, you’re someone who can’t allow that a film can be ‘only a movie’, or that a book can be ‘pure escapism’. This, of course is such a fatuous and thick-headed argument that you actually feel lessened for pursuing it. But, fuck it, I’m willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause, so let’s give it a try. If you want pure escapism, watch extreme sports or birds flying for two hours; and you know what, I guarantee after a few minutes you’ll want to know a bit more: why is the bleached-blond knucklehead throwing himself to his much hoped for death?; what sort of birds are they, where do they live, breed, nest? You see, you have to have something. You’ve got to hang your interest on some sort of hook, and if that’s the case, why not make it a bloody good one? Why not embrace a structured and satisfying conceit for a work crafted and moulded out of a genuine desire, as Lord Reith said, to educate, inform and entertain? Why settle for such dreadful shite? The Da Vinci Code fails as a piece of fiction because it is written by a moron who knows what he would ideally like to say, but who lacks, pretty much entirely, any of the abilities required to say it. “The famous man looked at the red cup” joked Stewart Lee, taunting Brown’s flat and unflinchingly bland style, and he hit it fairly squarely on the noggin. Dan Brown really is that crap. There is nothing to the man. He has as much style as a baby moving magnetic words around on a fridge door. When someone as lowbrow as Lee Child can manage to do it, and Dan Brown can’t, then shit, honey, you know you’re in trouble.

Now, I haven’t read Angels & Demons, but I have trudged all the way through The Da Vinci Code, and despite the possible shaking of heads and tuts of disapproval, I’m willing to believe that in it he hasn’t performed a startling volte face and produced a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sadly, I’ll admit, that is a massive assumption on my behalf, so if anyone wants to authoritatively contradict me, please go ahead.

…your games

OK, plot; here it is. Be warned, this is going to be painful. The Illuminati have decided to blow the Vatican up. To do this, they’ve waited for the Pope to die, and, during the conclave, managed to steal some anti-matter created in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, shipped it to Rome. Then, four cardinals are kidnapped. The reason for that is – bear with me – so that they can be killed on the hour in manners befitting the respective elements of scientific blah-di-blah, something about Air and Fire, Earth and Water. You know. You’ve seen this sort of shit before. Anyway, the cardinals are locked away in basements in various churches throughout Rome, while this nasty Illuminati type (who seems to work on his own, so has done quite well what with security and that) keeps heading out into the streets to dump the bodies every hour; once they’re gone, he’ll detonate the anti-matter and send the entire city to wherever it is evil non-church ancient science loonies blow things to. Who will save the day?

you’re insecure…

Well, if you’ve been watching and reading the Brownster, you’ll know the answer. It’s Robert Langdon…huzzah! The man who, in the books, “looks like Harrison Ford”, but in the movies is dependable potato-faced between-good-roles Tom Hanks! Yay! Langdon, as I imagine we all know by now, is a Symbologist at Harvard. I’m sure that makes him a Semiologist, really, but as we’re dragging as many people as possible along, it probably pays to follow the path of least resistance here, and the hard of thinking would only giggle at the accurate term’s first syllable. And then they’d get confused. And a bit scared.

Langdon is asked to fly to Rome by the Vatican itself. After the issues with the Catholic Church in the previous film (ironically – and it is the only use of irony in the entire thing – the movie takes place after The Da Vinci Code, whereas the book uses it as a prequel, and so we have several chortles at “our previous…difficulties”) you’d think this was a little rich, but it seems that the good Professor is the only person in the world who can work this shit out. As with all evil plans, the killer is intent on leaving frickin’ clues everywhere so that we can have a chase. Why these people don’t just blow shit up and be done with it is beyond me.

And, Jumping Jack Christ, isn’t Langdon happy to point out just how clever he is? All. The. Fucking. Time. Brown’s tiresome habit of telling us stuff we simply didn”t realise we didn’t know, or really want to know, or need to know, is echoed time and again. “Ah! The Great Castration of the statues by Pope Pius IX!” Hanks muses, without being asked, as he’s being walked to the Vatican offices, “In 1857…” Or, more patronisingly, “do I have to tell you guys your own history?” well, yes, Robert, clearly you do, because how else will we be lead along by the nose being told stuff you’ve whipped off wikipedia, you prick.

…you love me, you like her

Langdon’s character is followed around by the lovely Vittoria (Ayelet Zurer), an – I shit you not – enigmatic particle physicist. Her presence is crucial because a) making our hero an expert on the Higgs boson is a stretch for even the densest of cinema-goers, and b) Langdon needs someone to explain the plot to.

The action takes place over a roughly 6 hour period. This is not in real time, although it bloody well felt like it. It’s a nebulous timescale, swiped from Taken, and allows everyone to get into a bit of a lather, for ‘important documents’ to be flown from Switzerland, and for our protagonists to reach their artificially constructed deadlines at a minute to the hour, or just after, or just on. Leave me alone, I am trying to sex this shit up, dammit.

It means that everything can be done at pace. Langdon and Vittoria get to run into rooms, he gets to say something erudite about history or something, point at a picture, and then leave that room. Yes, it’s just like The Da Vinci Code. This is what passes for action. If you’re expecting to find out anything about these people, any hint of insight or motivation, you’ll be hugely disappointed.

Oh, and. And. God, anyone, anyone who has seen a twisty-turny thriller worth its salt will know at one particular point in this that the game is up. It is a cinematic truth, universally acknowledged, that when a reveal is made mostly off screen and the accused dispatched before he can explain himself fully, then issues have not really been resolved. We will be made to return – alarmingly, clunkily – via a secret camera to the unsatisfying scene to view it anew.

you make me laugh, you make me cry…

Things get worse. We are, as stated in Rome. Well, not Rome. That’s for damn certain. I mean, it is Rome, obviously. Look, there’s the Colosseum, there’s St Peter’s Basillica, that’s the Castel Sant’Angelo. The production values and the cinematography are fabulous, but, just as with Paris in the last movie, Dan Brown thinks you can get across town in minutes, he thinks that all the squares except St Peter’s are almost empty, and that people won’t notice if you tip a 70 year old man into a fountain. All the while, predictably, we’re being told this fact and that fact but if you think you might get an idea of what the Eternal City is actually like, you’d be better off watching almost anything else (Roman Holiday, La Dolce Vita, Sabrina the Teenage Witch Goes to Rome). Denied access to the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel and other areas, some famous landmarks have been brilliantly reproduced, but others, the Vatican archives for example, merely guessed at. And, so, if you need someone to remake a Bond movie circa 1973, Ron Howard is clearly your man. His secret underground library is hilariously Evil Nemesis Lair material. Who knew there was a hollowed-out volcano under the Basilica? No wonder the Holy Father commands such respect.

…your friends, they’re jerks

Brown’s books run along rails so painfully and determinedly, Ron Howard has no choice but to follow in exactly the same way. This is inevitable, because if they didn’t, if they had even a moment’s pause, to break out of the dull as buggery locate-and-cement-part-1-to-part-2 structure, it would all become even more obviously plastic than it already is. And of course this is the film’s almightiest failing. The film plays out like Dan Brown prose. It may just be the most faithful adaptation of a novel of all time, because it is flat, non-inflected, reactionary, shallow and tedious. All situations are signposted, all attempts at gravitas are misguided and amusing. The cliffhangers, when they’re not being ridiculous to the point of insulting (I can’t deny that it’s almost worth it for the helicopter ascending to Heaven moment, more of which in a second), are utterly pointless and derivative. Bombs with timers…you know what I’m talking about. It’s a bit like looking at someone else’s holiday snaps being described by a third party who wasn’t even there.

and the 7th thing I hate the most

…is Ewan McGregor. I was going to leave it there, but I can’t. In this, he’s the Camerlengo, the figure who allegedly acts as the Pope while the new Pope is being decided upon. He is supposed to be from Northern Ireland. What is his excuse for speaking in the bizarre Scottish/Italian hybrid he manages? Can’t Scottish people do Belfast accents? I bet they fucking can, you know. Why does he sound so terminally bored? Why does he look so terminally bored? If someone branded you with a three foot square red hot iron, would you be able to trot about five minutes later? Would you be able to fly a helicopter? Would you be able to time it perfectly to allow an anti-matter bomb to explode miles above Rome and then parachute out, straight back to the exact spot you took off from? Finally, the answer as to why Ewan can’t impersonate an Irish priest has become obvious; he’s Vin friggin’ Diesel, that’s why! It is, as I say above, almost worth shelling out for the helicopter moment (certainly, nothing will look more satisfyingly hilarious this year than a parachuting Super Priest with his soutane flapping merrily around his thighs as he floats into the wall of the Vatican), and it prefixes the most grandiose, self-regarding image manipulation you are likely to see in a long while. Ewan, creating a hole that goes up to Heaven.

Oh, OK, only sort of. But it’s a moment that really wants to wow you. It reckons itself big time, and it’s as tiresome and fatuous as everything that has preceded it.

Give me strength. Angels & Demons is a great fat wank fest of ill-considered head-scratching stupidity, limned by overblown imagery and pompous declarations of portent. It is full of the most dreadful dreck you can possibly imagine, and it is worse than all of that because it takes itself so painfully seriously. The straight faces and stern dialogue highlight just how far some people will go to make a buck. Dreadful.