Ratatouille

Cinema releases by Pixar are always trumpeted long before the event, and you’re never left in any doubt that This Is A New Pixar.

I guess, with all the effort and dedication (and money) they pour into their movies, and the length of time between each one, they can be forgiven for making a song and dance about things. Consequently, Ratatouille seems to have been coming to a theatre near me for months. And it has…that not-entirely-enticing poster with a parenthesised phonetic nudge telling me how to pronounce it, has been plastered up in Vues and Cineworlds forever. Now, it’s time to sample what we’re clearly expected to consider a treat.

And, heck it is. Almost.

Ratatouille starts as it means to go on. First, with a hefty splash of voice-over from our likable hero, Remy, a rat living in rural France, who dreams of following the world’s most famous chef, Gusteau, into the rarefied world of gastronomy. Remy has an advanced sense of smell, and turns his little pink nose up at the horrific garbage his family considers acceptable. This narrative voice attaches you to the resilient rodent immediately and, despite the absurdity of his ambitions, you’re rooting for him. Second, and for many moviegoers this will be more important, the whole story starts with a pan and scan down into a french farmhouse that simply looks, well, real. That is, it would, if it weren’t so ultra real. Nothing could be this gorgeous, this perfect. This can’t possibly be animation, can it?

And those are the twin appeals, I guess; a connection to this unlikely character, and the utter jaw-dropping gobsmackingly right-there-infront-of-you-ness of the visuals. It’s a winning combination.

The action – via a very scary and loud sewer ride, that had my 7 year old a tad worried – moves swiftly to Paris and creates an entire, fully realised, new world for Remy (and Pixar) to explore. There are some belly laugh moments here, and much fun to be had, as Remy tries to inveigle himself into the kitchen of Gusteau’s old restaurant; and danger, too, as the new dictator of the ovens, Skinner, attempts to find out just who (or what) is disrupting his empire.

But the ace card, cards, for there are many, are the set pieces that lead to the extraordinary visuals.

One chase scene, along the bank of the Seine, is almost too perfect, washed in a fabulous golden early morning light, the textures of walls and cobbles and water rushing past, the sheer dynamism of the protagonists, it’s almost too much to take in. You think that you can’t possibly get too much of this.

But, of course, just like the rich food of the very best eateries, you can.

Even at a shade under 100 minutes, this is probably one frenetic hold-on-tight scene too long, and by the time the rather too sugary desert came along I was ready to go and see what the actual Real World looked like.

NB. Whatever you do, make sure you get there on time for the start of the show. Not only should you endeavour to do this anyway (people who turn up late at the movies should be flayed, rolled in rock salt and then boiled), but there’s a fantastic short at the beginning, Lifted, which has all the invention and humour of the hour and a half that follows and then some, and it’s a must-see.

(for Lifted, )

A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon)

My recent foray into Korean movies has been a thoroughly enjoyable one, with solid gold star ratings across the board for everything I’ve seen thus far. I thought I was getting a hang on what to expect, but nothing could have prepared me for the genuine masterpiece that is A Tale of Two Sisters.

OK, I know, that’s as hyperbolic as it gets, so I’ll retreat for a second and try and come at it from a different angle.

Ahem.

I like my horror (when I like my horror – sometimes I just go off it altogether, irritated by the overwhelming wave of dross, the stamina-sapping ratio of the unendurable to the really good, the fact that as a genre it is frankly shite at holding it’s own and hardly ever does itself any favours in the public domain), to be like that digression; bewildering. Which is odd because I am, by nature, a fellow of calm and rational analysis, a tad scientific and occasionally lacking in good humour when tested by the indulgences of others. My cinematic tastes can – when I’m pushed or in a crap mood – be somewhat Gecko-esque.

Why am I watching you? Do something interesting.

So, buoyed by the Korean angle, but ever wary of a horror movie touted as anything beyond “it’s OK”, I pushed my copy of the AToTS DVD around the house for a few days, unprepared to notch up my first Korean, and nth horror, disappointment. What the hell was I thinking?

A Tale of Two Sisters is easily the best new (to me) film I’ve seen all year, and other than my annual re-watch of Night of the Demon, the best I’ve seen in 2007 in toto.

Two girls, sisters Su-mi and Su-yeon, return from a period of rest and recuperation to their home; their mother, who we learn has died, has been replaced by the unfriendly and shrill stepmother, Eun-joo. Very soon, Su-mi becomes convinced that not only is Eun-joo evil, but that a terrifying presence inhabits the house. With the help of her sister, she tries to convince her father that something is seriously wrong, but he is bafflingly unconcerned. Gradually, more and more distressing events occur, conspiring to send Su-mi over the edge into a very distressing psychological episode where nothing is as it seems.

It’s almost impossible to give a detailed synopsis of the plot, because it genuinely wouldn’t make any sense, and it’d be so spoiler heavy that it’d ruin any of the astonishing twists which thump into you at about the half way point. Two turns of phrase in particular, one a few moments after the other, will have you in a state of such upheaval that you’ll forget the next few scenes as you try and assimilate them into your understanding. Yes, this is a nothing-is-as-it-seems movie, and it’s quite the most accomplished I’ve seen. I have now watched it through four times and am smiling with the audacity and ease with which it picks you up and spins you round to face another direction.

When you’re feeling that disoriented a director can do almost anything with a story, and there are some genuinely bizarre, horrifying, scary and downright peculiar scenes thrown into the mix here. On a second, third and fourth take, these things iron themselves out and you see the beauty of the movie’s tortuous internal logic, but for a first-sitting, you’re not lost exactly, but you’re wide open for almost anything, and that sense of unease is like being outside Regan McNeill’s bedroom door, poised to go in, and sensing the cold. Anything can happen. Can you bear it? Can you bear to see what’s going to happen?

At one point, Su-mi wakes from a nightmare, only to find herself in the middle of a worse one happening in her room. I was in such a state that, for the first time since I was a child, I was sat there with my hands over my open mouth, unable to breath, heart racing, terrified out of my wits. I have no doubt that anyone who has seen this film will know the scene I mean and experience a chill as they recall it.

There is nothing like this in Western cinema. Nothing. As Gecko’s protégé Bud says, Life comes down to a few moments. This is one of them. Don’t miss it.

Solas (Alone)

María, a young woman living on her own in a poor barrio in Seville, is obliged to put her mother up for a few nights, after her father is admitted to hospital. As he recovers, and before they can return to the village from which they came, the two women bicker and fight, and pull themselves in opposite directions, debating their fractured relationship.

María – angry, feisty, struggling and stressed – blames her father for her ills, for him being an authoritarian bully, and cannot understand why her mother hasn’t abandoned him long ago. But, as the days drift on, the two women develop a gradual, touching, personal understanding of each other’s unhappiness, loneliness and the reasons for their respective abilities to survive.

Her mother, in one of the most moving themes in the film, develops a heartwarming relationship with the old gentleman who lives downstairs from María, drawing him out of his own loneliness, with all the innocent tenderness of a true love affair; this plays in stark counterpoint to the dead-end nightmare of María’s awful, pointless, abusive boyfriend. A powerful strength grows between María and her madre, and they realise that the only real way forward is, as Dylan said, to keep on keeping on: “Defeat is not the enemy’s triumph, admitting the defeat is”.

This isn’t as bleak or as slow as it sounds, in fact it’s 100 minutes that goes by in the blink of an eye, but the point that’s really made in Benito Zambrano’s film is that detail counts; that the small gesture can be devastating, that the briefest exchange can alter the course of people’s lives. After trying to discover Spanish film through the showy Madrileño brio of Almodóvar, it is refreshing to see a movie that embraces the srength of women in the face of poverty and isolation, and that does it by so many careful and considered steps. Solas covers a lot of the same ground that Volver managed with such entertaining flash and colour, but with economy and sobriety and much, much less sentimentality.