Love

Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Faith opens with a scene of self-flagellation, and anyone familiar with this Austrian director might be justified in suggesting that watching three of his films back-to-back is tantamount to the same thing. The titles Seidl has given to his Paradise trilogy are Love, Faith and Hope, but these are not the words that one readily associates with his films – words like bleak, explicit, confrontational and provocative are more likely to be found in reviews of his work, which has drawn as many criticisms as it has plaudits over the years. Despite all this, Sunday June 16^th was denoted as “Seidl Sunday” in the UK, with a handful of cinemas across the country offering a rare chance to see his trilogy in its entirety. I decided it was an opportunity not to be missed, but I must admit that I walked towards the BFI Southbank with a number of questions in my mind and a certain sense of dread in my heart. If I’m looking for paradise in the cinema, is Ulrich Seidl really the man I want to take me there?

The characters in these films may be seeking paradise, but of course, the situations they find themselves in more closely resemble purgatory. We meet all three of Seidl’s protagonists in the prologue for Love. Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is a middle-aged Austrian woman making final preparations for her Kenyan holiday, but before she can depart she has to drop off her teenage daughter Melanie (Melanie Lenz) at the home of her sister Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter). Anna Maria is a devoutly religious nurse whose spends her every waking moment worshipping Christ, whether she’s inflicting a painful penance on herself or lugging a statue of the Virgin Mary around town to try and win the hearts and minds of those in need. 13 year-old Melanie is a typical teen, sulky and unresponsive around her mother, and permanently glued to her mobile phone, but she’s about to get a rude awakening as she has been enlisted in a diet camp for the summer.

All three of these characters are united in their quest for something they cannot hope to possess. Teresa’s holiday is a search for love, but she is looking in entirely the wrong place. The Kenyan resort in which she is staying in offers the possibility of sex with young African males, whose bodies are one of the few saleable commodities they possess. Teresa’s fellow travellers understand this trade-off, but she wants more. She wants a young man to look into her heart and really desire her for who she is. Of course, the men are only too happy to make declarations of love for as long as Teresa has money in her pocket, and it is incredibly sad to see this woman being sucked in by the smooth-talking Munga (Peter Kazungu), who quickly begins telling her tales of woe about his sister being unable to afford her child’s medical bills.

One of the most striking images in Love is the beachfront on which the white European tourists sunbathe while young Africans stand patiently on the other side of a barrier, waiting for someone to cross so they can pounce with their trinkets for sale. This set-up potently expresses the film’s dramatic shift – Teresa and her friends think they are in control with these quiet young men, whom they objectify and mock, but as soon as Teresa crosses the rope she is on their territory, and they know exactly how to manipulate a woman like her. The power games are reversed again later in the film, when the four women drunkenly toy with an African boy in their hotel room, competing to make him produce an erection; a long sequence that’s very uncomfortable to watch.

Faith

Seidl loves his long takes, which immerse the audience in the characters’ experience and spare us nothing, even as we might wish to look away. There’s no doubt that he enjoys making viewers uncomfortable, and such an approach leaves him open to accusations of indulging in voyeurism, shock tactics of exploitation. I think he gets away with it in Love, largely thanks to a hugely sympathetic and moving lead performance from Tiesel and a deft sense of pacing and humour, but Faith falls some way short of the standard set by the first film in the triptych. Faith‘s Anna Maria is portrayed with astonishing conviction by Hofstätter, but the character immediately comes across as worryingly one-dimensional. She has given over her whole life to God, with crucifixes hanging in every room of her house and a picture of Jesus next to her bed that she kisses before falling asleep, and we see her roaming around her home on bloody knees for hours as she prays. Seidl shoots all of this in the same detached, non-judgemental style that he films Love, but Faith‘s problems occur when the film’s secondary character is introduced.

Although she appears to be a lonely spinster, we learn that Anna Maria is married when her husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh) – a wheelchair-bound Muslim – returns and demands that she perform her wifely duties. All of this raises too many questions that Seidl has no interest in answering. How and why did these two people marry? What was the accident that left him paralysed? Where has he been for the past two years? Did Anna Maria’s religious extremism only begin in that period? By giving us no sense of what their life together was like before, Seidl simply gives us a portrait of an odd couple who have no business co-habiting, and he sits back to watch the sparks fly. There’s no question that their ensuing conflict is often fascinating to observe, but the tension feels contrived and watching Nabil torment his wife in scene after scene eventually has a deadening effect. Some respite is offered by Anna Maria’s door-to-door Virgin Mary excursions, particularly a hilarious encounter with hoarder René Rupnik – who featured in Seidl’s 1997 documentary The Bosom Friend – but this film about the challenge of maintaining spiritual purity feels diluted through Seidl’s needlessly blunt approach.

Hope

While Anna Maria maintains that Jesus is the only man she needs in her life, her niece Melanie is also pining for a man she cannot have. At the draconian fat camp where she is resigned to spending the summer, Melanie strikes up a flirtatious relationship with the camp’s doctor (Joseph Lorenz), which quickly develops into an all-consuming crush. This is tricky territory and Seidl negotiates it quite brilliantly, with his skill at eliciting superb performances from his female leads extending to this film’s terrific young cast. The frank conversations that Melanie shares with her more confident and experienced best friend Verana (Verena Lehbauer) feel authentic and natural, and Seidl expertly captures the confused emotions of a hopeless teenage crush. When Melanie is rebuffed by the doctor in whom she has invested so much hope, you can almost hear the sound of her heart breaking as you look at Lenz’s forlorn face. I never would have anticipated such a touching, tender and funny examination of first love from Ulrich Seidl, but Hope is exactly that.

These stories were originally intended to exist in one film, but after amassing 90 hours of footage through his improv-heavy style, Seidl wisely decided to let each tale exist on its own and the result is an extraordinary bold and impressive trilogy. Certainly, you won’t see many better female performances this year than those on display here, and you won’t see many films as strikingly shot, with cinematographers Wolfgang Thaler and Ed Lachman crafting a series of stunning compositions, whether they are on a sunlit African beach or trapped in the confines of Anna Maria’s home. Of course, Seidl will never be to everyone’s taste (“I can’t watch any more of that shit,” I overheard a woman say as she left Love) but it seems to me that these pictures are the most accomplished, compassionate and emotionally complex films I’ve seen from him to date. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend a Seidl triple-bill to all viewers, but these films deserve to be seen, one way or another.

1995

“How long has it been since we just wandered around bullshitting?” wonders Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Midnight. The correct answer, though it doesn’t come, is nine years: the period of time since we last saw Jesse and Celine (Julie Delpy) in the 2004 film Before Sunset. Before that, it was nine years again, when the couple first met in Before Sunrise (1995).

It’s a long way from being the year’s biggest threequel, yet in some circles, Before Midnight is surely the most anticipated.  Directed, like its predecessors, by Richard Linklater, co-written by the director and his two stars, it now completes one of the most satisfying trilogies in cinema.

In the first, Jesse meets Celine on a train while travelling across Europe.  At a loose end for a night, he persuades her to spend a night exploring Vienna with him.  The film follows them as they explore the town, discuss their lives and their hopes for the future, and fall in love, while being aware that their time together is limited. At the film’s end,  they agree to meet in six months at the same station. Though open-ended, the question of whether or not they saw each other again was one that at the time, nobody expected – and perhaps, nobody wanted – to be resolved.  The film was the story of one romantic night, the kind of brief encounter that many people – young and old – would dream of experiencing on holiday.  It only became a cliffhanger in retrospect.

The second film opens with Jesse in Paris, on a promotional tour for his novel This Time, based on the events of the first film.  Answering questions in a bookshop, he is asked if his characters really did meet six months later. After claiming that the question makes a good test of whether you are a romantic or a cynic, he avoids it: “To quote my grandfather, to answer that would take the piss out of the whole thing.”

Of course, the answer is shortly revealed, though the film in no way takes the piss out of the whole thing. The shortest of the three films, Before Sunset takes place in real time as Jesse and Celine discuss their memories of their night together, and how they feel about it in retrospect.  Time is again against them, as Jesse is shortly to catch a plane home to an unhappy marriage.  The film ends on a cliffhanger of sorts – albeit a completely satisfying one – as it becomes clear that Jesse is not going to catch his plane.

Though Hawke and Delpy apparently had considerable input into the screenplay of the first film, it was credited to Linklater and Kim Krizan.  The sequel credits them officially as co-writers, and aspects of their own subsequent careers were clearly included. Hawke had become a published novelist (though one gets the sense that Jesse’s book had better reviews), while Delpy released an album, three songs of which are used in the film, including one sung, and supposedly written, by Celine herself.

2004

Before Sunset is a very rare kind of film; a sequel to a film which apparently had no need of one, that fits seamlessly with its predecessor in form and style while broadening its emotional scope.  That’s a high ambition for a brief, and apparently straightforward tale, but it is utterly successful; a masterpiece that also strengthened its predecessor.

The third film necessarily takes a slightly different approach. While the characters are again in a picturesque location (Greece, on holiday with friends and family) the pressure of time is off. We again get long, languid takes in which the couple wander around the scenery talking, but only after earlier scenes which involve other characters – firstly, Jesse’s now-teenage son – and reveal what has happened to the couple in the years since we last saw them.  Initially, all seems well, but it soon becomes clear that there are tensions in their relationship.  Jesse worries about his son; Celine, about her career.  Their friends have arranged for the couple to spend the night alone in a hotel, yet neither seems overly keen on the idea, and go along with it largely to avoid appearing ungrateful.

It’s in the hotel, in the final third of the film, that the bubbling resentments between the couple come to the fore in a painful, vicious argument.  Hawke and Delpy are better than ever here: there’s a moment when she sits, arms folded, eyes narrowed in cold fury, that should send a shiver of apprehension through every man watching.  And it’s possible to sympathise with both, to recognise when each is failing to understand the other’s perspective, and when each has a valid complaint against the other.  It is genuinely upsetting to see these most loquacious and articulate of characters turn on each other like this, but also riveting. Finally, it’s honest – both about the difficulty of maintaining the passion of a new romance, and about how small disagreements and resentments can fester and poison a relationship – in a way that a film suffused with the same romantic glow of its predecessors could not be.

2013

If I had to criticise the film, I would admit that some of the supporting characters feel as though they’ve strolled in from a Woody Allen film (though one of the good ones).  Also, the final scene feels a little artificial; it’s there to ensure a resolution, open ended and possibly temporary though it is, and doesn’t have the natural flow we’ve become accustomed to in this series.  But that’s a very minor flaw.

I have been lucky enough to see all three films on their original release, when I was the same age as the characters.  Anyone coming to them now is denied that.  Perhaps they could watch the first film in their early 20s and then space the sequels out, but that seems a little fussy.  And one wonders what people that age would make of Sunrise now, a film created in a distant time when it was still credible that the characters lacked mobile phones and email addresses, let alone facebook accounts.

On the other hand, it’s equally valid to watch the films in one go, or even in reverse order, studying the way Hawke and Delpy devolve back to their unlined, doe-eyed twentysomething selves.  How this would affect one’s response to the films is an interesting question (I’d love to know if anyone has tried this, and how they felt about it).

Will there be another?  Should we even want one? I feel the same way I did after Before Sunset - eager to see another film whenever the creators feel ready to make one, yet dreading the idea that they might not be able to pull it off again.  Equally, there’s a fear that their story might ultimately not have a happy ending (I’m really not sure I want to see them end up in a version of Amour). Each of these three films gives the viewer the same test: are you a romantic or a cynic? Did you believe they would meet at the station in six months? Will they stay together in Paris? Will they be able to maintain their relationship for another nine years?

One of the first things Celine says to Jesse is, “Have you heard that as couples grow older they lose the ability to hear each other?”  This, she explains, is because men lose the ability to hear high pitched sounds, while women lose hearing in the low end. Jesse replies that this is “Nature’s way of allowing couples to grow old together.”

I very much hope that Jesse and Celine will grow old together, and that we’ll be able to watch it happen.

Gareth Negus does a certain amount of tweeting.
Before Midnight is released in the UK on Friday 21 June.

Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is, in almost every way, the epitome of the contemporary fantasy comic-book blockbuster, assembled with enormous skill and craft – but also witless, repetitive, thoughtlessly cacophonous, artlessly pretentious. There’s an hour of throat clearing exposition before anything of any interest happens. The plot, on pretty much every conceivable level, makes no sense. Film and director seem needlessly cowed by the source material (the crazy Snyder grandiosity of 300 and Sucker Punch is entirely absent, and yeah, I miss it), yet also simultaneously Nolanishly embarrassed by its inherent silliness (the one time a character says the word “Superman”, it’s an inadvertently delivered punchline). Henry Cavill, in the lead, is given little scope to be anything more than a sixpack on a stick.

Not unusually for superhero movies, it’s down to the villain to save the day.

Michael Shannon’s General Zod has something that few movie villains of any kind have, and certainly few superhero movie villains – a credible motive for his villainy. He doesn’t just want to see the human world burn – he wants, more than that he needs, to see Krypton reborn from its ashes, because that’s the only thing he was born to do. Kryptonian society (in this film at least, feel free to enlighten me about comic book canon in the comments) selects the destinies of its children before they are hatched in vitro, and so the only thing military-man Zod is capable of caring about is protecting that society. On Earth he may have the powers of a god, but he is paradoxically a god without free will.

Kal-El, on the other hand, has been given the gift of free will by his Kryptonian father (Jor-El, played by Russell Crowe channeling Austin Powers’ Basil Exposition), and in a neat quasi-inversion of the story of Jesus Christ’s virgin birth, he was, uniquely for a Kryptonian, conceived in his mother’s womb. When you set his journey to becoming Superman against Zod’s story, it becomes slyly subversive – the story of a god refusing his godhead for the love of man, and the man within him; the story of Christ coming down off the cross to serve mankind as a man. The subversion carries a kick as the Superman mythos has arguably always been about viewing American exceptionalism as a form of divine providence. Man of Steel limns the limits of that providence, and by extension the limits of American exceptionalism: this is a fiction in which real moral authority comes from choosing to want to be the same as everyone else.

Of course, these are fragile insights, because most of the last act of the film consists of animated avatars of Zod and Kal-El knocking living fuck out of each other, while collaterally laying waste to downtown Metropolis. It’s spectacular to watch, of course, but the very scale of it is symptomatic of our jadedness as an audience: it’s a long time since a bit of green-screen could make us believe a man could fly. And as noted above, the cinematic destruction derby is blandly workaday, lacking the vigor and vulgarity of Snyder’s most audacious films (the crude 9/11-mongering doesn’t quite fill the gap), or the virtuosity of a maestro of CGI concrete carnage like the Michael Bay of the most recent Transformers film (what?).

But even amongst all the empty sound and fury, there are moments where the moral subtext resonates like crystal, and it’s all Shannon’s work. His portrayal (actually, his inhabiting) of Zod is diametrically opposite to the imperious camp of Terence Stamp in the Christopher Reeve Superman films – he’s dogged, ferocious, heartbroken and righteous. It’s unmistakeably Shannon, and just one more reason why he’s just about the best thing in Hollywood films right now.

At the Cannes festival last month, you could see – and hear, thanks to some conspicuous booing – the breakdown of the love-in between Western critics and Japanese director Takashi Miike, as his latest thriller Shield Of Straw got very short shrift indeed. Does this mark the end of Miike’s career as the go-to director for Asian weirdness? I suppose it depends on whether you trust the judgment of the sort of wankers who think that yelling at projected images will improve them.

Perhaps it’s the end of the respectable phase of Miike’s career – after a couple of years of working on the sort of serious drama that attracts festival programmers, he’s going back to just doing whatever takes his fancy. That’s not to say the boo-ers are wrong, though: in a career that’s getting close to hitting the 100 feature mark, he’s made a couple of undeniable stinkers. But no single film in his canon gives you any idea what the ones either side of it will be like. We can go back in time just one year – to June 2012, and the Japanese theatrical release of For Love’s Sake, now available in the UK – for a good example of that.

Ai to Makoto

I’ve mentioned before that Japanese cinema is going through a thin patch in terms of original ideas, even when compared against Hollywood: virtually every movie that comes out these days is adapted from material that originated elsewhere. Of the three that Miike made in 2012, one was based on a video game (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney), one was adapted from a novel (Lesson Of The Evil), and the one we’re discussing here was based on a manga. It was published in the seventies as Ai to Makoto, and Miike is quite upfront in the film’s making-of documentary (included on Third Window’s UK release) that he’s aiming squarely for the nostalgia market, keeping the period setting and targeting the manga’s original readers.

Ai and Makoto are the names of the central characters, but those names also have alternative meanings, so the Japanese title can be read as Love And Sincerity. Ai Satome (Emi Takei) is a rich girl, the daughter of one of Tokyo’s most influential families. Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is a poor boy, always getting into fights. The two of them first meet as youngsters, when Makoto rescues Ai after a skiing accident (an opening sequence shown here in animated form, as a sop to fans of the comic). Several years later their paths cross again, when a gang fight breaks out near Ai and her friends, with Makoto at the centre.

Within seconds, the parameters of their relationship are established. Ai throws herself at Makoto’s feet, insisting that violence is not the solution to life’s problems: Makoto tells her to mind her own business, punching policemen in the face while Ai is still hanging off his leg. This unrequited love stays unrequited for some time, despite Ai’s best efforts to redeem him. She uses her family influence to have Makoto transferred to her posh school, but in no time he’s been expelled and transferred to the worst school in town. Ai then has to try and protect him from the dangers that lurk there, many of which are female: notably the monstrous Gumko (Sakura Ando) and the superficially less terrifying Yuki (Ito Ohno).

Throw in a couple of other romances on the side – including the equally unrequited longing of Hiroshi (Takumi Saito) for his classmate Ai – and the stage is set for an over-the-top teen melodrama, with a very uncertain mixture of broad comedy, slushy romance and violent action. It would take something unusual to pull all these tonally incompatible strands together into something watchable. That, presumably, is why we have the songs.

This is, of course, Miike’s second musical. A decade earlier, he took a Korean black comedy called The Quiet Family and transformed it into a surreal song-and-dance-fest called The Happiness Of The Katakuris.  The songs in Katakuris are very obviously played for laughs: partly because of the contrast with the horrific situation, partly because nobody on screen was especially good at singing or dancing. (After a couple of viewings, you notice that the youngest child of the family has obviously been given no choreography instructions other than to just follow what everyone else is doing.)

For Love’s Sake is actually that most bastardised of forms, the jukebox musical – the songs are all classic pop tunes from the Showa era, hammered down to fit into a pre-existing plot. But they’re the perfect choice for an overheated teenage romance, specifically chosen to overheat things that little bit more. The choreography goes down a couple of odd paths – I’m particularly intrigued by a gesture that accompanies the mention of ‘love’ in two songs, the singer using one hand to mime their nose getting bigger like Pinocchio – but there’s actual choreography involved, and that makes a change.

Without the songs, I suspect For Love’s Sake wouldn’t actually hold together: the wavering tone, with unexpected bursts of actual emotion amidst all the overacting and violence, needs the music in there to paper over the cracks. Part of the problem is that the characters of Ai and Makoto never really change over the course of the film. Ai’s devotion to Makoto in the face of his utter contempt is so constant, you can’t tell whether you’re meant to find it touching or pig-headed. Makoto’s stoic indifference is the source of some of the best laughs in the film, but it’s largely depicted in terms of fight sequences that seem to go on for several hours, and never result in him picking up so much as a scratch. (Unless he’s fighting that guy with the ageing disease. Long story.)

As has been previously established on this site, there’s no such thing as a typical Miike film. You could argue that the comic edge to the violent scenes is the sort of thing we associate with him – for example, the escalation of Makoto’s fight scenes towards a climax where he has to beat up a couple of dozen feral schoolgirls. But if there’s a characteristic that marks this out as a late period Miike film, it would have to be overlength. For Love’s Sake comes in at two and a quarter hours, as he feels the need to not only cram in every idea that occurs to him, but also over-extend and repeat visual gags in the hope that this will make them funnier.

Back when Miike was directing seven features in a year, they were all short sharp movies that took you by surprise – and if some of them were duffers, at least those could be safely ignored. Now he’s doing two or three big films a year, their high and low points cancel each other out over their extended running time. On balance, the high points of For Love’s Sake outweigh the low, and there’s plenty of fun to be had. But with forty minutes or so of padding removed, it could have taken the top of your head off the way that Miike’s early films did.

For Love’s Sake  is out now on DVD and Blu-ray from Third Window Films.

Spank The Monkey insert justification of professional status here.

Imagine what Jack Vance could have done with this. The main action of After Earth is an inverted planetary romance – the father and son team of Cypher and Kitai Raige (Will and Jaden Smith respectively) marooned on a future earth abandoned by humanity and now purportedly transformed into a world as thrillingly alien as any other, a world they must negotiate and conquer in order to survive. The scope thus given for a writer to reimagine our familiar world is endless, that act of imaginative transformation as close as anything can be to the very essence of science fiction. But, like so many ostensibly science fictional films, After Earth does nothing more than borrow genre clothes as a kind of drag: and it has no wonders to show us because its mind, such as it is, is on other things.

Like so many films before it, what After Earth is dragging up in science fiction clothes is Joseph Campbell’s concept of the monomyth or hero’s journey – a common underlying narrative structure which Campbell described in the folk myths of many different cultural traditions, and which has been adopted as something close to holy writ in Hollywood (and its ideological satellites, such as the screenwriting-teaching-scam business) on  a progressively more pervasive level since George Lucas first adopted Campbell’s theories wholesale as the theoretical underpinning of the original Star Wars trilogy.

But the lesson that Hollywood continues to draw from the success of Star Wars is based on a fallacy; that Lucas based his story’s underpinnings on Campbell’s work does not demonstrate that his stories were successful because of such underpinnings. It is at least as likely that Star Wars’ audiences responded to a cohesive and attractively designed fictional universe rendered with state of the art cinematic technique, and populated with interesting characters played by likeable actors. The hypothesis that they responded on a primal level to the story of the Hero with a Thousand Faces is both unnecessary and far from proven.

After Earth’s big miscalculation is that the monomyth is the main event, and it lays the structure of it bare to the audience’s scrutiny, while its science fictional and dramatic trappings are given the shortest of shrift. Back to those wonders we might have expected a great science fiction writer to show us in an earth transformed when it first grew hostile to human life and latterly bloomed for a millennium in the absence of humanity: After Earth is set in locations drably indistinguishable from the real world places they are (at one point I wondered which of the US national parks a particular redwood forest might be located in – far from wild and hostile to humanity, a location protected and nurtured by it). The terrifying fauna that (maybe, see below) drove humanity from earth are represented by: a pack of baboons who are scared of water, some big cats with weirdly squashed faces, and a giant eagle cum deus ex machina (all of the foregoing rendered in shoddily conceived CGI animated form).

How the world got from here to there is glossed over, despite copious expository voice over and historical flashbacks, and what little is explained makes precious little sense. It would take longer than I have (or am inclined to have) to enumerate everything that makes no sense in After Earth (although I am sad not to have an opportunity to quote in context the line “Graviton buildup could be a precursor to mass expansion!”), but let’s talk about the Ursas.

So, after humanity has vacated Earth (for reasons that are never really made clear: is it because they have made the climate intolerable or because Earth flora and fauna have turned against them? Both readings are compatible with the film) they head in their space arks for a planet called Nova Prime, where they come up against an alien race of would-be competing colonists, the Skrel. In response, the Skrel specially breed a beast that the humans call the Ursa (although they are not at all bearlike, being instead standard issue excrescences of vaguely Lovecraftian CGI that could have been used without modification in 90% of fantasy blockbusters of recent years) which, although “technically blind”, can key onto pheromones secreted by frightened humans. Humanity’s victory against the Skrel comes about when General Cypher Raige invents a technique known as “ghosting”, to conquer his fear, enabling him to walk right up to an Ursa and stab it with his supremely impractical twin-bladed “cutlass” (humanity in After Earth eschews guns and bombs: fortunately, so do the Skrel, seemingly). Now, with the Skrel vanquished (or at any rate playing no part in the plot of the film), the Raiges are heading off Nova Prime for a training exercise with an Ursa in the hold of their ship, when disaster strikes.

So many questions! Why would the Skrel specially breed blind hunting beasts? Why would anyone be scared of the Ursas when everyone knows they can’t see you? Why, having vanquished the Skrel, would you continue to keep Ursas (and presumably breed them?) for training exercises, when the only point of learning how to ghost would be to kill Ursas?

So many rhetorical questions, it’s fair to say, as its clear that After Earth is about Kitai (who is suffering from fear and guilt after his sister was killed by an Ursa) learning to conquer his fear, master ghosting, and thereby become worthy of his father’s respect (and I’ve steered clear in this review of discussing any of the extratextual clusterfuck surrounding this film, but eww), and therefore plot logic is going to be secondary to Will Smith’s big monologue about the first time he ghosted and the moment when Jaden comes into his inheritance. But the script fumbles both moments badly – it’s not remotely clear from Cypher’s monologue what the emotional components or techniques of ghosting are, it’s not at all clear how Kitai achieves it at the end of the film (oops, spoiler warning), and it’s utterly opaque how the two are related (on the crudest possible level, director M. Night Shyamalan tries to tie the two moments together with an aural flashback, but without the meaning, the tying is fruitless).

After Earth ends on a pleasantly unexpected note when Kitai tells his father he doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps after all. Of course, with this film being intended as the first of a trilogy, that was never intended to be the character’s last thought on the subject, but After Earth’s probable box office failure should mean that we are spared the latter stages of Kitai Raige’s hero’s journey. So there’s that, at least.

Imagine a remake of The Inbetweeners Movie. In Dutch! Where the guys have never been on holiday without their parents before and decide to visit a brothel in Spain! Only – get this – Will is blind. And Simon has terminal cancer and is confined to a wheelchair. And Neil (or possibly Jay) is paralysed from the neck down. And they’re being driven around in van by Nessa from Gavin and Stacey. Who’s Belgian!

This almost certainly wasn’t the original pitch for Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come As You Are, which is released in the UK today. I did keep finding myself making comparisons between the characters in the two films while I was watching it though. It’s particularly true of Philip, the Jay/Neil character. He is gawky and belligerent and doesn’t let his quadriplegia get in the way of occasionally acting like a total wanker.

The three main characters are Philip, Lars and Jozef (Robrecht Vanden Thoren , Gilles de Schryver and Tom Audenaert). All three are cared for by their parents and are desperate for some independence. They are also fairly desperate to get their end away. Philip has heard about a brothel which caters for ‘people like them’ and persuades his friends to make a road trip.

There are no big plot twists here. The film is straightforward and predictable. We know where our heroes’ character arcs are headed. Which is fine, because the pleasure is watching them get there.

Aside from  the odd tasteless “Look at the blind man! He can’t see stuff” joke, this is a funny film and the humour comes from the interaction of three guys who display a close bond and genuine warmth towards one another.

For the most part, the hurdles placed in their way seem small. Oh no their parents might say no! But they say yes! Josef’s fallen in the river! Phew he’s out again! Claude the van driver seems grumpy! But she’s nice really!

However, you are never far from reminders of the enormous hurdles that dominate their lives. Philip can move nothing except his head and his right hand. Though Lars may have the pretty looks and the upper body movement that Philip lacks, he only has a short time to live and risks dying a virgin.

The story is based on the real life experiences of Asta Philpot, a British man with Arthrogryposis who had his first sexual experience in a brothel in Spain. He was the subject of the BBC documentary “For One Night Only” in 2007 in which he travelled with two other men – one blind, one in a wheelchair – in order to make another visit.

Philpot’s companions obviously provided the outline for their fictional counterparts. One’s an older guy who needs a magnifier to see anything and the other one’s a  pretty young lad in a wheelchair although their stories were significantly changed in order to fit the film’s narrative.

Remarkably, the most ludicrous and improbable aspect of Come As You Are is completely backed up in Philpot’s documentary. This is the fact that the girls in the brothel are unbelievably, head-turningly gorgeous. Seriously, Julia Roberts’s character in Pretty Woman could work there and nobody would even look at her twice.

Philpot is a writer and Executive Producer on Come As You Are. He is possibly the only disabled person involved in the film’s production.

All the protagonists are played by able-bodied actors, which is disappointing but probably difficult to avoid. It is a tall order to expect all quadriplegic roles to be given to quadriplegic actors. Of course, if you are an actor with severe movement impairment, it must be pretty galling to see a plum role like Philip given to an able-bodied guy. Your acting choices are going to pretty limited in any case. Sure, you might be offered work as an extra on EastEnders or as “second juror from the left” in some Sunday-night murderfest but no one’s going to be auditioning you for one of Andrew Davies’ costume dramas any time soon. And that dream of being in one of the Hobbit films? Forget it.

It’d be a dangerous road to go down, though. What about Josef’s role? Do we really want to live in a world where only registered blind actors can play the roles of vision-impaired characters? A world without Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman? Or Richard Pryor in See No Evil, Hear No Evil? Think about it.

Wait a minute, everyone except Asta is faking it!

Philpot is an outspoken campaigner for the right of disabled people to have an active sexual life, even if this means paying for sex. He advocates the Netherlands model where disabled people are helped to find suitable sex workers by groups often funded by the Local Authorities.

It’s a controversial subject. If you’re generally OK with the idea of people paying for sex then you’re unlikely to begrudge someone with disabilities using the services. But plenty of people aren’t OK with it, still. Are they likely to make  an exception for someone who may never experience sex any other way?

It’s not a question that Come As You Are seeks to tackle. This isn’t a political journey for our heroes. It is a deeply personal one. It’s a coming of age story which shows that wine and sex and having a laugh with your mates don’t become less important when you have a disability. When you have fewer opportunities and possibly not much time, they can be the most important things in the world.

Come As You Are is released in UK cinemas today.

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing happened.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Aguirre: the Wrath of God is one of those movies that has almost become more famous for what happened on the set than what happens on screen. The tempestuous relationship between the young German director Werner Herzog and his wildman star Klaus Kinski is notorious and the story of how Herzog ended up threatening Kinski with a gun to get him to behave has been well rehearsed; there’s little point in going over it all again here.

Of course the parallels are irresistible: Europeans struggling to adapt to the tropical terrain; a mission hijacked by an insubordinate madman; problems communicating with the locals; logistics from hell. We could just as easily be talking about the making of the movie as the movie itself. Even some of the shots blur the boundaries between art and reality. We see Inez (played by Helena Rojo), for example, stripped down to her corset, perched on a rock, idly swishing a long-stemmed flower over the ground. Are we watching the mistress of the leader of a Spanish scouting party, alone with her thoughts? Or Rojo chilling out between takes? Or both?

It’s moments like these, and there are many of them, that lend an air of documentary realism to the film. Herzog’s camera becomes a member of the conquistador crew, albeit one that observes their antics dispassionately, drinking in every detail of their self-destruction, in a series of calm, measured, almost listless, takes. Yes, there are bursts of action and violence, but they’re brief and the expedition soon regroups and continues its leisurely passage. Indeed, so serene and strange are some of the images – a masked horse afloat on a raft, a ship up a tree – and so languid and long some of the shots, that it lulls the viewer into an almost dreamlike trance.

Images are what I remember most clearly. They’ve burned themselves into my brain. In particular is the slow descent (foreshadowing the descent into madness to come) that opens the movie. A host of sixteenth century gentlemen in their doublets and breastplates (a couple of ladies too, in stiff velvet gowns and stiffer lace ruffs) pick their way slowly down the side of an Andean mountain. A Renaissance court, entire and intact, picked up and plonked in an utterly alien landscape. In that tropical climate, it must have been sweltering. Around them are servants and slaves carrying treasure and plunder and signs of the sheer absurdity of the mission: a sturdy cartwheel, useless on such terrain, is strapped to some poor native’s back. There’s no clearer symbol of the hubris and folly of imperial adventure.

The film’s thesis is not a difficult one to parse. The conquistadors are exposed as greedy privateers, the monk who acts as the film’s narrator a canting hypocrite, the native people and the expedition’s black slave are piteously oppressed. Balthasar, the mission’s interpreter, was a prince among his people until he was dispossessed by the conquistadors, he tells Aguirre’s daughter. There are echoes of The Tempest’s Caliban in the way he resents his acquisition of the conquerors’ language (“You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse”). Okello the black slave (surely another nod to Shakespeare) fantasises not of riches, but of freedom.

I don’t know whether Herzog ever read Heart of Darkness (like The Tempest, an established narrative of colonialism), but it’s not hard to see its influence – the scene of the Spaniards’ makeshift raft firing its cannon into the jungle, a gesture both futile and delusional, recalls almost exactly the quote above. And indeed Aguirre is a very clear and acknowledged influence on the later film Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Conrad’s tale.

But this is a German film, so perhaps we should look to Germany and its own disastrous twentieth century flirtation with imperialism. I’d never considered it before, but Aguirre is an obvious Hitler figure. Just consider the rhetoric of his climatic speech, which Kinski barks out in staccato bursts.

“Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be stamped on until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water… more than his ration, will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees… then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of god.”

It’s pure Führer. Herzog, born in 1942, lived through decades of both denial and denazification before the watershed generational reappraisals of Nazism of the late sixties. It’s not hard to see Aguirre as his comment on the figure of Hitler and the legacy of the Third Reich, refracted through the lens of Spanish colonialism. A journey to nowhere. A madman on a sinking raft, ranting at monkeys.

A new restoration of Aguirre: the Wrath of God is currently showing as part of the British Film Institute’s Werner Herzog season. The film is also showing in cinemas nationwide from Friday 7 June.

I don’t go to many first nights at the opera. As I settled into my seat at the Coliseum for the UK premiere of Philip Glass’ The Perfect American, his new piece about the final days of Walt Disney’s life, I suddenly flashed back to a first night I attended twenty-five years ago. That was also at the Coliseum, and it was for another Philip Glass opera. The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 was his adaptation of a Doris Lessing sci-fi novel, and I can remember precisely one thing about it.

Roughly three-quarters of the way through Planet 8, there was a brief pause in between sections. Outside, there was a sudden commotion, and a police car could be heard roaring down St Martin’s Lane, its siren NEE-NAW-NEE-NAWing at full volume like they used to back in the eighties. The orchestra paused, waited for the noise to die down, and then launched into the next part of the opera. This being Philip Glass, it started with a simple repeated bass figure on the strings, just a pair of notes separated by a minor third. It went nee-naw-nee-naw. The audience laugh that followed was extraordinary – a sudden burst of guffawing, which was just as suddenly truncated as everyone remembered that the composer of both of those notes was sitting in the room with them.

Glass was also present at Saturday’s premiere of The Perfect American: in fact, I walked past him on St Martin’s Lane just an hour and a half before curtain up. It took me a few seconds to realise who he was – I still have a mental image of him during his 1980s heyday, rather than the 75-year-old man he is now. If you wanted to be cruel about it, you could suggest that Philip Glass is the serious music equivalent of Michael Jackson: someone who hit his creative peak back in the eighties, and has been coasting on his former glories ever since. So is The Perfect American his equivalent of dropping dead during a rehearsal at the O2? Happily, despite some notable flaws, the answer is no.

The source material of The Perfect American is a novel by Stephan Jungk, which takes the few things we know about the end of Walt Disney’s life, makes up a few more, and turns them into a meditation on the American Dream. As the opera opens, Disney (Christopher Purves) is in a Burbank hospital, on his deathbed. We meet some of the people he shares his final days with – a nurse who he thinks of as Snow White, and a young boy who idolises him in the way most children would.

Mostly, though, Disney takes this as an opportunity to look back. We see his return to the small town of Marceline that apparently formed the basis of his worldview, a place where ‘dreams can come true, and tomorrow is just a miracle away’. But we also see him ruling over his animation studio with a rod of iron, stomping all over the rights of his army of artists to have their individual contributions recognised.

Gradually, the main theme of the opera makes itself apparent – the chasm between the public image of the Disney philosophy, and the behaviour of the man himself. To be fair, he shows occasional signs of self doubt, worrying that Disney will become the name of a brand rather than a man. But the darker side of his personality keeps coming through: most notably in the climax to act one, where he talks to the Disneyland animatronic dummy of Abraham Lincoln, suggesting to him that he might have got it all wrong about this whole freedom-for-negroes thing. It’s not just that Disney died: it’s that he died in the sixties, staying alive long enough to see all the homespun values he built his life around being torn down one by one.

The Perfect American is directed by Phelim McDermott for Improbable Theatre, the company who successfully revived Glass’ Satyagraha at this venue six years ago. (It returns there in the autumn, and is well worth catching.) As with the earlier work, Dan Potra’s design approach here is intensely visual, with heavy use of projected video. But it’s a very low-tech aesthetic – all hanging cloth screens, and hand-drawn animation de-enhanced with scratches and flickers. The one visible concession to modern technology is a huge rotating projection rig hanging above the stage, able to flip between front and back projection as required.

As with Satyagraha, there’s one flaw in the use of projected images: not much thought has been given to how they appear in the cheapest seats, meaning that some information (including captions telling us locations and dates) gets lost on its way to the balcony. But the visuals are generally bold enough to stand up for themselves, even without their supporting text.

If there’s a weak spot in the production as a whole, unfortunately it would have to be Philip Glass’ music. As has been the case for all the other Glass operas that ENO have produced, The Perfect American seems to be attracting a younger crowd than you’d normally expect at the venue. But you suspect the really cool kids are more likely to be seeing John Adams operas these days. Adams has the same interest in contemporary subject matter, but also has enough melodic talent to pull out a heart-stopper like Batter My Heart (from Doctor Atomic) at least once per opera. Glass, meanwhile, is happy to carry on reworking the same musical motifs that he was using a quarter of a century ago.

Also, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that his three most famous operas – Akhnaten, Satyagraha and Einstein On The Beach – were written respectively in Egyptian, Sanskrit and numbers. The text isn’t required to carry narrative: once he starts working with an English libretto, Glass seems to have a problem convincingly marrying lyrics to music without the result sounding trite. (Surprisingly, the librettist for The Perfect American is Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid.)

I don’t want to play down Glass’ contribution to The Perfect American – much like Disney, he’s pulling together the efforts of many collaborators into a work that couldn’t exist without him. As a piece of theatre, it’s a fascinating study of the American character, and the contradictions within it. Musically, though, it’s less satisfying. It’s possibly significant that its most dramatically shocking moment – involving a line that starts ‘you were never an artist…’ – is spoken, rather than sung. But I’m not going to hold that against the composer when the other elements tie together so well.

The Perfect American is playing at the Coliseum in London until June 28^th. A home video version will be released by Opus Arte in September.

Spank The Monkey knows full well that the first two paragraphs of this article are completely unnecessary, but he likes the story. Sorry.

The 66^th Cannes Film Festival ended just less than a week ago. In that time, I’ve attempted to clarify my feelings about what I thought, as I left France, was the strongest festival I’ve attended so far. It turns out that I agree with my younger self. This year saw three absolutely exceptional films, as well as a handful of other superb efforts. To clarify, the three best films I saw, The Past, The Great Beauty and Blue is the Warmest Colour elicited the strongest reaction from me since A Separation, which I believe is the best film of the past ten years or so.

I’ll touch on both The Past and The Great Beauty, and a couple of other really impressive titles, but my focus here is on Blue is the Warmest Colour, the film that Jury chair Steven Spielberg and his colleagues, including Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman, Cristian Mungiu, Naomi Kawase, Lynne Ramsay and Christoph Waltz, decided was the best of the festival, awarding the Palme D’Or to the director Abdellatif Kechiche and the two lead actresses Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopolous (it’s one of the quirks of Cannes that a film that wins the Palme D’Or isn’t eligible for any other award, so Spielberg took the unprecedented step of giving the Palme to all three of the key talents in the film).

Honestly, I don’t know which of the three films I’ll consider the best of the festival when I come to look back on it later in the year, but I’m absolutely convinced that Blue is the Warmest Colour is the right winner. I’ll touch on the strengths of the other contenders below, but none of them create, so effectively, a portrait of a single person, her hopes, dreams, loves, frustrations, guilt, arousal, losses, grief and maturation. It’s telling that the French title is La Vie D’Adele – chapitre 1 & 2, a much simpler and more accurate name for a film so forensic in its intimacy with its main character.

The film follows Adele (Exarchopolous) on her path from popular schoolgirl to young teacher. We’re with her as she loses her virginity, goofs around with her friends, first lays eyes on, and then falls for, her greatest and first love. We’re with her as she discovers herself through her sexuality. We’re with her as she feels lonely, ostracised, and heartbroken. We share so many of her formative moments that we live them with her; and her pain affected me a great deal.

Much has been made of the fact that this is a ‘lesbian’ drama, but that feels unnecessarily reductive to me. This doesn’t feel like a film about a singular experience, any more than Goodbye First Love, of which this reminded me a good deal, is a film only relevant to people with experiences of straight relationships. The power of Blue is the Warmest Colour is in how much its central relationship, complete with its problems and excitements echoes those in the audience’s pasts, and present.

Indeed, the film races past several (clichéd) landmark stereotypes of the gay experience. We don’t see Adele come out to anyone – this is less important to our understanding of the character, than seeing how she eats, reads, talks about and appreciates art, flirts, fucks, sleeps and fucks up. When people talk about the bravery of the film, they’ll mean the sexually explicit love scenes, the treatment of a same-sex relationship at the centre of a film, but the bravery is in the way that everyone involved commits to a film that so coolly, and completely, dissects a character.

Adele Exarchopolous and Lea Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Colour

Those sex scenes, that even saw critics from Variety get a little hot under the collar, are as brilliantly realised as the rest of the film. They are incredibly explicit, but not, in the least, exploitative. While many will focus on the act of the ‘real’ sex on camera, what is most astonishing to me is how well it serves the story. Kechiche is asserting that much of the bond between Adele and Emma (Lea Seydoux) comes from how passionately, and physically they love each other. There’s no more exultant, or physical display of that passion than in the seemingly pretty incredible sex they share.

It’s an extraordinary experience. Most cinematic sex adheres to the same set of signifiers to provide a sexual shorthand; a naked shoulder here, a bitten lip there. To see that so resoundingly thrown to one side is going to provoke some interesting reactions. At a festival noted for boos and walk-outs, I should point out that I saw neither at my screening. Of course, much of the audience in Cannes are hoary old pervs, so that might not mean much, but I prefer to think that the audience were so rapt by a groundbreaking, intelligent, awe-inspiring piece of filmmaking so clearly from the heart of all involved that they simply forgot that anything existed outside of the screen for the entire three-hour-plus running time.

In Kechiche’s previous film to get a UK release, Couscous, his canvas was an entire community. I liked the film a great deal, but it would be fair to say that it hasn’t stayed with me particularly. There’s no doubt that Blue is the Warmest Colour has left its mark in indelible ink, in the gorgeous photography, the beautifully stark way that the relationship begins to seem less than perfect, in how sexy the chemistry between Seydoux and Exarchopolous is, and in the power of the performances. Seydoux is terrific, better than I’ve ever seen her, but I’m struggling right now to think of the last time a performer made such a strong first impression on me as Exarchopolous does here. Her performance is scintillating and utterly, utterly complete. It’s the glue that holds the film together, the heart that ties the audience to it and it’s so natural, so primal that it feels completely brand new.

As brilliant as Blue is the Warmest Colour is, Abdellatif Kechiche was not the only filmmaker to build on his reputation at Cannes. JC Chandor’s All is Lost is an absolutely outstanding thriller, both old-fashioned and incredibly powerful with a stellar turn by Robert Redford (yes, really). Alexander Payne is back on top form with Nebraska, his best film since Election. The Coen brothers delivered another mini-masterpiece with Inside Llewyn Davis, which features a star-making performance from Oscar Isaac. Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar is an absolute gem of a thriller set in occupied Palestine, while Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman delivers something weird and wonderful with his animated head-fuck The Congress. I also loved Kore-eda’s Like Father Like Son, although it’s probably a touch below I Wish, Still Walking and Nobody Knows.

Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty

To the other two standouts, though. The Great Beauty is far and away Paolo Sorrentino’s best film – an epic lament to the vacillation of modern Italy, even in those who claim to hold its history of high art dear. He portrays a society drinking, dancing, dieting and fucking itself to death. It’s a powerful, joyful and beautiful film, a film that echoes La Dolce Vita, yet doesn’t suffer unduly in the comparison. It was the film I expected to win the Palme D’Or, as the direction is so ostentatiously brilliant that I felt it had to seduce the filmmakers on the jury.

The Past is Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to A Separation which, as mentioned above is the best film I’ve seen in years (About Elly released after A Separation was actually made the year before). For the vast majority of its running time I was convinced that Farhadi had improved upon what I considered perfect. It’s a tightly wound family drama, as adroit in handling the numerous relationships between the characters as A Separation was in observing the gulf between a still-loving husband and wife driven apart by their unshakeable belief that they cannot compromise. It features a handful of knockout performances, by Ali Mosaffa, Pauline Burlet and Best Actress winner Berenice Bejo (The Artist). She is absolutely terrific, the heart of the film – unable to turn away from her past, even when it’s all she thinks she wants.

Artificial Eye, or Curzon Film World as they’re also known, will be releasing The Past, The Great Beauty and Blue is the Warmest Colour in the UK. They’re the three best films of this year, or last, by a considerable margin. I hope that audiences in the UK get to see the version of Blue is the Warmest Colour with all of its ambition, character, warmth and emotional tumult present and correct. I’m sure that Artificial Eye will absolutely fight for the film to be seen uncut. I’m not overstating when I say that in a period in which I feared I may be falling out of love with film, a picture so accurate about, and inspiring of, love, has me head over heels once more.

Byzantium is a vampire movie.  Another one?  I hear a collective sigh. After all, we have been inundated with movies of this genre lately, especially with Stephanie Meyer’s kind contribution to the cause ruining the genre for generations to come.  Anyway, I feel I am straying off point here a little.  In director Neil Jordan’s last vampire outing (Interview with the Vampire) we met Lestat and Louis, one a murderous, animalistic killer and the other a tormented soul.  In Byzantium, based on the Moira Buffini play A Vampire Story, we meet Clara and Eleanor who bear a striking resemblance to their male counterparts.  Byzantium focuses on the relationship between the mother and daughter vampire duo and their struggle for their very survival.

In an echo of Interview, the story is narrated by Eleanor throughout.  It begins with the two protagonists going on the run to a dilapidated seaside resort; they take refuge in a disused hotel called Byzantium which Clara (Gemma Arterton) turns into a successful brothel to support herself and her daughter.  Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) is a lonely and tormented teenager who is desperate to find someone to share her story with, making the isolated hotel a fitting location for her.

Shot in Ireland and the UK, the story takes place mostly in a modern English city whilst using flashbacks to explain the origins of the vampires two centuries before.  The creation of Byzantium’s vampires sits firmly in a more mythical and old fashioned mythology, which involves visiting a mystic cave for the change to take place.  The setting for the vampire’s rebirth is beautiful, never more so than in the visually stunning scene of Arterton under a waterfall of blood.  In a twist on typical vampire physiology none of Byzantium’s creatures have pointed fangs for bloodletting; instead they have a sharp thumb nail that extends when they are ready to feed.  Besides this there is nothing noteworthy or identifiable about the vampires; the fact they are undetectable in a crowd allows an easier explanation of how they are able to survive.

The contrast between Eleanor and Clara is vast.  Clara is a strong willed killing machine who is prepared to do anything to ensure herself and her daughter’s safety, including selling herself and others to make ends meet.  Eleanor is in a constant struggle with her need for blood; in an attempt to soothe her conscience she gives peace to those about to die by only feeding off those who are ready.  To express her feelings Eleanor is seen repeatedly writing down her life story and then ripping it up and throwing it to the wind.  She struggles alone like this until meeting someone to share her story with.  Her soul mate comes in the form of Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), a teenage boy who is suffering from leukaemia .  Although Ronan is superb, including this vein of hormonal teenage angst does little to help the genre move away from the overcrowded nature of the Twilight generation.

There is an attempt to tackle gender politics with the revelation that women are forbidden from becoming vampires by the Brotherhood which controls access to the cave.  This does not come off as well as it could.  You are asked to believe that Clara is only working in the sex trade as that is how she lived her life before changing.  This suggests that Clara is exacting revenge on men for how badly they have treated her in the past.  The main distraction from making any real statement of this is the over sexualisation of Clara herself.  The camera focuses in on her body which does little to support the women’s empowerment and more to remind the audience just how hot she is.  The gorgeous, stripper type vampire has now been done to death and in my opinion would be a stronger story without relying on this crutch to sell female vampires.

There are some very good performances from the supporting cast.  Daniel Mays as the hapless love-struck man who takes pity on Clara, Tom Hollander as the English teacher who frets over Eleanor’s graphic imagination, Sam Riley and Johnny Lee Miller as the evil brotherhood.  Lee Miller is delicious as a hideous and foul villain providing a much needed threat to the girls’ survival.

The big question is do we really need another vampire movie?  I think there is still room for this genre to continue.  I could pretty much do without the moody teenage vamp thing, but will never be put off a movie because it has vampires in it.  The feminist slant of the story along with the deviation from the “normal” vampire mythology is a refreshing on a well-worn story.  There’s plenty of gore to please the horror fans, especially in the opening sequence with a cheese wire garrotte.  Is this going to be a film that people remember for years to come?  Probably not, but that’s not to say that it isn’t a beautiful film that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Sam Osborn tweets here. Byzantium is released on Friday 31 May.