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Showing posts with label lff 2015. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lff 2015. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
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"Boats. Big boats. Big men on big boats. Also, prostitutes."
Read the full review at We Got This Covered.
★★
Monday, October 19, 2015
Monday, October 19, 2015
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"Sadness and hope intertwine in Todd Haynes’ Carol, where a couple are caught in each other’s gravitational pull and the universe tries to tear them apart.
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s much-loved 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Carol chronicles the romance between Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a young New Yorker working in a department store, and Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a married society mother. Set in the early 1950s, lesbianism (and homosexuality in general) is regarded as a mental disorder – even a hint of same-sex reaction inspires loathing and disgust."
★★★★
Friday, October 16, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
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"It was in the woods near Halicarnassus that Hermaphroditus fatefully
encountered the nymph Salmacis. Resting in her pool, she was overcome
with lust for the beautiful boy and tried unsuccessfully to seduce him.
Later, Hermaphroditus, finding himself alone, decided to take a bath.
Spotting her chance, Salmacis dove in with him, wrapping herself around
the struggling boy. In ecstasy she yelled “Gods! May we never part!”
Gods were paying attention, fusing male and female bodies into one form.
It’s in this pool that we meet the nineteen year old Arianna (Ondina
Quatri). Worried that she hasn’t menstruated or developed breasts, she’s
been on hormone therapy, resulting in small breasts growing but with
few other signs of puberty. Worryingly, she also hasn’t felt any sexual
pleasure – both masturbation and experiments with boys leaving her
unfulfilled. Plus, there’s that mysterious scar above her genitals that
her parents assure her is from a childhood hernia operation.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out where this one is going."
★★★
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
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The Lobster is about as high concept as it gets. In a mildly dystopian future, any singletons must report to a hotel. Once there they must fall in love within 40 days, if they fail to do so theywill turned into an animal of their choice. Most choose dogs. Colin Farrell's David chooses a lobster because "they're blue-blooded like aristocrats, they live for hundreds of years, are fertile their entire lives and I like the sea very much".
But crustaceanhood is not inevitable. He can extend the amount of days he has left by hunting down free-roaming singletons with a tranquilliser rifle, or try his best to find a compatible partner amongst the rest of these sadsack singles. Gradually Lanthimos expands the borders of his world: exploring the world of forest-dwelling militant singletons and their guerrilla activities in a society only fit for happy couples.
The film is strange from top to bottom. On top of the animal transformations, Lanthimos shows us a society composed of adult children who suffer a life under byzantine rules, peppered with bizarre punishments and sudden acts of extreme violence. English is spoken in a faintly slurred monotone, as if the speakers are slightly drugged. What they actually say is honest to point of being surreal - the characters generally saying exactly what's on their mind at all times.
As a cinematic experience it's strangely hypnotic, like being stuck in a dream that's constantly on the brink of curdling. I can only really find two points of genuine comparison; the first are the monologues of satirist Chris Morris, the second is playwright Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros - about the population of a town slowly turning into rhinoceroses. Both these pieces and The Lobster fit into 'theatre of the absurd'. This is drama exploring the idea that human existence is unguided and ultimately pointless. It argues that if there's no meaning or purpose to life, then logic begins to dissolve, being replaced with the irrational and bizarre.
In The Lobster, Lanthimos applies this philosophy of meaninglessness to romantic relationships, reaching fascinating conclusions. On one hand there's an obviously satirical examination of people 'matching' with each other for the flimsiest of reasons. Lanthimos' couples define compatibility with each other by both sharing maladies; for example short-sightedness, limps and propensity for nosebleeds. There's clear parallels in the way we use Tindr, OkCupid and Match.com - searching for people who we can connect with on a completely superficial level.
Within the narrative this mode of thinking eventually infects even true love, Lanthimos characters unable to distinguish the superficial from the genuine. I think it's a little too neat to summarise The Lobster as an allegory for online dating, rather that it intends to expose how expectations of romance have been warped by technology, media and identity politics. In an age of where ego rules the roost, the modern singleton merely seeks a carbon copy of themselves to love, or tries their best to cram themselves into someone else's pre-existing mould.
Thing is, The Lobster is so opaque that this is just one of a thousand valid readings. I suspect that interpretations of what's really thrumming away in its emotional core will be strongly individual romantic experience.
That said there's some things that can't be quibbled with. For one, this is an unambiguously beautiful film. The inside of the hotel has a The Shining-esque creepiness to it, all repeated geometric patterns and shots of long, telescoping hallways. The latter half of the film takes place in the forest, where luscious tangled greenery bristles with dark Edenic eroticism recalling Lars von Trier's Antichrist.
Though the two 'halves' occupy opposite aesthetic poles, the film finds a visual unity in its framing. Keeping us on our toes, Lanthimos sticks with painfully long still takes with the aim of unnerving us. In one memorable shot we gaze at the twitching body of a suicide jumper. A halo of blood slowly grows around her head while in the upper right corner of the frame a character calmly sips tea. We gaze impassively alongside her, incriminating ourselves in the process. Another awesome moment is, a bravura slow-motion hunting scene, where we watch the character's flesh jiggle on their bones; faces alive with the fear and thrill of the chase. This slow motion highlights their animalistic behaviour - entirely appropriately given the story.
The quality extends throughout the performances, all of which seem to display the satisfaction you sometimes sense in actors when they know they're in a good film. Farrell is excellent as the protagonist, exuding a confused, hangdog innocence that makes even the weirdest events palatable. Rachel Weisz also seriously impresses, turning in a performance that grows increasingly heartbreaking. Ably supported by such luminaries as Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, John C Reilly, Léa Seydoux, Angeliki Papoulia and the wonderful Michael Smiley - the film is performative pleasure.
One of the best of the year and certainly my current favourite of the London Film Festival, The Lobster is a work of twisted genius. Though high concept, it speaks with intelligence and clarity about the human condition and is beautiful, funny and exciting to boot. A hell of an achievement in cinema and one that'll be remembered for years to come.
★★★★★
The Lobster is on wide release 16 October
Allow me to sell you on a movie: Kurt Russell plays a hard-bitten old West Sheriff who must battle a tribe of mutant cannibal troglodytes to save his townsfolk. The title? Bone Tomahawk. Try saying that out loud, enunciate every lovely syllable, it's fun. BONE TOMAHAWK. With this set-up, lead actor and kickass title, writer/director S. Craig Zahler is sitting in front of an open goal and just needs to tap it in.
And he fluffs it.
Given that the main plot device is a tribe of hitherto unknown mutated cannibal cavemen, you might expect the film to be a zippy, Sam Raimi-esque horror. But aside from maybe 15 minutes of the climax, this is just a subpar Western that happens to feature mutant cannibals a bit.
Essentially a riff on The Searchers, the plot follows Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) as he tries to rescue damsel in distress Samantha (Lili Simmons) from the cannibal tribe. He's joined in this by; his deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), an older man who compulsively chatters; John Brooder (Matthew Fox), whose family were killed by Native Americans and has sworn vengeance on them; and Samantha's husband Arthur O'Dwyer (Patrick Fox), who's desperate to get his wife back, yet struggling with a broken leg.
This motley bunch set out to rescue the wife, trekking across the wilderness to where they believe the troglodytes have made their lair. And boy do they trek. The film is more than two hours long and the vast majority of that time is spent watching Russell and co miserably trek from campsite to campsite while one character moans about his dodgy leg. Eventually (finally) we get to the cannibal lair where things pick up a bit with some satisfyingly gory action, but it's too little too late.
Bone Tomahawk's most obvious flaw is that none of the characters are particularly interesting nor exceptionally played. Drawn straight from the Big Book of Western Stereotypes, they speak in dialogue so rote it feels as if you've heard it all before. Disappointingly, Kurt Russell pretty much sleepwalks through his bog-standard Sheriff role, though no-one else particularly excels. Best of a bad bunch is Richard Jenkins' deputy, who at least has a modicum of personality.
The nadir is Lili Simmons' Samantha. Leaving aside the fact that her character is a seriously dull damsel in distress, Simmons simply isn't plausible as a resident of the Old West. There's a casting factor known as 'period face'; whether someone, at a glance, looks like they could fit into a time period. Matthew Fox has it, Sean Young (in a brief role) has it and an impressively beardy Kurt Russell has it in spades. Simmons simply doesn't, though she's not helped by a weird decision to give her lustrously gorgeous blonde hair after being locked in a cage by cavemen for a week.
Even ignoring all that, the basic plot conceit is seriously dodgy. A fair maiden kidnapped by savage natives is a plot that you can't really play straight in 2015, something compounded by a focus on Samantha being threatened with rape: "Just imagine what they're doing to her! Right this second!" the characters breathlessly exclaim.
To some extent, the film appears to realise that it's in murky waters, inserting a scene early on where an unnamed Native American character assures us that though the villains may look like Indians, scalp their victims and generally fulfil the exact plot device of Indians in unreconstructed Westerns, don't be fooled - they're definitely not Indians.
On the long road trip there's a couple of tantalising hints of a late plot twist when our heroes shoot some defenceless Mexicans that approach them in the night and generally act in a cavalier manner about their past bloodshed. "Ah-ha!" you think. "Maybe they're the real monsters, not the cannibal savages!" Sadly even this mild complexity is beyond Bone Tomahawk - you can be assured that the cannibal savages are indeed the real monsters.
Sadly this is a wasted opportunity all round; squandering a decently pulpy horror set-up, Kurt Russell and a decent supporting cast and wasting a kickass title. Being both dull and offensive is a lethal combination. Bone Tomahawk is one to avoid.
★
Bone Tomahawk is released 11 December 2015.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
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“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise deserves a top-class cinematic adaptation. Aside from having one of the all-time greatest opening lines, it's a marvellous feat of imagination. Ballard's setting is a futuristic tower block in which every human comfort can be found. Aside from chic, modernist living spaces: the building features a supermarket, a gym, a swimming pool, a school - almost as if you never have to leave.
This society-in-a-bottle quickly begins to disintegrate. Power cuts plague the lower floors, planting seeds of discontent. All too soon the residents of the building; lower, middle and upper, are engaged in literal class warfare. Veiled threats snowball into violence and suddenly everyone is giving into their primal urges; the elevator shafts and corridors of the high-rise becoming an orgy of mutilation, rape and murder.
Our protagonist is Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a recent arrival on the 25th floor. Recently bereaved, he desires insulation from the rest of the world and hopes to find it in the anonymity of the tower block. Detached, dispassionate and unfailingly polite, we learn about this world through his eyes. An educated middle class professional, he's able to move between the upper and lower class apartments, meeting both top-floor resident and reclusive architect of the building Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) and lowly second floor political agitant and documentary film-maker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans).
We first meet the building as a model of order and sanity but it's not long before the cracks begin to show. Whether it be a smashed bottle of wine falling from an upper deck, disagreements over blocked rubbish chutes and annoying power failures, the writing is on the wall. As if heeding the second law of thermodynamics, entropy kicks in and soon we're off into into dog-eating territory.
I recently took an architectural tour around the Barbican Estate in Central London and while watching this I couldn't help but remember what I'd learned. The magnificently realised tower in High-Rise is built to the same modernist aesthetics as the Barbican, with both the fictional Royal and real-life firm Chamberlin, Powell and Bon trying to achieve the same goal: a housing development that caters to the residents' every need.
Like Ballard's building, the Barbican Estate sports with libraries, shops, gardens, sports facilities, schools and so on. Both structures are carefully designed in order to impose a top-down social vision upon the residents; the desired endpoint a friendly, happy and cohesive community.
Both projects have proved to be failures; though the Barbican Estate never descended into murderous anarchy it ended up as an eerily quiet ghost town, the expected crowds populating the aerial walkways never materialising. Now the Barbican isn't sought after because of its strong communal bonds, but because it's an oasis of silence in Central London, where a contemporary Dr Laing can keep to himself in his soundproof box without having to deal with the smoky rumblings of the city that encircles him.
Ballard's vision of a building where each resident has their individuality sanded away until they fit into a pre-defined nook, and the failures that would inevitably arise from it, was prescient in 1975. But in 2015 we know that this style of living doesn't work - modern architects tend to work backwards, observing human behaviour than designing buildings around that. This makes High-Rise a prediction of a future that's already in the past, which inevitably saps a little venom from Ballard's scenario.
Still, by any standards this is a magnificent bit of cinema. After the excellent yet relatively small-scale productions of Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England, Wheatley clearly relishes working with a noticeably higher budget, going all out with production design and ambitious effects shots.
If I had to choose ten memorable shots from the London Film Festival, High-Rise would account for most of them. Whether it's the flesh being peeled from a skull rendered in anatomically precise detail, a super slow-motion shot of a body hitting a car bonnet or simply Hiddleston's face spattered with grey paint (as if he's merging with the building), the film lodges in the head: every frame carefully considered, every bit of scenery complementing the performances within, every semi-period costume patterned and coloured to perfection.
It's also design porn, so long as you have an appreciation of brutalism. The high rise might be a symbol of authoritarian control and class divide, but goddamn it's beautiful. The apartments have spires of naked concrete jutting through the middle, which feeds into a gently serrated exterior, crowned with a cantilevered set of balconies that scream confidence and permanence. Even the elegantly retro typefaces are carefully chosen, emulating the creme de la creme of 70s modernism.
Performance-wise, Hiddleston is excellent as a malleable man who's never entirely present. You sense that he's willing to be moulded by his environment, sacrificing his individuality to avoid personal responsibility. Also excellent is Luke Evans in a career best performance, brewing up a heady mix of rugby masculinity, fuzzy sideburns and testosterone. It's Jeremy Irons that get the best lines though, clearly loving saying killer lines like "This is my party, and I shall be the one who decides if someone gets lobotomised".
My only criticism is a slightly jumbled third act. Arguably this jagged narrative reflects the societal breakdown, but cross-cutting three or four narratives inevitably means a loss of focus, especially in comparison to the tightly-reined in opening third. I never lost the thread, but occasionally it's difficult to work out who's kidnapping whom, or which floor a certain character is on.
With each feature Ben Wheatley proves himself as one of the most exciting contemporary British directors. High-Rise, in keeping with his other work, is stylish, thoughtful, disturbing and darkly funny - and easily does justice to Ballard's vision. Whatever Wheatley cooks up next I'll be there opening night.
★★★★
Johnny Depp's regression from ultra-cool indie darling to flouncing tit depressed the hell out of me. Outright classics like Edward Scissorhands, Dead Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Ed Wood cemented him as someone willing to take on risky projects and deliver complex, innovative performances. Then came Captain Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter and finally, the cruellest blow of all, the truly execrable Mortdecai.
After suffering through Mortdecai this January I wrote: "Mr
Depp, you need to stop. This is rock bottom. Put down the silly hats.
Take off the beads. Throw away the eyeliner. Mr Depp, stop. Please stop." Mercifully, at least in Black Mass, he has.
Depp plays James "Whitey" Bulger, a vicious Boston crimelord who gradually seized control of the city. A textbook psychopath, his complete lack of conscience and fierce intelligence make him a natural and successful gangster. Black Mass shows us Whiteys inexorable rise to the upper echelons of organised crime, with a focus on his relationship with FBI Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).
Connolly and Whitey were childhood friends, growing up in the tightly-knit south side of Boston. Though they've ended up on opposite sides of the law, they're still Southie boys, and Connolly sees the connection as an opportunity. Approaching Whitey, the two form an 'alliance'; Whitey's gangland insider knowledge being used to take down the Italian Mafia and Connolly using his influence to get the FBI to tolerate Whitey's growing crime empire.
Higher-ups in the FBI grow increasingly uncomfortable with the arrangement, suspecting that the information Whitey's feeding them is useless and disturbed that anyone who informs on Whitey to them quickly ends up dead. As the years tick by the boundaries between gangster and federal agent gradually blur in a hail of bullets, blood and expensive steaks.
The obvious centrepiece of Black Mass is Depp's Whitey. Swaddled under reams of latex, with a receding hairline, sunken cheeks and ice-blue eyes, he's only just plausible as an actual flesh and blood human being. Despite looking a bit Dick Tracy, this lizardlike visage is hugely effective and actually intimidating. Depp takes this opportunity to suppress his flamboyant tics, achieving a scarily focussed intensity. Lots of this is in his beady eyes; they regard the people around him with eerie intensity - like a snake regarding a mouse.
That said, Edgerton more than holds his own. With a square-jawed, square-shouldered and square-haired figure, he looks confident, assertive and successful. He prides his masculinity, seeing both his FBI work and his Southie roots as validations of his personality. It's precisely that which makes him so vulnerable to corruption; eager to paint himself as a hero and ignore any negative repercussions of his tactics. The really depressing thing is that we quickly understand that Connolly's ego, ability to cross ethical boundaries to get what he wants and high ambitions would have made him a pretty damn good gangster - but he's a terrible FBI Agent.
It's their relationship that forms the titular Black Mass, with Whitey in the role of Satan and Connolly selling his soul. This mythic element bumps up the film from above-average gangster flick to something pretty special - and it's here that Depp's outré make-up finally reveals its true purpose. Whitey doesn't look human because he isn't human - he is Satan wearing a human skin: tempting, corrupting and sucking away every molecule of goodness from the world around him.
The core Whitey/Connolly relationship is elevated by a fine supporting cast. Dakota Johnson and Julianne Nicholson both find something new in the extremely well-trodden territory of 'miserable gangster's wife'. The thugs surrounding Whitey also come off well, particularly Jesse Plemons, whose wonderfully evocative mug kicks off the film. Special notice too for Benedict Cumberbatch - he maybe wouldn't be at the top of my list for playing a guy from the mean streets of Boston, but he does an admirable job with both accent and character.
As far as gangster films go, Black Mass isn't quite in the top tier. But when the top tier consists of the first two Godfather films, Goodfellas and Once Upon a Time in America you're going to be hard pressed to equal them. Instead it happily slots into the only-slightly-lesser 'really good gangster movie' category, alongside fare like Carlito's Way, Donnie Brasco and Miller's Crossing.
It also proves that Depp has still got the goods - let's hope that future years will provide a wealth of interesting, creative performances from him. Then again, Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is shambling its way into cinemas in 2017 so let's not count our chickens...
★★★★
Black Mass is released 27 November 2015.
Monday, October 12, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
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"I entered the BFI IMAX, the largest and loudest screen in the United Kingdom, at 18:20. At a shade after 18:40, Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room began. About two hours later I stumbled, disorientated, mumbling and drooling, onto the sandy banks of the Thames.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned; Guy Maddin himself had introduced the film, off-handedly joking that what we were about to see a) has the potential to induce aneurysms, b) that he’d be surprised if there was anyone left by the time it was finished and c) that he himself would only dare to watch the opening scenes before skedaddling backstage."
★★★★
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Thursday, October 1, 2015
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Beasts of No Nation spends two hours showing us the physical and moral degradation of an innocent child. It's violent, politically uncomfortable and deeply disturbing cinema that goes places most studios wouldn't. Despite this, it's also a downright beautiful, exciting and thematically seductive story that reels you in and spits you out.
Set in an unnamed African nation, we find ourselves in just another day in an anonymous every-war. A vaguely defined government battles against even more fuzzily defined guerrilla rebels. Caught in the 'buffer zone' is Agu (Abraham Attah), a young boy in a respected local family. Refugees from the battlefield trickle through his village each day, his father having set aside land to temporarily house them.
This oasis vanishes when soldiers arrive and indiscriminately massacre the terrified villagers. With Agu's family dead the terrified boy runs into the bush, where he's eventually captured by the otherwise un-named Commandant (Idris Elba). He's cruel, unhinged and sadistic, yet brims over with magnetic charisma, his battalion worshipping him as their collective father. Like a moth to a flame Agu is drawn to him, quickly becoming a murderous, drugged out child soldier bereft of conscience.
It makes for compelling viewing, largely because Fukunaga isn't afraid to portray the initial stages of Agu's transformation as romantic and exciting. This turns out to be a sly perversion of the Campbellian hero's journey: the orphaned child going on a quest under the tutelage of a wiser father figure and ending up transformed. Yet while the Campbellian hero saves the day and evolves into a wise, competent and fully-rounded adult, Agu ends up a hollow-eyed shell having achieved nothing.
That Fukunaga adheres so closely to these archetypes while simultaneously inverting them screws with audience expectations. On reading a synopsis you'd expect to despise the Elba character - perhaps associating him with hazy memories of Kony 2012. Yet despite all the moral and physical horrors his character wreaks, Elba imbues the role with so much raw charisma that we can't help but find ourselves in thrall to him. It sounds sick, but you can understand why people would follow his orders and abandon their conscience.
Elba's performance is elevated by woozily psychedelic cinematography that turns the warzone into a hyper-real, oversaturated dreamworld. This (in combination with intentionally disorientating editing) conveys the effect of the amphetamines and cannabis that the soldiers constantly take. It's a suffocating bad trip, bullets whizzing past the camera, screams, grass distorted to deep reds and constant random acts of background brutality. This is all scored by an excellent synth-led score by Dan Romer and results in a kind of cinematic sensory overload.
There's more than a sprinkling of Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line here, especially during Abu's monotone, philosophic voice-over. But it doesn't feel much like Fukunaga is ripping off Malick so much as he's playing with the same tool-set; deconstructing the imagery and emotions of war movies to understand what's going on in their character's heads. This psychological focus echoes Fukunaga's work on True Detective, which also has as much time for the protagonist's psychology as it does the narrative.
None of this would work without a rock-solid central performance, something Abraham Attah more than delivers. I don't know who discovered this young actor, but they deserve some kind of award for unearthing new talent. He's brilliant from minute one, as credible as a bright-eyed mischievous child as he is a burnt out AK-47 wielding psychopath. As good as Elba is (i.e. really good), his performance largely works because we can sense the awe in Attah's face when the two interact.
Beasts is the first film acquired for distribution by Netflix and seeing their logo projected across a cinema screen is a slightly surreal experience. Yet if Beasts is anything to go by the company is going to shake things up a bit. It's a depressing thing to note, but the fact that the film features no white characters (even in incidental roles) would probably make it untouchable by major studios. But Netflix, swimming in cash and with a pre-paid subscription audience, can afford to take 'risks'.
And thank god they did, because Beasts of No Nation is a damn fine piece of cinema. From the sound design, the costuming, the editing, set design and location scouting everything is top notch. It feels like the first proper shoe-in for a boatload of award nominations, particularly for Elba and Attah's performances. Best of all, it's going to be streaming to all Netflix subscribers in a couple of weeks. It's a must watch.
★★★★
Beasts of No Nation is available for streaming (and released in Curzon cinemas) on 16 October 2015
Friday, September 25, 2015
Friday, September 25, 2015
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I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the pitch for The Corpse of Anna Fritz. A world-famous young starlet unexpectedly dies. Her body is held in a hospital morgue where an orderly snaps a photo of her and sends it to his friends. They turn up eager for a peek, ogling her naked body and squeezing her breasts. Then one of them suggests having sex with the corpse, pointing out that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Sure she's growing a bit pungent, but after all, Anna Fritz is a celebrity...
It's probably safe to say that The Corpse of Anna Fritz isn't destined for mainstream success. This marks another entry in the mercifully limited necrophilia subgenre, alongside esteemed classics like the shiver-inducing NEKromantik series and the major league barminess of 1973's Love Me Deadly. These films set out to shock (and they succeed), yet simply freaking an audience out is like shooting fish in a barrel. So it's refreshing that Vicens uses necrophilia as a springboard for political and social comment.
The three men at the centre of the story - a hospital orderly and his two friends - are various degrees of moronically macho, yet instantly recognisable. Early in the film they cockily evaluate women in the hospital waiting room for 'fuckability', boasting that they could persuade a Chinese student to get breast implants and pimp her out. They're detestable creatives, yet their behaviour and dialogue is instantly recognisable: "Whey, mad bantz!"
This proves to be the tip of an iceberg of misogyny that this film explores and subtly satirises. From the garbled crackle of scene-setting news radio over the opening credits we learn of Fritz's life. World-famous movie star, international jet-setter, fashion icon and model - she sits atop the Mount Olympus of celebrity. Ordinarily, to men like our leads, she's practically divine, existing only as a fantasy. Even before the events of the film begin men (and men like them) have reduced Anna Fritz to a dislocated, impersonal sex object, something entirely separate to her as human being.
This makes their arousal when confronted with her newly-dead corpse weirdly understandable. Like Pavlov's dogs they've been socially conditioned to lust after beautiful, passive and submissive women, making Fritz's corpse utterly irresistible: a three-dimensional, tactile masturbatory aid. Ironically, even while dead she feels more 'alive' than the porn that's warped their minds. That their lust is vaguely comprehensible layers the film with pitch-black satire: Vicens concluding that unashamedly raping corpses is the logical endpoint of 21st century masculinity.
This is neat stuff and for a decent portion of the film Vicens is onto a winner, weaving together sociology and nausea-inducing horror into an uncomfortable yet satisfying watch. Yet, sadly, the film eventually degenerates into a conventional Hitchcockian suspense thriller composed of largely predictable narrative beats.
It's not that the film becomes bad, just that it turns into a decently constructed genre flick, which is a bit disappointing after the promise of the first act. Even so it looks great throughout, making much of the cool pallor of cold fluorescent light on skin and the textures of sterilised white tiles and grimily industrial hospital machinery. The performances are also top notch, with Christian Valencia's scumbag extraordinaire Ivan standing out as a particularly hateful asshole who deserves every inch of his comeuppance. Even Alba Ribas impresses as the titular corpse. Playing a dead body doesn't sound like the most promising of roles, yet she puts in an honest-to-god performance rather than just being a prop.
I can't deny enjoying The Corpse of Anna Fritz, though it didn't turn out to be the corpse sex film I'd hoped for. I love bold cinema that careens through taboos and explores seriously bizarre territory, especially when it's shot with as much panache as this is. Sadly it can't quite stick the landing, settling for genre competence rather than properly going off the deep end. Still, its mouldy, slowly rotting heart is in the right place.
★★★
The Corpse of Anna Fritz is at the London Film Festival on 7th and 8th October. Tickets here.
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