SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Stars: Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Nick Frost, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone, Sam Claflin and Eddie Marsan.
Writers: Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini.
Director: Rupert Sanders

Rating: 3.5/5

An expansive retelling of the Brothers Grimm classic, Snow White and The Huntsman takes its most impactful beats from such post-modern literary adaptations as 1998s The Man in the Iron Mask and Peter Jackson’s …Rings trilogy, as well as vivid fantasy imaginings such as Willow and Ladyhawke. That it doesn’t really nail a flavour all its own is ok; it mimics the best bits of other movies so well, there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had even if none of it substantially resonates.

There are incongruities that should sink first-time director Rupert Sanders’ big, ballsy mash-up of feminine generational conflict and throne-room treachery. Kristen Stewart is both too old to convince as a virginal vision of purity and too small to be an armour-clad leader of misfit revolutionaries, but she makes it work; there’s a lean mid-section to the film that belies its meagre fairy tale origins, but the padding-out of these scenes is expertly done; and, as the evil witch-queen Raveena, who yearns to consume the essence of her fairer foe, Charlize Theron chews the scenery like a termite plague – and is all the more awesome for it.

An opening sequence that steeps the film in ruthless royal intrigue and murderous betrayal sets the tone for a narrative that may prove a little too dark for the wee ones who were enchanted by Disney’s “hi-ho-ing” animated take. A stepmother usurping the kingdom of a monarch she murders and imprisoning his princess, rightful heiress to the land, then existing in youthful perpetuity by sucking the rich soulfulness of her subjects certainly makes for a compelling set-up. But parents, beware; under 10’s will spend more of the 125 minute running time averting their eyes than you may have expected.

As a blossoming Snow White, It-girl Stewart affords us glimpses of the compelling screen actress she is destined to become. Her strong presence and china-doll bone-structure recalling a young Nicole Kidman, she exudes a teary innocence in the film’s early stages before transforming into a warrior princess. One can’t dismiss her mousiness – she is definitely not physically right for the role – but it is impossible not to be compassionate for her plight, so engaging is her star power. As The Huntsman, Chris Hemsworth confidently continues his ascension to stardom, his brawniness recalling a young, in-his-prime Nick Nolte.

Tech credits, especially the work of the visual effects team, are superlative. The morphing of full-size actors such as Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Eddie Marsan, Nick Frost and Toby Jones into a feisty band of dwarves is seamless; an extended sequence set in a fantastical netherworld, whilst thin on plotting, is a sight to behold. Grandly-staged battle sequences that lead to the film’s denouement are suitably exciting.

DESPITE THE GODS

Writer/Director: Penny Jovniak

Rating: 4/5

A tightly wound American film director thrust into the Eastern cultural maelstrom that is modern India sounds like a wacky comedy borne out of a Studio City pitch-meeting. But Penny Jovniak’s Despite The Gods is most definitely not a comedy; in fact, it’s a daunting character study of an artist racked by her own insecurities, instabilities and inabilities.

That the artist is the enigmatic Jennifer Lynch only adds fuel to the fiery personal and professional circumstances chronicled in Jovniak’s compelling work. On location in India in 2008 to film Nagin the Female Snake Goddess, the already controversial story of the overtly sexual mythical temptress, the abrasive, passionate Lynch clashes with…well, everybody in trying to get her modern horror/musical/pro-feminine vision to the screen.

As a study of a collaborative and expensive work of art spiralling out of control, Despite the Gods is as good an account of miscalculated filmmaking ambitions as Hearts of Darkness, Man of La Mancha and Full Tilt Boogie. Lynch, still best remembered in Hollywood for the debacle that would become Boxing Helena, pertinently draws comparisons between this, her third film (after the largely-unseen Surveillance), and the troubled production that was her father David’s mental undoing, Dune. Scenes in which she expresses deep-seated fears that her mind is headed down the same path as her fathers, whose breakdown she witnessed as a young girl, are very moving.

Yet the film attains its most profoundly insightful moments when it relates to Lynch single-parent status and the role her then 12 year-old daughter Sydney must play on location in India. ‘Syd’ is often called upon to act as her mother’s emotional crutch, whilst also struggling with the often cruelly sexist local attitudes. Jovniak (who developed the project while employed as Syd’s nanny) captures a complex, at times sadly lopsided dynamic between mother and daughter, the access to intimate moments and trust established with her subjects obvious.

Despite the Gods may be construed as a pro-feminist essay; Indian actress Mallika Sherawat emerges as the film’s strongest personality, defying traditional expectation both in the physically revealing role she plays and via the manner with which she deals with disrespectful crew members (notably producer Govind Menon). One of the many hurdles Lynch, Syd and, presumably, Jovniak strive to overcome is the general attitude towards a female being in charge.

But this wonderful film is about a great deal more. Lynch is a uniquely talented individual whose art both flourishes under and exponentially adds to her neuroses. Like Boxing Helena, the journey of her film (now retitled Hisss) to the big-screen is a far more entertaining story than the film itself. Here, the art serves as a starting point in the artist’s real journey and Jovniak captures that rocky road with a compassionate yet unflinching gaze.

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED

Stars: Audrey Plaza, Jake M Johnson, Mark Duplass, Karan Soni, Jenica Bergere, Mary Lynn
Rajskub, Kristen Bell and Jeff Garlin.
Writer: Derek Connolly.
Director: Colin Trevorrow.

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Screenings - Fri 3 Aug, 9.00pm; Tue 14 Aug, 9.00pm.

Rating: 4.5/5

For all its cool, young key-demo sassiness and nimble use of the ‘snarky aside’ to get laughs, Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed is a ultimately a big sooky dose of optimistic sentiment. The superbly-balanced tone of this sweet and sour outsider-romance is the real star of the San Francisco native’s feature debut, though breakout turns by on-the-cusp players Audrey Plaza and Jake M Johnson add to the film’s warm and wondrous sense of discovery.

The buzz began when Derek Connolly’s script picked up the prestigious Waldo Salt screenwriting prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It is a written work rich in character detail but one which allows the protagonists to develop at a measured rate; there are no grandly histrionic scenes or manufactured false notes, merely four witty, kind-of-sad somebodies whose lives intersect at a pivotal juncture in their personal growth.

It is the story of Kenneth (a sublime Mark Duplass), a small town supermarket clerk who places a classified ad seeking a partner to accompany him on a time-travel experiment. A Seattle tabloid sees it as a quirky human interest piece and dispatches cynical Jeff (Johnson) and two interns, Darius (Plaza) and Arnau (Karan Soni), to beef up the copy by providing some insight into the oddball’s back-story. Darius goes undercover, but soon becomes enamoured with Kenneth, whose nutty theories have also drawn the interest of some dark-suited G-men, the ironically-named Smith and Jones (Tony Doupe and Xola Malik, respectively).

Sci-fi buffs will derive immense enjoyment from the outward manifestations of Kenneth’s inner voice, writ large in easy-to-comprehend detail. Trevorrow has been open about his love of Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, the epitome of comedy/drama/fantasy for a generation of filmgoers. Safety Not Guaranteed’s edgier moments of cynicism wouldn’t have played so charmingly back in 1985, but comparisons between the two films in terms of audience empathy and emotional involvement are spot-on. (When the film closed the recent Sydney Film Festival, the packed audience at the city’s grand State Theatre positively erupted with joy at the film’s final scenes).

The metaphors at work in Connolly’s script are no less endearing for being a little too obvious. Johnson’s Jeff travels to the backwoods township with small, narrow ambitions based on his past, whilst Duplass’ Kenneth seeks happiness by embracing the grand opportunities inherent to his vision. Fulfilment comes with self-belief and an assured sense of direction, back or forward. Trevorrow and his cast make this simple message particularly special; by yearning to travel across vast dimensions, they have captured the modern film narrative’s most elusive yet important one – depth.    

BRAVE

Voice-cast: Kelly McDonald, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, Julie Walters, Robbie Coltrane, Kevin McKidd and Craig Ferguson.
Writers: Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi.
Directors: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell.

Rating: 3/5

There is a fire in the belly of Princess Merida that burns as bright as her wild tangerine mane, but that passion never fully engulfs Brave, the expectedly wondrous new work from Pixar Studios.

Riffing on the notion that the heritage of the Scottish people is filled entirely with feuding clansfolk with horrible teeth who booze and fight as soon as eat and breathe, it is the combined vision of three animation veterans, steeped in both narrative and technical experience. Brenda Chapman’s star rose as part of Disney’s 90s heyday before she joined the start-up Dreamworks team (she last directed The Prince of Egypt); Mark Andrews is Pixar-based (the Oscar-nominated short, One Man Band) but did time at the short-lived WB Animation outfit (Osmosis Jones, The Iron Giant); Steve Purcell hails largely from a video-game and television background. Their last combined work was as script and story contributors on Cars.

This eclectic mix of experience and aesthetics may go some way to explaining why Brave never quite becomes the sum of its parts. Ostensibly a mother-daughter story in which both come to realise the importance of their womanly bond, Brave also weaves in ancient woodland mythology, fight-or-flight action thrills (littlies will get a jolt in some bear-attack moments), two rather perfunctory ‘Disney’-esque musical interludes and some broad comedic shtick (supplied by all the menfolk, none of whom have any bearing on the plot). It is all perfectly engaging, but is let down by characters who feel overly familiar. Largely absent from Brave is the absorbing family dynamic of The Incredibles, for example, which held our emotions as the visuals worked their magic.

If the script is unfocussed, the images that unfold are certainly not – Brave is a beautiful piece of modern animated art. Princess Merida’s corkscrew red hair is mesmerising to watch; one sequence, in which she scales a rock wall to taste of a sacred waterfall as the sun bathes the vast Scottish landscape, is truly breathtaking. Indoor sequences are a little less well-defined; the darkening effect of the 3D glasses reduces the clarity of the many candlelit scenes (some hurried action mid-movie is hard to follow). But overall, as we’ve come to expect from Pixar, the artform moves a further step ahead with Brave.

Highly-touted as the studio’s first female lead, the strength of spirit embodied in Merida (expressively voiced by a wonderful Kelly McDonald) keeps the film afloat when needed. Tweenage girls and their mums who have reluctantly sat through Cars 1 & 2 to appease Dad and the boys will love her energetic spunkiness and blossoming rebellious streak. It is frustrating that Brave does not ultimately honour her; it could have embraced its own moniker and the fearlessness of its lead and taken a few more risks.

SEEKING JUSTICE

Stars: Nicholas Cage, Guy Pearce, January Jones, Harold Perrineau, Jennifer Carpenter, Xander Berkeley, IronE Singleton and Jason Davis.
Writer: Robert Tannen.
Director: Roger Donaldson

Rating: 3/5

Despite growing increasingly preposterous as the minutes tick by, Roger Donaldson’s Seeking Justice is still at the high-end of star Nicholas Cage’s recent output. Though the star struggles to entirely convince as an everyman character, Cage’s current career phase hits a sort-of high with this New Orleans-set potboiler; whatever Guy Pearce or January Jones saw in their characters on the page, however, does not translate to the screen.

Cage plays Will Gerrard, a committed high-school teacher whose life turns upside down when his beautiful wife Laura (Jones) is brutally raped. Whilst sitting out her ordeal in the hospital waiting room, Will is approached by Simon (Pearce), who offers to correct the injustice done to their world. All Will need do is promise to repay the debt at some further point.

When Wil turns the table on his vigilante foes, convenience and circumstance all fall in his favour as they are prone to do in the world of B-movie star-vehicles. And there is an awful lot of B-movie pedigree in Seeking Justice. The premise is similar to the Richard Kelly’s The Box; the ‘secret assassin’ unit device was used in Peter Hyams’ The Star Chamber; and, a straight line can be drawn between Cage’s character here and his younger, tougher self in Simon West’s Con Air.  

But Donaldson and scripter Robert Tannen are clearly not out to reinvent the wheel with Seeking Justice (Clue #1, its blah-ly generic 1990s-style title). Their modus operandi is to give some well-worm tropes a good going-over and they largely succeed in their humble goals.

New Zealand-born Donaldson had a solid lock on undeniably daft but involving thrillers (No Way Out, White sands, The Getaway, Species, The Recruit ) before he peaked in 2005 with his passion project, The World’s Fastest Indian. He whirls his camera around corners and through speeding traffic with the solid but detached eye of an old pro; he appears to be doing his darndest to make sure his film could never be confused with any type of reality.

Which makes Cage his perfect leading man. The actor often seems to exist in a rarefied world, reacting with odd ticks and glowering facial expressions that are at first, incongruous with the scenario but which somehow gel with his director’s vision.

The time has certainly passed when critics can keep blathering on about how Cage’s current work compares to his meteoric emergence (Raising Arizona; Vampire’s Kiss; Moonstruck); that was thirty-odd years ago, and neither he (at close to 50) nor Hollywood make those sort of risky projects that thrive on A-list eccentricity. He seems determined to make the most of his Hollywood standing at present; if that all-too frequently leads to “WTF?” choices (Bangkok Dangerous; Trespass; Drive Angry; Season of the Witch; both Ghost Riders), it also occasionally yields a solidly enjoyable programmer, as is the case here.

LIVID

Stars: Chloé Coulloud, Félix Moati, Jérémy Kapone, Catherine Jacob, Béatrice Dalle, Chloé Marcq and Marie-Claude Pietragalla.
Writers/Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury.

REVELATIONS FILM FESTIVAL Screenings – Sat 7 Jun 10.45pm.

Rating: 1.5/5

Having crafted one of the great French horror works in 2007s Inside, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury tackle the haunted house/vampire genre with far less apparent alacrity in their follow-up, Livid. Pompous, over-stylised gaudiness and seen-it-all-before frights inspired far more giggles than gasps amongst the late night crowd at the Sydney Film Festival screening; the title may best sum up the reaction of full-price paying patrons.

Whereas Inside was a standard home-invasion thriller amped-up by bravado filmmaking and all-or-nothing physical horror, Livid tarts up a grab-bag of supernatural/kids-in-peril B-movie clichés with an arty pretension that grates. The film’s lofty thematic ambitions are to explore memory, longing, the corrosive effect of secrets and the avenging of cruel injustices, but only the most easily-pleased horror aficionado could claim Bustillo and Maury examine these with any insight.

Young trainee-nurse Lucie (a likable Chloé Coulloud) is taken by her bitter mentor Catherine (Catherine Jacob) to the dusty, shadowy mansion of bed-bound, comatosed crone Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla). The once-grand estate is in disrepair, the ambience of the house filled with remnants of past lives, notably a rather disgusting collection of taxidermied animals (the suit-wearing, tea-drinking giant catfish got the biggest laugh). Lucie learns that the house was not only once a dance studio run by Jessel, but also that her sizable, long-forgotten loot is hidden somewhere in its myriad of rooms.

Spurred on by boozy courage, Lucie’s obnoxious boyfriend William (Félix Moati) and his brother Benjamin (Jérémy Kapone) break into the house to acquire said booty, but don’t bargain on Madame Jessel’s waken state or the ‘children of the night’ that still remain entombed in the home’s walls. The trio become separated; the men act like imbeciles, thereby ensuring their demise (a spoiler? I think not, so predictable is the films plodding pacing). Only Lucie, who has kept her head whilst others loose theirs, can deduce the actions required to calm the spirits of the home and free herself from their grasp.

Flashbacks to dance-hall days when the home was sanctuary to teen-vampire ballerinas (read that again....) are so grandly realised as to resemble modern-day perfume commercials. Scenery-chewing emoting from all but Coulloud, who seems more bemused than frightened, ensures Livid never fully convinces. The bloated seriousness and shallow artifice applied by Bustillo and Maury nixes any hint of the self-knowing irony that the film needed (a flaw it shares with Tony Scott’s 1983 sexy-vampire pic, The Hunger, a film it closely resembles).

In fact, Livid shares much with any number of past horror standards. Euro-horror fans will spot stock-standard giallo references from Argento’s and Bava’s oeuvres; there are hints of gothic haunted-house classics such as The Others and The Innocents. But Livid has nothing to offer of its own, save a suffocating sense overtly art-designed set-pieces and a particularly nonsensical finale. It is film that doesn’t convey great film horror but instead tries hard to manufacture and sell it.

EXCISION

Stars: AnnaLynne McCord, Traci Lords, Ariel Winter, Roger Bart, Malcolm McDowell, John Waters, Jeremy Sumpter and Marlee Matlin.
Writer/Director: Richard Bates Jr

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL Screenings - Sun 10 Jun 9.00pm; Tues 12 Jun 8.30pm.

Rating: 4/5

 

To hear the deliberately droll Richard Bates Jr talk down the deeper aspects of Excision, his directorial debut, at a Sydney Film Festival post-screening Q&A, one may deduce that this extraordinary work was all a bit of a lark for him. When, in fact, nothing could nor should be considered further from the truth; his coming-of-age horror opus is positively dripping with slyly intellectual observations of the deeply-rooted link between a girls blossoming womanhood and the urges and rages such changes carry with them.

The opening shot is a clear indication of what we can expect from Excision – sex and violence and the yin and yang that those diametrically opposed halves represent within a young woman’s psyche. It is a dream sequence, in which two versions of our anti-heroine Pauline (Annalyne McCord) stare each other down; one is in the grip of sexual fulfilment, while the other is spewing blood and close to death.

Pauline is the greasy-haired, pimply geek archetype that is usually the butt of schoolyard jokes, both in the movies and real life. But McCord’s Pauline is a portrait of a teenager captured at a time when she is learning to embrace her uniqueness (a quick wit, sexual curiosity, anti-parental control). She brazenly offers herself to the school stud Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) for her first time; she rails against her tightly-wound mom Phyliss (Traci Lords) while learning to appreciate, even love, her sweet younger sister Grace (Ariel Winter), who is suffering from cystic fibrosis.

Pauline’s dream grow darker and detailed, each more violent than the last. They are the visions of an alienated but active mind, one struggling to reconcile between her place in the world and the measures she is willing to take to make things right.

The men in the film are grossly ineffectual. Two sexually-active cheerleaders joke about Adam’s smallness and inability to become aroused, even that perhaps he might be gay; his final insult is an indescribable moment involving menstruation and oral sex. Pauline’s father Bob (Roger Bart) is a shell of a man, beaten down by Lord’s shrill suburban-harpie, whilst the high-school authority figures are Malcolm McDowell as a hollow, ambivalent schoolroom lifer and Ray Wise as a slightly deranged principal.

Excision is a film in metaphoric overload, where Pauline’s every waking moment is consumed by images and thoughts pertaining to sex, blood and conflict. McCord, a mens-mag favourite whose resume to date gave no indication she was capable of crafting such a wondrously disturbed character, conveys the inner-collision of Pauline’s sympathetic reality and psychotic extremes with equal measure profundity and black, black humour. Her final on-screen moments are nightmarishly impactful.

The young director’s trope dissection is cut entirely from the chick flick/teen outcast cloth, but without the airs and graces of the kind that the late John Hughes might have employed; had David Cronenberg and Dario Argento co-directed Sixteen Candles it might have looked a bit like Excision. But Bates’ piercing originality and keen eye for framing and ear for dialogue sets it own precedents, standing tall on the stooped shoulders of Pauline and her teen-dream bloodlust.

THE WARPED FOREST

Stars: Rinko Kikuchi, Fumi Nakaido and Kanoko Kawagachi.
Writers: Shunichiro Miki and Yuuka Oosumi
Director: Shunichiro Miki.

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL Screenings – Mon 11 Jun 9.00pm; Sun 17 Jun 9.30pm.

Rating: 3.5/5

For those who crave auteuristic autonomy, unencumbered by studio constraints or concerned with audience response…well, having watched The Warped Forest, you really ought to be careful what you wish for. 

Entirely self-funded, visionary Shunichiro Miki, a Japanese ad-agency legend, offers up a work of glorious, often impenetrable eccentricity, multiplied by the power of ‘huh?’  You are not likely to see a film like The Warped Forest ever again and it will depend entirely upon the individual whether that will be considered a good or a bad thing.

From what I could gather (and everything you take from this film will depend upon your viewing experience, as no website or PR campaign exists to help one interpret its oddness), The Warped Forest is about a parallel world in which our souls exists to live out our longings, fears and ambitions. It is ruled over by an enormous spinning triangle that acts as a kind of ‘Dream Central’ Overlord.

Inhabitants of this strange land are giants and/or tiny people, who co-exist so as  influence each others  lives. Frustrated souls indulge in ‘dream tinkering’, an ill-advised indulgence with realistic highs but terrible lows. There is also anal/vaginal fruit that grows on naked-lady trees, a penis-gun and a large pink-and-white furry ‘blob-creature’  whose uterus-like inner-sac may hold the cure to one characters outbreak of pulsating open-wounds.

Suffice to say, the chances of The Warped Forest being adopted into a lavish Broadway musical are slim.  The Sydney Film Festival audience reaction ran the gamut; initially, there were lots of giggles at the gaudy visuals and amateurish acting (much feels entirely improvised), then there was some stunned silence, followed by some genuine investment in Miki’s vision and drama.

As programmer Richard Kuipers stated in his pre-screening introduction, The Warped Forest is a film that demands your attention and intellect, if only to decipher the indecipherable. The imagery is, at time, wondrous; at times, giddily naff. There is a sentimental undercurrent that keeps one engaged in the film (the soaring chords employed in the finale suggests the director is a softy at heart), but it is a purely visceral reaction. Nothing about The Warped Forest makes sense in terms of conventional emotionality.

Or does it? The film exists in a dream state, that most primeval aspect of human existence, so perhaps it is fitting that it feels both fleeting yet somehow resonant. Like our sleeping visions, it will be impossible to recapture fully upon reflection nor able to be fully understood. I guess it is best to just let it be what it is. Whatever that may be….

A ROYAL AFFAIR

Stars: Mads Mikkelsen, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Alicia Vikander, David Dencik, Trine Dyrholm, Thomas W. Gabrielsson, William Jøhnk Nielsen, Cyron Bjørn Melville and Laura Bro.
Writers: Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel; based upon the novel Prinsesse af blodet by Bodil Steensen-Leth.
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Running time: 137 minutes.

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL Screenings – Sat 9 Jun 6.15pm; Fri 15 Jun 4.15pm.

Rating: 4/5

Arthouse audiences craving the grand costume dramas of yore will be camping out for A Royal Affair, the gloriously-realized recounting of a short-lived period in Danish social reform as told through the eyes and loins of those in power. Director Nikolaj Arcel takes no great risks in his loosely-fictionalized version of events little-known outside of the region, but he maximises every potent element of the story whenever possible. A Royal Affair is a sumptuous tale of corseted desire, political malfeasance and complex immoralities.

Structured as to be the recollections of Queen Caroline Mathilda (a luminous Alicia Vikander) for the children to which she was denied access, the titular tryst is one that develops between her and German doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen). Introduced whilst doing some pro-bono healing in the dank halls of a community hospital, Dr Struensee is a noble figure though not of the upper class; Mikkelsen conveys movie-star magnetism in a role that all but consumes everything else in the frame with him, which is both a good and bad thing. As soon as his chiselled cheek bones and imposing figure enter the film, there is no doubt he’ll bed the leading lady and exert influence over the young, slightly loopy King Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, his high-pitched random giggle and eccentricity reminiscent of Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus).

As a man of the people, and flush with the confidence one oozes having seduced monarchy, Struensee begins to exert a gentle influence over the laws of the land. Upping taxes on the rich, dismantling serfdom and increasing expenditure on social infrastructure are just a few of the changes he inspires the King to demand of his subordinates. Of course, these are wildly unpopular with the wealthy, who leap at the opportunity to oust the doctor when the secret love between Caroline and Struensee is revealed.

In addition to the photogenic charms of Vikander and Mikkelsen, the production is one steeped in the opulence of the period and the gorgeous, untouched countryside of the day (it features one of the most beautiful title-card sequences in recent memory). The passionate embraces of the two illicit lovebirds are tastefully done, but don’t skimp on detail; the overall portrayal of sex, both good and bad (Christian is grossly ineffectual, even brutish, his first night with Caroline), is typically open-minded in its Euro-cinema way.

Having triumphed at the Berlinale, where it took home thoroughly deserved statuettes for Best Actor and Best Screenplay, Arcel’s classically old-fashioned candlelight-and-carriages take on the bosom-heaving, aristocratic love triangle is a compelling if slightly overlong effort. Not that fans of the genre will mind if the film sags a little in parts; in fact, they may not want it to end at all.

BEAUTY

Stars: Deon Lotz, Charlie Keegan, Sue Diepeveen, Roeline Daneel, Albert Maritz and Michelle Scott.
Writer: Oliver Hermanus and Didier Costet.
Director: Oliver Hermanus.

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL Screenings – Sun 10 Jun 8.30pm; Mon 11 Jun 8.15pm.

Rating: 4/5

Repression is a key theme in Oliver Hermanus’ Beauty and one made all the more potent by the production’s homeland, South Africa. The story of a white, middle-class businessman who has structured his life so that he may live out his homosexuality in a private shame, the sophomore feature from the director of the acclaimed Shirley Adams is an intensely-focussed, gruelling drama.

The ambiguously-titled film tells of a human forced to live an unacceptable reality in the eyes of the society he has created. The misguided sense of entitlement that still simmers for much of older white South Africa in the nation’s post-apartheid era infuses Beauty. As the brawny, steely-eyed Francois, leading man Deon Lotz is an archetypal Afrikaan alpha-male; his generation has already experienced a tide of social change that has robbed him of an aspect his people’s defining history, albeit a shameful one. That Francois must also hide his sexuality is a further denial of his true self and soon, the tenuous grip he has of the personal and professional facade he maintains daily begins to slip.

With his bald, bony pate and intense stare, shadowed under a prominent eyebrow ridge, Lotz’s Francois is a Silverback gorilla of a man. The boundaries he enforces over every aspect of his compartmentalized existence is maintained with fierce clarity. His marriage to Elena (Michelle Scott) is one of superficial suburban routine (she has her own sexual secrets); his disdain for his daughter Anika (Roeline Daneel) and her youthful freedom is plainly obvious. His indulgence is a weekly get-together at a remote property with other like-minded closeted men, where they indulge in manly banter and beer-drinking before sessions of rough sex.

Francois’ life changes when he becomes infatuated with dashing law student Christian (Charlie Keegan), the son of a family friend whom he glimpses at a wedding in the film’s stunning opening sequence. As his life becomes entirely about stalking Christian, Francois’ tightly-bound existence and the psychological rigidity that life demands begins to unravel. When his repressed state finally emerges, it is as a sickening act of sexual violence that is certain to leave faint-hearted viewers shaken (several hardened critics looked away at the preview screening that SCREEN-SPACE attended; the film’s hopes of gaining wider, non-festival exposure sans censorship cuts are slim).

Hermanus and his cinematographer Jamie Ramsay find much that is beautiful in Beauty. Long, still shots of Lotz in close-up are unusually serene, or at least until the sense of predation and its inevitable outcome become dominant; the framing reflects the control Francois exerts to maintain his life.

The final scenes suggest a degree of pity for the man, that had he followed a path truer to his real self he may have lived a fuller, happier life. Hermanus is asking a lot of his audience to recognise remorse in Francois and understanding in our view of him, but the young director is clearly not above taking bold risks that demand consideration. Beauty is a confronting work that succeeds as a study of a false life lived badly and as a reflection upon a society grasping at traditional views to its own detriment.