"I don't want anyone to imitate me" John Cassavetes once said, but Erick Zonca apparently didn't listen... and we're all better for it. Zonca's long-awaited follow-up to 1998 arthouse favorite The Dreamlife of Angels isn't another low-key chamber drama, but rather a live-wire response to Cassavetes' 1980 film Gloria - the indie maverick's rare critical and commercial success of his career, maybe in large part because he didn't have as much creative control it over the film as he did with landmark works like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence. I'll admit to not having seen Gloria, but there's nothing in Julia that suggests the alleged commercial calculation of its predecessor; it feels as if Zonca's taking the premise in the more prickly and potentially alienating direction that Cassavates would - or should - have, had he that kind of freedom. As result, the film is an unlikely yet successful Cassavetes pastiche, as Zonca appropriates his master's woozy verite formal style and hypernaturalistic approach to directing actors, with the usually poised Tilda Swinton getting her Gena-Rowlands-freak on, playing her scheming and kidnapping - but unfortunately scatterbrained and perpetually knackered - titular character with the feral desperation of an ritalin-deprived child learning to play a videogame by bashing the controls until he wins out of luck. It's a flailing mess of a film, but completely of a piece with its self-destructive and wildly impulsive subject - it begins with a study of her drunken face in closeup, and the end credits seems to roll the split-second that it seems she's arrived at a point of self-realisation, as if such clarity is too much for the film itself to bear. All this combines for a film whose fascination is strictly of the slow-motion trainwreck variety... but it's fascinating nonetheless.
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Part of the new wave of French extreme horror films (moratorium on 'torture porn', plz?) Martyrs is an utterly deranged film, not only for its boundary-pushing screen violence, but also for its deadly serious rendering of ideas that are so ridiculous, that the film almost edges toward the sublime (Film Freak Central's Walter Chaw suggested it could've been made by a cenobite). I can't say that I took the thing as seriously as it's makers evidently did, but I admire its ballsiness in attempting to depict such a level of torture and suffering, and then asking us to get past our kneejerk moral reactions (ie, that the film indulges in exactly what it sets out to admonish, etc), and - much like the torture process depicted - to work stage by stage until we've reached a state of contemplative awe at the suffering on display. So, OK, if that is the film's raison d'etre then maybe that's not really enough to make it a truly great film rather than simply a provocative one, and certainly for much of the film I was wondering 'do I really need to be watching this?'. But unlike, say, Haneke's Funny Games (another film that almost resists qualification), Laughier respects his audience enough to trust that our cine-bloodlust might come from a deeper place than just excessive uncritical media consumption (no matter how innately retarded the finale's bid for spiritual heft might be), and unlike Haneke's film, you absolutely have to squirm til the very end for its message to register. It's also pretty much first-rate in just about every formal area, and the two young actresses are superb.
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When I saw Shane Meadows' Somer's Town at the Sydney Film Festival a few years ago, I predicted its running time (a scant 68 minutes) would mean it'd probably just turn up as a DVD extra on Meadows' next 'major' film, but for my money it's his best work to date; simply for the reason that he resists forcing any semblance of narrative contrivance and concentrates his eye on naturalistic, beautifully observed and often hilarious scenes of quiet character interaction. Maybe British cinema has already seen one too many testaments to the hopes and dreams of the working class, but when they're this funny and bittersweet, I'm not complaining. Thomas Turgoose also proves This is England wasn't the fluke of a young non-professional; he's an astonishingly natural comic actor with range, in the Simon Pegg mode.
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