Drum Media reviews, March: BIUTIFUL, DOGTOOTH, A TOWN CALLED PANIC, THE MECHANIC, HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER

Biutiful - Yes, that’s how the title’s spelt – it refers to a scene in the film involving a child’s misspelling of the word. Obviously a metaphor, but for what? The fleeting innocence that’s stripped away from us early on, before we’re plunged into a life of misery and sin? Probably. It’s also a mashup of the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘pitiful’; an apt description for this latest slice of bloated, self-serious, over-aestheticised wank from Alejandro González Iñárritu, which manages the feat of making his prior Babel look like a model of lightness and modesty by comparison.

Biutiful follows Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a single father of two, who makes a living in Barcelona trafficking in the labor of illegal immigrants. He’s also a medium, early seen communicating with a recently deceased child, and he’s about to come face his impending mortality, via a terminal illness. This is roughly the extent of the film’s plot – much of the 2.5 hour runtime is devoted to montages of urban squalor, scored to plaintive acoustic guitar strumming.

Ironically, for a film that nominally takes on human exploitation as one of its core themes, there’s something faintly exploitative in the manner that Iñárritu doles out these ‘big issues’ as glib, token signifiers of his seriousness of purpose. With its muted colours (every interior looks like a Redfern public toilet), and dour, humourless tone, Biutiful feels like the work of a filmmaker afraid that his audience will mistake it for anything less than a Masterpiece. Sure, Bardem suffers affectingly, but if the film resonates as a ‘meditation on mortality’, it’s mostly because its end credits feel like the sweet release of death.

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One of the more stunning films to emerge from the festival circuit in recent years is Dogtooth, a Greek film that’s finally seeing a local DVD release. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at 2009’s Cannes, it’s since gained enough traction and plaudits to nab an unexpected Oscar nomination for best foreign film. “Unexpected”, because this is the kind of transgressive, terminally weird provocation that the Academy Awardsä usually pass over in favour of more conservative fare.

Dogtooth centres on a middle-class family whose elders have kept their two daughters and one son, now presumably 20-somethings adults, in the confines of their household for fear of outside contamination. The parents have infantalised them with a number of lies about the outside world, including a revised vocabulary of deliberately ill-defined words (zombie = flower, to name one). The title refers to the arbitrary rule that allows them admission to the great yonder – when their dogtooth falls out. Writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos leaves many of the specifics of the story ambiguous, particularly the reasons for the childrens’ imprisonment, and it could be read as anything from a home-schooling satire to a political/religious parable, depending on one’s vantage point.

Many will cite the influence of Michael Haneke on the film’s icily controlled imagery, but this is no knockoff. Haneke’s compositions tend to entomologically pin down his characters, whereas Lanthimos lets his subjects wander around the static frames, sometimes letting their heads protrude out of vision during conversation, mirroring the collapse of the rigid system imposed upon. And unlike Haneke’s filmography, Dogtooth is goddamn hilarious much of its time, even at its most sadistic, and an all-round a triumph of originality and command of tone.

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A poker game atop a falling boulder. A giant robot penguin designed to throw snowballs at animals. A horse figurine given a cap for its birthday, complete with flaps that blast synthesized Mozart into each ear. Any review of A Town Called Panic, a nutty stop-motion animation from Belgium, would be better off simply listing the film’s numerous surrealist scenarios. Based on a short-lived TV series, it’s a truly manic delight: kinda like a lo-fi, dada-ist Toy Story, or what the Monty Python animated interludes would look like if done by the Aardman folks.

Set in a small provincial town, we open with a Cowboy, Indian and Horse figurine (each named after those descriptors) going about their antic morning household routine, with the mood turning increasingly antic when Horse announces that it’s his birthday. Cowboy and Indian’s impulse decision to make a barbeque as a present is upset by a succession of additional ‘0’s to the online order of 50 bricks. This sets in motion a chain of nonsensical events that suggests a 6-year-old child took over in the film’s writing stage. This is, of course, a good thing.

A Town Called Panic is viscerally funny stuff, and gets its laughs out of inexplicably funny nuances of motion and sound as much as any actual jokes, and manages to give ‘quirk’ a good name again. Many animated films aim to please children and adults alike – A Town Called Panic is the rare film that should please both parties for the exact same reasons.

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Early in The Mechanic, Jaw-son Statham is seen riding a speedboat, accompanied to the forlorn twangs of an electric guitar; an image seemingly ripped straight out of an 80’s cop show. It embodies the strangely anachronistic vibe of the film, which has all the flash and body-count of any modern straight-to-DVD actioner, but also the lean moodiness of vintage Don Siegel or Walter Hill – it is, after all, a remake of a largely forgotten 1972 Charles Bronson flick.

Statham may or may not be one of our finest thespians, but the dude has star quality. Like a modern-day Randolph Scott, he turns up, does little more than glower, but you somehow root for him. It also helps that he plays a soulless killing machine here, making his hits look like accidents, including that of his aging, wheelchaired mentor (Donald Sutherland), whose death he fixes to look like an anonymous carjacking. Wracked with guilt, he takes on the man’s son (Ben Foster) as his protégé, teaching him to sublimate his rage into his profession, rather than taking revenge on random carjackers.

When films are this formulaic, it’s the grace notes that count. And though Simon West’s (Con Air) direction is strictly functional, the dynamic between twitchmeister Foster and Madame-Tussaud’s-ready Statham has a certain spark that energises much of the film, carrying it through some admittedly incoherent passages (Most Random. Boardwalk Showdown. Ever). The Mechanic is merely serviceable, but with the recent Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson vehicle Faster paying explicit homage to Hill’s 1978 classic The Driver, I’m hoping this is the beginning of a stripped-down/no-bullshit action film mini-renaissance.

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The term ‘existential thriller’ is bandied about with such recklessness, that seemingly any film about a hitman staring into space qualifies as an archetypal example of the subgenre. How I Ended This Summer, on the other hand, genuinely embodies the label. It’s a film whose suspense and apocalyptic sense of dread is generated by the unpredictability of its characters’ motivations and actions when literally left alone in the wilderness, at the end of the world.

The wilderness in question is the barren surroundings of a Russian Arctic meteorological station, run by two men: Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin), a 20something young turk learning the ropes of radiology under the guidance of grizzled, gruff Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis). They’re worlds apart, in age and experience in their profession, as well as their overall temperment; Pavel’s playful streak, established by the opening scenes as he runs atop a walls of barrels with his discman on full blast, puts him at odds with Sergei’s rigor and focus. When a key piece of news for Sergei from back home is withheld by Pavel (uncertain of how he should break it), the stakes slowly become life-or-death based on the consequences of his inaction.

This is a film that really lets you feel the pull that its physical environment exerts over the characters, and once you do, the ensuing duel is hypnotic (‘landscape as character’ is another oft-abused cliché that writer/director Alexsei Popogrebsky grandly reinvigorates). There’s surely an old/new Russia allegory present in the conflict between Pavel and Sergei, but the nuanced, emotionally precise performances from both actors keep both characters beyond mere avatar status. Even the slight fizzle of an ending can’t detract from the masterful buildup that’s preceded it; the journey here is absolutely more important than the destination.