On the outskirts of Rio De Janeiro rests a site known as Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest garbage dump, home to growing towers of waste from all ends of the class spectrum. From afar the site registers as pure, undulating waves of debris, not unlike the action scenes in a Transformers sequel. Among these remnants are the catadores (‘pickers’), who scavenge for recyclable material. It’s a meagre existence upon first glance, with obvious health risks, and their earnings unsafe from raids by thieves, although preferable from the alternatives of drug dealing and prostitution – or what one unfazed worker posits as the “dirty shame” of upper class guilt.
Waste Land documents this area and its people through the perspective of Vik Muniz, a Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist intent on shining a light on this disenfranchised community via a large-scale art project that recreates photo-portraits of the pickers using a palette of the waste itself. And just as Muniz aestheticises this unlikely milieu, director Lucy Walker doesn’t have to work overtime in finding an eerie beauty in Gramacho’s post-apocalyptic-like environs.
The film itself has two main strands – one detailing the motivation for Muniz’s project and its subsequent creation, the other based around interviews conducted within and around the grounds of the dump. While the culmination of the former strand packs an obvious emotional punch, it’s the latter strand that’s truly fascinating, and I could help but wish Walker and co. stayed there longer with its inhabitants. Minor misgivings aside, Waste Land is potent stuff; and one of the few recent docos that merits a big screen viewing, dealing in two kinds of large-scale spectacle captured in glorious 35mm; a medium itself on it’s way out.
With a setup that plays like the clerical equivalent of The King’s Speech, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope is a shoulder-shrug of a film, in which the great Michel Piccoli plays the title role, as a pope suffering from a nervous breakdown on the eve of his election. Moretti himself, as ever, has a starring role, here as a psychiatrist called in to examine the pope as he’s reduced to an insecure, quivering mess. The latter descriptor somewhat applies to the film itself, as it awkwardly alternates between sombreness and broad-strokes comedy.
We Have a Pope has a minor, featherweight surface, and that’s not a knock against it – Moretti’s Caro Diario (1994) was casually profound, using its notebook structure to great advantage. But his new film is merely lopsided, limiting its Catholic Church critique to a sight gag involving a old cardinal falling over, and neither Moretti’s psychiatrist nor Piccoli’s pope emerge with enough depth for one to care about their respective neuroses. Moretti’s an appealing screen presence, but his insistence on casting himself in major roles is particularly detrimental here – an extended scene of him refereeing a game of volleyball between the clergymen particularly overstays its welcome.
The film at least ends resonantly, offering a nicely ironic depiction of personal catharsis doubling as national malady, but until then, Moretti fails to give weight to his Pope’s stage fright and thwarted theatrical ambitions. That Piccoli is such a compelling, expressive actor certainly helps – his tremulous visage does practically all of the film’s dramatic heavy-lifting – but this is a very flimsy vehicle for him.
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia begins with an awakening; an extreme closeup of Kirsten Dunst’s face, her closed eyes opening in ultra-slow-motion. It’s the first in a tableau of painterly, Wagner-accompanied slo-mo shots that depict the apocalypse; horses falling, a woman desperately carrying her child across a golf course, and finally, a planet-sized comet crashing into the Earth’s surface. This dreamy flash-forward overture casts a doomy sense of inevitability over the proceedings, which take place at the wedding of Dunst’s Justine, before she awakens to the relative irrelevance of the human life surrounding her.
Trier opts to shoot the wedding with his infamous shaky-cam, which here feels less like a naturalism device than a tool in rendering human activity fleeting, ephemeral; compounded by repeated images of fragility – flimsy wedding dress fabric, diminutive golf buggies, mini hot-air balloons set aflight in celebration. Likewise, many of the people who orbit around Justine are less rounded characters than avatars for vice and venality (most memorably Keifer Sutherland’s arrogant, capitalist brother-in-law), driving her further into a funk.
Trier has gone on record about writing the film during a period of depression, and though it can hardly be called cheery, it at least shows signs of having felt through it – indeed, its first half is practically a black comedy. At the midway point, the action shifts from Justine to her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who responds to the impending doomsday with fear and anxiety for the lives of her and her family. By evenly splitting the film between the two characters, von Trier seems sympathetic to both of their attitudes (aided by Dunst and Gainsbourg’s deeply-felt performances), and it’s this ambivalence that makes the film so resonant – and to this writer, Trier’s best film to date.
In theatres this Boxing Day is The Iron Lady, an uproarious parody of everything awful about Oscar-baiting biopics, starring an unrecognisable Amy Poehler as former UK prime-minister Margaret Thatcher. The film nails all the cliches with devastating accuracy: the flashback narrative set in motion by items of household ephemera, the awkward attempts at containing an entire, wayward life into a rigid three-act structure, the crassly manipulative music score, the garish overacting, the makeup department showboating… it’s all accounted for. There’re times when The Iron Lady could easily be mistaken for the real deal.
Which, sadly, it is. This vehicle for Meryl Streep’s impersonation prowess is so stiflingly unimaginative in its dutiful box-ticking, that one can only decide that the creative team (multiple parking meters?) behind it are taking the piss. Or after some kind of mimetic strategy; depicting the infamous leader of UK’s right-wing government with storytelling that’s similarly conservative to the point of loathsomeness. If one wanted to be generous, you could laud the film for being non-judgemental: but if it’s portrayal of Thatcher is balanced, it’s only a by-product of the stock-standard sentimentality that comes with this subgenre, mixed with the damning facts of Maggie T’s reign. Call it ambivalence via non-committal-ness.
The Iron Lady ultimately proves as stimulating as watching Thatcher’s Wikipedia page scroll up a cinema screen for two hours. Fleeting pleasures are limited to some punk rock tunes over the many newsreel montages, and the impressive-in-a-vacuous-way nature of Streep’s transformation. Otherwise, this exercise in Academy-voter pandering only proves, beyond all doubt, that the awards-season ‘arthouse’ releases can be as soulless and cynical as their Hollywood Blockbuster counterparts.
The Skin I Live In is a uber-macabre, unabashedly melodramatic tale of obsession made by one of modern cinema’s most renowned obsessives; Pedro Almodovar. It focuses on the relationship between mastermind surgeon Robert (Antonio Banderas) and his mysterious relationship with a captive, kidnapped woman (Elena Anaya) who, we learn early on, is his guinea pig for the creation of a synthetic damage-proof skin. The people around Robert seem strangely tolerant to his experiment, including his elderly female housekeeper, but nothing in this scenario is as it seems.
This is a tricky one to synopsise for the uninitiated, since its mid-film plot twist is the kind of bombshell that would be cruel to even hint at. Hitchcock famously mandated that theatre owners not let latecomers to Psycho into the theatre until the next showing, and that could just as well apply here as well. Suffice to say that Almodovar – taking his cue from another Hitchcock Vertigo – fashions a frighteningly absurdist vision of a world where humans are malleable screens for projection, ripe for remodeling at the whims of their dominators.
Similarly, the film’s narrative structure plays upon our own assumptions and ingrained viewing practices, confounding expectations at every turn. The aptly opaque performances from Banderas and Anaya complement the themes, and though the tone remains steadfastly detached and precise through (credit Almodovar and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine’s improbably gorgeous/clinical visuals), the ideas carry ample emotional weight. The ads for David Fincher’s upcoming Girl With a Dragon Tattoo trumpet itself as ‘the feel-bad movie of the season’ – for my money, it’ll be hard to top this twisted, twisty delight.
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