Rust and Bone: going swimmingly

Rust and Bone is a raw and gritty love story from director Jacques Audiard, whose last film was the harrowing prison drama A Prophet. This new one’s a much easier watch, even if it is liberally studded with abrasive arguments and reversals of fortune, mainly because there’s a real sense of redemption here with the characters eventually transcending their misfortunes, which range from the petty to the life-shattering.

The two main players here are Ali, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, a kind-hearted chancer who’s washed up at his sister’s house with his young son in tow at a coastal town in the South of France, and Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), a trainer of killer whales. Ali’s scraping a living through a string of security and doorman jobs but doesn’t seem too bothered about life, except when his responsibilities towards his son are brought to his attention – he’s happy to spend his free time making money in terrifying backstreet boxing matches and indulging in guilt-free casual sex. He’s a nice enough guy though to want to help Stéphanie out when she suffers a personal calamity although he barely knows her, and he doesn’t seem to be motivated to do this out of anything other than his essential good nature. She in turn starts to be drawn to him, but this isn’t anything like your standard issue Hollywood romance. The two are obviously attracted to each other but there are plenty of gnarly complications and differences of outlook to work through if they’re ever going to make it work. By the end both characters have been put through the mill, and both have learned to cope with what they’ve been missing.

So this is a pretty involving, well-considered piece of work but: I’ve got to say I was distracted throughout by one specific aspect which kept me from really surrendering to it. Ironically, it’s the success with which the film-makers achieved one particular physical effect that kept stopping me in my tracks – in the interest of avoiding spoilers I’ll stop here and won’t say any more other than “How the hell did they do that?”

P.S. Soundtrack note: there’s some good use of modern rock and indie songs, but after hearing John Cooper Clarke last week say how proud he was that his Evidently Chickentown was used on The Sopranos it was particularly nice for it to also crop up here.

The Dark Knight Rises: if I could just bat this one back to you…

I seem to have lost the taste for big-budget, all-action, things-exploding block-busting extravaganzas of late (I didn’t even catch the Olympics opening ceremony), although my spies tell me there have been a few worthwhile superhero reboots of late that have been worth a look (Avengers Assemble, which didn’t appeal as the title made it sound like it was going to be a documentary about how masked crusaders come flatpacked, and The Amazing Spiderman, which I turned down because I seem to remember watching a perfectly adequate Spiderman re-telling only about five minutes ago). I thought I should probably make an effort for The Dark Knight Rises, however, as I did really approve of Batman Begins, the first part of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of angst-ridden Gotham City based vigilantism, even if I found its follow-up The Dark Knight overlong and awkwardly structured, and unbalanced by Heath Ledger’s showboating performance as The Joker – it was electrifyingly watchable whenever he was on screen, but seriously draggy when he wasn’t.

So the good news, I guess, is that this third film is a definite improvement, at least in terms of pacing and coherence. It tells its story reasonably clearly, builds to some impressive setpieces which have real impact because the stakes have been properly prepared for the audience and while there are more subplots to keep an eye on than I’m completely comfortable with at least it doesn’t turn left into a completely different narrative two-thirds of the way through as the last film did. It’s efficient, even if it’s far from lean, what with all the heavy lifting required in the early stages to let us know what’s been going on with Bruce Wayne, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred the butler et al in the eight years since we last met them, and also establish a whole raft of new characters, a lot of whom just seem to be generic sleazy businessmen or police officers. Most eye-catching of the new guys are super-villain Bane, played behind a gimp mask by an unrecognisable Tom Hardy, who has an attractive if hardly original line in casual sadism and Nietzschean wisecracks, and Anne Hathaway’s feisty safe-cracker Selina Kyle, who’s never explicitly identified as Catwoman, although the ears are a bit of a giveaway. Also along for the ride are Marion Cotillard as entrepreneur and potential saviour of Wayne Enterprises Miranda Tate and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an idealistic young cop who you sense might be being set up for a more central role in the future.

You do need to concentrate a bit to keep up with how all these folk’s agendas fit together, and to be honest it’s not made any easier by the predominantly dark production design or by the way that a lot of Bane’s choice rejoinders are rendered indistinct by the distortion effect that’s been used on his voice, but I’m pretty sure the film plays fair and gives you all the information you need to make sense of it. By the midway point the nature of the baddies’ scheme has become clear and it’s certainly effectively realised on screen, with the various bangs and crashes and explosions coming over as satisfyingly physical and non-computer generated. A key to the success of these films is the vulnerability of Christian Bale’s Batman and he’s put through the mill good and proper here, suffering multiple reversals of fortune – he’s a much more interesting and rounded figure than any of the bad guys, whose motivation seems a little sketchy to me. Best of the new characters is Selina Kyle, who convinces as a properly conflicted human being and gets to deliver witticisms that are actually funny, while the holy supporting triumvirate of Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman are as classy as you’d expect, Oldman excelling as the beating heart of the film. It’s a long movie, and in places a slightly wearying one, but I’d be surprised if I came across another action spectacular this…err…weighty…any time soon.

Contagion: this society is sick I tell you

Back in the 70s (as I seem to have a habit of saying) there was a brilliant science fiction drama series called Survivors, concerning a world where 99 per cent of the population had been wiped out by an airborne virus. You may have caught the recent re-make which was all-right-I-suppose but not a surgical patch on the original for out-and-out bleakness. The title sequence of the original series alone is one of the most terrifying things ever seen on television: a montage of short shots of a Chinese scientist lifting and then dropping an ominous looking beaker of liquid before catching various aircraft and getting passport stamps from every major city on Earth, over which a bombastic, authoritative-sounding, current affairs style theme tune plays. You should YouTube it straight away if you don’t know it.

Compared to Survivors the new film Contagion, which plays out a very similar scenario, is somewhat lighter on the shock value and consequently a lot less gripping. This is for the main part admirably sober and well-researched, with director Steven Soderbergh seemingly going out of his way to avoid melodrama and tension-filled climaxes. The most out-and-out dramatic scene comes only about ten minutes in, when Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, who has seemingly come down with a bug she picked up in Hong Kong, is rushed to hospital after collapsing at home and shortly after dies (this isn’t really a spoiler, it’s in the trailer). Henceforth, individual deaths are not dwelt on and the movie spends its time on the doctors and scientists who are struggling to replicate the virus and come up with a vaccine, the effects on society as people start dying in their millions, and the establishment’s efforts to combat a troublesome blogger (Jude Law) who claims that an effective antidote already exists but is being suppressed for political reasons. There are a number of plot strands, the action is split between the USA and South-East Asia, and an impressive roster of big name stars on display: Laurence Fishbourne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard. The script is intelligent, the direction is restrained and nothing really feels clunky or over-contrived.

Despite all this, I found the film curiously uninvolving. This is partly because it seems to be neither one thing or another – if you’re going to be sober and unsensational, then use a less recognisable cast, don’t be so meticulous with your compositions and colour schemes and above all, don’t lay in doomy-sounding music to underline your point that things are VERY SERIOUS. And it’s partly because the various narrative threads don’t really go anywhere that interesting. It’s all as credible as a Hollywood film is ever going to be on this kind of subject, but I’d have liked a bit of government conspiracy, or massive medical cock-up, or actual collapse into anarchy. I mean, I would probably be complaining that it just wasn’t realistic if I’d been presented with some cartoony bad guys or cannibalistic tribes but it might stopped Contagion being just a little bit dull and worthy.

Midnight In Paris: getting the painters in

Woody Allen used to be known for making a lot of sharp and funny movies that entranced and delighted audiences, then he was known for getting off with and subsequently marrying his partner’s adopted daughter, and recently he’s been known for making a lot of weak and half-assed and not very funny movies that have left audiences wondering why they bothered turning up. I’m not really equipped to gauge whether the last part of that callously reductive career summary is fair comment as I tuned out somewhere around Small Time Crooks and have only caught a couple of entries from Allen’s 21st century output, both on the strength of a few “return to form” angled reviews, but both were pretty disappointing: Match Point rehashed themes from his earlier and far superior Crimes And Misdemeanors in between providing cameos for more or less every TV comedian in the UK, while Vicky Cristina Barcelona wasted some highly charismatic actors on a story that went nowhere.

Third time lucky. Allen’s latest release Midnight In Paris is as fluffy and insubstantial as a Christmas cracker joke written inside a meringue but it’s undeniably charming, and engaging, and here and there quite witty, and is the best thing I’ve seen by him since Sweet And Lowdown, with which it shares a period setting, for some of its scenes anyway. The set-up is simple: Owen Wilson plays Gil, a hopelessly romantic screenwriter who’s visiting Paris with his ill-matched fiancée and her materialistic parents. Friction between them causes him to end up wandering the streets by himself at midnight, at which point a vintage taxi appears and whisks him off to the past, where he meets and befriends many of his idols: Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and so on. Inevitably, he also encounters a beautiful girl (Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard) towards whom he feels a powerful attraction, and this starts to exacerbate the uncomfortable situation he finds himself in in the present.

Crucially, there’s no straining for significance here, or any pretence that the feeble storyline is there for any reason other than an excuse to show off some predictably lovely footage of the French capital and some very nicely rendered reconstructions of 1920s bars, restaurants, fairgrounds and living rooms. Every character is a caricature, Gil’s horrible potential in-laws no less so than Hemingway, who’s constantly delivering useless advice about how to be a true man, or Salvador Dali, who pops up to enable some not bad jokes about surrealism. Once you relax into it, it’s all really quite soothing. Wilson turns out to be a canny choice for the lead role, which would surely have gone to Allen himself had the film been made twenty or thirty years ago – he plays it light and wide-eyed, and very much in the style of the director, without coming off as a pale imitation. This is probably the most throwaway film I’ve seen this year, but it achieves what it sets out to do and entertains along the way so I’ll take it over The Tree Of Life for now.