LFF 2016:A Monster Calls / The Handmaiden /The Red Turtle

Well bugger me with a candlestick and call me Karen if it isn't that time of year again: it's the London Film Festival, a whole entire festival of films about London Records, the label that was home to such stellar talent as The Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and Gay Dad. What's that? Oh, right. Ignore me. Here are some film reviews!

A Monster Calls

Juan Antonio Bayona's fantasy-drama is heavy on the fantasy and light on the drama, suggesting he might be the ideal choice for an FX-heavy blockbuster like, say, the next instalment in the increasingly dull Jurassic Park series. Not that A Monster Calls is dull at all; in fact the scenes in which young Lewis MacDougall's tormented protagonist summons Liam Neeson's stunningly-rendered giant tree man (think a really fucked-off Ent) are some of the most entertaining in cinemas this year. But Bayona, working from a script by Patrick Ness (working from his own novel, working from an idea by Siobhan Dowd), sets up a promise early on about the healing power of storytelling which never quite delivers.

There's much to love here, not least some eye-ripplingly gorgeous animated sequences and a pivotal performance from Felicity Jones, but while Bayona is busy tugging on your heartstrings in the final act he's letting the opportunity for a truly thought-provoking fable slip through his fingers. Also, just a thought: when writing the lonely, awkward schoolboy with problems at home requiring a supernatural solution these days, I'm fairly sure writers aren't legally obliged to include the three antagonistic bullies, the leader of whom is clearly destined for a nasty comeuppance. And yet here we are.

The Handmaiden

Park Chan-wook is back in vengeance territory, thank God, although he's also in his fifties now, which means that as an arthouse director he is required to spend miles of footage (or, more likely, petabytes of memory) shooting young girls having it off with each other in the most graphic scenes you can get away with in a mainstream movie. And so The Handmaiden gets the Blue Is The Warmest Colour award at this year's LFF for the most comically extended scenes of fanny-on-fanny action which do more to titillate than advance the plot, although at least Abdellatif Kechiche's 2013 sapphic slurpathon had a believable and tender love story behind it.

Park's film, based on Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith, is a tale of con artists, double-crosses and heavy scissoring which starts off slowly, finds its rhythm in the middle and reaches a satisfying climax, but goes on so long your buttocks eventually get sore. Completely rewriting the novel's third act, Park stretches the story into a flabby revenge tale that lacks the lean, mean spark of his celebrated Vengeance trilogy. As expected, it's sumptuously shot and has a healthy seam of black humour running through it, but Park's shock tactics have lurched from smartly-crafted stomach-churning violence and brain-spinning plot wrinkles to adolescent lesbian fantasies. That's all well and good if you just fancy a wank, but less so if you came to the cinema for a different kind of stimulation.

The Red Turtle

Written and directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit and co-produced by Studio Ghibli, The Red Turtle is a seamless marriage of European and Asian sensibilities: hopelessly romantic and dreamily inscrutable, it's a dialogue-free fairytale that leaves you baffled, but in a warm and glowing kind of way, like that's just the way things are. Dudok de Wit's designs are simple but gorgeously animated, and while the premise (man is washed up on desert island) necessitates vast, empty backgrounds, it also allows the animation to breathe, pulling you into its carefully-crafted world. A triumph of originality and unpredictability, with solid support from some comedy crabs.

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London Film Festival: Mother

The London Film Festival trundles on like a great big convoy of films driving through the middle of London honking their airhorns and leaving behind a choking fug of reviews all saying much the same thing. In today’s case that’s especially accurate, because I saw Mother, another slightly unhinged Korean film, the day after I saw Thirst (see Friday’s post), and I can pretty much just copy and paste the review from Thirst and swap the vampire priest for an over-protective mother.

Mother is the story of a woman whose 27-year-old mentally retarded son is framed for the murder of a local girl, and who goes to extreme lengths to prove his innocence and find the real killer.

The film begins with what I was sure was a lengthy scene of former BBC newsreader Moira Stuart dancing in a cornfield, and things didn’t really get any less weird from then on. Although not as supernatural or surreal as director Bong Joon-ho’s previous film The Host, Mother still firmly inhabits that world of Asian cinema where everything’s slightly skewif. The mother and son relationship, for example, is surprisingly close in more ways than one.

Like Thirst, the black comedy’s there, the cinematography – while not as impressive as Park Chan-wook’s – is excellent, and the two leads are convincing as an obsessive mother and a troubled son, but the longer the film went on the more I was fidgeting in my seat waiting for it to end. The mystery is eventually solved unnecessarily late, resolving itself primarily by having characters suddenly remember something which could easily have been remembered about half an hour earlier.

Still worth watching, then, but I’m still waiting for the next Oldboy to burst out of Korea and gobble up its contemporaries like a reluctant live squid.



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Thirst

It feels like there have been a bajillion vampire films released this year. You can’t walk into a cinema right now without some undead bloodsucker chomping on your jugular. Although it’s always been like that at the Shepherd’s Bush Vue.

I don’t care much for vampire films, which is why I was so surprised when Let The Right One In turned out to be such a moving, beautiful and breathtakingly great movie that it’s been spreading its batwings at the top of The Incredible Suit’s Best Films of 2009 since I saw it.

I was never going to see Twilight last year, or the 2009 sequel New Moon, because – like boy bands, The X Factor and alcopops - it’s aimed largely at teenage girls, of which I am not one. Lesbian Vampire Killers wasn’t on my radar because it starred the unfunniest double act since Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, and appeared to have been made about 15 years too late to catch the ‘readers of Loaded magazine’ market it was intended for.

However I was always going to watch Thirst, the new film from South Korea’s Park Chan-wook, because I would watch anything that he made – despite the fact that he’s South Korea’s answer to Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam; someone who makes exceptionally extraordinary-looking films, only a tiny amount of which are actually any good.

Park’s Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy are two of the most goggle-bogglingly great films made ever, never mind in South Korea; the third film in that trilogy – Lady Vengeance – was fine but not as good as its predecessors, and Park’s other films (JSA, I’m A Cyborg) looked incredible but failed to deliver as a complete product.

Sadly much the same can be said for Thirst, the story of a priest who becomes infected with vampire blood, making him unspeakably horny for a childhood friend, and has to balance his newly acquired bloodlust with his raging libido and his desire not to kill anyone in order to survive if he can help it. Needless to say it doesn’t work out all that well, and by the end there’s more claret been spilled than at a gathering of nervous Mouton Rothschild lovers.

Thirst features some typically (for Park Chan-wook) blackly comic sequences and dazzling camerawork, and its two leads, Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-vin, are excellent. The final scene, featuring a clifftop, a car boot and two bickering vampires is simultaneously hilarious and touching, and visually stunning. However the whole story lurches uncomfortably from scene to scene, with little in the way of a narrative core to hold on to, so you’re never really sure what the aim is for these characters or why you should care.

That said, Thirst isn’t terrible, and there’s enough there for fans of Park Chan-wook, Korean cinema or vampire films. I’ll still queue up for Park’s next film, whatever it is; I just hope it’s better than Thirst, because if not, there will be blood.

Thanks to Ultraculture for the graph idea which I pretty much pinched wholesale there.

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