Guest review by George Ghon - CONTAGION

A ghastly virus breaks out. It kills so fast that any hope to find a suitable remedy in time becomes elusive. A father, whose wife had died, tries to protect his daughter from the evil disease (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anna Jacoby-Heron respectively). The government official (Laurence Fishburne) with field experience shows his toughness and rigor to handle the nightmarish situation according to his professional standards. He cooperates with the World Health Organization, which in turn sends a cute epidemy specialist (Marion Cotillard) to analyse the trajectory of the virus and determine where it had come from, ending up on site in Hong Kong. The scientist in the laboratory (Jennifer Ehle) does what she can and all along the viewer waits for an unexpected turn in the plot. 

Is a James Bond villain behind all this? Does the CIA have secret intelligence? Can it be that a Swiss pharmaceuticals CEO has gone insane under the current economic pressure and a little experiment to boost the sales for Aspirin went way out of control? 

No, nothing, the story just continues and the source of the disease is backtracked to an obscure bat population in the Asian jungle. The whole trick box of elaborate Hollywood dramaturgy remains closed, giving preference to a Realistic account of a current-day bio-catastrophe. There is no evil scheme to be discovered. The guys in power are working hard, doing their job as best as they can. The alternative souls (Jude Law as Frisco-based wannabe journalist) are as corrupt and prone to sell their conscience to greedy hedge fund managers as every other human being could possibly be. And even the offices of high profile government organisations, and with them their functionaries, are suspiciously unattractive.

Steven Soderbergh, who wants to see this?Hollywood is the dream factory, not the documentary Mecca! It is easy to dismiss this film as unsuccessful try to wrap an action plot into some layers of the Real. Boring! On the other hand, do we need to see another hyper-stylized, action packed, fast cut, over-dramatized doomsday film? Isn’t Steven Soderbergh here discovering an interesting gap that uses all the tools Hollywood has on display, but does not heighten them to a flasher à la Michael Bay? 

The film is purely led by the prosaic unfolding of a story, which could happen any day, without any conspiracy scheming that goes unnoticed by the public. The lead characters are not immortal (Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, watch out for Mr. Soderbergh’s casting director, he might eventually get you), nor are they overly beautified (ok, Gwyneth Paltrow looks sexy in a party scene, but no one else would show her deliberately with reddened skin irritations on the neck, I guess) or morally beyond (the people having privileged access to the vaccine that is eventually found gladly take it, without making too much fuss about their ius primae seri). Contagion doesn’t bother too much with aesthetic conventions or viewer’s expectations. It just tells it how it is. Hollywood for the quotidian.

CONTAGION played Venice 2011 and opened in September in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy and the US. It opened in Hungary on October 13th; and in Finland, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and the UK on October 21st; in Norway on October 28th. It opens in Belgium and France on November 9th; in Spain on November 29th; in Australia on December 3rd and in Germany on December 24th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 9 - MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE is a movie with a fascinating premise and a compelling central performance that is let down by a deeply non-credible plot and incredibly flawed cinematographer. It arrived at the London Film Festival fêted with praised and awards from the Sundance Film Festival, but sadly does not live up to the hype.


The central premise is to tell the story of a young girl in the immediate aftermath of her escape from a Charlie Manson like cult.  Day by day we see her struggle to adjust to normal society - her behaviour increasingly paranoid and aggressive - her family turning from accepting to irritated.  I really liked the novelty of taking this point of view. Rather than a lurid movie taking us into a cult in simple chronological fashion, it was far more fascinating to see the impact of the emotional manipulation in nightmarish flashbacks.  (That said, and to resist plot spoilers, I will simply say that I found the final scene to be needlessly "tricksy".)


Elizabeth Olsen plays the girl who has escaped - birth name Martha - but renamed by the cult leader Marcy May - a clever re-naming trick designed to alienate her from her former life and family ties.  I guess she'll forever be referred to as the "other" Olsen girl, but this performance should go some way to give her a name of her own.  Her performance is subtle, brave and deeply compelling - it's the backbone that keeps the movie together - and places her as a young talent to watch in the same peer group as Carey Mulligan and Evan Rachel Wood.


The tragedy is that her performance is undermined by a script by debut writer-director Sean Durkin that is utterly (and literally) incredible.  If your kid sister vanishes for two years, then suddenly calls you begging you to pick her up from the middle of nowhere, is in visible distress, covered in bruises, and starts acting really weirdly, wouldn't you ask what just happened?  Wouldn't you take her to a doctor immediately? Wouldn't you try to reach out to her?  I simply found the character of Lucy, Martha's sister, utterly unbelievable, and I wondered if this was deliberate on the part of Durkin or just a mistake, compounded by Sarah Paulin's icy, almost robotic, performance.  But even before that, I found the plot absurd. In the first scene, Martha escapes from the commune by running off into the woods, and then stops in the nearest town for some food.  One of the men from the cult tracks her down and looks menacing, but instead of hauling her ass back, simply let's her hang out in town assuming she'll come back of her own accord.  That just seemed laughably stupid.

Elizabeth Olsen (Martha) on the red carpet
for the UK premiere of  
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE at 
the BFI London Film Festival 2011

The other major problem with this film is incredibly poor quality cinematography from DP Jody Lee Lipes. That's not to see each frame isn't beautifully composed - that there isn't brilliant work in creating trick shots - reflections.  But I really hate it when people use DV and create colour palettes where the blacks aren't true blacks but washed out greys. It muddies the picture, and reduces the intensity of emotion.  When Martha runs into the woods, for instance, the scene is less petrifying but the scene looks washed out.  


MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE played Sundance 2011 where it won the Directing Award - Dramatic. It also played Cannes, Sydney and Toronto. It opens today in the US. It opens on December 22nd in Sweden; on January 20th in Poland; on February 2nd in Russia; in Ireland and the UK on February 3rd; in Spain on February 24th; and in France and Germany on March 29th.

WINTER'S BONE

WINTER'S BONE arrived in the UK from Sundance and Berlin covered in praise for its strong central performances and gritty portrayal of middle-American rural poverty.

The heroine of the film is seventeen-year old Ree Dolly played with impressive authority and conviction by Jennifer Lawrence. Ree is the daughter of an absent felon father and mentally ill mother, and has been forced to take on the parenting of her younger brother and sister. This involves a delicate balance of learning how to live on scraps and handouts without losing a sense of pride. This fragile existence is put under threat when bail bondsmen threaten to seize Ree’s house and woods unless she can find her father and bring him to jail. One could almost regard the search for the father as a MacGuffin – an excuse for the Ree to take us on a journey into the wider community. Because that’s what this film ultimately is – an excuse to explore a community full of adults that have responded to the lack of economic opportunity in the Ozarks, and turned to drug-using, drug-dealing and violence. Every single adult Ree turns to for help refuses to take the responsibility befitting an adult. And while, to spoil the ending, she does ultimately keep her house – and there is palpable relief that she won’t be separated from her brother and sister – that relief is ultimately false. Because we leave Ree in exactly the same position that we found her in at the start of the movie – living in poverty, forced into maturity before her time, and martyring herself for her family. We’ve basically just seen a young girl literally beaten to a pulp in her fight to stand still – just maintain.

So, WINTER'S BONE is no pleasure-ride, but it is an impressively made and well-acted movie, and that gives a certain pleasure of its own. By persuading the people from Ozarks to let her use their houses, and to appear as extras and minor characters, director Debra Granik imbues her film with a rarely seen sense of authenticity and sympathy. To be crude, even when viewed from the comparative luxury of your art-house cinema seat, this film never feels like poverty-porn. Is the movie flawless? No. I found the black-and-white animated dream sequence gauche and what should have played as a grimly horrific scene on a river was so over-the-top I laughed. Nonetheless, this is a powerful film – a film that creates and sustains a menacing tone, and that contains fleeting glimpses of genuine familial tenderness in the most unforgiving of circumstances.

WINTER'S BONE played Berlin 2010 where it won the CICAE Award and the Reader Jury Prize of hte Tagesspiegel. It also played Sundance 2010 where it won the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It was released earlier this year in the US and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in France on November 3rd.