London Film Fest 2010 Day 8 - WOMB

WOMB is a beautifully photographed, beautifully acted, deeply painful movie about an unboundaried relationship between a mother and son. Its entire run-time is basically a wince-inducingly uncomfortable exploration of unconventional emotional relationships - and you emerge from the cinema desperate to breathe. Writer-director Benedek Fliegauf creates - with just a few subtle strokes - a world like our own but with one sci-fi touch - cloning is possible. This is a key idea, but is introduced only after half an hour, and while its ramifications are hinted at, this is not really a sci-fi movie at all. What the concept does is allow an exploration of psycho-sexual transgression. Eva Green - Queen of independent cinema's messed up young women - plays Rebecca. She is reunited with her childhood sweetheart Tommy (Matt Smith - TV's latest Doctor Who). When a car accident robs them of a future together she decides, against his mother's wishes, to birth his clone and raise him as her son - all the while keeping him ignorant of this fact so as not to open him up to prejudice against "copies". So follows a brutal tale of closely observed suppressed emotions. Eva Green is superb - as usual - in portraying the single-minded madness of the thwarted women who comes to confront her guilt - expressing all this complexity with a remarkable stillness. Lesley Manville and Peter White - as Tommy's mother and father - are also superb in small roles.  The atmosphere is morose, oppressive and sinister without relief.  The result is a superb film marred only by one directorial choice - not to have Eva Green age - something that bugged me and brought me out of the movie throughout the second half of the film.

WOMB played Toronto and London 2010. It was released earlier this year in Russia, Germany and Hungary. It goes on release in Singapore on August 11th.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 6 - ANOTHER YEAR

Mike Leigh returns to the Festival with a typical Mike Leigh product: heightened social realism mixing comedy and tragedy - finely observed, and improvised by the actors he often works with. The resulting film is a quality product if less memorable than, say, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, and less scarring than SECRETS AND LIES.

The movie is set around a couple called Tom and Jerry (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) - solidly middle-class, nice, cheerful, and happily married. They have a 30 year old son called Joe (Oliver Maltman) who through the course of the year finds a cheerful Poppy-lite girlfriend called Katie (Karina Fernandez). They all get on really well. This stands in sharp contrast with the people who surround them and who are, by turns, taken under their wing. As the movie opens we see Jerry, a counsellor, deal with a depressed woman called Janet (a cameo from Imelda Staunton). And then, the person who really anchors the work is Lesley Manville, playing a lonely middle-aged woman called Mary, who consoles herself by drinking too much and constructing an unrealistic fantasy that Joe will ask her out. Finally, we meet Tom's elder brother Ronnie (David Bradley), recently bereaved, living numb in a grey house.

As we pass through the year, we see that Tom and Jerry are kind and sociable and create a lot of fun around them. They are constantly telling people to sit down and have a cup of tea and asking them if they are okay. But, in essence, the people who surround them aren't okay - they are miserable - miserable and pretending, badly, not to be. This is best shown by a superb little end-scene for the character Jack, played by Phil Davis. His wife is ill. Jerry asks if he's okay and he says "Well we try not to let it get us down", but then looks to the ground forlorn.  So, how far is the friendship of Terry and June enabling that delusion, by blithely making cups of tea - and how far is it making it worse by presenting these poor folk with an image of smug domestic bliss? To that end, I found ANOTHER YEAR problematic, but I think I was meant to. I also found it, despite the laughs, a profoundly depressing, if well-made, film.

Additional tags: Michele Austin, Karina Fernandez, Martin Savage, David Bradley, Oliver Maltman, Gary Yershon

ANOTHER YEAR played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opens in the UK on November 5th. It opens in the Netherlands on November 11th; in France on December 22nd; in the US on December 31st and in Germany on January 27th 2011.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL - good intentions under-cut by cheap tricks

Bullied as a poor child, Ebeneezer Scrooge has turned his back on love and become a miserly, mean old man, persecuting his good-hearted clerk Bob Cratchett and his kindly nephew in turn. On the eve of Christmas, in smoggy, lamp-lit, London, he is visited by the ghost of his old business partner Marley, and warned to transform his ways. Scrooge is then visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, who show him what he has turned his back upon, how horribly he is viewed by others, and the lonely death that awaits him. He awakes on Christmas morning a changed man, having had his heart melted by Cratchett's young crippled son Tiny Tim, and the shit scared out of him by the hellish Ghost of Christmas Future.

So goes the iconic Christmas tale from the author who was simultaneously England's greatest social critic and the writer of some of our most sentimental nonsense. To that end, Dickens got right to the heart of the Christian message as telegraphed by St Paul: one part tears and mercy; one part hell and brimstone. Accordingly, his books veer between rapier-like, courageous social critique and absurd depictions of innocents and children. The villainous Fascination Fledgby goes hand in hand with the unreal Oliver Twist. The superbly drawn sexual psychodrama of Bradley Headstone stands in contrast with the bizarrely anemic and oddly-motivated John Harmon. Dickens pulls this off because he is a genius.

The sharp contrasts inherent in Dickens can trip up those who try to adapt him for the screen. Oftentimes, a simply crazy and irreverent attitude is best. Thus, you can't not enjoy A MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL and I even have a soft-spot for the Gordon Gekko-transposed Bill Murray vehicle SCROOGED.

By contrast, Robert Zemeckis' new Jim Carrey-CGI extravaganza is far more faithful to the source-text and the popular idea of how Dickens should look. His film is all smoky chimneys, candle-wax and handsome whiskers. You simply can't fault the detail of the design, the texture of every surface, and the believable rendering of human emotion on every face. In general, I loved the production design. Indeed, the only character I thought really didn't work was the Ghost of Christmas Present, partly because of the look of the character, partly because the trick of looking through the floor to new scenes didn't quite get the perspective right, and partly because Jim Carrey voice-work didn't do much for me.

Zemeckis tries to pull off the Dickensian double of horror and twee emotion. Early scenes with a ghostly door-knocker and bells-tolling had little kids squirming and the Ghost of Christmas Future and his Black Riders are absolutely terrifying - and so they should be. Jim Carrey's Scrooge looks genuinely horrified and makes a convincing turnaround. I also liked the fact that after every really scary scene, the movie had some light-hearted physical humour to break the tension. Unfortunately, I thought Zemeckis didn't pull off the emotional scenes. The emphasis was somehow all wrong, especially at the end. Schmaltz requires that we see Scrooge and Tiny Tim gathered round a resplendent turkey. But in this adaptation, we just see Scrooge pack a turkey into a carriage and then head over to his nephew. Zemeckis definitely missed a trick with that one.

Still, even with the failure with the second ghost and the missed-trick on the ending, this could've been, on balance, a rather good film, were it not for Zemeckis' fatal flaw: he just can't resist having his characters whoosh through the skies in 3-D glory. Yes, it looks cool. Yes, the kids might love it. But what on earth has it got to do with Dickens? And why on earth would you spend so much time creating an authentic and textured depiction of Dickensian life only to under-cut the whole thing with some cheap, vulgar, hyper-modern stunts? Poor show.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL is on global release.