The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013)

From http://twitchfilm.com/assets/2013/07/StrtangeColorPoster-1.jpg

Dirs. Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet

As a side note, the viewing of the second feature length film of the directors of Amer (2009) does come with a strange anecdote of going to see it. There were tests being run just before a 3.20pm screening, and after some delay, the first images on the cinema screen were mute clip from The Truman Show (1998). If Jim Carrey had actually been in an avant garde psychodrama cribbing from the texts of giallo films from Italy, my head would've exploded. I have no grief with said cinema just to let the reader know. The screening was late but all the trailers usually played in front of films were skipped, and the film was presented to its best as a visual and audio barrage, so I have nothing to concern myself with. It's just that odd moment is very memorable.

It's befitting the type of film The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears is that this kind of breaking up of cinematic conventions was done by accident before the film actually started. Done completely sincerely, it nonetheless takes the conventions of the giallo, a murder mystery story, and inverses them. Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) arrives back in Belgium from his work abroad, only to find his wife Edwige (Ursula Bedena) is nowhere to be found. The building complex they are living in is a maze of hidden secrets and perplexing circumstances surrounding the environment. The fellow occupants have their own hidden sides, and nothing is what it seems. Joined by Detective Vincentelli (also played by Klaus Tange), reality becomes less and less tangible as the walls hide older ones, a killer is clearly within the building, and the circumstance are so severe Kirstensen even becomes his own killer, victim and witness at the same time one restless night. It is not a good comparison to say this is close to an original giallo. They could be campy, schlocky and significantly different even when they were stylish and artistic. For all their abstract moments, even Dario Argento's, they had a simple narrative that was followed closely. The Strange Colours... has a narrative, unlike Amer's three segments, but is likely going to be the more difficult of the two for people because it purposely goes away from what is easily understandable, using symbolism and outright surrealism for plot points. The film is very unconventional on purpose, the experimental style of the directors made clearly apparent again like in their previous work rather than for them to be making a throwback film. Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball (1975) this is not, a trashy and wonky Italian pulp film, but violently nasty, pulsating with sex and weird imagery, as much Art with a capital A and a sensority experience.

From https://static-secure.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/10/1397138290671/Aping-Bu-uel-a-scene-from-010.jpg

It feels right on point that critic Anton Bitel, in Sight and Sound magazine reviewing the fillm, suggested this was a treatise on the mind of a psychologically damaged man, Kristensen's possibly. When the Detective and the protagonist are played by the same person, it immediately suggests, to paraphrase a title of Video Nasty film, that this is nightmares of a damaged brain we're seeing. Amer, despite its three separate pieces that made its whole, had an obvious connective tissue - the growth of a girl into a woman, puberty and sexuality inbetween - while The Strange Colours... jumps from its narrative tracks to follow the mental environments of its characters. This is furthered by the trademark style of the directors, an exceptional and total cinematic flourish. It's not just the striking use of colours. Or the unconventional use of ordinary objects. It's the obsession with the smallest of details, amplifying them greatly. Rarely in films do you get the sound of leather stretched. As the sole other person in the theatre with me said, afterwards, there was an extensive use of added sound effects. Concerning one with all the aspects of a film - visuals, sound, editing and so forth - with as equal care never feels apparent in quite a lot of cinema when you many movies. Far from giving attention to itself with this, pushing you away from engaging in the film, it is as immersive as a dream, no matter how abstract the film around is, all interconnecting in a way perceived to make rational sense. Instead of becoming impatient in wanting a standard A-to-B narrative, which is a danger when viewing a work like this, this has its images and scenes connect together by themselves in a way that explains what is going on that you have to be willing to follow on their own accord.

When the detective has his own flashback to previous assignment, involving voyeurism and vengeance with red wrapped "sweets" and rings as claws, that seems to have no connection to what is originally taking place, it's clear it's not as random as Kristensen points it out to be in being mentioned as the film goes along. It's just one part of a clearer connected tissue of moods and ideas. The anxieties and lusts of a male where his wife interchanges with many other women, sex and death juxtaposed and combined as the apartment complex becomes a host of a single mind than a building. Turning an all changing entity of photo-optic tricks in the opening credits, that can house the most sadomasochistic acts, including an uncomfortable situation with glass, to the curiosity of a young boy. Never has the goal that Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali had in mind with Un Chien Andalou (1929) been a clear reference point for a film that is also indebted to a specific area of cult genre cinema, but it's the case with The Strange Tears..., especially the notion of removing anything that had an obvious explanation but using a well known narrative structure to construct a film around this irrational material. Everything has a purpose or is designed to juxtapose in unconventional ways. It becomes very obvious what has happened to Edwige, but the reason why it has happened, and the individual involved, who may be connected to the disappearance of an older man years before, as seen in someone else's flashback, is left a mystery. And it becomes more and more obvious as the film becomes more unconventional that the individual responsible is not necessarily a mere killer, and that something more complicated is going on. When a box of toys suddenly appear, with spiked wheels and erotic imagery amongst them, or a chapter on the desires of a woman, likely Edwige's, plays out involving a bowler hat, stop motion straight from Jan Svankmajer, and an inspired scenario taking place onscreen which uproots conventions of a chase sequence from giallo or slasher films. Even the title, a beautiful one, turns out to be a very obvious reference to something the viewer sees in the end but also hides so many potential signifiers within it, particularly with the amount of wounds and injuries that are inflicted to the human body. The previously mentioned scene of Kristensen literally being duplicated and taking on multiple roles against himself, harming himself, eventually, long after the film ended, becomes the obvious sign of the hidden paranoia of his that becomes more obvious as the other scenes play out.

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It's not that rare to see experimental artists use pop culture that is seen as un-progressive and below high culture for a source of inspiration. Actually, its more common than you'd think. In most cases it's the reasons the material were criticised for that are the aspects latched onto by the artists to replicate in their work, Andy Warhol the obvious example. There is definitely a fan vibe to this film when the protagonist, part of an intercontinental telecommunications company, has so many main themes from Italian giallo on vinyl and plays them at convenient moments, the film littered with tracks taken from the original inspiration and providing the theme of Killer Nun (1978) an expecting resurrection as a tense and inspired ditty that gets into your head. And The Strange Colours... inherited the lurid side of the giallo - the nudity, the sexuality, and the linking of death and said sexuality together that'll be shocking for some viewers. A razor blade and a woman's anatomy, an image repeated multiple times, is something that you see at the beginning of the film and lets you in on what to expect for the rest of the running time. I admit I was concerned the film was going to get silly or undermine itself with questionable content, especially from a scene early on where a woman is completed naked on a balcony of the apartment complex for no discernible reason. But when, around then, it seemed to progress dangerously close to tasteless, fitting as it references giallo, not a good thing when it's trying to be a serious avant-garde film too, the equal opportunities attitude to both genders in what happens takes place and a much more complicated tone is revealed by the halfway point that prevents it from being mere ultraviolent softcore. Its a work of pure style, I confess that, but its a gem of this because it uses its style to create a tone of fear linking with anxieties of sexuality and violence that gives a depth to the proceedings. Using the ability of dream logic to transform moods into sensations that are more than enough to have a profound effect on you. The works that take their influence from "disreputable" objects tend not to stick with the structures and meanings of the originals, and transport them into a new context. As Kristensen becomes more entangled within a situation that becomes more of a cloud over him for the viewer watching the film, the sense of reality being altered that is apparent in giallo, where each plot twists changes the rules of how everything works, is here as well but with a significant difference. Each piece of information in a giallo, far from a breadcrumb to get one home, is a further complication in these films, but there's a conventional narrative surrounding them nonetheless which is not found here. Dropping the conventional narrative, this is no longer a stylish pulp journey for the sake of twists and turns that a giallo usually is, but concentrates itself, using the sub-genre's style, on the sensation of tension and sensuality. While Amer was about female sexuality, this is clearly about male sexuality. Amer had danger, death and fetishism, but this feels more chaotic, nastier and paranoid in tone to the earlier film. They mirror each other, but this one feels the more intentionally horrific once it gets to its ending, all stemming from a complete lack of understanding in femininity once you get what its title originally means. You could argue the reason why Amer ended as it does is explained in this film like a metaphorical prequel, although rewatching Amer is a must for me now.

After the viewing, when the lights came up after the end credits finished, I was the sole person in the screening room, the other individual who watched the film having already left as (presumably) the end credits rolled, creating a sense of having been dropped back into real life suddenly. It was startling. With its blasts of sound, heavy percussion based music cribbed from the original inspirations, visual manipulations and moments of editing that felt like a knife piercing flesh, it felt like the sensual overload I went into the screening hoping it would be, having left me disorientated for a long while after the viewing. The lights of the nearby bathroom were a heady, sickly yellow of artificial lighting, a cramped claustrophobic toilet cubicle with a grill behind you when you sit down. What's behind the grill, something I actually asked myself jokingly but with curiosity. Complete blackness. Maybe behind it, what was a respectable art cinema with modern architecture hid a secret or two like is found in the film when a wall is broken down. While The Strange Colours of Your Body's Tears doesn't provide intellectual meat to leave on, its a film that causes you to look and listen carefully around you when you leave the cinema and step back into the real world, causing one to see it through senses and emotions. Everything pulsated when I got on the train for the long way trip home, even though it was a bright English afternoon and no one was being killed by someone in leather gloves nearby like an Argento film. Probably the reason giallo was the object of obsession for the directors Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet is that it's the sub-genre where style and what is seen, felt and heard was so extravagant and obsessed over, from the music to the colours. And a story of murder and sex is always about sensation too even if it's pure fantasy. What's truly cinematic is when you can feel a film, not just look at pretty pictures on a screen. With a success rate of two out of two feature films, a great segment in the wildly varying (but underrated) The ABCs of Death (2012) and short features, the duo behind this are few of the only individuals who take reference from the history of cult cinema seriously and create results that actually have virtue to it. Not through indulgence, sarcasm, or merely presuming to replicate the older films, but by turning it into their own voice even if its divisive and for only a few. It's going to feel like hell for me waiting for their next film now. Even a short would suffice!

From http://www.critic.de/images/the-strange-colour-of-your-bodys-tears-03-The_S.jpg

Under The Skin (2013)

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Dir. Jonathan Glazer

I find myself seemingly disappointed with current cinema when yet I've seen plenty of great films being made within the last few years, regardless of debating whether any of it is canon worthy material. It doesn't have anything to do with the issues of celluloid film against digital cameras that are currently of debate - its only a concern for me in preserving films and whether people making the films can actually use either properly cinematographically. I've put up with the lack of access to less mainstream films in cinemas, and it's pointless to whine about blockbusters when I can avoid them. Probably the issue for me is that, in the middle of this current era, and used to believing trends within cinema are distinct, barring a few obvious ones there's few key movements that feel tangible or actually are worth talking about. Decades on, maybe an older Michael Hewis can have hindsight and wiser critics who can dig up the best of the 2000s and early 2010s rather than what's popular in the middle of it. Writing about Under The Skin, I am writing of a buzz, red hot British film that, while divisive, is getting the British film circles excited. Still under the brows of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut's dismissal of British cinema, we have a complex on the subject of our country's filmic output, both dangerous in championing mediocrity by leaping on any work that wins an international award, and yet a hope like all of us like myself have for work that burns itself into cinema's history. The question is, can I really give a full, final review to Under The Skin after only one viewing or is this a blind leap for something different?

Scarlett Johansson is Laura, a mysterious beauty, clearly a being that is not human when she takes the clothes and identify of her doppelganger in a white room. With an unknown motorcyclist guiding and watching over her, cleaning up aftermaths, she drives around urban Scotland in a white van, a siren to men leading them to a death in literal blackness. The film caused me to sit up from the beginning, the first inclination of what virtues this film has not being the first visuals but the first notes of sound, a modernist score by Mica Levi that, atonal yet melodic, unsettling yet alluring, cements the mood before images appear. When the images do appear, what appears seems to be a doughnut shaped entity encircling over a ball, a globe, a planet, from the blackness, a light that turns into the headlight of a motorcycle. A human eye. Against the music, it becomes tangible and felt fully. But this is within a film that has decided to also depict a realism of the human world Laura travels around, to the point it technically qualifies as documentary at points.

The film becomes quasi-documentary as secret cameras were used to depict the real Scotland, a Hollywood actress playing a distant being, with a British accent, wandering the streets or driving on the roads, next to brand stores like Marks & Spencer. When a road is congested by football fans, in mass and blocking cars from moving, the likelihood you're viewing actual football fans pass through a film that is made to be fiction is felt, knowing this production detail immersing. Fiction next to bursts of actual reality are odd bedfellows but together you can get incredible results onscreen, reality piercing the fictional and effecting it. This goes as far as some of the men Laura talks to, in an attempt to lure men to her trap, are actual men randomly found on the street, who gave permission for the final footage of them to be used, having a conversation with  Johansson with the hesistant pauses and errs of real conversation. The mixing of this and the unreal sci-fi adds a unique layering to the film, real ordinary life with the fantastique, giving one hope that the British environment - of stores, chewing gum covered pavements, council housing - can intertwine with the supernatural and, forgive the pun, truly alien.

From http://www.fangoria.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/under-the-skin-scarlett-johannson-skip.jpg

Immense appreciation is there for Johansson for taking this role in the first place, and that her performance, with a cold tone of voice and minimal dialogue, is good enough and more so to make it work. The glamour of her Hollywood work follows her into this, adding to her aloneness, but as the character develops a distracted empathy for one of her potential victims and breaks away from the predestined tasks of hers, the sense of an ordinary woman, onscreen and as a person whose vocation is to act in these works called films, comes out. Honestly, this ordinariness actually makes her even more beautiful - unlike Black Widow in The Avengers (2012) who is a Barbie doll for male geeks, Laura, especially the scenes of seduction, feels more powerful for the mix of the real actress playing the character and the role itself she's playing. It also befits the character's duality, the cold mix of being a complete stranger, where the act of communication is an odd experience for the entity trying to make small talk, and a person, particularly when it comes to the last quarter when Laura ventures off into the countryside away from the motor biker. It would have been a difficult role - minimal or improvised dialogue, having to use a British accent that had to be convincing, the non-fiction conversations with people off the streets, the same sort of distance that David Bowie brought to his character in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) - and she does so fully. And it's a testament that, for a minimal amount, the other actors and non-actors stand out as much, especially Adam Pearson as the person that causes her to break away from the role she's in.

The welding of the fantastical and the real is different from many others that do the same, probably because unlike The Man Who Fell To Earth this is set in the truly ordinary. It's modernist score sends shivers down the spine, the distinct moments of the unhuman - bright white room, complete black liquid - stand out, but the world being depicted involves buses, Tommy Cooper, and baked beans. A moment where the protagonist tries to connect with the world is done with a black forest gateaux. In fact even the turning point where she gains struggling emotions involved the mention of the supermarket Tescos, the banality of Britain against the unreal creating probably a more abstract tone than for other films. The banal also becomes alien, the sound design becoming one with the score, the lights of passing vehicles UFOs on the roads, and the juxtaposition of these objects with fantastical blurring into one another. Few films are willing to depict a reality within fantasy itself, or fantasy within the real, but this one does. If you can put yourself into Laura's position within the final piece of the narrative, the film becomes as much the story of how an ordinary environment grows into unknown proportions when there is no connection to it, slowing grasping to understand. Of course this has potential feminist readings in how her body is being used as a tool to capture men and how she tries to escape from this. Ultimately the roles are switched of who is prey and victim, the same human beings where the sound of a balloon popping will never sound the same for me again without a creepiness to them. Neither side is inherently good or evil, just treating each other as mere others. Laura can blend into a gaggle of women, probably real people being filmed, taking her along hand-by-hand to a dance club, only for her to be unnerved by the strange world inside, bleeding red lighting, and music so loud, as someone who hates loud uncontrolled noise can attest to, that it's no longer music but a sonic barrage. The normal world is just as unknown as hers. The most disturbing set piece involves a beach incident that happens in everyday life, not the alien, a horrifying incident that is made more disturbing when one onlooker is so detached from the situation, showing how such a everyday accident in more troubling in happening to anyone.

The issue of whether the film will last in quality is there for this final viewing, but leaving the Showroom cinema in Sheffield, I could still feel the impact of the images and sound, and they've jarred themselves into my mind for weeks from that viewing. The discordant string sounds repeating again and again as I was walking in the afternoon air of the city, a rich tableaux that will sink in my thoughts and stay there for a while. It will at least have the virtue of being "total cinema", where every piece (acting, tone, editing, colour, sound etc.) is considered or in some way as distinct as the other pieces and all add to one fully immersive work. Very few films actually care for this, and a big problem with British cinema is that aspects that build the whole of a film are virtually ignored, but this film does so. What I feel with Under The Skin is an unnerved exhilaration. I have never seen any other work by Jonathan Glazer's, even his music videos; I can't explain why I haven't, but Under The Skin is encouragement at its strongest to go to them. The individuality of the film stands out even as a strong, potential entry for the cult British canon of cinema, causing one to wonder why we can't have more directors follow these braver ricks more. It's a peculiar entry into the archives of British Film Institution funded work being made now, as we speak, but only because I wish more people would do this rather than make the conventional.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/under-the-skin-2013-006-laura-in-fuschia-walking-down-village-lane.jpg?itok=8Y_P_ZO5

A Little Death: Stranger By The Lake (2013)

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Dir. Alain Guiraudie

Cars are left side-by-side to each other at a dead end of a country road, an improvised car park. This image repeats in Stranger By The Lake, set over consecutive days. Repetition, similar actions and events happening but with more and more complication. It's summer and Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) goes to a beach each day, a gay cruising spot where men can sunbathe, swim, interact, or go into the woods to have sex with any of the other patrons. The film begins at first as an erotic, naturalistic drama, as Franck is unable to find a romance or even a brief sexual fling each day there. Instead he develops a friendship with Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), a older male who sits on the other side of the beach by himself and never goes swimming or cruising. Very static shots make up the film. No music. In the throes of summer, the beach and surrounding woodland is beautiful and cut off from the rest of the world. A vast sea is shot in the brightest blue and you could get lost within the surrounding woods.

Naked men lay on the beach, explicit full frontal nudity, completely casual, in a way that makes the taboos of male nudity a complete farce. At tines these men look like deities on holiday. The sex is explicit and real, even if body doubles were used. It actually amused me to see a film with real acts of sex on a cinema screen. In fact this is the first film with hardcore sex I've seen at the cinema. As the nearest multiplex is in another city to me, the nearest art cinema to have seen this further afield, to see such an explicit work on a giant cinema screen than on DVD for once is a vast difference. Only now writing this review do I also realise, usually as a solitary viewer, that I viewed such scenes of ejaculation and sex in the prescience of strangers I didn't know, all male young and old in the day time, and that I never gave consideration to the sex itself as I left my seat to the in-cinema cafe but to the unsolved thoughts of what the film was altogether. I feel hesitant talking about sex with even my parents, yet complete strangers did not bother me with this film, too enraptured by said film and more concerned my head was blocking the screen for the person behind me. Having actually seen a film now, at a cinema, with hardcore sex that was available to see for a wide audience, even in an "alternative" cinema, now makes the fear I had in viewing any real sex, hetereo gay bi etc., completely stupid by how it never registered to me in the viewing as I was more concerned for the characters and what the director was intending to do. It also makes the fact, especailly in Britain, we're still debating this issue within cinema just as farcical. After this film ended, I walked out, passing a glance with the only other person who stayed until the end credits finished, and the only thing on my mind was wrangling the moods I felt for the film, not necessarily these hardcore images by themselves. The scenes themselves have a real, alluring eroticism that even for a heterosexual viewer like myself can feel, unbelievably passionate when experiencing viewing the film. Brilliantly though, even as Thanatos and Eros start to intermingle, the director Alain Guiraudie also has the down-to-earth and absurd also take place alongside the erotic. Condoms strewn on the woodland floor to the annoyance of someone about to make love to Franck, and a running gag of a chubby guy who likes to watch others have sex and masturbate nearby, sometimes to the bafflement of the party he's near. The fact that this man is fleshed out, character wise and literally, beyond being a gag into a loveable personality himself shows a rich dynamic to the eroticism and characterisation too that is rewarding. This is not just a misery fest like a lot of arthouse films with hardcore sex in them are stereotyped as, not helped by films including ones I admire that are this, nor neither is it flimsy hardcore. This for me feels like someone who actually cared about depicting sex in a way that even viewers like me who aren't gay can feel as much as a gay viewer could.

Part of the way through however, Franck views a heinous incident, falling in love with the mysterious but likely dangerous Michel (Christophe Paou). Their romance blossoms but as a police inspector (Jérôme Chappatte) enters the world of the beach, Franck's romance may be for the worst. Less a murder mystery than a psychological suspense drama based on one man's desire, Stranger By The Lake proves you can have a make version of the femme fatale, alluring yet dangerous. The difference is the figure of desire here is a very masculine, muscular and bearded male. There have been films where an average Joe/Jill falls in love with a very dangerous person; the director has said the film's an expedition into his own sexuality, but there is a universal aspect to the story too, the fear of potential danger and how as much it might be a draw to them, as they know how ill-advised their romance could be rather than naive about it. The inspector comments that only two to three days after the heinous incident, the patrons of the beach are acting as usual, as if nothing has happened, but the environment is a fragile one. Its cut off from everything, but it's not that far away from the rest of the world. Once, humorously, in a man wandering through wanting to meet "horny" women, but when a boat passes by its clear how thin the distance from the rest of the world actually is. Everything appears to be normal in the secluded beach too, but the murder does linger amongst the patrons at the back of their activities.

Until the end the film continues with an exceptionally engaging character drama with these characters that populate the beach. The film never leaves this location, the repetition of Franck arriving at the beach and regular faces met, including always saying hi and talking to Henri, giving the film a sense of lived-in reality, but also a rigorous structure to work around. If something strays from what is repeated before, that means something is very amiss. The erotic desires of Franck and Michel are palpable and legitimately sensual, but it's clear, especially through Paou's performance, Michel is someone "off" from everyone else. Regardless if his lovers were other men or women, there is something very amiss to him. I could be sticking my foot in my mouth, as a heterosexual male discussing a film by a gay filmmaker, but I question what critic Armond White said in that this film shows a retrogression in depicting gay men when it's a film set around a specific story with specific characters. Its beach world is incredibly normal, welcoming so, as well as sensual, the fears Guiraudie might be expressing clearly interpretable in the fact that the danger, wrapped around a potential thriller, is not linked to homosexuality itself but a concept that has existed in all the arts, and for any form of physical and emotional desire. The lover who you crave, love, but who could be harmful to you at the same time. This doesn't mean the fact that this is a gay filmmaker making a psychodramatic work around gay men should be ignored - if a film is specific, it should be allowed to. The problem is when its scrutinised under a perception outside of the individuality of films that oppresses the ability to gauge each film because a "respectable" portrait always has to be encouraged without a logical reason to. It doesn't need to do this and feels richer for this. Its greatest virtue is also being an immensely engaging, slow boiling hybrid of genre and drama. The ending, the last minutes, are not that of a Hitchcockian thriller, a blurb praise the film's been saddled with to sell it, but that of the central relationship and the theme within it. What was an abrupt one when I left the theatre screening room, realising this, becomes pitch perfect for the whole film when you consider this dark romance is the central plot.

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Hold My Liquor: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

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Dir. Martin Scorsese

Let's push aside the idea of this being a true story. It's based on the autobiography of Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film, a man who through his success and illegal activities in the penny stock market led a life of debauchery with his employees until the FBI caught wind of him. But it's to the point now the biography in cinema as a beacon of truth has become a faded ideal. The films themselves have dramatic license more than "truth", thus making the notion of "truth" a subjective issue. American Hustle (2013) starts with questioning the factual truth in a caption. Pain & Gain (2013) has to state at one point something gruesome actually happened in the real events, but changed content elsewhere to the point there are potential moral implications that have troubled many. Notice the common trend between the films mentioned too. The Wolf of Wall Street about one man's rise and fall in wealth. American Hustle about con men. Pain & Gain about body builders who stole a man's entire wealth. Add The Bling Ring (2013), another true story about girls and one boy robbing celebrities' homes, and Spring Breakers (2012), not a true story, about girls wanting spring break forever even if through Uzis. If you go past cinema, you could add Kanye West's Yeezus, which contains aspects of the complications of wealth, and the despair it causes, as well as the exhilaration, especially with the song New Slaves. All about people who desire to be someone else, or have already gotten to the peak of wealth and looking at the tremor in their hands. It doesn't require a PHD in Sociology to realise, after the global economic issues within these many years, that these American works released within the same year or so are all mapping together a consciousness of what it means to be have a life in the USA. Living in Britain, they map out how the concept of wealth or grandeur are fleeting desires that may not be worth the pleasure they give.

If there is one benefit to this film, it's that a very adult film, both in its inherent subject as well as content, at three hours long and no sense of pandering to a middle taste is able to be seen on a cold January day in a multiplex. Completely bolted to the seat for all the narrative, but also leading to the sense of actually feeling the elevation and drastic, numbing fall Belfort enters physically, your endurance felt in registering all the sound and visual information Scorsese wants to show you. While clearly from the same page of Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), this film exists in a different context. The same playfulness with visuals, monologues etc., alongside the eclectic use of music, is here like in those films, but Belfort's story is a different moral issue. His is not a world of mobsters and actual violence. His is of cheating the stock market and self implosion through Quaaludes and lack of responsibility for his actions. We except mobsters to be corrupt and violent, but even now it would be shocking to actually know what a stock broker could get up to. It's even more shocking now in a politically correct time, as Belford has extra curricula activities including paid hookers and "dwarf tossing" to reward his financial army of testosterone with. Moments in the film, even if they were hilarious, as much a masterpiece as a comedy as well as a horror, left me grimacing at the same time. The film has become controversial in how Scorsese never openly damns the life of Belford and his colleagues had. I admit, despite the obvious grotesque nature of it, that the exhilaration felt, the energy shown in the film techniques used, pleasure for pleasure's sake, constant sex and wanton destruction, had an effect on me I will not try to hide or deny. There is the sense of a central banquet sequence of a rich landlord in Satyricon by Gaius Petronius, the remaining fragment of a Roman work of a vast length, adapted into a 1969 film by Federico Fellini, in how the debauchery is both gruesome but pleasurable within it. There are Bacchus levels of lunacy in the film, which Belford references, but there is something clearly amiss or horrifying too even when you laugh and find Belford, thanks to DiCaprio's tremendous performance, charismatic. His complete disregard for women, especially when he doesn't get his way, is a paradox in that there are women in the wolf pack of his business who are just as abrasive as his prostitute shagging, cocaine breathing alpha males, but his treatment of his first wife and second wife Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) is that of a child with a violent streak hidden in him. The eventual comedown, the cold turkey, after two hours when Belford falls feels like an abrupt, cold change of the tone from before, when you feel mental pain at how everything has stopped completely in his world for the last hour on. The greatest virtue of the film is that Scorsese doesn't need to wag his finger at his viewers about this content. Success to him is both an adrenaline but it ends with misery, all without a direct lecture. He cuts to incredibly grim moments in the debauchery from the beginning, only to go back to the debauchery. The funniest sequences in a film where the actors were allowed to improvise, incredible performances all round with Jonah Hill being a perfect foil to DiCaprio, actually have in inherent darkness to them in their implications.

Such as the scene where Belford has consumed so many Quaaludes, a banned sleep aid held like rare diamonds for him and his second-in-command Donnie Azoff (Hill), that he has regressed physically to a sponge wriggling forwards on the floor, making the concept of getting down stairs, let alone drive his car back home quickly, an impossible task. Incredible for DiCaprio's comedic ability and Scorsese's subtle use of the visuals alongside the editing of Thelma Schoonmaker, it also sets up the discomforting fact that, unlike the rituals of Bacchus that, for their destructive frenzy, were a celebration of life, Belford and his lackeys are celebrating suicidal self-destruction instead by letting events like this happen to them. By this point in the narrative the FBI and an agent within it (Kyle Chandler) are closing in on Belford, but he already looks like a person liable to destroy himself with drink and substances with incidents like this. This willingness to close in on an overdose, physical harm or harm of others, with being a married man with children at that point, makes the illicit pleasures shown reveal their truly disturbing side.  

The question that has to be asked is whether The Wolf of Wall Street is actually a great film. The issue of how a film can change on a second viewing is significant for me. But I cannot just watch a film immediately like others could - I need to digest them, even if it takes a year, before doing so again. In context of a single viewing, as a first exposure to this material, isolated by itself without the issue of rewatches, it succeeds very well. It is not a biography to me, but more of a study of how the desire for more and more is a trait that can exist in all people, that we can all disregard any responsibilities for disregard for itself to be the main drug of choice. Belford succeeds in the penny stock market, the bottom of the barrel, so anyone could turn into this version of him in real life in any area where pay or promotions are available. Azoff says at one point that trashing his body after a night's debauchery is what he enjoys in life, and the desire for money is only to make this possible, a concept inevitable to collapse. As the farce of Belford trying to cover up his crimes leads to even Mother Nature knocking him down (literally), the sense that his recklessness is as much a self-conscious need to potentially kill himself. By the end the only difference is that he's going to be respectable but not change at all his mentality of the past from wisdom. All the films (and album) I've referenced in this review have a close connection to this ideal too. The real life Bling Ring became too confident, boasting of their riches and painting a bulls eye on their back through Facebook and gossip. American Hustle shows that even a FBI agent can fail to realise that glory is a self-harming thing he won't get in the first place. Spring Breakers shows a potential "happy" ending, but it's going to be one of a violent videogame that will require continuous gun use. Yeezus the album, a prescient work for the year of 2013 too, is how the desire to have more and more is as much a desire at destroying everything for destruction's sake. The only exception is Mark Wahlberg's character in Pain & Gain, who is content with the one crime, but is dragged back into another by his fellow accomplishes who want to continue despite being, for a lack of a polite choice of words, brain-dead fuck-ups. The issue of whether Scorsese's film adds anything of worth is in that, as a veteran artist of over five decades over everyone who made the mentioned work, he is able to draw from himself and his own cinematic knowledge to fully explore his character of Jordan Belfort.

As someone exceptionally disappointed in the last two feature films of his, its elevating to see a film that will add to the complex structure of Scorsese's final filmography when it arrives one day. News, especially from a letter to his daughter that was translated to hypertext online, suggests he is considering retirement, but I hope that he will make a few more films before this day comes. For the potential of The Wolf of Wall Street to become slight over a few viewings, it's a potential shift to a piss-and-vinegar version of him who made After Hours (1985) and Bringing Out The Dead (1999). No desire for stating obvious morals bur pressing the viewer to make their own decisions. Rejecting the average mellowness of the last two films before this one for growing wiser through vulgarity, bad taste and cramming as many techniques he picked up over the years into films as he can. This is if he works with how this film has opened him up in his filmmaking again. 

Made From Ingredients From The USA, Canada and Indonesia: V/H/S 2 (2013)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/V-H-S-2_Poster.jpg

Dirs. Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sánchez, Timo Tjahjanto and Adam Wingard

Like a beautiful coincidence, I cover the original V/H/S (2012) months earlier, and like this sequel's release in Britain, you get V/H/S 2 the same year near Halloween. How many franchises get both the prequel and sequel debuting in the UK in the exact same year to each other? There is a slight caveat to the words "beautiful" though. The original V/H/S wasn't a good anthology film. Set around a mysterious series of VHS tapes found in a house, a Wunderkammer of death or an atrocity exhibition, the first film in hindsight was the creation of directors who clearly wanted to make dramas than horror shorts for the most part, and barring one legitimately good segment, none of them were good at the drama in their work either. They dangerously became films that symbolised some kind of elite club of white, middle class, male twenty something horror fans rather than horror shorts for everyone; if the grindhouse phenomenon has (thankfully) died on its backside, its unfortunately been surpassed by a vocabulary of mostly swearing, quasi-drama with no interest and power dimensions amongst peers that really didn't need to have been fed by accident with V/H/S 1. It was a nostalgia for a format (VHS) without considering the potential mysteries of the object in question, and with no real sense of atmosphere and tone, a bane on the genre's existence that has frankly sabotaged it for decades long before I was even born. 

Harsh words, very harsh words, but while I have suddenly become enamoured with this new era of anthology films, at the moment like giving bloodied candy to a four year old, the first film was the one blot when its sequel and The ABCs of Death (2012), for their flaws, had been enjoyable in their fragments, and for both showing potential new talent and even bringing back interest in directors I was cold to. V/H/S 2 can still be criticised for many things, and is as much as an all men's club frankly, in an era where one would hope for more female horror directors to exist, but it's still a drastic improvement on the original. No longer, thankfully, preoccupied with evil women as the segments in the first did barring that one good one which skewered the notion. While still wadding in violence, some sex and general misanthropy, it's for more inventive and trying to do something generally interesting in all the key segments. And, aside from returning contributors Simon Wingard and Simon Barrett,  you've got clear outsiders with different ideas now to bring to the table. A Canadian Jason Eisener, whose work with Hobo With A Shotgun (2011) and his short Youngbuck for The ABCs of Death is that of someone obsessed with visual style and bouncing off the walls in his anarchic tendencies. Eduardo Sánchez, co-directing with Gregg Hale in one of the two contributions done by a duo, one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the beginning, legitimately, of the found footage subgenre that this anthology is part of, the drastic shift from that film to a decade or so later adding a potentially fascinating layer to Sánchez's contribution. And finally, expanding the film beyond North American soil, there is the pairing of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto and British director Gareth Evans, the later significantly known for martial arts action cinema, not horror, and bringing a drastically different perspective to the material because of this.

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Tape 49 (Dir. Simon Barrett) - V/H/S 2 needs some suspension of disbelief to make it work fully. This is not a criticism at all, as most films need one aspect, or a couple, that need to be accepted as they are. That's the nature of fiction, and of cinema. But it has to be bared in mind, all these occult and supernatural events put on videotapes, with some of the events composed of more than one camera, all existing in the same world as two private detectives search for a young man. They instead find an abandoned house full of these tapes and one of them watch them to figure out what's going on. It's fascinating to imaging whole worlds within one bigger one, subjectively questioned by the film without it realising it, all of which may have more disturbing effects on a viewer than showing mere gristly demises. As the wraparound story that bookmarks the four key segments, its vastly superior to the one in the first film because it actually makes sense. The first one was a clusterfunk of bad pacing and editing, while this actually has a pace. It's the weakest piece alongside Adam Wingard's, the directors alumni of the prequel pointedly, but it at least fits the improved quality of this sequel by being interesting to view. What brief titbits it has about the meaning of these tapes' existence is tantalising this time as well; I hope if V/H/S 3 ever happens it suddenly turns into Videodrome (1983) in the implications made here. Brian O'Blivion would be proud of the idea this nudges towards, but just needs the final push if another sequel is made.

From http://cdn.bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/V-H-S-2_Naked_Chubby_Banner_6_3_13-726x248.jpg

Phase I Clinical Trials (Dir. Adam Wingard) - A man (the director himself) is given a robotic eye transplant, with recording equipment inside it for the creators to monitor its functions, only to find that he can see things with malevolent tendencies he didn't see before. The reason this is the weakest of the key segments is because its difficult to write a lot about it. It's a supernatural story reminiscent of The Eye (2002) but with a very short length, cutting it down to a basic structure, and a gimmick of being recorded from an eye in a quasi-Enter The Void (2009) first person. But it's still a higher quality work than almost all the shorts from the first film. It raises the interesting question of how someone got hold of the footage in the first place, an enticing what-if rather than a logical flaw. It's fascinating for a film in this anthology to be seen through a person's eye. It also starts the greatest virtue of V/H/S 2 - that it takes advantage of two key aspects of the found footage genre and uses both well. That they're filmed on various video recording devices, and that, when done properly, it's very kinetic and all about movement. None of the segments are mindless shaky camera, with even the chaotic moments where the image is incomprehensible being appropriate for the moment. It's far from perfect, and you will raise your eyebrows at the sex scene that suddenly happens, verging close to the same questionable, laddish mentality of the first V/H/S film your dread even if you would find it titillating in a perverse way, any potential eroticism undercut by the fact that, frankly, it's an excuse for nudity without just admitting its an erotic moment and objectifying the actress for no justifiable excuse in the context. But it's a good start to lead to better shorts, ending well in a panicked state, with an interesting idea, leading on to segments which are superior with running with these ideas that can top it easily.

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A Ride In The Park (Dirs. Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale) - A male mountain biking aficionado straps a head-mounted camera on and goes to record a morning bike trek in the local woodland park. Unfortunately he rides into a zombie outbreak. What happens is a really clever take on such a tired subgenre, the zombie film, as he is bitten and becomes a member of the undead, shown through improv zombie-cam. It's great to see one of the founders of the found footage subgenre, and a producer of said original film, bringing something very interesting here in such a simple thought, one that someone would come up with while drinking one night and be amused by it.  In fact it may actually be superior to the more acclaimed segment Safe Haven for the amount of emotions that the premise suddenly holds when its presented as well as it is here. How curiously charming it is to see the world from the shuffling dead, almost like flesh eating newborns who, in a nice touch, will chew on anything before they figure out what they're supposed to sustain themselves on. How a victim, as they're being eaten, will suddenly become undead and the attackers suddenly stop and welcome them in the horde, wandering off together. How hilarious the film gets in a sick way even when the zombies get to a birthday party, the use of various camera, while a leap in logic too, helping the film significantly in tension. And also how deeply sad by the climax the story becomes and how it plays out. All these emotions co-exist in the same minute within the film too, forcing you to feel them all together for maximum effect. It's short, its succinct, but brilliant for it.

From http://diaboliquemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/VHS21.jpg

Safe Haven (Dirs. Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans)- The biggie. The short everyone talks about in this anthology. The centrepiece in its longer length and bombast. Set in Indonesia, a group of filmmakers manage to get inside the home of a controversial cult to interview their leader, dubbed only as Father, and let him speak on his own terms about their beliefs without opposition. In the middle of the interview, a bell rings and Hell on Earth tales place. It's the most maniac, insane, and downright violent of all the segments, but it's also incredibly complicated in structure. It has numerous camera the footage is recorded from, all that needs to be co-ordinated so the viewer gets what it going on, and doesn't get to know everything at the same time, before and during the chaos; and for all the madness that takes place, it's also as much a story about the filmmakers too, while simplistic, where there's conflict and a strained relationship in their camp which turns the final act into more darker implications. I have seen only one film from each director who made this, and while I am very open to them now, those two works weren't good. Evans is famous for The Raid (2011), but for its visceral fight scenes and their craft, its completely bland in the ideas it actually has. Tjahjanto I know of only from his few minutes long contribution to The ABCs of Death, L Is For Libido, a potentially interesting piece, very well made, that becomes pointlessly shocking for the sake of shock value, almost becoming silly when it tries to cram as many taboos as it can into its short length. There is a possibility, on another viewing, that this ridiculousness was actually a really clever, unexpected moment of self consciousness from Tjahjanto as a horror director who realises the perversity of upping the disgusting sakes for viewers mentally masturbating over it, but it'll have to wait until rewatching that piece to see if I change my mind on it. As a duo thought, I want to wager they cancelled out the other's flaws. Evans pulling Tjahjanto back from pointless gruel, but Tjahjanto getting Evans to try to create something very interesting. It's been seen before in terms of the ideas of the short, and may be pointlessly twisted at times, but Safe Haven is a gem because it's clear in its goal, and baring some disappointingly obvious CGI, works. It could be off-putting in content or how it uses very well used clichés in horror cinema, but it never feels pointlessly sick or insipid, and ends on such a high note that, honestly, this should have been the final segment of the four that leads to the wraparound story's own conclusion. And while I am open to these directors now, I think the two should work together more, likely to boost Indonesian genre cinema up again as a pair combining styles.

From http://zanyzacreviews.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/rtyrtrty.jpg

Slumber Party Alien Abduction (Dir. Jason Eisener) - It's unfortunate that Eisener had to follow Safe Haven. His short - the name on the tin says it all, but with a large part of it recorded on a camera attached on a dog's back - should have been between the zombies and Indonesian cults. Its flawed, the second weakest of the key segments, but I admit I have hope for the director. As someone who likes putting works as one single, giant creation of its creator(s), I wish Eisener gets better and better. Hobo With A Shotgun has an ending the annoyingly peters out, but the energy of the first three quarters was so infectious and legitimately daring than tedious in tone like so many neo-grindhouse films. His segment for The ABCs of Death was structured like a politically incorrect music video, which he pulled off perfectly. If there's another flaw with V/H/S 2, all the segments are structured around chaos suddenly taking place. For the most part it failed, but at least the first film has a varied choice of plot structures. But this short's still fun. Still scary when it gets hectic, with strange aliens that clearly hung around a Edvard Munch painting or two, and the premise of making most of the film shot from a dog's perspective, aside from some hijinks early on from the young cast, again takes the kind of premise joked about in a night's trip to the pub but makes it interesting. From the "eyes" of a small dog, looking up at the world, or crawling in the undergrowth outside, you are truly lost in what is going on, which makes it very interesting as a concept short. The result is still impressive even if it's in the wrong place in ordering the segments together.

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Altogether, there are flaws, but this still raising the bar higher than per usual horror films of now. With this and The ABCs of Death, as I've already stated, there is a potentially wonderful phenomenon approaching of genre anthologies like this becoming a subgenre of interest. I still have some reservations admittedly, when directors coasts, or that they spend their time making entries for these anthologies than actually making feature films. But in the subgenre's favour, you cannot rest back on the worst aspects of genre filmmaking - padded plots, workmanlike aesthetics, tired clichéd structures - in such a restricted short length and small budget unless you want to be the one the viewers dub the bad entry in said anthology. It can potentially cut the chaff from these directors so they can improve, and as this film and the upcoming ABCs of Death 2 show, the combination of so many unconventional choices of directors from various generations, nationalities, even not known for making horror films, could make for some interesting combinations. What needs to be done with the subgenre if they're now in vogue, funded by theatre chains, DVD labels, or in this case Bloody Disgusting, creating an interesting ouroboros in horror films and their audiences, is to prevent it from what unfortunately happened with the first V/H/S, a small club whose language is befitting a small clique that bars outsiders and the new perspectives from it. Here at least there were four different nationalities in the director chairs, and even the plot structures are similar, you have people of various areas, including one from outside of horror, nonetheless making a film with a very consistent tone. Leaner with less segments, clearer but replacing the vagueness with material that adds layers to the segments, and a kinetic grace to all the segments in using the cameras mixed with experimentation. It's a shame it has to replicate the obnoxious end credits style of the first film - abrasive music, and a barrage of sex and gore scenes more closer to a thirteen year old boy or two writing the project. The film that preceded it, while still schlocky, was far more interesting than this.

From http://media.sfx.co.uk/files/2013/10/VHS-2-bloody-chair.jpg

Representing Ireland: Grabbers (2012)

From http://www.docrotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/grabbers_2012.jpg

Dir. Jon Wright

My thoughts on this film have become colder since I wrote this review, but as the second film made by the director Jon Wright, it gives hope for me that he will go on to make increasingly better films built on the virtues found in this one. The only sense of negativity in what I've just wrote is that horrible feeling when directors haven't gone further in quality in their work and coast, which has sadly happened. Worse is that some make bad films. Also of significance is that some were not allowed to build a big filmography, their work scattered and erratic in quality. This is definitely an issue with British cinema, baring in mind that this is as much an Irish film too, but luckily Wright already has a movie in post-production that I hope adds far more idiosyncratic tendencies to the material and is better. Until that film is released, Grabbers is superior than most monster films with similar premises in many ways. 

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/17170/grabbers-2012-director-jon-wright/

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Representing Russia: Faust (2011)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN-0OtsMQEBcNHRzyHGNA3SWcCQxNEaesRc2xYLXWnYhCV8u4eOcltA2VUcGdCFDIUw2qnpmsmQKauwSbb94CyhzV64K9pfHja4mCkqTqH3-CVh7h0qZaypYlFUNJ49Z_cnnhQ6Dp0R7Y/s1600/faust-2011.jpg

Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov

Even for those who only know of the Faust story though the idea of it, a man who signs away his soul to the Devil, Sokurov's take on it, the final piece of the legendary director's tetralogy of films that concentrated on three real world figures (Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito) beforehand, is a bizarre, legitimately bonkers film which is yet an intellect crafted work about the placement of wisdom and trying to find meaning in existence that may have no God. The connection to those first three works immediately brings about issues - having seen two of the three, it's clear that the issue of power compounded against the ordinary, contradictory behaviour of human being is shared, with this story being the proto-diagram of the real life individuals. It still has to be digested how the Faust story, where the titular character (Johannes Zeiler) needs money and finds himself pulled into a series of strange events with a demonic moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), is turned into this mass of ideas from existential musings to full-on body horror played as a joke at points as well as being gross. It is almost, if not, a perverse buddy film where Faust is less of a friend of the moneylender than dragged behind him in a series of squabbles, pulled into his hands finally when a youthful beauty Margarete (Isolda Dychauk) becomes an obsession for Faust. But the moneylender, as the Devil exists less as an evil being here than a bulbous imp, a literal mass of fat flesh when you see him completely naked at one stage, acts in all his dealings with Faust as if it's a normal transaction or deal, or as a comedic buffoon who wrecks havoc with anything he touches.

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Sokurov's film is dense. Long at two hours twenty minutes. A vast, distinct world of German origin,  interpreted through Russian production, depicted onscreen with a heavy, symbolic tone. But its dense not because it's a grand scale morality drama - F.W. Murnau did this with his silent adaptation in the twenties - but because for such a critically lauded auteur, as I slowly get into his work tiny piece by piece, Sokurov has such a peculiar film here in the final results. Grotesque definitely, the first interior image of the film a giant close-up of the penis of a male being cut open by Faust for research and long passed his mortal coil. That doesn't even begin to explain what the moneyleader actually looks like naked, or when Faust's assistant Wagner (Georg Friedrich) brings out a project he claims to be his to impress Margarete, suddenly evoking Frank Henenlotter in the middle of a serious, austere film. An austere Russian film which yet clearly plays for laughs the moneylender entering a church to empty his bowls blasphemously after drinking the hemlock solution Faust wanted to end his own life with. What Faust as a film means, there's a very obvious idea that, stripping the pretence, the titular protagonist here is no longer the Faust of Murnau who wanted to help people, but wants money, later wants a young, baby faced woman just for a night at least, having to deal with her mother's clear hatred of his presence, but despite coming off as a detestable man, eventually shows the human being who was a professor of great acclaim who finally gets his desire for knowledge back even if it's too late to save himself. The Sun (2005) and Moloch (1999), the two films of the tetralogy I've seen, made frank comments that the characters, Hirohito and Hitler respectively, were human beings, especially with the later despite his disgusting crimes against humanity. The later film needs a re-watching for me, but it at times was comedic, Hitler apathetic and only kept awake in life by his love Eva Braun, his minions like Joseph Goebbels bitchy and whiny, making Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) not that different to Sokurov's film in the mindset of depicting the real life individuals. The Sun, which had actual comedic scenes too, while not showing the atrocities Japan and America did in World War II, showed a man believed to be the human incarnation of God for the nation of Japan as a human being, wanting to know and learn of the world too in his interests, forced to show his nation he was only of mortal flesh. Faust had the potential to be a great person, but has yet signed his soul away by the end of this film for the mere ability to have sex which he later regrets, the most obvious of metaphors but perfect for being the central pieces of the other three films before it in this series. As the moneylender points out, a Devil who yet has moments where he is wiser than anyone else, if Faust cannot help heal people, considering he has medical knowledge, or console them, he is useless.

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The film is presented as something very different from most fantasy and art films. Alongside the many mentioned moments in the review, and ones unmentioned, the film presents itself in a very unconventional form. Murky while also visually splendorous, moments in the film are shown through a distorted, tilted camera lens, fitting something that is both sincere in its prestige seriousness but also close to wading through literal faecal matter with its fart jokes, pulsating flesh and extreme distortions of human body parts like genitals. Like Moloch and The Sun, the serious subject is nonetheless counterbalanced with a far more expansive view of humanity which can be bizarre and downright vulgar. Faust is extremer in tone and content than those films, but even with something like Russian Ark (2002), Sokurov combined very difficult content to digest with seemingly out-of-absurdities and humour that yet fits the material and deepens it. Faust is definitely a difficult film, at its length an immense amount to soak in, but it succeeds immensely. As much a very potent take on finding meaning in life through the "comedic" hijinks of Faust and the moneylender as they visit place to place bickering about each other's beliefs. Its swerve to the danger of desiring power, through Faust's gamble for love, shows that even in the simplest wishes, as Sokurov's depictions of Hitler etc. showed too, people can damn their souls through their moral failures. It's a weird film, a gruesome film, abstract when it ends, using Icelandic shooting locations, nearing Max Ernst's landscapes, but as a whole Faust manages to make all of itself work.

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