Wu Xia "Swordsmen" (2011) dir. Peter Ho-San Chan
Starring: Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro, and Jimmy Wang Yu

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

A dash of Rashomon, a pinch of A History of Violence, with Donnie Yen's left foot crushing your windpipe, Wu Xia takes a few chances with the Asian martial arts genre and mostly succeeds.

In 1917 China, two marauding bandits of great repute accidentally give up the ghost to local “aw' gee shucks” farmer Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen with blindingly white teeth for a humble peasant) in a foiled village robbery. All appears on the up-and-up to the local officials except for Detective Xu Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and his B.S. alarm. He's the sort of sleuth who can pull off the calabash pipe look. In a superb sequence, Baijiu's inspection of the crime scene recreates the battle, as the three combatants fling themselves around in slo-mo with projectile CGI teeth pinging about. Questions are raised about Liu's past, as the detective peels away his facade, inadvertently catching the attention of a fearsome Triad with a stake in the matter.

The touch of the detective in Wu Xia is far more subtle than that of Tsui Hark's overblown Detective Dee from last year, as Kaneshiro's character is enjoyably worthy of his own film. It would have been interesting to see him use brains in order to outwit flying-fist Shaolin monks and roadside bandits on his own. The rest of the story in Wu Xia is mostly enjoyable hokum with its x-rayed pressure point brutalities and acupuncture needle assaults. This film mostly suffers from a lack of epic rumble like those the Chans and Jaas have previously delivered. There's just something about one mean hombre taking out an army that puts a hop in my step. Despite Yen's immense skill and screen charisma, the fight sequences often suffer from being cut too quickly. The longer the take holds, the greater my admiration grows for what Ho-San Chan's stars and stuntmen can accomplish. Outside of these qualms, the film is commendable for experimenting with a formula that was once at its most basic – foot + face = awesome.

The Tree of Life (2011) dir. Terrence Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

With his fifth feature, Terrence Malick doesn't necessarily need to make another film after The Tree of Life. In gestation for decades, it’s his Apocalypse Now, his Ran, his Once Upon a Time in the America. There is a hugeness about it, as Malick has crafted a work about life, the afterlife and all known creation that boomingly expresses his philosophies and elements of his childhood. The Big Bang (or Genesis) is painstakingly re-enacted from the first pop to forms of interlacing DNA with the consultation of Douglas Trumbull, which gives the film a 2001 star sequence quality. I should mention that the birth of the universe through to evolutionary bloom occurs in the 2nd reel. What could a director possibly do afterwards to top that?

Tree is an unabashedly spiritual experience that irked my inner Agnostic. And yet, overlooking the predictability of whispering voice-over as hands brush past rock and weed as we'd expect from Malick, the film's scope was quite humbling – a one-second shot of a supernova is still pestering me hours later. Just about every thistle in existence is preciously filmed, as Malick and returning New World cameraman Emmanuel Lubezki tilt the image upwards to turn an oak orchard, crevasse or Brad Pitt into iconography. The film is mostly a multimillion-dollar home movie for the director and merges into a dense narrative successor to Godfrey Reggio's QATSI series.

The more recent planetary-bound story is split between little Jack O'Brien's (Hunter McKraken) Texas childhood with his father (Pitt) and mother (Jessica Chastain), embodying combustible nature and gracefulness, and the cross-cutting of the grown Jack (Sean Penn) and his alienation within cityscapes. Pitt is the featured star, but his role is more of a presence than a performance, a figure of mythical proportions in the household to his children as their saintly mother (Jessica Chastain) is in tune with their nature. The Tree of Life might plumb overwrought moments of golden-era 50s innocence, but the brief sparks of transcendence (kids shadows at play shot with an upside-down camera, Pitt's mute reaction to an unpleasant phone call, the fog of pesticide, Saturn) act as a counter-measure to occasional sappiness.

My star rating is a smokescreen. The Tree of Life could be four stars next week or one. I'm baffled by its leaps in logic and scenario, as Malick's impatient cinematic language is spoken quickly. I'm only certain that it is worth seeing. And my head is throbbing right now.

The Kid with a Bike "Le Gamin au Vélo" (2011) dir. The Dardenne Brothers
Starring Cécile de France, Jérémie Renier, and Thomas Doret

***

By Blair Stewart

Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta, The Son and The Child) return to Cannes with their winning cinéma vérité formula. Approaching films with a focus on lower-class European sociology, the Dardennes' storytelling engages you with films of emotional complexity that are told with what initially appears to be docu-drama simplicity.

The Kid with a Bike follows the lousy situation of 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), dumped by his father (Jérémie Renier, a grown-up follow-up to his role in The Child) into foster care. Cyril is a ball of thwarted energy, furiously pecking away at his perceived imprisonment by jumping fences, badgering his councillors and doing anything to burrow back to his absentee pa. He breaks out of the home and runs smack into hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), who in turn establishes an often fraught relationship with Cyril as she becomes his surrogate mother. The baggage and vulnerability of Cyril is a weighty task for Samantha, with the child's greatest danger coming from a mentorship with an adolescent thug cut from the same cloth as the boy. In the thug, the Dardennes effortlessly sidestep trite judgement of Cyril's bad company with a simple moment involving the thug caring for his invalid grandmother. A moment like that sticks with me, as a dimension is added to a stock character who has his own motivation for why he would commit crimes. The story has a circular purpose to it, with Cyril's behaviour dictated by his father's choices in another pleasant surprise where I'd almost taken the Belgian filmmaking duo for granted with their script.

The Kid with a Bike doesn't break new ground for Jean-Pierre and Luc, but of their major releases over the past two decades, this is their most overtly sympathetic film – it hurts to watch Cyril. Cécile de France is lovely in her working-class role, as she communicates the interior scheming of a good woman nursing a damaged kid. Thomas Doret is a wonderful child actor, his buzzing restlessness reminiscent of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. I thought of Truffaut's film often during the long moments of Cyril riding his bike, urgently trying to gain a step in a hopeless situation.

What's kept me from rating The Kid higher is that with each new film, the Dardenne pair tread closer to old grounds and could certainly expand well beyond their safety net. The film's soundtrack is also periodically breached with an overwrought score yearning for catharsis rather loudly.

While The Kid with a Bike doesn't have the heady morality questions of The Son and its payoff, the Dardennes' latest is a fine film that will reward their audience.

Footnote "Hearat Shulayim" (2011) dir. Joesph Cedar
Starring Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi and Micah Lewensohn.

**

By Blair Stewart

What a wonderful plot for a comedy. What an utterly over-directed film.

Footnote from Israel prods at two universal sources of humour – the persnickety egos of tenured professors, and the buffoonish moods of fathers and maybe, just maybe, their sons. Perhaps.

Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) has been buried so deep in Talmudic studies he's emerged on the late side of life a grumpy old homunculus. One of his many rivals in Jewish academia on the opposite end of what he regards as frivolous research happens to be his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), who is more gregarious but retains that Shkolnik family touchiness.

From the opening, comprised of a close-up of Eliezer listening to a long painful speech, the backstabbing and pettiness in their insular world bleeds out. Eliezer has been waiting on the coveted Israel prize for his painstaking study of his peoples' history, but several decades of zilch has reduced him to a curmudgeonly existence. Shkolnik's disposition hasn't been helped with the cherry-picking by his arch-rival Grossman (Micah Lewensohn, blessed with one of the great knotted brows in cinema, as he appears to have sand dunes attached above his eyebrows) of his life's work and his only claim to fame a throwaway mention in an obscure book: Eliezer is the footnote. The story shifts around leading up to that speech, as the Shkolnik clan all spin off in their different trajectories.

An intelligent comedy that lampoons the intelligencia, Footnote distracts from the humorous performances of Ashkenazi, Bar-Aba and Lewensohn with unnecessarily flashy inter-titles, cross-cutting and deadweight voice-over. It's a droll comedy, directed like a David Fincher thriller.

The stylistic choices are the director's literal expression of Bar-Aba's study, and the film needed something much more subtle. After the first scenes of witty dialogue supported by actors with chemistry and pace, they're let down by moments of tedium. For instance, why are there needless moments of characters walking about, often away from the camera? Is their ass supposed to be funny, or is it a break so I can catch my breath from the guffaws? I appreciate a film told with clarity. We don't need to see the short-ends.

A few notable supporting characters are also either vastly underwritten or have had their lines splashed across the cutting room floor. Earlier scenes of promise featuring the supporting cast members never receive a payoff, which makes the previous time spent with them wasteful. Lastly, the score of Footnote is painfully insistent throughout, as it constantly crashes into the movie as if it was a drunk elephant on a cruise ship. Silence would have sufficed.

Footnote is a waste of talent, but my dad just might enjoy it for Bar-Aba's grouchiness.

Michael (2011) dir. by Markus Schleinzer
Starring Michael Fuith and David Rauchenberger

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

The man is a blank.

Balding, pasty, forgettable. Bland suit, bland shoes, bland words. He arrives home from the insurance office, removes the bland suit and shoes, makes a snack, goes downstairs to his padlocked basement, into the playroom of the 10-year-old boy he's held captive for months, and he rapes the boy. That's his routine.

This is the reality of Michael, Markus Schleinzer's debut feature after cutting his teeth as a casting director, most notably for Michael Haneke. His influence hangs over so many of the art-house releases these days, he's like a trend instead of an auteur. Michael deals with the outrage of the Josef Fritzl revelation and other cases of child enslavement within our generation.

Michael Fuith is Michael the adult, an obsequious middle-manager type of deep silence, hard-wired as a sexual predator, matter-of-fact and mostly competent in his crime. David Rauchberger is the boy, required to engage Michael in sex, expected to play the role of a playmate and chattel. The film shifts between the man's outside existence and his casual trips down to the basement, absolute evil reduced to banality. The scenes of molestation are mostly implied but brutal to fathom, even if you're not a parent. The film doesn't insist exploitation or controversy, it confronts an aspect of human nature that's existed since the catamites; it could occur, and has already, in small-town Austria, Afghanistan, California.

As a film, in regard to design, Michael is accomplished but unspectacular and quite predictable. But to be fair, if the story was sensationalized, I'd be furious – Schleinzer has made a mostly honest film from an unfathomable source. It does pander though in having Michael as a vacant monster, Todd Solondz was much braver in humanizing Dylan Baker's paedophile in Happiness. Fuith and Rauchberger are committed in their roles and commendable in their bravery. Michael is a film of great unease that I don't want to watch again, but it’s worth respecting.

"But I... I can't help myself! I have no control over this, this evil thing inside of me, the fire, the voices, the torment!"
-Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's M.

Miss Bala "Miss Bullet" (2011) dir. Gerardo Naranjo
Starring Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez

****

By Blair Stewart

Sometimes I come out of a movie theatre and the film I've just seen is mighty enough that I want to walk along the streets afterwards and express my happiness to passing strangers. Tonight I had that rare joy. Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala is pure cinema, a head above the mostly minor works I've seen so far at Cannes, a coal-black rat maze of a film with a young woman tumbling up the steps of Mexican border anarchy towards absurdity.

Stephanie Sigman is Laura, the dirt-broke shirt-vendor in Tijuana, starting her day by entering into the local beauty pageant and ending the night an ensnared accomplice in a freeform ground battle between kingpin Lido (Noe Hernandez), his army of triggermen and Lido's local wonk officials going all-in against the gringos of the D.E.A. After witnessing Lido's Darwinistic housecleaning aptitude, Laura's safety is now tied to the drug-runner with her prospects on par with that of Schrodinger's cat. The story takes the humble girl and pitches her through unceasing sequences encapsulating Naranjo's disgust with the systemic rot of the federales, the silence of the feminicidios and the cartels above all, from the Baja to Tamaulipas state and San Diego to El Paso.

Miss Bala shifts so many gears it could enter an off-road rally and win, and it often appears to be heading towards preposterousness before wantonly leaping right into it. Lately, having watched so many unambitious releases coming from the mainstream and the art-house, it is so gratifying now to see a film that ignores plausibleness and the audiences' expectations to just keep running you ragged for two hours.

The tension of Laura's endangerment is perfectly sustained, only for Bala to dip into cruel satire until the story once again kicks into escalating carnage of ambitious direction. Stephanie Sigman is the same kind of sympathetic 'living barometer' of vast human destruction as Polanski had done when he focused on the plight of one man to express the enormity of the Holocaust in The Pianist. In his first role, Noe Hernandez as Lido has a fearsome Charles Bronson quality about him with dull black eyes and the odd charisma of a man who massacres casually.

Naranjo takes the myriad of ongoing violations between/against his countrymen, distills them into the plight of a lone girl at the mercy of Mexico's (and America's) phantom war dividing her land, then uses action as a Trojan horse to unleash his indignation when the audience might be hoping for entertainment. How awesome.

The script by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz is economical and confident in character and action, but the tandem of Naranjo and his cinematographer Mátyás Erdély is where the film succeeds. It’s a collaboration reminiscent of Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki's best work together. Dollies, brilliant crane shots, Steadicam, mise-en-scène – the film is in constant, justified movement to match the pace of the story, and Naranjo knows what a camera is capable of and how it should really move.

I expect Miss Bala to be somewhere high up on my year-end list of best films.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) dir. by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller

***

By Blair Stewart

Tilda Swinton faces terrible labours as a mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay's beautifully flawed return after her 2002 masterpiece Morvern Callar.

To Eva (Swinton), her first child Kevin (played at various stages through youth by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller) is not a welcome addition to the tidy life she keeps with husband Franklin (John C. Reilly). From an early age the child plays sides between his parents effortlessly, with Eva usually holding the losing hand during the potty-training and spelling lessons stages. We see from her splintered memories of Kevin's upbringing the irksome stare he commands in diapers at a tender age, as if the boy is channelling Vincent D'Onofrio's Pvt. Pyle from Full Metal Jacket.

Kevin acts like a little monster, but surely most kids can be bastards in the playground sandpit. Kevin's ambiguity as a major brat/minor sociopath is out of his mother's grasp, and the film jumbles up Eva's past with her raw present as a subjective bookend to the tragedy of Van Sant's Elephant. Could we be seeing the sum of her mistakes as a parent that lead to disaster, or did she do all that was within her power to steer her supposedly loved child from his deeds?

This is Swinton's film, as the camera locks on her face like sunlight through a magnifying glass baking a crippled ant. There is a moment early on in which Swinton, with a look to an off-screen character, accomplishes more with her silence than pages of superfluous dialogue could possibly accomplish. All that cauterized emotion comes right out of her eyes, and she really is one of the great actors working today. On point and a coup for Ramsay is Billy Hopkins' casting of Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin skulking about the house. In Millers’ uniqueness, Ramsay chooses to indulge in fetish-like close-ups of his shredded skin and open pores like an insect in the pupa stage, a kind of grotesqueness that would fit well with the fleshy horrors of Cronenberg.

While We Need to Talk About Kevin is heavy material to digest, with the mesmerizing and unexpected opening to the framing of Kevin's actions, it's skillfully made throughout. There's been much acclaim for this film thus far here at Cannes. Where I differ is in the non-linear structure of the story that saps the work of tension. By the middle half of the film, I wasn't engaged with the events as much as I was watching a rockslide gain momentum where the end results were fairly obvious. There's also the niggling issue of why Eva would stay in a town of often broad American caricature in which she is a pariah akin to that of Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, but just as well she could be carrying a mother's great burden into extremity.

Kevin is a powerful view at the nasty before and after of accumulated mistakes.

Sleeping Beauty (2011) dir. by Julia Leigh
Starring Emily Browning and Rachael Blake

***

By Blair Stewart

Few subjects raise the hackles of cinema-goers quite like a sexual power-play when the woman is the willing submissive, as Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty portrays. Arriving from a familiar but far crueler vein to Bunuel's Belle de Jour, young Lucy, as played by Emily Browning, is a striking, almost-pubescent college student with a hazy past of addiction and the trashy roots of the low-class family she's shucked. She's also a trendy bar-bathroom prostitute, earning her keep and dirty knees in the stalls when an offer arrives to join sex games for the contentment of elite men – Berlusconi himself just as well could show up as the master of ceremonies.

Lucy's job offer is that of a 'Sleeping Beauty', a doped-up, unresponsive play doll to be used by old-moneyed hands for any vice 'excluding penetration'. Leigh's film charts the spiral of Lucy's warped sense of curiosity and loathing through this degradation. This is neither a straight drama nor an erotic seduction piece, as the graphic scenes of Browning being pawned by sagging leathery men would corrupt most libidos. Having withheld Lucy's backstory (I'm certain every art-house film withholds backstory these days) and left us with just scraps of dialogue and small twitches of personality indicating why she's chosen her unique, necrophilic field, the work has the quality of an airless art gallery piece, or the political sex-bombs that Catherine Breillat has tossed in the past.

The unconscious transactions with Lucy's clientele have a creeping dread in them helped greatly by the hum of Ben Frost's ambient score. The film itself is pieced together with a minimum number of cuts, or as a fellow critic pointed out, the movie doesn't have scenes as much as vignettes. The framing is classical with brief but soft camera movements, which show us an influence from Michael Haneke's own twisted works.

It's an interesting time for Australian film. Since the productions of the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix films, Hollywood has largely left Oz's shores. Now the homemade independent/arts-funded films have stepped into the spotlight again. At the same time, the films themselves have looked to foreign influences in their themes, with Animal Kingdom sharing a kinship with Michael Mann's L.A. crime swagger, The Proposition an Outback mule-kick that could have been transported to the Rio Grande, and now Sleeping Beauty with the European austerity of ruling-class perversity.

Under the mentorship of Jane Campion, this is the film debut of praised author Julia Leigh. Given the choice of subject matter, attention will likely be focused on the grimy parts of her film. But her star, Emily Browning, a ballsy actress for such a petite woman, and Rachael Blake as Lucy's sangfroid Madam, are both sterling. The film is decisive and unpleasant but also undeniably skillful in its creation, reminding me of the glow of a Francis Bacon painting: both striking and terrible to look at. As you have already gleaned, the American Midwest is surely going to love this.

Midnight in Paris (2011) dir. by Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard and Michael Sheen.

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

I had a dear old friend so hung up on the past that not one conversation went by without him whining about his disgust at being born 40 years too late. Music back then had a genuine animal strut to it; revolution applied to politics instead of a buzzword used for the latest flavours of Coke; early Godard was a genius instead of the cranky old hermit he is now. In hindsight, that friend depressed the hell out of me, and as his time-displacement dilemma is central to Midnight in Paris, I hope my old mate watches Allen's latest when it's released. But he'll likely complain about the cost of tickets nowadays.

The old spoilt trollop that is Paris is given more praise, as Woody Allen eavesdrops on neuroses along the Seine, and his camera professes love for her streets while conveniently overlooking the banlieues. On holiday with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her ugly American in-laws, Gil (Owen Wilson), a milquetoast scriptwriter, is overcome by the nostalgia of the city's belles-lettres heyday of Stein, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Making a midnight jaunt to avoid his fiancée’s faux-intellectual admirer (Michael Sheen), Allen nicks from his own Purple Rose of Cairo, as Gil strolls into a 1920s phantasmagorical Madame Tussaud's exhibit where he can hobnob with his dead heroes (Cole Porter, T.S. Eliot, the Surrealists) until the tourist needs to wake up to the present or before Ernie H. gets too drunk and punchy. Gil's dallying is complicated by the arrival of Picasso's fetching muse played by Marion Cotillard as a gal most folks would happily build a time-bending DeLorean for.

As is the case with his recent, too-kind travelogues of Barcelona and London, Woody Allen portrays Paris in the kindest light possible and doesn't upset his own aesthetic applecart at all – faint praise for a comedy that has a couple of smart jokes sprung from characters that, in order to get belly laughs, thankfully lack a) cheap profanity and b) sexual depravity.

Midnight in Paris is a mostly enjoyable, though slightly forgettable, work by Allen, not surprising as the last great film he's made goes back to the previous decade, 1999's Sweet and Lowdown. Back to his Bottle Rocket roots, Owen Wilson is as likable as always, Corey Stoll does Hemingway justice, and Marion Cotillard is the charming quasi-ingénue as all heck.

If anything, Midnight is worth seeing for Adrien Brody's small but fantastic turn in one of the more memorable bits of screen-thievery in recent years.