LordLucan

Been chewing over a way of expressing the type of anger this film generated. This is how it's looking so far: the film works much in the manner of the police infiltration of the Black Blocs during recent protests (in Genoa, for example) – content to smash a few windows, trash a few banks… but all for reasons that are counter-revolutionary, self-serving and only to be condemned. This film may act like it, but it's not our friend. The film takes on the outer-trappings of High Art. The camera spins, the actors practice their silences, degradation, sex and extremes are served up… but to what effect? Are we really supposed to play-off the opening of the film (homophobia spiced up with brutal violence, disorientation in every sense) with the ultra-cliched final images? What are the creators trying to tell us? That life isn't – hold on to your chair – all sweetness and light? That life is cruel, vengeful, bombastic and crude? (Something achieved with a lot less self-importance in A Ma Soeur!… or even from an exposure to any mainstream media outlet at the moment). The problem is that this film takes a lot to watch: it demands patience, an open mind, a willingness to let the film lead us around the block. It delivers nothing of worth in return. Consequently, those with willingness, and those who thought they had it and felt they could test it by buying their ticket, have their faith thrown back at them. The incredible camera work and superb performances don't mitigate this (if anything, make it worse… an awful meal in a beautiful restaurant). This is a film worthy of contempt – but let's not be idealistic and simply say this: it's a waste of my time. The director needs to wake up to contemporary reality and engage with palpable tragedy. This is titillation and shock for the Middle Classes and should be avoided as surely as a Multiplex.

It's difficult to put a finger on why Phoenix Nights is so invigorating. For a while, you're just knocked for six that a soap opera format can be used so brilliantly, and enjoying the freshness of the (at long, long last) preoccupations of the post-Oxbridge Graduate monopoly on TV comedy. On reflection I think the thing is this: the series concerns itself with a very specific milieu – the Lancashire Catholic working class community (the very same that informed so many of Anthony Burgess's books). This is the defining characteristic for Potter – his sarcasm comes from an inherent toughness that goes with such an environment, a Northerness that looks on the brighter side no matter how awful things get, that sets about getting the job done. Potter is someone who unwittingly finds himself to be a cynic, and struggles to drop the cynicism (too Southern an attribute?), but encounters 101 little events each and every day that underwrite it. And so we're gunning for him; partly deluded he may be, but he's no Keith Lard – ultimately, we laugh with Potter at the world around us.

As with The Office, Phoenix Nights owes an awful lot to the sublime first series of I'm Alan Partridge and, as with The Office, achieves so much more than the second series of I'm Alan Partridge. Unmissable, gut-wrenchingly funny comedy that somehow still takes you to a place Kurt Cobain would have been familiar with in his final few hours.

A Bergmanesque study of a marriage that is turned upsidedown by one part mishap and one part momentary lapse of reason. What's provocative here, and makes for an intelligent and moving film, is the way in which the spurned wife (played with quiet dignity by the estimable Paprika Steen) doesn't dish up deserved revenge, quivering hatred or physical or mental violence. but, rather, offers an attempt to understand, to accept, and to hold the family together regardless. How rare is this? The line that stays with me - and it's a casual aside but one that cuts straight to the bone - is Paprika telling her husband's mistress that `we can't even afford' the new furniture he has lavished on her.

Once the film hits its groove, its DOGME origins are forgotten and we're left with intimacy and the thousand and one little tragedies that unfold on any given day of any given week. It could be said to be modest in scope, somewhat uninventive in form, and it does immerse itself uncritically in the middle class milieu (and in this respect, I would liken it to Moretti's `La Stanza del Figlio' - except that film does seem to express a suppressed distaste for Berlusconi's Italy), but there's an honesty and maturity that make it a valuable experience - particularly for any teenager used to a soap opera diet of hysterical marriage operatics. or for anyone still recovering from `Festen'.

At its best, and there's a frisson of that here, DOGME-95 has delivered fresh slices of life (or, to elaborate, privileges a panorama of personal battles against a recognisably familiar backdrop) - its Vows of Chastity whittling the camera down to something akin to a microscope.