j-wood

Director Alexander Vartanov (Elena) sees the stray beauty in repugnant situations and manages to bring off a rare prison drama in the process. His young hero with a mop of blonde curls and a hurt, vacant look wouldn't be out of place in a Gus Vant Sant film. Through a series of events he is catapulted from his abusive home life into a juvenile prison cum Russian labour camp. The regime here is so brutal it makes One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich seem like a Sunday picnic. The only way to survive this is to be even more brutal than the guards and fellow young crims; a path our put-upon hero soon excels at. There are moments when Vartanov lets his obvious love for realising kinetic violence overtake sense and logic, but there is also some fine film making and acting on display. He has an eye for poetic detail amongst the ravages of camp life and he takes risks to put these details in. The artful use of black and white also puts it in a direct line from Russian cinema of the 1970's. For example, the combination of insane brutality and wide eyed youthful incomprehension is reminiscent of Tarkovsky classics such as Ivan's Childhood.

Director Ian Palmer had a contact with Irish 'traveller' families and he became interested in their ways. In particular he sought out the semi-ritualized bare knuckle fights which solve (and re-kindle) their feuds. This feature-length documentary has been gestating for over a decade. Palmer's film partly appeals because of the secret nature of the age-old practice and the raw brutality of some of the moments caught on film. It grabs the same part of the psyche that responds when the ugly cage fighting is on (Cable) TV. Of course bare knuckle fighting isn't the invention of the 'tinkers' – it was common throughout England in the 19th century – it just looks weird now as an atavistic survival amongst these sprawling, huge, feud-locked families. Some of Palmer's subjects are great documentary material, especially his lead character who keeps fighting (and winning) but who has begun to felt heart-sick at the whole thing. You can also see the well springs of renewal in the adoring faces of the little boys who shadow box and dance around him as he comes home victorious. This is what it means to be a real man in this community. The old men are involved too, usually as referees (there are rules as we discover when young aspirant loses the plot and is disqualified for a bit of the old Mike Tyson face-biting). Away from the blood lust and excitement of the back lots and lanes, the members of the various feuding families – the Quinns and the Joyces – pontificate on what the point of it all is. "It's not just wars", says one man, "it means something." But the remark hangs in the air precisely because, as Palmer's haunting doco shows, this might no longer be true, if it ever was. There is individual heroism here but increasingly the sad idea takes hold that this dying form is just a huge cannibalistic waste of community energies.

It is fairly unusual to see contemporary urban Vietnamese movies that are commercial and not art-house social realism. This is a youth love story cum dance film and it is enjoyably upbeat. The young cast are attractive especially two female leads who represent the various aspects of a rapidly-modernizing Vietnam. The story line - with the evil developers threatening the youth club - is a little underdeveloped but it doesn't matter too much. The film is still good to look at. The Ho Chi Minh City locations are well used. An extra point of interest is to see how the Vietnamese kids have taken up hip-hop/break dancing (now the ubiquitous vector of a globalised youth culture) and produced an authentic Asian take on it. Not a major film but refreshing and watchable in its way.