ashishjoshi-04517

A tense, white-knuckle home invasion thriller directed by Michael Haneke, this is about a mother, father and their young son held hostage at their lakeside holiday home by two white-gloved psychopaths. Ulrich Muhe plays the husband while Susanne Lothar is his feisty spouse.

Unlike other similar films, this 1997 release has one of the attackers (Arno Frisch) often breaking the fourth wall by periodically addressing the audience. By making the watcher vicariously partake of the horror, it somehow makes it all the more chilling and difficult to watch. This is a downright nasty film, so only those with strong stomachs can sit through to the end. In fact during its Cannes premiere, several critics walked out of the theatre in disgust.

You have been warned!

French auteur Bertrand Tavernier transposes Jim Thompson's gritty novel Pop.1280 from the American South to French colonial West Africa. Philippe Noiret is Lucien Cordier, an ineffectual and much put-upon cop in a small dusty town in Senegal just before Word War II. His shrewish wife (Stephane Audran) openly mocks him by cohabiting under their roof with her 'brother' and the other townsfolk despise him for his unwillingness to stand up for himself. But one day without warning, Cordier sheds his cloak of cowardice and transforms into a sort of avenging angel, picking off his tormentors one by one while maintaining an air of studied innocence.

The director beautifully captures the ambience of moral corruption and ennui under colonial rule. The town is flat, dusty and without any natural beauty. The majority of the ruling whites are openly racist and consider the natives as little more than vermin. Their women are no better. Though there are flashes of humour, an air of spiritual damnation hangs over the film like a perpetual shroud. There are no redeeming characters. Though, in the end, Cordier tries to kindle a relationship with the virginal schoolteacher Anne, he might already have been too late to save his soul.

This is a superior, slow-burn crime drama with fine performances from Noiret, Isabelle Huppert (as his mistress) and Stephane Audran. I give it a solid 8.

Delicatessen, the first full-length film helmed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, is set in a futuristic society that has apparently run out of meat. By turns dark, visually stunning and abounding in black humour, it concerns a young butcher's apprentice who takes up the job after the old one vanishes. The charcuterie.is located on the ground floor of a dilapidated building. The apprentice and the butcher's daughter fall in love and she enlists the help of the troglodytes, a subterranean dwelling race of vegetarian humans, in getting her lover out of harm's way. For in this particular butcher's establishment the apprentices have a habit of disappearing after a few months on the job. Highly recommended, this one is for those who like a touch of the outlandish and unexpected in their feature films. Dominique Pinon is superb as the apprentice while Marie-Laure Dougnac brings a touch of sanity as his lover in an apartment overflowing with all manner of loonies.