Film Carew: Snowpiercer, The French Minister, Venus In Fur

19 July 2014 | 10:20 am | Anthony Carew

Plus The Lunchbox, Charlie's Country and All This Mayhem

SNOWPIERCER

The artistic success of Snowpiercer depends on what lens you want to view it through: is it a commercial action movie, or a renegade art-film from a Korean auteur? If it’s the former, then Bong Joon-ho’s English-language debut is a marvellous antidote to the staid, boardroom-birthed blockbuster; a wild, hilarious, ridiculous, rollicking ride on an express train hurtling ceaselessly through a post-apocalyptic ice-age, in which Chris Evans has a Keanu-in-the-Matrix-moment, his bland-hunk persona dropped in a grim dystopia of social symbolism and ironically-futile revolt. In comparison to the committee-thinking, corporate-branding approach of Evan’s Marvel dayjob, Snowpiercer is wonderfully bonkers and audacious. But compared to prior Bong joints like the meticulous Memories Of Murder or the singular Mother, it feels overheated and overrated.

You can pilot passengers trains through the potholes in its plot, but here’s the premise: in 2031, the sole survivors of a failed Global Warming antidote are housed in the titular train, a perpetual-motion machine dreamt up by the unseen, cultishly-worshipped visionary Wilford. The tail end of the train is a Dickensian hell, steerage populated by an ensemble of soot-stained faces — Evans, Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Ewen Bremner — fed a steady diet of Soylent-Green-ish Protein Blocks, agitating for an uprising against the oppressive ruling classes.

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You can pilot passengers trains through the potholes in its plot.

To overthrow the prevailing order, they must violently venture from one end of the train to the next; through a collection of themed carriages that grow increasingly stylised, whether it’s the aquarium-cum-sushi-bar or the hollowed-out host to a horde of axe-wielding gimps in leather balaclavas. Along the way the gang pick up Bong stand-by Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung (playing father/daughter, just as they did in his 2006 monster-movie The Host), a pair of drug-addled electricians who can detonate each security door; make a hostage of Tilda Swinton’s company spokeswoman, a high-comic caricature of tongue-rolling brogue and oversized denture; and find their way into a classroom indoctrinating ‘Train Baby’ kids in the way of Wilford, a single scene in which Alison Pill’s over-the-top turn straight-up steals the movie.

It’s a blast, but there’s a limit to its lunacy. Just as the train is locked into its journey, Snowpiercer can never veer off the tracks of genre. Soon, the cast starts getting knocked off one-by-one, villainous Vlad Ivanov (the black-market abortionist from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days!) morphs into an unstoppable killing machine, and Evans is the grim-faced-man-on-a-mission, the last hope for humanity. Its social parable is pretty standard stuff, too, neither incisive nor unexpected. As delightful as the hyper-stylised, upper-class carriages are — a furs-and-finery parade of gold-plated Saunas, gilded salons, and grotesque discothèques — such satire is on the same popcorn-movie level as The Hunger Games. And the man-behind-the-curtain reveal of Wilford is a familiar pop-cultural trope, his W logo even tipping the hat to both the Wizard Of Oz and Willy Wonka.

When the final tête-à-tête shakes loose the great shameful secrets of both Evans’ haunted past and the train’s inhumane ways, its lead beefcake lacks the acting chops to make such revelations hit home; his pained cry re: the deliciousness of a certain foodstuff likely to be parodied by filmgoers before the final credits are done. But this, too, is no damned fate for Snowpiercer: it’s probably Bong’s least artistically-successful picture, but there’s no shame in being a crackpot actioner ripe for internet-GIF-ing, comic riffing, and instant quoting.

THE FRENCH MINISTER

Fans of Armando Iannucci’s satirical takes on political machinations will find plenty to like in The French Minister (and/or Quai d’Orsay, depending), a sly portrait of the backroom shenanigans and arcane jargon that run wild in French government’s clandestine corridors-of-power. It finds Raphaël Personnaz as a newly-hired speechwriter toiling for Thierry Lhermitte’s absurdist MP, a fast-talking tornado of wild ambition and rank idiocy, who leaves chaos trailing — and paperwork sailing — in his wake. It’s a minister’s office as cult-of-personality, the self-styled CEO lording over underlings who regard him with a smirking mixture of contempt and fear.

Under Lhermitte’s whimsical guidance, the simple task of writing a speech becomes a Sisyphean Ordeal of increasingly ridiculous re-writes; Personnaz instructed, at one point, to make the tone of the text “the opposite of mutton stew”. Old vet Bertrand Tavernier delights at the wicked wit and the farcical tone; when he stages an ’80s-style montage at the end of the second act, it’s a winking acknowledgement of the cheesiness at play. And his delight is easy to share in, even for local audiences foreign to the French political landscape.

VENUS IN FUR

From the moment Seigner comes in snappin’ gum in her mouth, Venus In Fur is just embarrassing to watch.

Venus In Fur is directed by Roman Polanski, but forget it, Jake, this ain’t Chinatown. His adaptation of a David Ives two-hander finds Mathieu Almaric as a director auditioning Emmanuelle Seigner’s actress after-hours in an abandoned theatre. What unfolds is a portrait of seduction, sexual manipulation, and power-plays that is, if we’re being sympathetic, a meta-commentary on acting.

But its ‘sexiness’ is boilerplate, its drama on-the-nose, its single-stage setting a theatrical contrivance that feels like an airless prison. 2011’s savage Carnage proved Polanski could pull off a closed-room theatre adaptation, but from the moment Seigner comes in snappin’ gum in her mouth, Venus In Fur is just embarrassing to watch.

THE LUNCHBOX

The Lunchbox is being marketed as a subcontinental rom-com, but Ritesh Batra’s debut film is anything but. Where romances usually play out as pale crowdpleasery, Batra dares thrust romanticism back in the hands of the audience, something symbolised by the picture’s pleasingly-abrupt ending. The Lunchbox presents us with a pair of characters — Irrfan Khan’s dour, widower accountant; Nimrat Kaur’s frustrated, invisible housewife — whose ‘meet-cute’ moment involves them never meeting; their connection coming via Mumbai’s famous dabbawala delivery system. A lunchbox mix-up leads the pair to trading notes, slowly drawing closer by correspondence. It’s strictly an epistolary courtship, which feeds into what the movie is actually about: the alienation of life in a modern mega-metropolis.

Batra largely films his leads in the isolation of close-up; removing his actors from the tumult and chaos of their surroundings, even as the mise-en-scène remains socio-realist. Khan crams into a train but keeps his eyes on the floor, Kaur converses with a never-seen ‘auntie’ upstairs; each symbols of life in the tiny spaces and cramped confines of Mumbai. Class is a constant motif in the film, as is the passage of time; Batra’s screenplay collecting totems of times-past — old TV shows, dusty Bollywood-soundtrack cassettes, archaic ambulances — to connect his characters to the warmth of nostalgia. Just as memories mark a safe retreat from the loneliness of their lives, so, too, do their traded letters offer sanctity from life’s hardships. The pen-pal paramours may fantasise of running away together, but Batra refuses to take that leap with them; The Lunchbox more concerned with depicting the reality around them, not the romance within them.

CHARLIE'S COUNTRY

For a renegade filmmaker regularly cited as an Australian great, Rolf de Heer has never come up with a cinematic premise he hasn’t bludgeoned his audience with. Though 1993’s Bad Boy Bubby earnt him an eternal place in local lore, it’s been a painful two decades since: a parade self-righteous social crusades (The Quiet Room, Dance Me To My Song), lowbrow genre-works (Dr. Plonk, The King Is Dead), and abject disasters (Epsilon, Alexandra’s Project) in which the overdetermined form dictates the content. His ‘loose trilogy’ of collaborations with David Gulpilil —2002’s The Tracker, 2006’s Ten Canoes, and, now, Charlie’s Country— have risen above those rank ranks, fated as bold explorations of race in a nation in denial of its genocidal past.

Yet the sledgehammer-subtlety and black-and-white morality that dogs de Heer at his worst still undermines him when at his ‘best’. And Charlie’s Country is a textbook case: an Important Movie About The State Of Australia that comes up with obvious symbols, points them out, brings them back, and then points them out again; as if the filmmaker has no faith in the ability of his audiences to think for themselves.

The image says plenty, but for de Heer, it’s not enough.

It opens with a static shot of a Liquor Act sign outlawing alcohol in a rural aboriginal community; weirdly aligning it with John Singleton’s blasting ghetto-movie Boyz N The Hood, which opened with a zooming close-up on a stop sign. The image says plenty, but for de Heer, it’s not enough: soon locals crack open drinks by the sign; later, Gary Sweet explains liquor laws. Gulpilil and his pal Peter Djigirr have their truck, guns, and hunting spears confiscated by Luke Ford’s local policeman, but, again, the symbolism isn’t left alone; Gulpilil needs to explain the White Man Stealing Our Stuff motif out loud, too. “They stole our land and put a police station on it!” he says, and so he ‘borrows’ a police-car in return, off to rediscover the “old ways” of living off the land; renouncing the oppressive opiates of reservation life — the white man’s ‘gift’ of alcohol, tobacco, ganja — and recommuning with nature.

These scenes should be Charlie’s Country at its most poignant, but when the evocative sounds of the bush —the thrumming circadas and chirruping frogs— are drowned out by Graham Tardif’s dreary, repetitious, sad-piano score, it’s all too telling.

ALL THIS MAYHEM

“Skateboarders got fucked in the ass so bad,” pronounces one of the tattooed talking-heads in All This Mayhem, a defiant holdout from the days in which skating was for outlaws. He’s not just lamenting the corporatisation of the sport, but articulating the film’s theme in one vulgar utterance. As with Helen Stickler’s sterling Stoked: The Rise And Fall Of Gator, Eddie Martin’s documentary uses the stratospheric ascent to stardom and swift, harrowing, horrifying demise of its subject — here Melburnian brothers Tas and Ben Pappas - to make a trenchant commentary on the commodification of youth-culture, and the ruined lives of those chewed up and spat out by the machine.

“Skateboarders got fucked in the ass so bad.”

It’s a drug-addled tale of transcendent talent and sheer self-destruction familiar from the world of rock’n’roll. Greek-Australians from rough-as-guts St. Albans, the Pappas brothers are bogans with attitude, daredevil vert-skating revivalists whose swift rise to stardom coincides with the consolidation of ESPN’s X Games empire, and the pro-wrestling-esque coronation of Tony Hawk as its untouchable face. Both the Pappas brothers and Martin paint Hawk as a villain, but he’s more a symbol: a corporate stooge and canny businessman who stands in antithetical contrast to the more-credible yet utterly-clueless, coke-snorting siblings. Martin’s film is blessed with endless archival footage, all the way back to its subjects’ youth. A random moment in which the adolescent Pappasii jump from a moving train, midway across a bridge, into the Maribyrnong below, is an astonishing image; an unexpected, ephemeral instant of wild, silly joy.

All This Mayhem is both a celebration of its subjects and a cautionary tale; a portrait of when ambition and drive are perverted into ego and excess, when a life of hard-partying becomes a psychotic death-spiral. Its heart-and-soul is Tas Pappas, whose to-camera confessions are frank, funny, and filled with perspective. That he’s talking in prison means that, even when All This Mayhem is depicting the youthful optimism of yore, you’re gripped with a noir-film’s feeling of inescapable dread.