Film Carew

It takes all of one scene for The Place Beyond The Pines to give viewers - either unsuspecting or eager - prime Drive flashbacks: Derek Cianfrance holding on a sustained single-take tracking shot that follows Ryan Gosling strutting through the heightened light/noise of a carnival; stylised to the hilt in peroxide, facial-tattoos, and tight, worn-with-aplomb red leather jacket. Gosling may be the internet's imaginary boyfriend, but once more he's playing someone not particularly dreamy: an itinerate motorcycle cage-rider, Handsome Luke, who scans as the terrifyingly-realist counter-take to the toothless cutie Elvis dolled up as in 1964's Roustabout. The realism and essential vérité of the opening's sustained-single-take turns motorcycle daredevilry into a visceral cinematic spectacle: the machines hurtling around the cage-of-death a terrifying cacophony of screeching sound and blurring movement; these men truly living life in the face of imminent death, a cracking of nerves or failing of machinery enough to spell their instant demise.

Handsome Luke's blowing through Schenectady, New York (whose name also means 'Place Beyond the Pines', as well serving as a Charlie Kaufman pun in Synecdoche, New York) on an annual port of fairground call; and, calling back fond memories of last summer, he sees Eva Mendes, nipples on high-beam, a vision-of-love amidst the clamour of the carnival. And, like, surprise!: that tender night 12 months yore has, hence, done turned into bouncing baby Jason, introduced to unsuspecting pops in a moment of face-to-face meeting that has pleasing echoes of the Rory Culkin/Josh Lucas mirroring-faces meeting in Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me (in, mostly, the spot-on-ness of its casting). And so sets the saga in motion: The Place Beyond The Pines a three-parter told in two 15-years-apart timeframes, feeling more like a novel as it shifts perspectives twice over - via two narrative 'hand-overs' - across an epic 150 minutes.

Its first act is its most potent: Gosling an outlaw on the back of that steel horse, throttling towards an imminent oblivion; riding like lightning (in a Ride The Lighting sleeveless) yet due to crash like thunder. The first narrative-handover starts, slyly, in the middle of a high-speed pursuit; cutting away from its protagonist, for the first time, to the cop who's the other half of the car-chase. Said cop is Bradley Cooper, who's soon feted for official police heroism - “the hero card is the only one they have to play,” offers his pops, disproving of a chosen career as one of New York's Finest - but remains wracked with guilt for his role in Gosling's demise; something symbolised by ill-gotten lucre that he attempts to pass off, give away, and eventually hide like the telltale heart. The story later hurtles forward to a subsequent generation; with the children of Gosling (Dane DeHaan from Lawless, channelling a young Nick Stahl) and Cooper (Emory Cohen, a self-styled Wigga Gino in whitey wifebeater and gold chain, the dismay of his by-the-book pops) forming an unlikely alliance, unaware of the sins of their fathers, but still carrying them deep in their DNA. Yet, in the age of Google, no family secret can stay buried, and, as the movie comes to a slow close (closing, with shades of Rust & Bone, with Bon Iver blasted on the so-emo soundtrack), the trauma of the past comes home to roost.

Blue Valentine, Cianfrance's prior picture, also sprawled out over the years with echoes of the past reverberating in the present, even if its dramatic frisson came from the way that it ricocheted between the two; cutting contrastingly between the giddy, flirty joys of new romance and the horrible, oppressive prison of a bad marriage. For all the power of its drama - which was a potent portrait of an affair that can both rescue and destroy its paramours - Blue Valentine was blighted by bum notes (mostly from the way the method-acting of Gosling and the normally-much-better Michelle Williams constantly drew attention to itself). And so it goes, again, with The Place Beyond The Pines, which in its middle act submits to a bunch of cop-movie clichés (including Ray Liotta cast to type as crooked cop) that feel utterly generic when contrasted with the artful outlaw-realism of the opening act, or the essential Greek tragedy of the final one. The unusual, unexpected structure means that the film as whole will never scan as standard, and Cianfrance has a yen for both memorable images (like Gosling riding his motorcycle through endless pines, inside-out white-t-shirt fluttering like a flag in a gale; or a striking single shot in which his face flips from red to green as traffic-lights change) and turning soap-operatic contrivances into moments of ferocious drama. But the essential simplicity at the core of this tale of masculinity hamstrings the cinematic whole; making for an uneven, pseudo-auteurist picture that feels as doomed in its pursuit of greatness as Gosling does in his greaser nihilism.

Fifteen years after delivering Dogme #1, Festen, Thomas Vinterberg is finally back with something to live up to it; something that, in both trivial and meaningful ways, inhabits similar cinematic territory. The Hunt features a big country house, a gathering of extended friends and family, a revelation of molestation, and scenes in which people collapse under the weight of dramatic extremes. Its classical composition is far calmer than the hand-held, held-by-Anthony-Dod-Mantle whimsy that, in hindsight, makes Festen play less as unvarnished realism, more as relic of the nascent digital epoch. But The Hunt has the same fearsome approach to its text, the same determination to squeeze out every iota of its emotional weight.

It comes as a pleasing development for those who once saw Vinterberg as Dogme's rising star, only to see him then author a cockeyed cinematic dream that doubled as a bona fide Hollywood debacle (It's All About Love, of which I'm in the so-bad-it-becomes-surreally-wonderful camp), a revisionist Western whose sub-von-Trier American-history-on-Danish-backlot seemed like a symbolic revenge-fantasy played out on the US movie industry (Dear Wendy), and a grizzled, gristled piece of brow-beating, frowny-faced prison-movie 'realism' (Submarino). None of those films - deservedly - came anywhere near Australian cinemas, which means that The Hunt feels like a reintroduction for a forgotten figure.

It stars Mads Mikkelsen - and, thus, gets a boost now that he's bound for eternal syndication as network-television's Hannibal Lecter - as a pre-school teacher in small-town Denmark. When one child says that said teacher's penis is “stiff like a club”, soon said small-town is gripped in small-town hysteria; with the school's claims of respectfully performing due diligence duly abandoned for a witch-hunt of implanted suggestions, fantasised parental nightmares, and modern-day lynch-mobbing. Vinterberg's script - which he co-wrote with Tobias Lindholm, maker of the genuinely-impressive pirates-take-hostages stand-off A Hijacking, due soon on local screens - is at its best when there's still a mystery to what's happening; when one wonders what Mikkelsen did or didn't do, what this actually means, and whether he needs to answer for it.

Eventually, however, the film just becomes a portrait of a virtuous man victimised; a piece of scripted outrage that uses irrational paedophila-fearmongering as but the basis for a simplistic parable. Here, self-appointed moral guardians become greater monsters than those they're out to condemn; a complex scenario reduced so as to reveal the ridiculousness of Christian hypocrisy. For all its flaws, though, The Hunt is still exciting in the way it amounts to Vinterberg hauling himself out of a career tailspin. The film itself performs essentially the same trick; growing more simplified and strident as it progresses, until an unexpected, memorable final scene suddenly throws things back open for debate.

Tabu - a film whose square-format black-and-white imagery makes it a visually-distinct proposition from anything else screening on general release - starts and finishes with two acts paying extended homage to seductive folklore and the sweetness of silent cinema. It opens with a cutesy, faux-ethnographic prologue that introduces the tenor of myth, then closes with a second half whose tale of tragic love in colonialist Mozambique carries a matinée grandeur (and an explicit reference to old RKO pictures). In between the two, as the film's opening half, is something that stands in stark contrast: a downplayed, mundane, modern-day-Lisbon rendering of the relationship between three aging women, whose clear references to Bresson - the monotoned delivery, the fluttering lighting bordering on devotional, and looming presence of a Catholic God - carry none of the crowd-pleasery that sits on either side of it. Yet it's soon revealed to be a piece of artful grounding; the underplayed 'dullness' of the first chapter - titled Paradise Lost, and played out on a day-by-day basis, as in a diary - established as counterpoint to the flowery drama that comes thereafter, in a second chapter - titled Paradise, doled out as month-by-moth saga - told at a completely different tenor.

Writer/director Miguel Gomes - a former film-critic, god bless him - showed himself to be a skilled proponent of the thoughtful, artful turn with his prior picture, 2008's Our Beloved Month Of August, in which what's initially presented as a documentary slowly reveals itself to be semi-staged; playing out the act of observation changing the behaviour of the observed as a cinematic gambit, making for a meta-commentary on documentary cinema's boasts of 'truth'. Here, the radical shift from the banal to the mythical is less elegant, more dynamic, and way more theatrical, but certainly not bipolar. “People's lives are not like dreams,” we're warned, as some near-biblical commandment in the dryly-domestic opening act. But, then, in the second half, it's revealed that they are; the hidden history of one of these old ladies filled with passion, danger, intrigue, and near-Amélie-levels of whimsy; a tall-tale whose telling ties back to the folkloric opening.

On the one hand, Tabu is a romantic portrait of the unspoken-of pasts that trail out behind the alienated and elderly, ignored by modern culture; but it's also a juxtaposition between the banality of the present and the mystique of memory. The nostalgia for the past - be it silent cinema, super-8, colonialism, girl-group records, vintage rock'n'roll bands in matching suits, or the universal notion of one's own youth - is due to memory's power; how it holds humans in its thrall. The past is like a dream, and, so, Gomes depicts it like a dream: his pseudo-silent second stanza staging heightened ambient sound - birds carolling, circadas chirping, frogs chirruping; scythes through grass; water rippling - yet excising the spoken dialogue; though whether his actors are speaking aloud and having the sound removed or simply mouthing the words isn't revealed. With but this simple disjunction between sound and image, Gomes sets up stagey unreality that can't be ignored, having the effect of never letting an audience slip into the safety of suspension-of-disbelief.

And yet, Tabu obviously isn't supposed to be a critical commentary on the romantic remembrances of jolly-old colonialist days  -replete with tea-and-biscuits at the plantation house whilst the rebellion for independence brews up around them - because its romance is so genuinely romantic; its tragic love so mythically tragic; the kind of heart-rending affair that, 60 years later, a little old lady would indeed carry to her grave. “You may run as long as you like, as far as you can, but you can never escape your heart,” the prologue prophesies, and so it plays out; as our star-cross'd lovers fall victims to the blood coursing through every ventricle. Their love-for-the-ages isn't, due to the pseudo-silent presentation, actually spoken between them; but, instead, intoned in storytelling recollection, and read aloud in etched-with-agony letters, so evocatively written as to sound as if spoken poetry; heartbreak, as always, making for the most beautifully-agonised writing. That love seems greater at a distance - be it the physical distance of lovers-kept-apart, or the less-literal distance of time-passing - plays into the film's greater gambit, in which the romance of a lifetime, the romance of memory, and the romance of silent cinema all come from the same human impulse; they all swirling together in a magical, magical-realist fable that feels like some cinematic dream.

Like Someone In Love has been billed as a lesser film from Abbas Kiarostami, both by the hardcore cinephiles unmoved since the Koker trilogy and the casual come-latelies charmed by the crowd-pleasery of Certified Copy. But save for a seemingly-uninspired central hook - a widowed Tokyo professor hires a call-girl out of a desire for company - there's nothing about Kiarostami's latest picture, and his second made in exile from Iran, that sullies his sainted status as cinematic master. Its mastery begins with the film's opening shot, in which we listen to the isolated conversation of a girl in a crowded bar, but can't actually see her at all; we hearing only her voice, never seeing her face. Kiarostami is one of motion-picture-history's greatest users of sound and framing to tell the story, and he does it masterfully, again, throughout Like Someone In Love; the essentially-pleasant opening shot mirrored by a terrifying closing one, where sound from outside the frame marauds those within it.

As well as his brilliant use of sound, Kiarostami is best known for his love of scenes set in cars; his 2002 film, Ten, shot entirely from a single camera situated on one car's dashboard. Again, Like Someone In Love stays - at times almost trapped - within a moving vehicle; beginning with our call-girl's call-out to the client, which features an incredibly beautiful instant where she asks to be driven past the waiting country grandmother she's in the middle of standing up, of lying to in a fashion that breaks her own heart. Scores more scenes are set in cars, but another one stands out vividly: when our old prof falls asleep, only to be awoken by the call-girl's abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase, who, as lead from Suo Masayuki's brilliant I Just Didn't Do It and key actor from Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, is the only familiar face in the tiny cast), who mistakes him for his grandfather and confides in him with something you could call hostile reverence.

Kase is a figure both to be feared and pitied, and Kiarostami delights in depicting the shifting power-balance in relationships; in how play-acting, falsehoods, and façades can shift perspectives - both of characters and the audience - in unexpected ways. Like sound-out-of-frame and long, single-take trips in cars, these narrative character-games have a familiar feeling for followers of Kiarostami. Yet, whilst there's none of the same frontierist thrill as back in those Koker days, where it feel as if he was inventing a new kind of cinema, Kiarostami is still in profound command of his brand of cinema. And, in the face of such, using his own greatness against him feels like it's selling both filmmaker and film short; Like Someone In Love being great unto itself.