Film Carew

“Celebrities are not people, they're group hallucinations”, pronounces Nicholas Campbell, playing the head of a dystopian-near-future pharmaceutical-entertainment-industrial-complex concern who injects its customers with germs from the famous. In a worse film, Campbell would be the villain; the head of a shadowy, secretive corporation makin' Soylent Green out of the homeless. In Antiviral, he's just a businessman, providing a service that the Free Market - that neo-mystical force religiously worshipped by proponents of late-period capitalism - has shown they desperately desire. In some ways, the film is an easy satirical mark on celebrity obsession; delighting itself no end in staging the faux-entertainment-channel updates that buzz away in the background, which ably mock the most invasive, grotesque, and banal forms of celebrity stalking perpetrated by TMZ-esque parasites. Yet, its conversation on celebrity culture is hardly the be-all and end-all of Antiviral, which is notable for marking the feature-film debut of Brandon Cronenberg, son of Canadian cinematic legend David Cronenberg. In a classic apple-hasn't-fallen-far narrative, Antiviral is a work of cold, aloof, grotesque body-horror; whose obsession with disease, deformation, mutation, mucous, blood, parasites, and foreign bodies will be plenty familiar to those devoted to dad's early, creepy works. He's not ducking the connection, either: casting from papa's past (Campbell, who was in The Dead Zone and Naked Lunch) and present (Sarah Gadon, fresh from A Dangerous Mind and Cosmopolis); Gadon playing the film's ultimate object of celebrity obsession, a vacant cipher who develops a mutant strain of disease that makes blood ooze out of her cherry lips (shot not just with fetishistic relish, but then stuck on the poster), which threatens the stability of this whole celebrity-germ industry.

Gadon is less human, of course, than group hallucination; a collection of pixels representing airbrushed-perfection; her existence an opiate for the masses administered in injections of contagious bodies. Throughout the film, she's essentially unseen, and may or may not actually have died; Cronenberg tapping into the eerie immortality of the digital era, where people's idealised projections of social-media-profile self will live on long after they're dead (or, in the smart speculative satire of Charlie Brooker's brilliant TV series Black Mirror, be used to create the illusion that they're still alive). The contrast between the unreality of fantasy - the bright whites of antiseptic interiors, the glowing embers of high-def flat-screens - and the reality of bodies - all disease, decay, excretion, pus, death - is the film's chief metier, and Cronenberg pushes it stylishly, with visual panache and a deadpan frigidity that will leave many viewers cold. Those wanting the normal hallmarks of rote hackwork - cuddly characters you love to care for; heroes and villains; problems arising and things, eventually, being put right - will be put off by the fact that the film's characters are all as two-dimensional and essentially-empty as the projections-of-celebrities, but this serves the greater mood well; Cronenberg's debut an impressive piece of chin-scratcher, seat-squirmer cinema in which the contemporary digital age is amplified into giddy grotesquerie.

Before it became known as the Arab Spring, the insurgent movement of anti-dictatorial rebellion in Egypt was given a catchier, more brand-centric handle by the foreign media: the Twitter Revolution. In an attempt to make a worlds-away Eastern struggle for human-rights 'relatable' to the consumers of their Western readership, foreign press plumped for a classic celebration of medium over message; deifying not the resistance, but the tools used to coordinate it; all so readers could somehow imagine the blathering banalities of their incessant status-updating as a manifestation of pure freedom. Pablo Larraín's No essentially does the same, attributing the 1988 plebiscite that ousted dictatorial general Augusto Pinochet out of Chilean power to a snappy marketing campaign conjured around the 'no' vote; becoming a feelgood fable in which righteous resistance is a capitalist commodity like any other, and marketing can be synonymous with truth-telling. Its feelgoodism earnt No an Academy Award Nomination; a not-entirely-unexpected result for any film fictionalising - and simplifying, and romanticising - historical tumult into an easily-digestible motion-picture entertainment. For such an All-American celebration, it also offered a collective cultural mea culpa: it was the CIA, after all, that bankrolled the bloody military coup that ousted a democratically-elected communist government in 1973, on that most symbolic of American-imperialist days: September 11.

No marks the third film in Larraín's 'Pinochet trilogy', a portrait that, collectively, spans the 15 years of dictatorial rule. And, it marks a radical change for the gifted young filmmaker: thematically, tonally, stylistically. 2008's Tony Manero and 2010's Post-Mortem both dwelled in the depraved darkness of the regime; the latter, especially, making literal the collateral of a coup, as it chronicled the morticians struggling to keep up with the ever-growing piles of bodies. The film was about complicity in wartime; about how cowardice and self-preservation can unite to make a populace willing participants in their own enslavement. The film's final scene was one of the most memorable single shots in cinema this decade: an unbroken five-minute symbol of Chilean resistance - and humanity - being slowly entombed, brick by brick. It was a motif that made the brutality of the preceding film seem all the more brutal; a piece of cinematic snuffing, a symbolic asphyxiation that squeezed hard on an audience.

So, for Larraín to turn around and make No marks a radical aboutface; going from the brutal, final ending of the coup to the first flickers of life in the long-held dream to oust Pinochet from power. In a piece of familiar screenwriting, Gael García Bernal plays the down-and-out, bearded-hipster, suddenly-single dad - shades of, just for one, Ben Affleck in Oscar-beloved, dismissed Argo - who, in the wake of his separation from idealistic firebrand Antonia Zegers, believes in nothing, least of all that the vote to determine the continuance of Pinochet's regime will be anything but a show-trial; a sham pantomime out to deflate Western political pressures whilst sticking to a fixed result, and keeping the status quo. The 'no' vote is a losing cause, and, in such, it suits Bernal; an advertising whiz-kid fresh off shilling cola in Mexico, depressed to be back in backwards Santiago. Part of the reason Bernal throws himself into the campaign is the disapproval of his boss and creative partner, Alfredo Castro (the lead from Tony Manero and Post-Mortem, Larraín's seeming muse), who first warns him off the case with concern, then looks on with a smirk, then becomes an openly-hostile rival. There's a real father/son dynamic at play in their relationship, and Bernal's black sheep is clearly a proxy for Larraín himself (with Zegers, notably, the filmmaker's real-life wife). Growing up in Pinochet-era Chile, Larraín was the son of government ministers; a kid of private-school privilege kept sheltered from the horrors. With a sense of penance, Larraín has explored this hidden history he missed out on, hoping to seek out the 'ghosts' of the past. The left-wing kid of right-wing parents plays out that family dynamic on screen, in a film that, in some ways, is its own fantasy manifest: a piece of empowering propaganda that changes the life of its self-centric anti-hero, shaking him to commit to a side, believe in a cause, and work to change the world. Thus, the pessimistic misanthropy of Tony Manero and Post-Mortem gives way to piece of broad populism that, in a greater sense, hopes to act as a catalyst for viewers seeking radical social change in contemporary countries.

Bernal skateboards in, some tiny Ibero-American Don Draper in mullet and Chuck Taylors, and shakes the crusty, old-guard leftists out of their noble slumber, instilling Hope and Change in the beaten-down hearts of the Chilean people via advertising's ability to sell big dreams. Rather than the Twitter Revolution, it's the Television Revolution: a handful of late-night, low-budget ads going the Chile-in-'88 equivalent of viral. Rather than recreating the original spots, Larraín re-airs them, and borrows liberally from behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes, and newsreels. In a gesture of technical problem-solving that becomes inspired visual decision, Larraín overcomes the obligatory disconnect between newly-shot footage and old archives by working with the technology used in Chilean television in the 1980s: 3/4-inch U-matic magnetic tape, in 1:1.33 ratio. Meaning: every scene in No wobbles and bends and bleeds and bleaches like an old VHS cassette, creating a sense of staged contemporaneousness whose dialogue re: the intersections of memory/magnetic-tape and the fetishisation of antiquated technology make it play as a piece of cinematic chillwave. Even if, to many audiences, it may visually scan as piece of kitschy nostalgia, it's clear that Larraín isn't indulging in sentimentalising a historical marker from his childhood, and the soft-drinks and TV commercials that came with. No may crest with the feelgood apex of a victory-against-all-odds, but the director can't resist another cold coda; there an emptiness that comes in the aftermath of achievement, when all you've hoped for comes true, yet doesn't feel the way you imagined. And, in that feeling, the personal symbolises the cultural. As in the Egyptian Revolution itself, the despised dictator is ousted, but then all that comes afterwards feels anticlimactic, and the bright new day still lags in the dark night of the past; this great moment of profound cultural change feeling like it changed nothing at all.

The Company You Keep has its own Affleck-esque central character: a smart-ass lawyer raising a precocious 11-year-old daughter as a widowed single dad, whose stopped-caring-about-life façade is ruffled up by the spectre of his radical past. Only thing is, this isn't no slice of bearded beefcake, but 76-year-old Robert Redford! He's hella old because, back in the Age of Aquarius, he was a bombin' Weather Underground radical with a sweet handlebar moustache, and, now, thanks to the diggin' of a plucky reporter (LSD-trippin', will-fuck-for-Lars-von-Trier method-man Shia LaBeouf) beamed in from a '70s movie - always digging, playing hunches, buying sources, hitting-the-streets, having envelopes slipped under doors, refusing to Tweet, all pen-and-paper notes and endless phonecalls - playing a role that ol' Bobby Sundance may've once himself. Redford is in good company: his on-the-lam, pulled-down-baseball-cap flee from the cops (Terrence Howard, whose every single line is, literally, a barked order; Anna Kendrick, wearing her trademarked sarcastic frown) a series of three-decades-on pseudo-reunions with his former activist underground, a veritable run of dignified grumblers (Chris Cooper, Sam Elliott, Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins) and still-got-it beauties (Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie).

It's quite the cast, and you can see why they leapt at the chance: films this filled with the senior set are usually set in retirement homes or hospitals, and are about dying and Alzheimer's. The Company You Keep - with a script by sometime-Soderbergh penman Lem Dobbs - is about former-radicals trying to both escape their paths and live up to them; about how idealism holds over time, about penances served, and setting an example and/or sacrificing yourself for their kids. These aren't old folks waiting to die; even if they know they've “become [their] parents,” their glory days just stories-to-tell from those Baby Boomer days from which too many stories have already been told; the picture's nostalgia for old-fashioned journalism matched by its fond recollections of the days of righteous sedition and/or domestic terrorism.

Of course, all this staying-true-to-the-cause/old-actors-getting-meaty-roles stuff would be way better if the film was better. Instead, The Company You Keep does what Redford's always done: sugars his 'liberal' political pill with the trappings of Hollywood glitz; fumbling through a bunch of left-over clichés from countless crime-movies and political thrillers, sometimes assigned at seeming random, like when LaBeouf's angry boss, Stanley Tucci, gives him “24 hours” to keep his job, in a piece of writing so awful and ephemeral that it would be better played as a living-the-cliché, meta-aware joke. Most of the film would, in fact, be better played as a joke; which says plenty about its political and cinematic merits.

The first film in a decade by Bernardo Bertolucci - and the follow-up to his much-loved May-'68ers-endlessly-and-incestuously-fucking nostalgia-piece The Dreamers - feels like it should be some kind of cinematic event. But the fact that Me And You trickles in for a handful of local screenings suggests how much it's a minor event; it not being largely-ignored because it's in Italian and is, in some ways, an art-movie, but because its dramatic stakes are so low. Here, an acne-flecked and peachfuzz'd teenage boy (Jacopo Olmo Antinori; screen debutante, actual teenager) skips school ski camp and hides out in the basement of his apartment building, where he'll spend a week drinking carbonated beverages, reading books, and looking at his ant-farm. His nerdy retreat is ruined by the half-sister (Tea Falco) he barely knows, a glamorous junkie who blows in off the streets looking for jewellery to pawn. Angry young man that he is, he wants her to get lost, but, really, it's obvious he wants to fuck her (an awesomely-uncomfortable early scene reveals he wants to fuck his mum, too); and, it being Bertolucci, you can set your watch by how long it'll take him to show Falco in her underwear. Despite them being locked, largely, in a single room, there's no sense of claustrophobia, or the surreal chipping away at the bounds of normalcy and reality; just a parade of Cold Turkey clichés, endless shots of Antinori gawping at Falco, and a bunch of costly classic-rock-song placements that reminds you that, as minor as Me And You is, its maker is famous, wealthy, and important.

Marco Bellocchio has never ascended to the ranks of feted maestro or beloved populist, but no other filmmaker has - from 1965's Fists In The Pocket through 2002's My Mother's Smile - so acutely, artfully captured Italian society's collisions of extremist politics, operatic Catholicism, and backwoods superstition. ACMI is currently staging a micro-retrospective on the underrated auteur, including a recent-recut of 1971's In The Name Of The Father that bucked Director's Cut clichés by excising 15 minutes from the film; as well as an always-welcome reshowing of his new-millennial masterwork Good Morning, Night, the only Bellocchio film in living memory to receive a local cinematic release. But the program is, really, all in service of Bellocchio's latest film, Dormant Beauty, which explores the endless political/media/Vatican discourse re: Eluana Englaro. Largely unknown outside Italy, Englaro is hugely famous therein, less as human, more as symbol; a one-size-fits-all-martyr who became a Saint for all sides of the Ethuanasia debate.

After entering a vegetative coma at the age of 22, Englaro's father fought for 17 years to turn off the machines keeping her alive. Bellocchio translates this to screen with swirling, busy, pirouetting excess; staging an intersecting-storylines, ensemble-cast (Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberto Herlitzka, etc) picture in which various divided-families orbit the central figure/s of a loved-one idling in a persistent coma. The greater cultural discussions are made manifest in characters grappling with various moral, ethical, and spiritual quandaries; and, in lines like “you can't impose on others what you think is right!” sometimes the themes are just literally spoken aloud.

As always, Bellocchio sees society as deeply deluded, ideals as easily abandoned, and religion as best viewed with sceptical smirk. His screenplay never hews to anyone's understanding of your regular Based On A True Story issue movie, tripping into moments of odd reverie, dream logic, or symbolist storytelling. And, photographically, the filmmaker again revels in the blackest blacks, and loves those moments where characters arise out of the darkness, squinting in the light like disbelieving moles. He plays with darkness and light in a device that throws the trial-by-media nature of the tale brazenly into frame: Bellocchio posing parties standing static under video projections of that symbolic figure of all-Italian hypocrisy, Silvio Berlusconi. The 'debate', reduced to the gaseous emissions of blowhards such as he, becomes so much hot air; the white-noise of the news cycle. And, thus, Dormant Beauty features constant scenes set over gibbering screens: the endless drone of TV-news-reports and mobile-phone-updates as constant as the rhythmic hum of an artificial respirator.