'Partisan' Is An Australian Film Unlike Any Other

Partisan

Behold, our latest potential case for the Great New Australian Auteur. 29-year-old Melburnian Ariel Kleiman makes his directorial debut with Partisan, a defiantly idiosyncratic, highly-stylised art movie that resembles no one’s clichés of Australian Cinema. It stars French screen legend Vincent Cassel (and a cast of English-as-a-second-language non-professionals), was partially shot in Georgia, and is set in a Nowhere Land that plays as halfway between a bombed-out village in the Balkan Wars and an outpost of a post-apocalyptic near-future.

It’s there that Cassel presides over an isolated compound populated solely with ‘rescued’ single mothers and their offspring. It’s an enclave from the outside world —to enter you must descend down a drainage pipe, as if down a rabbit hole— that is functioning as a cult-like commune: Cassel teaching ‘his’ children biodynamic gardening and an electrician’s basics, hoarding trinkets and scrap and repurposing them in a junkheap fantasia. Like all cult leaders, he’s at once romantic visionary and horrifying delusional: the commune’s real livelihood made from turning its pre-adolescent tenants into contract killers; the kids only let outside to ‘play’ when there’s a mark to be gunned down.

In such, Partisan takes its place in a lineage of films in which patriarchs keep their children under lock-and-key, creating warped micro-societies that function as parables. But its screenplay delivers Cassel not as hissable villain, but flawed father figure. We’ve seen this corrosive father figure presented as maniacal religious zealot (The Castle Of Purity), absurdist buffoon (Dogtooth), and rapey pimp (Miss Violence). But, here, Kleiman and co-writer Sarah Cyngler muddy the moral waters by making Cassel a sensitive new-age dad, presiding over his harem, and his many adopted children, with more benevolent love than malevolent rage; life for the kids all star charts, group therapy sessions, and weekly karaoke blowouts.

Refusing to turn Cassel into an easy villain —nor, really, much of a villain at all— is a fascinating screenwriting choice that, in many ways, weakens the potential for parable; Partisan lacking the moral certitude and fearsome outrage of its predecessors, its Totalitarian State symbolism and trenchant, topical child-soldier resonance merely lingering on the fringes, rather than commanding the frame. Vinny C’s not some symbol of hateful misogyny and phallocentric society, just a dad trying to do his best.

Inevitably, as all parental-control dramas must, generations clash, and they do so on that oldest parental battleground: mealtimes! Partisan’s plot is, boiled down, a simple coming-of-age/loss-of-innocence tale, in which 11-year-old debutante Jeremy Chabriel, the commune’s #1 assassin, has a crisis-of-faith about the Godlike, bearded man in command, when a newly-arrived boy earns dad’s wrath for refusing to eat his chicken.

But this story —hard facts barely meted out, dialogue sparely used— recedes behind Partisan’s sense of style; Kleiman’s auteurist credentials on show in the way he tells story through silent imagery, composes frames (and frames within frames), and lets Daniel Lopatin’s synthy, droning score carry the sense of perpetual unease. It’s eerie, evocative filmmaking uninterested in catering to known genre, hitting familiar narrative beats, and pandering to an audience; making it, in both setting and temperament, an Australian film unlike any other.

slow West

Slow West is set, apparently, in the “baking heart of America”. Only, it clearly wasn’t shot there. It was largely filmed in New Zealand, with some shooting in Scotland. That’s where debutante director John Maclean —a former member of the Beta Band!— hails from, and where its flashbacks’re staged. There, Kody Smit-McPhee frolics in the autumn mists of memory’s romanticism, flirting with his boyhood sweetheart Caren Pistorius. This back-story is what augurs Slow West with its sense of tragic love: showing how our upper-crust hero, smitten with a common girl below his station, sparked a chain-reaction that’s now led to him riding through the American frontier, in search of a lost-love who was forced to flee their highland homeland.

Michael Fassbender rides into frame as an outlaw who instantly becomes Smit-McPhee’s self-appointed saviour, charging a gouging payment to shepherd him cross-country. Fassbender also serves as the narrator, and he speaks the themes of Slow West aloud when he says that Smit-McPhee believed “we were in a land of hope and goodwill”, whereas Fassbender —a cigar-chomping, gun-slinging, unruffled, Eastwoodian alpha male— sees a grave new world in which “a desperado would knife you in the heart if there was a dollar in it.”

Fassbender’s character talks of the savageness of both man and the landscape, but, visually, Slow West doesn’t measure up to his claims. Its landscapes of monochromatic flower fields and snow-topped mountains (supposed to be the Rockys, I guess) are too pretty, too painterly, too wet, too Kiwi to ever seem some sun-scorched hell; this less the baking heart of America, more a succession of postcards, another cinematic NZ tourism ad. The environment never feels foreboding, which is only a problem because Slow West keeps suggesting that it is.

After beginning with a sense of Western earnestness, the film soon reveals that it wishes to be no grandiose, symbolist, widescreen work, but a comedy; eventually clocking in at 84 minutes, and leavening its gruesome violence with a fondness for slapstick. Maclean is not enough of a stylist to mount something as singular as Dead Man, even if that seems Slow West’s obvious inspiration. Instead, his picture becomes a series of landscapes playing host to set-pieces beautiful, violent, and utterly daffy, sometimes all at once; as in the case of a beautifully-framed tableaux where, mid-shootout, an outlaw gang’s members pop one-by-one out of a wheat-field like some artful Whac-A-Mole game.

Its jokes, in turn, have a contemporary sense of the comically absurd. When Fassbender and Smit-McPhee find a skeletal woodsman who was crushed by the tree he was felling, they laugh, and Smit-McPhee talks of Darwinian natural selection; making this comic death 1870’s entrant in the Darwin Awards. Another swift, unexpected-reverse death feels like it could’ve come from the Coen Bros. With more comic killing, a crusty old-timer spins a flashback-illustrated tall tale of mistaken shooting-death identity; whilst lamenting that young people all just want to be famous for being famous’s sake. And a final shoot-out involves a dying man’s pants falling down, and salt pouring into wounds both literally and physically.

This smirking drollery makes for a revisionist Western in which the revisionism largely seems like hipster affectation —where the range offers Congolese musicians and a German anthropologist openly aping Werner Herzog, and Ben Mendelsohn drops in with a bottle of absinthe— rather than social symbolism. Even when, say, it’s theoretically tackling frontier feminism. When the film finally finds Pistorius, she’s no handwringing wallflower nor Penelope In Peril waiting to be rescued, but a thoroughly modern Bonnie: struggling with keeping her artisanal hand-churned butter cool; Wearing The Pants in ass-hugging high-waisted brown corduroys; and makin’ inter-racial eyes with her noble Native errand boy.

These moments of incongruous cutesiness or contemporary stylisation become, in the absence of thematic weight, Slow West’s calling card. Its most indelible image is not some vision of Smit-McPhee’s undying/dying love, nor Fassbender’s True Grit, but of Mendelsohn, in the latest of a growing line of bugfuck-bonkers villain performances, swanning about in a fuck-you fur coat part Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs Miller, part Frontier Kanye.

gemma bovery 

Do two films make a genre? If so, mint Rural Treechange Fantasies In Which Gossipy Local Villagers Obsess Over Gemma Arterton as an official movement; Gemma Bovery following 2010’s Tamara Drewe as a light-and-fluffy, Sunday Afternoon-worthy comedy-of-manners in which the camera openly, lovingly, leeringly lingers all over Arterton’s body. Here, she becomes the obsession, chiefly, of Fabrice Luchini, when she and husband Jason Flemyng move to a picture-book French village. Luchini’s fascinated with the fact that her name is Bovery, and the screenplay cutely plays art-imitates-art games by endlessly evoking Madame Bovary. But Anne Fontaine’s film seems to mistake literary evocation with cinematic merit; this a minor conceit and essential trifle, no matter how much you admire Arterton’s cans.