Alexandra
Russia 2007
Starring: Galina Vishnevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov
Faintheart
UK 2008
Starring: Eddie Marsan, Jessica Hynes
Director: Vito Rocco
Taken
France 2008
Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace
Director: Pierre Morel
SUSAN SONTAG once described Aleksandr Nikolayevich Sokurov as “the most ambitious and original filmmaker of his generation working anywhere in the world today”. However, the 57-year-old writer-director-producer’s work hasn’t always found such ecstatic favour. Responsible for Russian Ark (2002), Mother and Son (1997), Father and Son (2003), and the so-called “power trilogy” of oblique biopics Moloch (1999, on Hitler), Taurus (2001, Lenin) The Sun (2005, Hirohito), Sokurov has been attacked his perceived pretentiousness and religiosity, and for what have been seen as reactionary subtexts in his pictures. Alexandra – which premiered in competition at Cannes last year, but whose belated British release is topical after recent events in South Ossetija – exists on a typically tricky moral position.
As played by former opera-star Galina Vishnevskaya (also Rostropovich’s widow), the title-character is a doughty babushka visiting her soldier grandson Denis Vasily (Vasily Shevtsov) in an unspecified corner of the southern Caucasus: Chechnya, we presume. Whereas Denis and his colleagues remain penned in behind their fortified garrison’s barbed wire, Alexandra’s age, sex and indomitable mien give her freedom to roam. The camera follows in close attendance as she wanders into a nearby village and warily befriends some “mature” Chechen ladies. Sokurov shows us bombed-out buildings, but the residents thereof are conspicuously hale and hearty. No missing limbs or shrapnel disfigurements are on view here. Likewise, although one senses an attempt to be even-handed in showing both sides of the conflict, the film never addresses the fundamental rights and wrongs of the weighty issues involved (this subject isn’t really suitable for fence-sitting), and seems principally concerned with the soldiers’ inadequate ordinance and provisions.
It could be that the director is merely mirroring his heroine’s priorities – her main concerns lie with her darling Denis’ well-being (they share one embrace which is a tad too passionate for comfort), while her sympathies with the Chechen women, we realise, only extend so far. And there’s no denying the strength of his: dust-blown, near-monochrome vistas accompanied by subdued classical music. But Alexandra leaves a somewhat troubling aftertaste in the mouth, especially taken in conjunction with the director’s previous assertions that he’s “not interested in history or politics,” but in “human stories.” Taken strictly on those terms, however – as an intense, intimate character-study of a fascinating individual – Alexandra can be counted an achievement, one worth a look even for those wary of Sokurov and his oeuvre
Your starter for 10: which 40-year-old British thespian has, since 2002, worked with directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Mike Leigh (twice), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Isabel Coixet, Terrence Malick, JJ Abrams, Michael Mann and Richard Linklater? And that astonishing list doesn’t encompass his scene-stealing appearances in V For Vendetta, The Illusionist and Hancock, or his acclaimed performances in the lesser-seen Pierrepoint, Sixty Six and Beowulf and Grendel.
The performer in question is Bethnal Green’s Eddie Marsan, a hangdog, notably-gifted character-actor – Britain’s Paul Giamatti, if you like – whose ability to vanish into roles has seen him in constant demand on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone in the present decade who has so effortlessly alternated between small-scale independent pictures, award-laden “prestige” works and Hollywood blockbusters with anything like Marsan’s aplomb.
Although one suspects he’ll always be happiest in supporting roles (vide his incendiary work as the demonic driving-instructor in Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky), Marsan is gradually making the transition to leading parts. He’s very much first among equals in Faintheart, a low-budget “Brit-com” whose unique selling point is the fact that it was developed among users of the social-networking website MySpace. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of a decidedly lukewarm, only intermittently amusing enterprise, one which doesn’t quite justify keeping Marsan from collaborating with yet more of the world’s most high-profile auteurs.
Here he plays Richard, a DIY-store worker approaching middle age, who spends most of his spare time in elaborate medieval costume as part of a historical-re-enactment group – to the acute embarrassment of his teenage son Martin (Joseph Hamilton) and increasingly fed-up wife Cath (Hynes). Eventually Cath moves out and starts up a relationship with cocky young PE-teacher Gary (Paul Nicholls), thus forcing Richard to re-examine his priorities in advance of a major “battle” with a rival re-enactment outfit. Martin, meanwhile, has love life issues of his own, as has Richard’s best pal Julian (Ewen Bremner), an obsessive Star Trek fan whose idea of romantic small-talk involves expressing himself in fluent Klingon. These various plots and subplots are worked through with dutiful ploddiness, all the way to a thuddingly by-the-numbers climax. Indeed, it’s ironic that a movie which makes such a song and dance about proud individualism and defiant non-conformity should itself so assiduously adhere to the underdog-triumph template now grindingly familiar from The Full Monty and its countless imitators.
Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it recently emerged, didn’t get round to applying for a passport until 2006 when she was 42. The contrast with her British namesake Michael (no relation) could barely be more acute, but Palin’s stay-at-home preferences are depressingly normal in the United States. And that’s hardly a surprise when scaremongering trash such as Taken infests multiplex screens from sea to shining sea.
In cinematic terms, the idea of an American in Paris used to conjure charming Technicolour memories of Gene Kelly dancing down the Champs Elysees in 1951. Five decades later, the City of Lights has become a zone of desperate danger for any unwitting Yanks who unwittingly stray into its lethal environs. So reckons ex-CIA-man Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), who panics when his teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) expresses a desire to follow U2 on the band’s European tour. Kim’s mother Lenore (Famke Janssen), from whom Bryan has long since separated, reckons the benefits of such a trip far outweigh any possible hazards and Bryan, most reluctantly, agrees.
However, within hours of landing at the airport, Kim has been snatched by nefarious evildoers and Bryan must track her down before she vanishes forever into what used to be called the white slave trade.
Taken, whose kinetic, often hand-held camerawork, fast cutting and realistic fight sequences nod desperately towards the Bourne movies (Neeson, scarily fit at 55, is actually much closer in age to the character in Robert Ludlum’s books than Matt Damon ever was). But whereas those pictures welded their propulsive plots to coherent characterisation and believable themes, Taken quickly spirals into from mild daftness into utter absurdity (“Jean-Claude, I will tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to”) and onward into offensiveness,
After a mid-section in which Mills’ instinctive recourse to sickening torture is celebrated in the style of television’s 24) as the only sensible reaction to his situation, we then get a truly loathsome final act in which caricatured Arab lechers are shown bidding for the kidnapped (white) girls in a megabucks auction. While no masterpiece, Hostel II explored similar terrain with infinitely more intelligence and wit. Taken is too ridiculous to even work on basic thriller terms, its idiotic xenophobia – especially its jaundiced presentation of the French – all the more mind-boggling when one learns that it’s actually an entirely French-funded enterprise, co-written by none other than Luc Besson. Quelle honte; quelle infamie.
Neil Young
