Moon
Director: Duncan Jones
35 Shots of Rum
Director: Claire Denis
Soul Power
Director: Jeffrey Levi-Hinte
Given the current media hoop-la over the 40th anniversary of the Apollo landings, you might think there could be no better time for thoughtful, stimulating science-fiction tale Moon to arrive on our screens. Except that it’ll surely be crowded out of all but the most adventurous multiplexes by those fantasy-genre behemoths, the latest incarnations of Transformers and Harry Potter. The former cost a reported $200 million, with a marketing kitty to match. Moon was shot in 33 days for a paltry $5 million.
Then again, these things are relative. Moon, entirely British-funded, cost 10 times as much as Shane Meadows’ wonderful Somers Town, which it followed into the record-books by taking the Michael Powell Award for best new British feature at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. Moon, however, is decidedly more ambitious – transcending financial limitations to look rather better than many examples of digital-reliant Hollywood product.
And while the focus is mainly on character, there’s no shortage of incident or sly narrative development in Nathan Parker’s script (from a story by director Duncan Jones). It would be unfair to reveal too much here. Suffice to say that we’re on the dark side of the moon in the not-so-distant future. A new form of energy is being harvested – one sufficient for all humanity’s needs. In charge of the vast, automated operation is a sole human, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who’s two weeks from completing his three-year shift and longs impatiently to see his family on Earth. But complications ensue.
In normal circumstances, to note that a film resembles a blown-up television programme would be a criticism. But to say that the story told by Moon could easily have been a classic episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits is very much the opposite. Indeed, so ingenious is the double-twist format and so thought-provoking are the existential subtexts that top-drawer 20th century science-fiction authors like Philip K Dick and Stanislaw Lem would surely approve and applaud.
The 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky adaptation of Lem’s Solaris is duly referenced at several points. As in the “original”, the lonely “astronaut”, Bell, receives an unexpected “visitor” whose presence hints at a dark, disturbing secret. Genre-fans will also enjoy the homages to cinematic forerunners such as Silent Running, Outland, Alien and Dark Star. It’s to Moon’s credit, however, that the film, despite a slightly rushed climax which leaves several loose ends, is much more than merely the sum of its antecedents. This is partly thanks to terrific, poignant work by Rockwell, a somewhat spiky actor who gets to display impressive range (ably supported by an unseen Kevin Spacey as the voice of the moon base’s computer system).
Rockwell has been an indie cinema fixture for some time, whereas Jones and Parker are relative newcomers whose ambition and skill augur well for their future projects. If space-oddity Moon is any guide, with Jones the apple clearly hasn’t fallen too far from the creative tree. He is, after all, the son of Mary-Angela Bowie Barnett (better known as Angie Bowie), whose grandmother, like Lem, came from Poland, and whose 1977 poem Time features the lines “Times pass methodically/ Tick-tocking hours of our lives/Multiply the product of Earth men/And our energy survives”. In addition, her 2002 solo album was entitled Moon Goddess, while Lou Reed credits her with creating his early-1970s Transformer look. Which is, sort of, where we came in.
Five years ago Claire Denis made one of the decade’s finest films with the dazzlingly mysterious and unclassifiable L’intrus (also known as The Intruder). Apart from 2005’s relatively little-seen documentary Vers Mathilde, 35 Shots of Rum is the first we’ve heard from her since.
It’s the empathetically humanistic story of middle-aged black Parisian train-driver Lionel (Alex Descas), who lives in the capital’s faceless suburbs with his 20-ish daughter Josephine (Mati Diop). Josephine’s white, German mother has been deceased for some time and Lionel has – we deduce – been romantically connected with his tower-block neighbour, happy-go-lucky taxi-driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue.) The plot, such as it is, revolves around Josephine’s slow-building relationship with another neighbour, free-spirited bachelor Noe (Gregoire Colin).
However, 35 Shots of Rum isn’t chiefly concerned with the development of story. Instead, Denis traces the bonds which connect family members, friends, lovers, work colleagues and acquaintances in a modern world defined by its “flexibility”. What she’s after is a representation of what might be termed the “soulful quotidian”, showing how individuals bind themselves together via shared culture: music, cookery, experience.
And she’s very much concerned with how people – especially those whose families originally came from what’s referred to here as “the global south” – find room to live and breathe in the chilly, sometimes hostile north. “I don’t think we can forget Stiglitz”, someone remarks early on and there’s no mistaking Denis’s fascination with 21st century economic and social structures – as illustrated by the small set of characters she chooses to dramatise.
But while her intentions are solidly admirable, there’s something not quite satisfactory about the results. Whereas last year’s Couscous essayed similar territory with seductive vivacity and charm – concentrating on the bond between a French father and a daughter in a long-integrated “immigrant” community – 35 Shots of Rum feels more academic, more a working-through of concepts than an involving, organic experience.
Whatever its merits, this is emphatically a disappointment after the genre-busting expansiveness and tantalising elusive mysteries of The Intruder. The single most original element here is a minor one: the way the actors’ names are displayed on screen throughout the lengthy opening titles. In contrast, the crew – including such key contributors as the cinematographer and the editor – have to make do with a few fleeting, shared seconds in the closing credits.
This is, however, entirely appropriate for a film which is primarily constructed as a framework for its performances and 35 Shots of Rum does feature a near-flawless ensemble, including a likeably eccentric cameo from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sometime muse (indeed, his sometime wife) Ingrid Caven as the sister/friend (typically, the exact connection is never made crystal-clear) of Josephine’s late mother.
If music is a crucial cultural signifier for 35 Shots of Rum, it’s the very pulse of life itself in Soul Power. This is a rousingly enjoyable documentary about the 1974 concert organised alongside the “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman – both fight and concert taking place in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Whereas the boxing match has long since embedded itself in popular culture – via books such as Norman Mailer’s The Fight and George Plimpton’s underrated Shadow Box, plus Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings – the concert (described here as “the greatest musical performance that ever was” by reliably-hyperbolic promoter Don King) has been perplexingly overlooked.
Having worked on When We Were Kings’ editing, Soul Power’s director Levi-Hinte realised there was a treasure-trove of high-quality concert footage waiting for someone to lick it into shape. More than three decades after the event, that’s exactly what has happened. This allows us to enjoy the likes of James Brown, Miriam Makeba and BB King in what looks and sounds very much like their prime. Any film book-ended with Brown in such electrifying form must be worth at least a look. And much of Soul Power has the feel of a project shot on the Pyramid Stage at this year’s Glastonbury, rather than a time capsule of a bygone era.
That said, there are some naggingly troubling aspects of what is otherwise a breezily engaging bit of historical revision. Chief among these is the shadowy presence of Zaire’s despotic ruler, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who sought to boost his international respectability via his sponsorship of both the big fight and the concert. Historical perspective now casts much of what we see in a decidedly troubling light.
As for the gig itself, this two-day affair seems to have passed with barely a hitch, without a whiff of egotism or trouble from any of the outsized personalities on view. We get a hint of the real rough edges that must have accompanied such an ambitious staging in early scenes that show sponsors’ representative Keith Bradshaw – by no means a typical rock ‘n’ roll type – fretting over minor technical details.
It’s in such priceless behind-the-scenes glimpses that Soul Power really comes alive. During such junctures, what we’re witnessing is a bit like a documentary version of Robert Altman’s Nashville. Elsewhere, the film-makers seem a little too content to take the likes of King, Ali and Brown at face value, when the passing decades have made us realise just how complex and flawed all of them were behind their carefully-constructed, painstakingly-maintained public facades.
Neil Young
