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l realism to put it another way european art film is a house built by andrei tarkovsky and jean luc godard whereas british art house film owes considerably more to left leaning social realists such as alan clark and mike leigh unfortunately for davies and many directors like him the 1990s saw the economic heartlands of prestige cinema shift a lot closer to the american middle class and while the abstract tendencies of european art film survived the transition the british art house tradition did not may 16 2017 may 16 2017 by jonathan m review melody 1971 art house british film film uncategorized british film film criticism filmjuice melody social realism waris hussein 4 comments bit late uploading this but filmjuice have my review of waris hussein s thoroughly excellent and recently re released british drama melody also known as s w a l k set in 1970s east london melody begins by introducing the resolutely introverted and middle class danny to a working class community that his shit munching parents are hoping to gentrify initially alienated from his class mates danny soon manages to establish a friendship with a local lad whose home life is so horrifying that you never actually see it on screen made in the great tradition of british post war social realism melody explores not only the dynamics of gentrification and middle class concern for the lower orders but also the ways in which proximity and cooperation can work to establish solidarity between people from ostensibly very different backgrounds filled with these lovely scenes in which the camera runs and runs as kids go about their normal daily lives the film soon transitions into an utterly charming and genuinely moving love story between danny and a little girl called melody despite being set in a recognisably socialist universe in which social class shapes both your identity and your hopes for the future melody is a deeply romantic film that wants to believe in the absolute power of love to remake the world at first these two thematic strands appear to be in conflict as nobody but danny and later melody believe that they should be in love or want to get married however as the film reaches its conclusion opinions begin to shift as kids rally to the couple s cause and set about creating a world of their own in a move that recalls the ending to both tony richardson s the loneliness of the long distance runner and truffaut s the 400 blows melody ends with the protagonists running away from a world that they can t escape because sometimes all you need for happiness is a bit of breathing room as ornshaw says don t forget to change at clapham junction interestingly the weakest element of this film is probably the soundtrack that inspired its makings dominated by profoundly not famous tunes by the beegees it feels way too folky and blandly up beat for a film with the urban setting and realistic tone of a film like melody this being said melody is a thoroughly excellent film from an era when the british film industry was still interested in making films that spoke directly to the experiences of british people march 29 2017 by jonathan m review paterson 2016 american film art house film jarmusch american film art house film film criticism filmjuice jim jarmusch paterson 2 comments this week sees the home release of jim jarmusch s paterson his first film since 2013 s only lovers left alive which i adored unlike most of jarmusch s recent films paterson comes without the sugar frosting of genre tropes no vampires no spies no cowboys and no assassins just a dude who writes poetry and drives a city bus my filmjuice review can be found over here there are many paths into an evocative film like paterson but the one that caught my attention was the relationship between the poet who exists in an oppressively repetitive world where he is just happy to be a normal guy and the wife who spends her days trying to perform the identity of an artist only to have her true calling almost creep up on her it would have been easy for jarmusch to unpack this tension in moral terms and so take a swipe at the culture of public performance created by social media but the view he adopts is actually far more nuanced in that it supports the poet who keeps beauty locked up inside his own head as well as the people who feel the need to fake it till they make it creatively like many of jarmusch s more memorable films paterson is episodic urban and filled with a wry melancholy over the isolation and strangeness of normal lives but paterson uses those themes to explore the creative process as it plays out in the lives of normal people paterson is a beautifully conceived beautifully shot and beautifully acted film that serves as a reminder of how sensitive and humane jarmusch can be when he isn t forcing the round peg of his vision into the square holes of popular culture it is also an interesting piece of cinematic business as while the age of austerity is forever turning the screws and forcing works of art further and further outside of the cultural mainstream jim jarmusch managed to convince amazon com to help distribute a 5 million film about a bus driver who writes poetry january 13 2017 by jonathan m review indochine 1992 film french film film criticism filmjuice french film indochine oscar bait postcolonialism regis wagner vietnam 1 comment my first review of the year is of a film that is as intriguing as it is flawed and problematic first released in 1992 regis wargnier s indochine can only be described as a piece of post colonial oscar bait the post colonial bit refers to the fact that wargnier s film followed the example set by david lean s a passage to india and used france s colonial history as an excuse to make a beautiful and nostalgic film about an exotic foreign land wargnier s producers knew full well that nostalgic prestige productions tend to do disproportionately well at the oscars and so indochine was always a cynical exercise in bringing home the gold hence the term post colonial oscarbait however while the idea of white people from former colonial powers making films about former colonies is always going to be problematic i think that indochine deserve some credit for not only siding with the oppressed but also presenting colonialism as a system that was both monstrous and politically unsustainable my filmjuice piece about the film can be found here indochine is a beautifully made and well performed film that handles a difficult subject in both a progressive and sympathetic manner however while the film s production values and ambitions may scream quality there is no escaping the fact that this was a film about colonialism made by white people for the consumption of other white people the writers and director do try their best to get beyond this limitation but the decision to use the vietnamese characters thematically rather than narratively means that the film retains a cool detached and ultimately frustrating viewpoint that denies its subjects agency when it should be seeking to understand their actions re reading my review it strikes me that indochine exemplifies many of the problems presented by cultural appropriation though many of the film s narrative problems do stem from a decision to focus on the white characters rather than the vietnamese characters having a bunch of french people tell a story about vietnamese people struggling to defeat french colonialism would arguably have been just as bad november 15 2016 by jonathan m review chevalier 2015 greek film politics tsangari 2015 alt right art house film athina rachel tsangari chevalier film criticism film juice greek film politics sexuality yorgos lanthimos filmjuice have my review of athina rachel tsangari s excellent third film chevalier tsangari is a director who sits in the shadow of yorgos lanthimos lanthimos began to turn heads back in 2009 when the excellent dogtooth used surreal imagery to paint a picture of a young generation that was being slowly crushed by the deluded ideas of their parents tsangari may have produced dogtooth and given lanthimos his big break but the fact that dogtooth hit big while tsangari s first film did not means that it was easy for some critics to view tsangari as the junior in that particular creative partnership this is rather unfortunate as tsangari s breakthrough film attenberg showed her to be by far the superior talent indeed i consider tsangari along with celine sciamma to be one of only a handful of really interesting film directors working in european cinema today much like attenberg tsangari s chevalier is funny weird and politically astute in a way that will only become more obvious with the passage of time the film is set onboard a luxury yacht where a group of wealthy middle aged men are enjoying an off season holiday right from the start the energies at work within the group are noticeably weird but things start to get really strange when one of the men suggests a competition that involves everyone awarding each other points in order to determine something resembling an objective pecking order within the group unsurprisingly the boundary less nature of this competition serves only to accelerate and amplify tensions present within the group this means that an already bizarre holiday gets progressively weirder and more unpleasant the longer it is allowed to last time and again failure to succeed at challenges set by the group leads to loss of face and emotional breakdowns that somehow never quite blossom into either outright violence or the kind of transgressive sexual activity suggested by that image of the bloke showing his feet to someone over the internet this is a holiday on which older men obsess about their sexual potency while younger men smoulder with resentment at the amount of control exerted over them by more senior and wealthier members of the group friendships rise and fall alliances are made and broken lies are spun and abandoned but none of it ever seems to matter what makes this film so interesting and timely is the fact that it is quite obviously about male sexual desire and how those thwarted desires can result in the birth of political abominations there was an interesting piece in this week s guardian about the alt right and how donald trump s head political strategist has nurtured a connection between right wing politics and what is often referred to as the manosphere an online subculture centred around hatred anger and resentment of feminism specifically and women more broadly i have a lot of respect for abi wilkinson as a political commentator but i actually think that she has this precisely backwards the manosphere is not built around hating either women in general or feminism in particular it s a space devoted to indulging male sexual fantasies to the point where they are completely unconnected to reality it is that disconnection from reality that fuels the resentment and anger the manosphere is in some ways quite similar to the world of fan fiction where a predominantly female crowd write stories that take characters from popular culture and imagine them not only in non canonical emotional relationships but also in sexual relationships that are as explicit as they are transgressive the difference between the worlds of fan fiction and the manosphere is that while the literary and derivative nature of fan fiction allows women to indulge their various kinks whilst keeping a clear boundary between their kinks and their real sexualities the manosphere not only encourages men to fantasise but to do so in a way that stresses the connection between the stuff they have and the stuff they secretly want the manosphere encourages men to internalise their pornographic obsessions and urges them to act on those obsessions it achieves this by forging links between the consumption of porn and the employment of sex workers on the one hand and learning how to trick desirable women into sex on the other it s no surprise that reddit features so prominently in discussions of the alt right as the structure of reddit allows people to indulge their pornographic desires and their desire for political engagement without ever leaving the site the problem with connecting the stuff you use to jerk off with the stuff you use to make decisions about your life is that almost nobody can afford endless escorts expensive cars exclusive gym memberships and flash wardrobes that are positioned as solutions to the problem of involuntary celibacy in effect the alt right is an epidemic of blue balls that has bootstrapped itself into a political movement as all of that sexual frustration has curdled into resentment at the women who refuse to play ball that resentment has now been weaponised by political operatives in the same way 1970s republicans weaponised the moral discontent of the evangelical revival the plot of chevalier does not explicitly mention the alt right but it does deal with a load of emotionally under developed men who are incapable of controlling their sexual desires and so allow those desires to manifest themselves as a weird yearning for social domination the film s political edge comes from the fact that while the men battle for dominance the real world is seen as nothing more than a set of empty buildings on a distant horizon the sexual energies of the alt right are not just toxic but solipsistic in that it begins by drawing on male desire for things they cannot have and then tells them that they can have these things by brutalising women and minorities on their way to remaking the world november 11 2016 november 11 2016 by jonathan m review day for night 1973 art house criticism film french film truffaut 1973 day for night film criticism filmjuice francois truffaut french film 2 comments filmjuice have my review of francois truffaut s thoroughly excellent day for night also known as nuit americaine in reference to the practice of recreating night on screen by shifting the white balance and deliberately under exposing the shot despite not having seen this film in about twenty years day for night was absolutely central to my discovery of art house film i first discovered a love of film while my parents were getting divorced as my mother would take me to the video store and allow me to rent as many films as i wanted regardless of their age appropriateness i took my love of film to the next level as a teenager when my gcse english teacher started showing us films in an effort to make us think critically about texts i rather enjoyed the process and so started going out of my way to rent unusual films and one of the films i stumbled upon quite early on was day for night a film whose true brilliance i really only understand now that i m able to spot all the jokes and references day for night is a film about film making or rather the process of film production and how films are assembled by a combination of authorial vision individual incompetence collective brilliance and...