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Seamstresses (Shivachki)

February 8th 2010 03:19
The big city corrupts. It’s a mantra to depend upon in stories like writer-director Lyudmil Todorov’s Seamstresses (2007), an understated drama of simple country girls venturing into a metropolis with dreams of escape. From poverty and despair in Popovo to Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, these 20 year-olds arrive with the name of a contact in their back pocket, their ability to sew a lone calling-card. Misho (Julian Vergov) is no white knight however, only a slick opportunist, a dubious businessman used to deploying young innocents in menial job vacancies.

Initially he doesn’t know what to make of Dora (Aleksandra Surchadzhieva), Elena (Elen Koleva) and Katya (Violeta Markovska), a trio of ignorant blow-ins from the sticks, armed with ludicrous notions of plying their meagre trade for profit. He takes pity on Dora first, offering her a waitressing job before finding work for the other two carving steaks for a butcher. Fragile blonde Katya has a weak stomach however and Dora offers to take her place. Scrimping change, they manage to survive in a rented room provided by the kindly Inna (Gergana Stoyanova) and her bank-guard boyfriend, the glowering Valyo (Assen Blatechki).


Dora (Aleksandra Surchadzhieva), Katya (Violeta Markovska) and Elena (Elen Koleva)


It’s a difficult transition for the trio, struggling to equate the notions of a better life, innocently clung to, with the grim reality of what they encounter each day. Attempting to shrug off the constant cold and lack of interesting distractions, they find strength in Dora, their natural leader. It’s she who is alert to subtle shifts in behaviour and before long, she picks up on disturbing signs in Katya’s behaviour. Separated from the others, Katya becomes more resourceful than her frail persona of the early scenes would suggest. She adopts a blasé attitude to everything, wrapped up in her new-found freedom. Dora’s curiosity about where Katya ventures after-hours evolves into spying where she uncovers a worrying connection to Misho's extracurricular activities.


Inevitably their friendship becomes fractured as tensions increase. Dora demands an explanation from the increasingly secretive Katya about her heedless spending of the money they’ve struggled to accrue. A wedge forms between the pair, causing an acrimonious split. In time, all three will go their separate ways. Will the acute isolation break their spirits or help to strengthen their individual resolve?

Though some of his transitions between scenes are clumsy, Todorov is able to realistically portray the intrinsic bond that exists between these girls. As their connections are weakened by circumstance, genuinely wrenching moments emerge from the bleak context of their solitary struggles. Overly-sensitive to the alien surrounds of their urban environment, it’s never quite clear which of the young women will emerge as the strongest. It’s this unpredictability that really brings the film alive.

Dora, Katya and Elena, wide-eyed country girls arriving in the city


Ultimately a tale of hope, Seamstresses may be modest but it's loaded with redeeming features. Though the general through-line is a recognisable one, unique cultural elements come to hand, providing access to the sights and sounds of a country sadly under-represented in world cinema terms. This interesting slant on Bulgarian life largely negates what might be accused of as the story's generic universality.

The young actresses are all strong contributors, though it’s Koleva as the resilient Elena who shines brightest. Some of the humour may be slightly lost in translation but musician Zachari (Phillip Avramov) provides moments of absurdist humour as he tries to impress Elena, whose name he’s always getting wrong.

Admirably Todorov doesn’t cheapen his film with any sleazy, exploitative angle; the set-up seems tailor-made for such a scenario, but the central preoccupation of his story - a determinedly humanistic one - eschews sensationalist dimensions. But neither is this some unbalanced fairytale of yearnings eventually reaping reward for those desperate enough to succeed. The final scenes, resolving the fates of all three, fall somewhere in between. It's a very satisfying compromise that provides Seamstresses with some of its most moving moments.





Seamstresses will be screening on Saturday March 13 at Melbourne's ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) as part of their Windows on Europe season.



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The Homecoming (I epistrofi)

February 5th 2010 03:40
Time changes everything. Especially for a man returning to this homeland after 35 years, with innocent, almost naïve, expectations of reverting back to the ways of a bygone era. Is it possible for Ilias (Arto Apartian) to recapture the essence of life in a tiny Greek village, held close to his heart for so long? Unlikely, for though a stern patriarchal figure, Ilias is a man harboring quaint delusions that are bound to punish him.

His younger wife Eleni (Maria Skoula) is resentful of their recent return from Germany. Though gratefully lured away from the changeless, inexplicable boredom of her past life by Ilias’s charm, she found herself no better off in that foreign place, domesticated and pining for home. Now, a return to Greece seems even less attractive; hardly a final reward for tough living and wifely devotion. She sees no paradise into which she can blissfully retire, only suffocation in a backwards place of exile, fighting tedium all over again. Their daughter Alexandra, born in Germany, can’t imagine life here and abandoned, Eleni is left only with a sullen, remorseless husband clinging to obsolete memories.

Eleni (Maria Skoula) contemplates the open road out of town


When renovations to their house fall behind schedule, Ilias decides to hire an Albanian hitchhiker, Petros (Artur Luzi), to speed things up. Impressed by his industriousness, he hires him full-time to assist with the running of his petrol station and tavern. It will be a fateful decision, Ilias’s faith sorely misguided, for the presence of Petros is the kind of distraction to further underline the empty spaces in Eleni's life.

Writer-director Vasilis Douvlis’s film assumes the shape of familiar dramatic scenarios; here, in a meeker incarnation, it might seen like a variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), only without the overwrought dynamism. The isolated rural location means the writing needed to be economical for the interplay to work and develop nuances. It is, though for a while Douvlis relies a little too much on searing, meaningful glances between Eleni and Petros as they look for recognition in one another’s eyes.

Petros doesn’t require particularly keen insight to see that Eleni is a profoundly unhappy woman, trapped between morbid duty and a lack of feasible exit routes. There are obvious parallels between the pair; Petros too is trapped in a land where his illegal status draws the resentment of every local, meaning little respite from suspicion. His play for Eleni's affections is clumsy and decidedly unromantic but gets the required result. Only when it’s too late does he realise that matters are getting out of hand, and that a definitive step needs to be taken one way or the other to resolve things. There’s an endearing simplicity to his world view but it's one that will eventually undermine him, laying the foundation for tragedy.

Petros (Artur Luzi)


The structure of the film may be overly familiar but its slowly evolving tension does have its attractions. Much rests on the shoulders of leading lady Skoula and, critically, she gives the strongest performance as the centerpiece in this irrational triangular equation. For Petros, the consequences are more clearly defined; for Eleni, bound by moral duty on one hand, either option has the potential for disaster, exacerbating her sense of confinement.

This simple but compelling tale is inflected with elements of classic melodrama, with unhappy existences tempted by potentially ruinous primal emotions. Kostas Gikas’s cinematography skillfully captures the authenticity of a way of living that has the appearance of grinding to a halt, without drawing attention to itself. Then there's the subdued, flavourful music of Thodoris Abazis which adds another tinge of melancholy to this unassuming, believable drama.





The Homecoming will be screening on Sunday, March 14 at Melbourne's ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) as part of their Windows on Europe season.

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Edge of Darkness

February 3rd 2010 03:14
Director Martin Campbell must have been persuaded to tackle an abridged, updated version of his 1985 BBC mini-series on the basis of having a great feel for the material. From an audience perspective, hopes have been high that a return to the acting fold for Mel Gibson would re-ignite his career and stir fond recollections of his prime, though well aware that this project was being fed through the wringer of the almighty Hollywood machine.

Unfortunately, this tale of a man’s revenge becomes ensnared in the convoluted machinations of a deep and increasingly implausible conspiracy theory. The film begins promisingly and with real intensity too. Boston detective Thomas Craven (Gibson) has a welcome visit from seldom seen daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic), but as they settle down to dinner on a miserable, rainy night, Craven senses his daughter unease. A father and cop’s instinct is telling him Emma is concealing something, and when she begins to vomit blood the mood turns to stark terror. In one of the film’s most effective scenes, a gunman lets loose on their doorstep as they depart for the hospital, cutting down Emma but leaving Craven – presumably the intended target – unharmed.



Craven, in his zombified state of bereavement, pushes on, determined to uncover the killer's identity. He looks into both his and Emma's recent past, hoping to put the pieces of a cohesive explanation together. Instead he finds scattered odds and ends that make little sense. Slowly a bigger picture emerges, her employer Northmoor looming large and casting aspersions on Emma’s work as a trainee nuclear engineer. Could it be that she was the intended target all along?

Campbell ably maintains the thrust of William Monahan and Australian Andrew Bovell’s taut screenplay in the early going; a pervasive, genuinely sinister element creeps into the design of Emma’s fate as her story unfolds in reverse. However, isolated moments of incredulity begin to take increasingly larger bites out of Craven’s fervent delving. The film is pushed to the edge of a precipice by the time Craven’s first meeting with Northmoor CEO Jack Bennett (Danny Huston) arrives, and begins inching downhill thereafter.

Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson): man on a mission


Huston is an actor I generally like but here he’s given a thankless task as a heinous, one-dimensional bad guy whose conscience must have left his body, like an aura, at birth. At the end of their exchange, the camera hones in on the Bennett's face as he brazenly asks of the bereaved father, “How does it feel?” It’s a sinister but vaguely ludicrous moment and proves to be merely a set-up for a later showdown between the two when Craven, pressing a gun to Bennett’s face, mockingly regurgitates the same question.

Ray Winstone’s character, the eccentrically named Jedburgh, turns up at intervals with ominous messages for both sides. He’s one of those ethereal shadow-men who couldn’t really exist in the world as he does here, slipping beyond everyone’s notice and drawing attention to his own ambiguousness as a means of playing both ends of the deck. With his allegiances shadowed in doubt, he’s impossible to get a handle on but Winstone’s portrayal, a mix of suave omniscience and rough-around-the-edges cynicism, has a certain captivating allure.

Craven meets the mysterious Jedburgh (Ray Winstone)


The film is surprisingly over-plotted for such mainstream fare, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to become mired in circular motions without any headway being made. Essentially it boils down to conspiracy theories that poke at the secret misdeeds of powerful men; it's a familiar, jaded restatement of ideas in a world where those who hamper the avariciousness of assassins in suits become expendable waste products.

Edge of Darkness is a solid enough thriller, relying on a handful of heart-in-mouth shock moments which are, admittedly, very effective. You have to wonder how compromised Campbell’s vision for this second run-through of the same story has been, but one assumes he went in with eyes wide open when asked for his signature on the dotted line.

The absurd leanings of the third act certainly undermine its credibility but there’s still enough meat on these bones for me to grant it a pass mark - by a hair's breadth. Gibson is suitably grim and focused in conveying the force of Craven's quest. In truth, this material is right up his alley, and he suits up as if the armour had never been discarded seven years ago for the sake of crucifying Jesus to a cross and beheading Mayans.






Trailer can be viewed here.



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Up in the Air

February 1st 2010 04:14
Confirming his earlier promise, director Jason Reitman has followed the award-winning Juno (2007) with another outstanding drama. His latest project has more of a personal touch too; gone is the quirkily quotable, whip-smart Diablo Cody dialogue, replaced by characters he largely shaped himself using Walter Kirn’s source novel as a launching pad. The result is an assured, meaningful glimpse at modern living in an era of corporate downsizing; at the sacrifices of vocation over any internal life, and the awkward meeting of conflicting philosophies, both economic and personal.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is constantly surrounded by a rolling background of strangers who mean nothing to him. Most at home engaging in the minutiae of air travel and its lavish rewards, his occupation is harsh and impersonal. Venturing to every far-flung corner of the country, he gets to inform thousands of workers of their termination, of their eroded value to employers. Bingham is a model of efficiency; he lets them down easily, but in the eyes of a professional doing his duty, the downcast faces blur and recede. In doling out pain on a such a mass scale, he becomes anesthetized to the devastation left in his wake


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Invictus

January 28th 2010 04:35
Clint Eastwood’s admirable, though slightly underwhelming Invictus embarks upon the political and sporting history of South Africa, offering stirring insights into how great men forge a path for their people. There’s no doubt that in Morgan Freeman, Eastwood has an actor who, through the weightiness of his presence, is capable of clarifying blurry historical boundaries and making them plausible to casual audiences. Without him, this film might have seemed like a frail, tainted version of events, serving little artistic purpose. But Freeman commands the screen, filling it with his intimidating presence, and his portrayal of Nelson Mandela probably ranks as one of his finest to date.


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The China Syndrome

January 21st 2010 05:14
A film about sub-standard work practices that put millions of lives in jeopardy, with minimal characterisation, and full of technical dialogue that might as well be in a foreign language: does it all add up to something disastrous, incapable of enduring as drama? Rather, clocking in at the tail end of America’s finest decade of cinema, The China Syndrome (1979) remains a gripping, spine-tingling masterpiece.

Reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) and her cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) are used to filing throwaway puff pieces despite a yearning for something more. When they’re called out to shoot another nondescript time-filling segment at California’s largest nuclear power plant, their coverage becomes anything but routine. In a case of being in the right place at the right time, they watch startled from the gallery as an “incident” takes place. An alarm blares, workers in the hub of operations circling like rats in the suddenly suffocating confines of a maze to re-establish the plant's equilibrium, foremost amongst them, harried supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon


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The Road

January 19th 2010 05:11
This dour, yet transcendent, trek through a blighted, post-apocalyptic wasteland was director John Hillcoat’s reward for The Proposition (2005), a film which earned him plaudits both here and abroad. His meticulously crafted follow-up - long held back by a studio attempting to predict an opportune moment to drop this bleak bombshell into the public's lap - has been worth the wait and proves again he’s not one to shy away from difficult, uncommercial stories.


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In a genre crowded with rehashed stories put through the production wringer again and again with little or no variation, where do you turn in search of an energising jolt of originality? Something that’ll leave you reeling, perhaps remind you of a time when filmmakers actually fooled around with novel approaches? How about casting an eye over Jacques Becker’s classy, influential crime drama from 1954? Yes, it’s from before you were born, but here's a film brimming with those intangibles that inform true greatness. And nearly sixty years later it still leaves behind a vivid impression.


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The Dark Wind

January 12th 2010 04:25
Better known as an award-winning documentarian, director Errol Morris’s solo leap into the fray of fiction remains The Dark Wind, an understated meditation on the clash of spiritual and empirical worlds on an Indian reservation in Arizona. Based on a novel by crime writer Tony Hillerman, the film is a real curiosity piece, its turbulent post-production clearly a large factor in delaying the film's release in the States until three years after its 1991 shoot.

The film's centrepiece is Lou Diamond Phillips as Jim Chee, a Navajo policeman recently assigned a new posting where land once belonging to his people has recently been decreed Hopi land. He soon has his hands full with a series of minor thefts and the discovery of a dead body, but these pale into insignificance after he witnesses a light aircraft crash one night while on a lonesome stakeout in the desert. It’s an admittedly dubious pretext for his presence but you have to see the depth of open space in these parts for yourself to appreciate the plausibility


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The Silent Partner

January 11th 2010 02:57
There’s nothing tastier than a psychological cat-and-mouse game between a protagonist and a demented villain. Hollywood films often adhere to a strict template however, making for vicarious but predictable thrills. Thankfully, Daryl Duke’s classy 1978 Canadian production, The Silent Partner, avoids the usual pitfalls and winds up being a riveting suspense drama despite its relatively unknown status.

When mild-mannered Toronto bank teller Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) gets wind of a potential robbery by a suspicious man, Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer) - disguised as a bell-ringing Santa Claus in their crowded mall - he does some clever pre-planning. Taking advantage of the good old days and a glaring lack of cameras to monitor every movement, Cullen begins splitting the days takings between his till and a box secreted under the counter. After the robbery eventuates, Cullen helps the bank calculate the damage, though naturally the amount credited to thief Reikle is only a proportion of the total amount with the devious and unsuspected teller getting away with the remainder


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