Hyena – Vivid, visceral Cinema

Buckets of claret. Weird, unsettling visuals – a waking nightmare that’s much scarier than horror, as these events are all too plausible. Bitches and Butchery might have made a good title, if Hyena’s Albanian crime overlords had been consulted. They’re not likely to attend a men’s anti-sexism group any time soon. Inevitable reaction to a pair of male cops on their territory; ‘are they lovers?’

The violence was too much for a reviewer on the once reliable Roger Ebert site, who starts by wittering about ‘bobbies’ – only fifty years out of date. ‘…its sheer unpleasantness may be enough to satisfy some viewers..’ Yes. Me, for one. Stand aside, you big girl. And I don’t think it’s ‘unbalanced’, possibly ‘racist’, to portray drug and sex trafficking kingpins as monstrous, murderous brutes. Any Albanians not running international crime empires will despise these vile thugs.
There is of course a lot more than ‘sheer unpleasantness’ to this original, bravura work. First class direction and cinematography, the actors and locations are utterly convincing. Police and victims’ support groups were consulted which shows in the grimly realistic script. Peter Ferdinando as an undercover detective is magnificent, inner turmoil often conveyed without words.

Stephen Graham gives us yet another memorable, intriguing character.

Hyena has a unique visual signature. Time Out review nails it: ‘balletic slo-mo, neon colour washes and giddy tracking shots – all recalling the Hong Kong heyday of John Woo and Ringo Lam.’

Some said it’s not news that cops can be corrupt, but it’s often ignored in unrealistic forensics shows, or polite dross like Midsomer Murders. Not everyone’s seen Bad Lieutenant, indeed it’s six years since the remake. If even the eunuchs at the Guardian liked this, with reservations, it’s obviously worth investigating – if you have a strong stomach.

Avoid if rape or extreme violence is triggering. Bodies are dismembered, the living and the dead. It’s not a barrel of laughs and I’m struggling to find something uplifting for those of us fighting depression. Hang on, I’ve kicked carbs – a rare victory against the forces of darkness. And there’s something to be said for shock therapy. I like a jolt, whether it be strong coffee, raw chillis, or the bleakest, blackest Noir.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4lUnJnwFL0 trailer

One of the party-loving cops – Tony Pitts, brilliant acting throughout – tells an internal affairs guy he wants compensation for his employment-related depression. A pause then the interrogator erupts into incredulous laughter. Mental disorders may be over-diagnosed, perhaps over-medicated. Some compensation payments for public servants can look ridiculous. Yet undercover work is stressful enough to cause clinical depression even without battling ruthless killers. Maybe these cops could have done a little less booze, toot and MDMA? Is this just ‘Post-Nasal Depression’? – as Paul Whitehouse’s rock star says in the excellent Nurse. Well, those who risk their lives regularly often run on heavy fuel. We shouldn’t judge. My depression eased up since the three day parties finished. Not so high any more, but not so low. Getting used to the middle, the bullseye.

The ending – genuinely surprising – takes some getting used to. It’s the right one, though some will disagree for equally valid reasons. It has an echo of Get Carter director Michael Hodges’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, another feelbad Noir, which also stays with you. Vivid, visceral cinema. Looking forward to more from director Gerard Johnson and Peter Ferdinando.

http://www.timeout.com/london/film/hyena
http://www.filmdivider.com/9165/peter-ferdinando-on-corrupt-cops-keeping-performances-organic-and-hyena/

Sex, Suicide and Satie. The Fire Within. The Cinema of Louis Malle Part 2

The protagonist of The Fire Within is a depressed, alcoholic writer. Great. Does he play the saxophone? He’s suicidal but there are limits. The Fire Within is mostly what our hero lacks, although it could mean conflict or what will eventually prevail. Pointless nitpicking but while we’re here one of the subtitles to Louis Malle’s Lift To The Scaffold was ‘poor show’, an odd choice considering there was no guest appearance by Terry-Thomas. We start in rehab, in bed with an intelligent, beautiful women who will do anything to help, one of several offers throughout. He’d rather suffer. ‘Once again the feeling has eluded him.’ Comparing reality with what you think should be happening is self-defeating. So he carries on doing it.

He is an Algiers veteran – a back story shared by the killer in Lift To The Scaffold, also played by Maurice Ronet. Jean Paul Belmondo or Gerard Depardieu have more charisma but Ronet’s perfect as a vapid drifter. As with Lift To The Scaffold, there is the highest quality cinematography and music which will last forever, this time by Erik Satie. Roger Ebert, the best film critic, recommends this highly, as do I, the worst film critic, but this is an anti-depression blog, with a fewer-people-should-commit-suicide bias so I must point out that it’s better to stop banging your head against a brick wall. If nothing else it’s nice when you stop.  Our hero prefers the head/wall interface solution.

Like Leaving Las Vegas, this is based on a true story. A young man has supposedly seen too much of life and is certain it will never get any better. I was also convinced of this, as an especially tiresome teenager. Which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Decades later I remember being shamed by a story in the self help book What Happy People Know. A man lost his business and many friends and employees in 9/11. He coped better than I did with ‘only’ a difficult divorce, involving children, heavy drug and alcohol addiction, unemployment, sexual exploration that went further than it needed to – right round the transgender spectrum and back – even dabbling in fetish sex work, (Not that there is anything wrong with that… but it’s not really me. And the clients deserved someone better looking.) There was the mid life crisis that hits even rich, successful people. It was bleak but then most of the planet wouldn’t mind loafing about with easy access to delirium and debauchery,  in London, the city of infinite possibilities. It could have been worse.

Paris eventually calls our hero out of his rehab half-life, although it fails to satisfy his fastidious nature. Among the irritations: the conversation of his haute bourgeoise friends – an entirely valid reason to commit suicide. One of the smug prats thinks western eroticism is based on good and evil, transgression and original sin. Really? I thought the reproductive imperative is triggered by an hour-glass figure, swaying hips, the uncontrollable desire to bury one’s face in a pair of insistently protuberant…be that as it may, perhaps something was lost in translation.  I can’t endorse suicide but I did share the hero’s distaste for dinner party drivel.

I really didn’t like the criticism of his friend’s happy family life. Very occasionally anti-depressants would whisper to me that suicide was an option. Being less of tortured aesthete than our hero, it didn’t appeal, mainly because there were also responsibilities towards children who eventually turned out as well as possible, (mostly through their hard work). That bond might have fixed this guy. In the 80s a flautist friend told a Bavarian doctor about his existentialist angst (he was a big Sartre fan). The cure? ’Get married and have children. You won’t have time to feel sorry for yourself’. We laughed at this small town, conservative wisdom yet…it’s one solution, though conceptual despair will sometimes seem like a luxury compared to family life.

Parents are happier than Philip Larkin ever was, sat there moaning on his own, or at least more satisfied. It’s also perfectly reasonable not to have children, of course, many fine people don’t, to their advantage.  If the big adventure doesn’t appeal, or a wise woman doesn’t use her wicked wiles to persuade men they should reproduce, as so often happens, at least get some feelgood medication, preferably not energy and libido-sapping anti-depressants, something with a bit of zing. The high life beats no life. Our hero tells some opium users they’re dead inside – (the book was based on on a Dadaist poet in the 1930s, when smoking opium was more prevalent), Even if true, it’s better than being actually dead. Existential fail, dude.

If you can’t find the ultimate love affair, help those radicalised by the Algerian war or lose that all-pervading anxiety, can’t you just settle for something less? So you can’t get some obscure cigarettes straight out of rehab. There’s a solution…

And If you mope into an an early grave you’ll also miss this great movie. Ennui? Idiocy, more like… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-w-AGgWd4o A series of interviews and clips which greatly enhance the film. Paris then and now, and you learn who was an actor and who was an amateur with an ‘intriguing face.’

Beautifully packaged box set. available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Louis-Malle-Collection-1-DVD/dp/B000ENUWF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1431604985&sr=1-1&keywords=louis+malle+collection       Seems I saved £71 picking up a freecycle copy. Only one left! Lucky me. For once.

Curiously, the disc stopped playing for a while, Maybe it thought I was too déclassé to be watching it or it wanted to remind me that life is so much preferable to the eternal void. Then, like Christ and Nigel Farage, and his three day resignation, it came back from the dead,

If our doomed writer hadn’t been so contemptuous of his married friend’s ‘mediocre certainties’ he might have discovered that, just as reproduction can alleviate depression, It can also cheat death. or at least give him a black eye.

And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.

(‘brave’ = challenge in this context)

Shakespeare Sonnet 12

In short, cheer up, ffs. GRATITUDE!

 

Blue Noir. Lift To The Scaffold. Miles Davis. The Cinema of Louis Malle Part 1

Should we depressed people immerse ourselves in Noir? I’ve always been drawn to dark culture, gallows humour and a vicarious life of crime (not always vicarious, come to think of it…). I didn’t have any choice as to Kink, which can take you to very dark places, especially combined with drink and drugs, (as not recommended by scene preachers, widely indulged all the same.) Ecstasy and transcendence may only be a temporary solution – kicks, as some called it when this movie was made – but it works in the moment. Where we live.

Louis Malle came from a prosperous family but throughout this tangled tale of adultery and murder his sympathies are with the underdog. We open on a passionate declaration of love from a beautiful woman, straight to camera, no make up. With her lover she has plotted her husband’s murder. It’s a perfect locked room mystery until he goes back to be trapped in what may be a Lift to the Scaffold – the death penalty still applies. Later a car thief discusses whether his head will roll. Sports Car to the Guillotine? The American title for this was also a little awkward to English ears: Elevator to the Gallows. (I have recently been so immersed in the electoral defeat of a dictator’s stooge that I just typed ‘Gallows’ as ‘Galloways’.)

The killer is observed by teenage delinquents, perhaps the inspiration for the couple in Godard’s Breathless. He’s a James Dean wannabe in leather – a sulky churl who would benefit from some physical chastisement – nothing erotic, just a good, sound drubbing. She’s beautiful, charming and chic. And trouble. When their little adventure goes badly wrong she suggests an overdose, dreaming of newspaper headlines: ‘the tragic lovers’.

A more tragic, infinitely less glamorous couple were fighting at St Leonards Warrior Square when I returned from Bexhill, a pleasant coastal town where I picked up a freecycle Louis Malle box set from the station waiting room. Our star-crossed lovers were a stocky thug and a screeching shrew. Chav couture by Sports Direct. Loud, crude abuse courtesy of very few brain cells. Conflict resolution from Jeremy Kyle, the very name an amused bystander mentioned. ‘It’s always at this station’. Well, we also have Bohemia, which housed the original artistic rebels and still tolerates the genteel poor, including me and my wife.

Despite having acquired a criminal record through various drink and drug-fueled idiocies, I still reserve the right to despise thick yobs. Bourgeois hypocrisy? Classism? No, realism. Ted Lewis and Robin Cook/Derek Raymond’s narrators didn’t like the ‘slag’. Only twits like Owen Jones would think otherwise.
We could have done with Jeremy Kyle’s security as the bickering clods chased each other through the commuters. Some laughed, though what would have been one-sided violence very nearly erupted. I would have sat this one out, having already had permanent eye surgery after one intervention – perhaps handicapped by two bottles of vodka. (Top tip, skilled martial artists always look at their opponents).

To return to somewhat idealized criminality, this excellent beautifully shot movie finishes with the protagonists facing the consequences of their actions while us senior delinquents count our blessings, waking up in our own beds, freer than imprisoned existentialists. We still have a life sentence of depression but there is remission – especially through art, the deeper and darker the better.

Trailer
http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2014/jan/08/lift-to-the-scaffold-trailer-louis-malle-video
The famous night time walk, waiting for her lover to return from the murder, unaware he is trapped. Miles Davis at his bluesy best.

next time – sex, suicide and Satie. The Fire Within. Louis Malle pt 2

Ted ‘Get Carter’ Lewis back in print from Syndicate books. New introductions. Classy covers. http://www.syndicatebooks.com/