Alps is the second feature from Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director whose first feature, Dogtooth, won the Un Certain Regard award in Cannes a couple of years ago. I wish I'd seen it at the time; when I finally caught up with it, I'd seen, in the interim, Mexican director Arturo Ripstein's unforgettable 70s black comedy The Castle Of Purity, which, too, was about a family being sheltered from the outside world, so the novelty was somewhat lost. I didn't have especially high hopes for Alps, then, but what I saw has persuaded me to give Dogtooth another go. It's hard work for sure, and delivers only two obvious clues in the first 45 minutes. But once the premise is made (sort of) clear, what seems like a very fuzzy, meandering movie suddenly snaps sharply into focus. Whether this is even the real world, let lone the modern day is left abundantly vague when the film opens, and a scrawny ribbon dancer is shown performing a breathless dance to the blaring strains of Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries. She's phoning in her performance because she'd rather be dancing to pop music, but when she says as much, her coach turns sour, threatening physical harm if she speaks so insolently to him again. These two people – from memory, I don't recall any real names being used, but that could just be the disorientating nature of the film – are part of a mysterious quartet who operate out of a rundown gym. We meet the other two soon enough; the group has a meeting, in which their leader announces that he has decided on a name. They are to be called Alps: for many reasons, but the primary one being that it gives no indication of what it is they do.
So what do they do? Well, it's shown to us in tantalising fragments that come together so slowly the film will test the patience of the casual viewer. But if you stick with it, Alps becomes a brilliant, baffling puzzle that, though it looks superficially like one of the suburban grotesques cooked up by Austria's Ulrich Seidl, is actually more of a Lynchian mood-piece. Though dream-like in tone, it never becomes nightmarish, and the climax is even somewhat moving. Made with a brutally assured style that at times borders on anti-cinema, Alps is a provocative story about people and relationships that constantly undercuts our needs and expectations. Above all, it's about individuality – how much pride we have in it of ourselves but, more poignantly, how we demand it of other people.
Saturday morning's film Hail was certainly about individuality too. I must have slipped up somewhere but I decided to see this instead of Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which I skipped because a) it's out on Friday in the US and b) even afterwards, the kindest thing anyone had to say about it was that it was “quite good”. That said, Hail wasn't the hardboiled Australia crime movie I was hoping for it. It's stylish, bold and definitely not for the squeamish, but the struggling non-professional cast were pushed too hard for my liking. Inspired by the real-life experiences of its star, the weather-worn Daniel P Jones, it tells the story of a criminal named Danny (Jones), who gets out of jail and goes back to the home he shares with his patient, loving partner Lauren. Danny gets a job but breaks his arm in a fall, so, to help him get back on his feet, an old flame of Lauren's comes by with a proposition that has disastrous consequences for all. There are good moments in this overlong and, visually, slightly self-regarding film, but they mostly don't involve the genre elements. Hail works best when its leading man is trying to articulate his troubles, and the look in his eyes in certain scenes certainly does open a window on a very dark psyche. Ultimately, though, I didn't buy what it was about and left feeling rather soiled by my stay in Hail's world. The music choices, however, made that time tolerable.
I can't pass comment on James Franco's Sal yet because the security at this festival is a farce and I couldn't get in. But I didn't mind too much because it meant that I got to see all of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's wonderful Chicken With Plums, an Iran-set love story with echoes of Amelie but with a much punchier sense of humour and an elegant sense of tragedy and loss. Mathieu Almaric stars as Nassir-Ali, a violinist who is in despair because his favourite instrument has been smashed and no other will do. At his wits end, he decides to die, and after rejecting all the options in a hilariously bleak montage of potential suicides he opts to stay in bed and simply waste away. Will he die? The film answers that question very early on (I won't spoil it), but the film continues to surprise us, using an ingenious mix of flashbacks and flash-forwards, explaining how Nassir-Ali came to give up on life and why he can create such beautiful music. After the animated Persepolis, which also mixed gallows humour with sweetness and sadness, Chicken With Plums is a startlingly accomplished live-action follow-up. Its zaniness has less of a Jeunet quality and resembles more the the wackiness of the early Coens, if they had a bit more heart. The ending is a bit elongated and undermines the power of the film's simplicity, but this film completely won me over with its eccentricity, confidence and pure, unsentimental emotion.
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