The Raid (above) isn't technically a Sundance movie, since it premiered last autumn in Toronto, but it certainly found the right audience here. As all the pre-publicity suggests, it is indeed a powerhouse of an action thriller: brutal, super-violent and, despite an ominous 100-minute running time, a surprisingly fast-paced thriller that never drags. The director is Gareth Evans, an Indonesia-based Welshman, and the most thrilling aspect of The Raid is not how stunningly it captures its Asian fight-movie set-pieces but just how beautifully it sites them in a grindhouse context. Which means that just as it recalls such 70s cult items as Streetfighter and Enter The Dragon, it also captures the early pulp-indie spirit of George Romero and John Carpenter. Indeed, The Raid not only gives the latter a run for his money, thanks a neat midway twist it also combines Assault On Precinct 13 and Escape From New York into one breathless two-for-one bloodbath.
The plot concerns a police raid on a huge, crumbling tower block in Jakarta, where crime boss Tama has built up his drug-dealing operation. The building is a vertical slum, mostly populated by lowlifes and criminals who live in lawless, rent-conrolled squalor. The cops go in, most of them rookies, but it appears Tama is waiting for them, and what begins as an attack soon turns into a rout. If you've always wanted to like martial arts movies but never quite come to grips with the work of, say, Ringo Lam, The Raid is the film you've been waiting for. It doesn't just drift from fight to fight, there's an Infernal Affairs-style intrigue to drive things along, and the combat scenes vary greatly, from gunfights to handfights via explosions and all sorts of gravity-defying martial ballet. Momentum are releasing this film in the spring, and fans of genre films will not be disappointed.
Next up was Simon Killer (right), from the creative team behind Martha Marcy May Marlene. I first heard about this film in Cannes from Brady Corbet, who talked about it while promoting the Lars Von Trier movie Melancholia there. It came as no surprise, then, that Von Trier was thanked in the closing credits of this gripping, dreamlike sort-of-thriller, as is Michael Haneke, since its blank spaces and emotional distance owes more to European cinema than American. But if it sounds like an icy art movie, it isn't – this is only the framing style, and the film wouldn't work without the brave central performance from Corbet as Simon, a recent college graduate who has arrived in Paris after a traumatic break-up with his girlfriend. At first we feel sympathy for Simon as he stumbles through his new city, awkwardly trying to make friends and masturbating forlornly in his borrowed apartment. But slowly we reveal that our sympathy is the currency that feeds Simon's hidden animus, and over the course of the next 105 minutes we see the mask of mundanity start to drop.
The film takes a while to reveal itself, and its frank sexuality suggests a Shame-style character study. But as it progressed I was put in mind of the news story about the Japanese student who murdered his English teacher and left her in a bath of sand before going on the run for months (if not years). This has nothing to do with Simon's story per se, but the ending reveals that Simon is capable of something equally inexplicable and evil, beneath a veneer of banality and fecklessness. My good friend Jeff Goldsmith noted comparisons with Taxi Driver – notably in the parallel affairs Simon conducts with a seedy hooker and a well-to-do French girl – but Simon Killer is its own thing. Director Antonio Campos touched on the pressurised male American psyche in his last film, After School, and it struck me that Simon Killer is maybe After-After School. It's not an easy ride, but admirers of cutting-edge American-indie drama should start tracking this film now.
No comments:
Post a Comment