Reviews

This was clearly a carefully crafted film (despite the microphone appearing several times in frame - which really tears down the 'fourth wall'. Do film-makers still make that mistake?), whose success and failure both seem to be down to leaving the 'creatives' unattended with the film.

Indeed it feels very much as though the actors, screenplay writers and editors all indulged themselves to the full, and made a film without the interference of meddling businessmen who dare participate in the process of making this 'art'. But they actually perform a role those businessmen, a role of taking the film back to those who will consume it. There's only so much a viewer will pick up in the first screening of a film, and an actor, director, even editor, can easily lose sight of this.

Which is what has happened here.

We linger for a long time on Tilda Swinton's naked aged person, which helps the plot none, nor me in my chair, nor Tilda in her Woodstockesque grassy love scene, nor anyone. I would have rather seen the (underpaid in my opinion, whatever he was paid) plucky male protagonist naked, close-up. And indeed I might ask, as we are discussing a film which challenges formulae of film-making, why didn't we see more of him instead of Tilda and her distracting evidence of a lumpectomy winking at you.

While my wife liked it a lot, I was left ruing my inability to sleep on planes, trains, and now cinemas. What is it with chairs?

Two post-scripts: first, there is not a flicker of a sense of humour anywhere to be found. Nada. This should ring alarm bells.

Second. Tilda is wonderful, but let's not join some credulous reviewers in praise of her new-found ability to speak Italian and Russian. If we hear her speak three words of Russian and 100 words of Italian in the film, rest assured, that is probably as much Russian and Italian as she can speak.

This brief documentary profiling a Pakistani shopkeeper in Barcelona opens with an earnest shot of a lowly, hard-working immigrant, and all seems set fair for a worthy, hand-wringing look at the global society we've created.

Far from it. Very soon it becomes clear that the film-maker wants primarily to portray the tailor as a person, as a flawed man. He bullies and fleeces his employees, deceives and harangues his customers, and is selfish, shiftless and lazy. Unlike many short films on global migration (which this is emphatically not), this story is the opposite of the 'success through hard work' model, but rather an unexpected tour of the Peter Principle.

His secondary aim is to show the reality of life for the world's social flotsam, as the characters reveal the choices they face, the pittance they earn, the battle they fight for basic human needs. In this respect the film is interesting rather than ground-breaking, contrasting the good characters in the film with the tailor, as unfortunates whose bad luck is a tragedy, while his is just desserts.

The film-maker's skill is his transparency, or more probably his temporary absences, which push the characters into behaving with no self-awareness. This creates some very amusing episodes, one of which is accidentally ingenious, which I will not ruin, but which involves the two protagonists discussing the film-maker himself, with richly ironic asides about the film in which they are the stars.

Based on truth, the Army in the Shadows takes the French men and women of the Resistance as its theme, at a point near the end of the war when the Resistance movement and Nazi intelligence about its work and staff are both firmly established. As well as giving a thrilling history lesson in the workings of the Resistance, from the rural ladies who operated safe houses, to the chateaux-dwelling aristocrats whose lawns played host to light aircraft smuggling collaborators in and out of France, it also is a fascinating essay on the gruesome realities of heroism: including moments of hopelessness and complete failure of nerve. Events test our group of collaborators, so that each one bumps up against his or her personal limit, as to what they are intelligent enough to understand, brave enough to endure, and determined enough to achieve. Excellently acted and directed, it is a classic uncompromising Melville thriller.

Plenty of (intended) non sequiturs and arrivals at nothing, with some good French sauce. Sure, it is surreal, but don't think clever-clever bakerlite phone with a lobster handset, more amusing sketches which taken singly are absorbing vignettes.

There is plenty of cinema that is terrified of being understood too easily and resorts to weirdness as a proxy for intellectualising, but this does not do that. It leads you somewhere articulately and clearly, it's just that that place is in the middle of nowhere.

If you want to claim it's a masterpiece or a comment on our time, do so if you must, but it's a fun watch without any of that.

Extremely tight two hours, full of story, with every word in the script, every visual element propelling us forward. Matthau is an excellently conceived, unglamourous, put-upon, middle-management New Yorker working on the Subway, cast in a straight role but showing his genius for comedy in the scenes with the Japanese visitors. Gratifyingly, we are given in this film the origin of Mr Pink, Mr White etc of Reservoir Dogs, perhaps suggesting a homage by Tarantino, which helps convey the kind of plot-driven genre we are in. As you watch, you sense that the film will allow nothing to interfere with a realistic portrayal: the noises of the underground are deafening, and if he says he's going to shoot, he will.

Ohayo carries an unshowy, wry humour close to the surface throughout, and entertains just by offering privileged access to 1959 Japanese suburban society, and its houses, streets and bars. The little boys driving the drama are comic to watch and act wonderfully. Their hunger strike and fart games are presented matter-of-factly, almost obliquely, and the humour is not so much understated as unstated altogether.

The film also is apparently filmed at knee height. While most great cinematic breakthroughs pass me by without leaving a mark (so what if that was all one take?), this gives rise to a pleasingly Alice in Wonderland feel. More importantly, it puts you in with the boys in their scenes, and includes you in the dialogues between gossiping neighbours, and informal meals, which all take place seated on the floor.

The result is quirky and accessible, and easy to like even for those who are not lovers of abstruse cinema.

Maria Braun is an extraordinary woman presented fully and very credibly, despite being so obtuse as to border on implausibility. She will do everything to make her marriage work, including shameless opportunism and sexual manipulation. And thus beneath the vicey exterior, she reveals a rather sweet value system. The film suffers from an abrupt and unexpected ending which afterwards feels wholly inadequate, with the convenience familiar from ending your school creative writing exercise with 'and then I woke up'. It is also book-ended at the other end with the most eccentric title sequence I've ever seen, but don't let any of that put you off.