Reviews
Fine start for the Boar's Hill auteur
Oxford has long been a breeding ground for film talent. But few have made an impact at such a young age as 22-year-old director Vicky Jewson, whose debut feature, Lady Godiva, opens this week. This is a remarkable achievement by a film-maker of undoubted potential and tenacity, who persuaded a producer of the calibre of Adam Kempton to back a project that was co-produced with Rupert Whitaker and brought it in pretty much on time and budget.
Although it begins with the wife of the medieval Earl of Mercia riding naked on horseback through the streets of Coventry, the action mostly takes place in contemporary Oxford, as teacher Phoebe Thomas strives to honour the memory of her dead brother by relaunching the art project he established for young people. However, a chance encounter with celebrity playboy Matthew Chambers deflects her purpose, only for a misunderstanding to renew her resolve and force him to make good a £100,000 bet that she wouldn't repeat Godiva's epic ride across Magdalen Bridge on May Morning.
Veering between romcom and domestic melodrama, the story isn't always novel or convincing, with some of the transitions rather clunking into place and the subplot involving Prince William being wildly implausible. The dialogue could also have done with an occasional polish. But Jewson's camera technique is confident and accomplished and she coaxes committed performances out of both Chambers and the Pre-Raphaelite Thomas, who will be familiar to fans of People Like Us and Holby City respectively. Moreover, Jewson captures Oxford as a living city and not just as a tourist trap. This is very much a first-timer's film. But the sheer fact that it's been accorded a nationwide release suggests we'll be hearing much more of Vicky Jewson in the future.
It's instructive to compare Lady Godiva with Russian debutant Andrei Kravchuk's The Italian. Despite consciously evoking the dank world of Dickensian miserablism, this well-meaning picture eschews the glib sentimentality that blights so many stories about kids in peril to present a sobering study of the abandoned and disenfranchised on the margins of Putin's Russia.
Having learned that his mother may still be alive, six-year-old Kolya Spiridonov absconds from Maria Kuznetsova's orphanage before she can sell him to an Italian couple and crosses the country in the hope of a reunion. The odyssey is packed with predictable scrapes and encounters with benefactors and scoundrels alike, as Kuznetsova and brutal boyfriend Nikolai Reutov close in on the courageous moppet. Moreover, Alexander Burov's photography is too handsome to attain genuine neo-realist authenticity. But, Kravckuk ably captures the post-democratic disillusion and degradation that facilitates the Fagin-like criminal network run by the institution's older inmates.
Italian cinema has always made inspired use of expressive kids and another neophyte director, Kim Rossi Stuart, draws on the Vittorio De Sica classics The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) for Libero, an earnest, if not always credible study of juvenile alienation. Alessandro Morace is poignantly sombre as the 11-year-old Roman boy who blames his quick-tempered cinematographer dad (Rossi Stuart, apeing actor-director Nanni Moretti) for his detested swimming lessons and the absence of his over-indulgent mother, Barbara Bobulova, whose wanderlust is the result of an emotional inconstancy that makes her both irresistible and infuriating. But, while Morace ably suggests the interiority of a child who's learned to trust only himself, the film fails to build on his performance and too often resorts to soap operatics before culminating in an unconvincingly cosy finale.
Florent-Emilio Siri's Intimate Enemies is more considered and less melodramatic. But it, too, has its faults. Revisiting themes explored in Philippe Faucon's The Betrayal, this is a solid and admirably restrained insight into the grim realities experienced by French conscripts during the Algerian War. Cinematographer Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci unfussily captures the inhospitable ruggedness of the terrain, while the cast ably conveys the sense of dehumanisation that comes from losing comrades and dishing out retribution against the terrified locals.
But rather than offer any trenchant historico-political analysis, Siri concentrates on the relationship between liberal newcomer Benoît Magimel and his hard-bitten sergeant, Albert Dupontel, who has seen action in Indo-China and despises his murderous enemy. Furthermore, this harrowing, if formulaic discussion of duty and divided loyalty might have carried greater weight had Siri placed more emphasis on the dilemmas facing the Algerian volunteers fighting against the FLN fellaghas.
So, the week's only consistently cogent feature is the documentary Our Daily Bread, which is showing at the ICA in London. It sounds a bit glib to state that a film about mechanised farming provides food for thought. But that's exactly what Nikolaus Geyrhalter sets out to do in this impossibly beautiful study of the state of European agriculture. Refusing to identify his locations, Geyrhalter presents the cavernous hothouses and battery sheds he finds across the EU as proof of the homogenisation of continental consumption, reinforcing his points with occasional shots of the lunching workers who perfunctorily sustain our ancient, but increasingly tenuous relationship with the soil. As the camera hovers over or glides through sterile landscapes, whose depopulated silence is broken only by the agonised bellows of slaughtered cattle, Geyrhalter generates an ominous science-fiction-like atmosphere that robs humanity of the dignity of labour while reducing it to indolent dependence on globalised corporations. It's chilling stuff and deserves the widest possible audience.
| | |
Print 
Email this 
Comment
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
