District 9

It’s hard to know what to expect from a South African sci-fi horror film, in the same way that you might struggle to accurately perceive what a Cuban screwball comedy might be like, or a Dutch political drama. You’re curious from the off. District 9, then, has no precedent that I’m aware of, and that lends the film a constantly surprising allure.

Johannesburg is chosen, for some reason, by a horde of some million aliens (‘prawns’) as an earthly base, and they outstay their welcome. Our hero (Sharlto Copley) is tasked with the thanklessness of serving up eviction-notices to these itinerant creatures as part of a ‘relocation’ programme, from a ramshackle base reminiscent of a third-world slum, ‘District 9’, to ‘District 10’, a newly positioned alternative alien site (more like a back-of-beyond isolation camp) for them to reside hundreds of miles outside the city, where they can be forgotten about and kept in distant check by the authorities. Short-shrift being given to any obstinate evictees: they’re exterminated on the spot with nary a shrug.

During this process, Copley raids an alien home and inadvertently sprays himself with a substance that ushers in an old horror-staple – a spin on the old ‘infected’ vampire/zombie/werewolf metamorphosis. Copley grows a ‘prawn’ claw, a glossy black pincer that renders him a bit of a curiosity initially, but he is soon put to nefarious means by a government keen to capitalise on his new-found ability, due to DNA enactive geek plot development, to engage with alien warfare and become a weapon against the interlopers. They are ready to vivisect the poor chap before he blossoms into another prawn, so he legs it, becomes a fugitive and an intriguing initial premise morphs into a genuinely compulsive thriller with shades of Alien Nation, Enemy Mine and countless others.

The sci-fi elements, so often the downside of this type of film, are totally believable throughout, and the ‘prawns’ are engaging, empathetic and likeable, with a neat line in sardonic, aggrieved dialogue that renders them ingratiatingly cynical. We also have a protagonist in Copley that’s basically floundering much of the time, a weedy suit forced into defending his existence, albeit as a fraught human/prawn fusion.

The film has a few simple but clever conceits. By merely affording the prawns human-like movement and gestures, the savagery of the humans disparagingly shepherding the prawns into a ghetto compound is exacerbated to the extent that it’s not just injustice that puts us onside with the ill-treated tribe of aliens, but a neatly manipulated anthropomorphic recognition. In other words, the clever effects make us care about their plight. In other, less dextrous hands, the aliens might merely be a neat array of expendable CGI gestures, an interesting looking bit of insignificant bullet-fodder. Here, our sympathies are muddied, then subverted in an intelligent, pointed way.

The finale is perhaps a little time-honoured, but there’s much to be impressed by in District 9. After drivel like Knowing and a slew of uninvolving effects-led films over the last few years, this is a welcome addition to a recently ill-served sub-genre.

500 Days Of Summer

Rom-coms: whatever the state of the world, from multiplex down to fleapit barely staying afloat in marginal towns, cinemas unflaggingly stick them onto their screens for couples of smirking victorious women and compromised men, jaunty groups of over-garrulous teens and 'the older generation' who never fail to pile in with breezy assurity that THIS is the pill they need. The new Jennifer Aniston over-perfumed, clean-cut and airbrushed vehicle of nice; the new Kate Hudson screeching party of over-energised fluff; the new Gerard Butler heart-string-twanger with a glinting eye. Rose-tinted inevitability and succour for the feelgood seekers. Great houses overlooking everything. Shrill Clairol faces jostling amid bouncing hair, temporary setbacks and ultimate baby-abundant or Hallmark-written resolution.

500 Days Of Summer promises to be ‘a different kind of rom-com’. The tagline, for example, reads: ‘Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.’ Hey, that does sound slightly different. Then you notice that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are in it. Gordon-Levitt seems to have almost accidentally fallen into ‘indieboy’ pole-position that Tobey Maguire lightly grasped before Sam Raimi and Spiderman shot him onto the A-List. Ever-young of face and effortlessly likeable with a hint of easy-intelligence and enough of the maverick, quirky solemnity about him to render him polished slacker elect.

Deschanel has the gleaming face of eight-year-old health, like something off a breakfast cereal box, but the kind of unforced charm and allure to make you miss her absence whenever she isn't in a scene. She has clearly worked out how to look like she doesn’t care and yet make you care a lot. For this, you need to be very cute and clever. So both leads, then, are multi-dimensional and appealing. Expectations raise.

We start near the end, and the film is a jumble of non-linear glimpses of different moments on the central relationship timeline. We already know the relationship will end (but we suspect it will all tie together seamlessly, somehow) so it’s a case of watching how the whole thing falters. Cue some neat editing juxtapositions (Gordon-Levitt getting into a lift full of joy; pictorial timeshift from day ‘37’ to ‘188’, Gordon-Levitt exiting lift looking crushed) that help develop the central conceit and well-placed splicing of high- and low-moments. That such a device is employed to capture the recollection of the ebb-and-flow of a relationship is understandable, and it works pretty well. We see the same footage twice, with very different attributed observations. ‘I love the way she smiles!’ becomes ‘I hate her crooked teeth!’ as these things are wont to as the demise of the relationship hoves into view.

You get the big ‘I see the light’ moment akin to John Cusack foisting the tinny-blarings of Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’ upon a bed-restless Ione Skye at twilight, or Billy Crystal sprinting through streets towards Meg Ryan to Sinatra’s ‘It Had To Be You’. Only here, it’s the downbeat shrugging off of idealism that a departing Deschanel augments. Gordon-Levitt quits his job as a greeting card writer, citing his lack of wanting to ‘add to the bullshit’. He then hangs out in his musty apartment and wanders down to the 7/11 for fresh supplies of whiskey and junk-food as he waits for the misery to filter out of his lethargy-freighted system. He decides to chase his dreams of becoming an architect and cultivates a portfolio. Things, clearly, can only get better etc…

Gordon-Levitt is extremely good at this kind of thing. Affable and with enough reserves of complexity to remain compelling. He’s the new Heath Ledger (he even looks a bit like him). Deschanel will eventually run out of these roles and presumably become a Disney-mom but this may be the film that defines and captures her best. Unattainable but impossible to dislike, she’s the perfect object of Gordon-Levitt’s doomed attentions.

The film isn’t a laugh-fest and isn’t a navel-gazing wallower either; it’s an enjoyably unprecious, smug-free charting of a briefly igniting romance that threatens to go somewhere and then doesn’t, much to Gordon-Levitt’s despair and Deschanel’s empathetic indifference, and it gets the balance right. And, in the end, it deserves credit as being a genuine attempt at something unusually bittersweet. (Until the end, where it resorts to type, but 500 Days Of Summer has earned enough goodwill at this point for you to let it go.) The architecture job interview: he meets a fox in the foyer, also waiting to interview. Do you think he’ll get the job? Clue: the woman, who (eventually) agrees to join him for coffee afterward, is called ‘Autumn’.

Girl Cut In Two

Girl Cut In Two is spectacularly French. And that’s a good thing. It's entirely ridiculous and charming in equal measure. Claude Chabrol gives us Francois Berleand as a 50-something author of considerable repute and not inconsiderable kinky proclivities engaging in a gleefully permitted adulterous tryst with the gawkily attractive weather-girl Ludovine Sagnier. She likes quoting from books and saunters around her mum’s bookshop like some cultured coquettish dream. It’s not only Woody Allen that does this: Chabrol basically puts his ideal of cerebral beauty up there and has his aging artist pull her with ease as she initially bats off the awful attentions of a dreadful dandy, played by Benoit Magimel, who does a good job of channelling a young De Niro meets fey aristocratic waster. The kind of guy you might encounter in a nightmare after watching Brideshead Revisited whilst you were learning French.

However, our old scribe is the kind of chap that says impressively uppity things like, when confronted at a restaurant table by Magimel, ‘The impertinence of an inferiority complex’. The guy is pompous, but we loathe Magimel to such an extent that we immediately side with the gnomic writer. Which isn’t particularly easy. And is made harder still by his continually baffling toying with Sagnier, who clearly loves a bit of clever old arty guy but isn’t too fond of being bedded and then dropped like a bit of merde. And Magimel’s vulturous playboy waits in the wings, loaded and loathsome. He’s a prize berk and she’s clearly in need of a slightly more favourable love triangle, but we’re in a French film, so it’s never going to be run of the mill. You want to lead Savigner in the direction of the nearest scarecrow for a better deal, but that’s not just Chabrol’s drawing up of a couple of spoiled – in different ways – characters. Savigner is, let’s face it, adorable. It’s akin to watching a small child careening between two very different monsters.

Savigner loves the reclusive old writer who likes having her perform sex acts on his friends at an exclusive gentlemans club he frequents. He continually plays come-hither daddy-figure and then palms her away. The empty playboy loves her, or should I say covets her and can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t succumb, and she rebounds into the arms of the young disaster, eventually marrying him. She continues to yearn for Berleand and Magimel gets jealous – and the to-and-fro continues until a shooting clears the stage of both men and leaves Sagnier to contemplate what on earth she’s been doing for 90-odd minutes. In the meantime Savigner’s relatively new husband’s family uses her to get murdering hubby’s sentence curtailed before tossing her aside.

Sagnier muddies the directors intent, I’d say – which seems to draw some kind of conclusion about the contemporary power of women to shrug off dreadful men without becoming forever tarnished – by being the only likeable member of the cast. We wouldn’t care if she was done a hundred times by a reincarnated Hitler with a rusty iron swastika whilst dressed as Eva Braun: she has one of those inviolable screen presences that render the whole attempt a little futile.

Unless, of course, I have read the film wrong. I do, though, feel that a more complex, less likeable female lead might have posed one or two more interesting questions and might have lent the film a little more much-needed ambivalence. This is no ‘Girl Cut In Two’ – this is a girl manipulated by a couple of soulless men for a while but ultimately fairly okay thank you, better off well adrift of any of the characters Chabrol seems to delight in peopling his films with.

That all sounds rather critical: the film seems to strive for a certain feminist piquancy but instead seems like a bit of a confession. And either way, the film is supremely entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work as well as it thinks it does. Berleand wears a face that says, affably enough, ‘Yes, I am a pretty hollow, problematic guy that can’t get a hard-on without playing out all manner of elaborate fantasies. And I’m quite happy to mess people around for a bit of fun. So sue me!’ Benoit Magimel is a pantomime brat. Good support comes from the likes of Mathilda May. But Savigner not only steals the film, she saves it: a frothy, slight comedy of buffoonery, cold sexiness, moral decreptitude as sophistication and ruined people playing games. If France was that good, I'd move there.