A Law Unto Themselves

Filmed in the heart of the Adirondacks in New York State, Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award Winner Here Alone utilizes its locale to great effect. Capturing its rich vivid landscapes, be it rolling hills and mountains or lush forests surrounding a still lake, screenwriter David Ebeltoft and director Rod Blackhurst juxtapose the idyllic setting with a sense of loneliness, loss and secluded dread. Though at first glance, Here Alone may resemble your typical zombie flick, it is, at its heart, a searing character drama, while the infected flit around the periphery. Our main character is Ann (Lucy Walters), a young woman living by herself in the middle of a leafy forest which surrounds a chilly lake. The first portion of the motion picture plays like a taut, tense silent film, as we witness her struggles to survive. Lacking food, fighting the elements and struggling with her own pained past, she is utterly alone. By way of flashbacks, we are introduced to her baby girl and her survivalist husband Jason (Shane West), the one who brought her way out into the woodsy setting to survive. We slowly learn their fates over time.

One of the most buzz-worthy performances of this past Awards season, Isabelle Huppert’s multi-dimensional turn as rape victim Michèle Leblanc in the French film Elle, directed by PaulVerhoeven, led to a wide array of nominations and wins, with her taking home the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Performance but ultimately losing the Oscar to Emma Stone. The film also took home Best Foreign Language Film at the Globes. Beginning with the intense, jarring end of the horrific rape (the only witness, her less than helpful cat), Michèle (Huppert) doesn’t hysterically scream or phone the cops after her masked assailant has departed, but quietly cleans the mess left by the attack (and then herself) – simply returning to the normalcy of her life after doing the tasks.

I often wish the studio system would turn back time (in a sense) and begin to focus on developing short films again. A wonderful way to cultivate and produce young talents (think Charlie Chaplin or The Three Stooges), it also provides the audience with fun, brief excursions into fantastic worlds before even delving into the main feature. Comedy, drama, horror and even action work nicely in shortened versions, which is why I like to highlight certain pint-sized motion pictures from time to time – today, we will look at Buster Keaton’s 1920 comedy The Scarecrow. A premier example of ingenuity and the genius of motion, the nineteen minute tale follows two farmhands (diminutive Keaton and the much larger Joe Roberts – another example of the ever-comical combo of fatty and skinny) as they vie for the hand of the youthful and pretty farmer’s daughter (Sybil Seely). The two room together in a house of contraptions – the record player seconds as a stove, bed as a solid wooden piece of furniture/piano, bathtub as a settee and so on. Perhaps even more impressive is their dinner table design – ropes hang from the rafters on pulleys, meaning that everything from salt and pepper to food and beverages are attainable from anywhere at the table (Keaton had originally developed a similar mechanism at their family’s summer home when he was just a child). When done, they have a speedy way to do the dishes as well – afterwhich the ropes disappear and a light fixture descends from the ceiling. It is a spy’s house without the spy.

Director Chan-wook Park, a visual mastermind who concocted the intoxicating Stoker in 2013 (a loose remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s superb Shadow of a Doubt), his first, and to date, only English language film, follows it by putting his talents into making another striking, intricately plotted psychological mystery/thriller in The Handmaiden. Loosely based upon Sarah Waters’ novel "Fingersmith", the filmmaker moves the tale from Victorian era England to 1930s Korea – which is under Japanese colonial rule. Divided into three parts, he utilizes the technique to great effect, providing us with only part of the story each time. In many ways it’s like being given a puzzle with only the edges to start with, so we think we understand what is going on, as we have been given the outline, but only truly gain a stronger appreciation of its complexity and beauty when provided with the pieces that fill in the whole picture. Park’s unique style slowly divulges the true essence of this film by providing alternate angles, different perspectives, flashbacks and flash forwards (those essential remaining puzzle pieces).

A trenchant piece of social commentary, I, Daniel Blake could have been a one dimensional film filled with gloomy despair, but in the capable hands of director Ken Loach and first time actor and long time comedian Dave Johns, it is laced with deft, dry, sarcastic humour throughout – making it a relevant, multi-faceted dramedy. Written by Paul Laverty (a regular collaborator with Loach), the modern day tale, which is set in Newcastle, England, follows a fifty-nine year old carpenter named Daniel Blake (Johns), who, as the film begins, is frustratingly dealing with a government employee over the phone. They have denied his claim for ‘employment and support allowance’ – despite the fact that he has had a debilitating heart attack and his doctors vehemently state that he is in no shape to return to work. A wonderful piece of sardonic humour, this opening scene finds the man having to put up with a plethora of unrelated questions that have nothing to do with his particular condition. Highlighting the lack of common sense or logic found in the modern day governmental system, it is somewhat akin to a man continuously banging his head around the rim of a toilet seat (it hurts, is irritating and, in the end, gets you absolutely nowhere).