Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life (Werner Herzog, 2011) Review

Michael Perry is a subject of Herzog's lens in Into The Abyss (2011)...

"Death waits forever, it is eternal."

- Peasant, La Soufrière (1977)

There is no question of Michael Perry and Jason Burkett's innocence. In October 2001 the then-teens broke into the home of fifty-year-old nurse Sandra Stotler, having previously been turned away from her doorstep, and then murdered her for the keys to a red Camaro. The body was discarded in neighboring woodland, but the duo came unstuck when trying to re-enter the gated Highland Ranch community where she had lived. Why didn't they just take the car when disposing of the body? For this foolish oversight two further people lost their lives: Sandra's son, Adam Stotler, and his friend, Jeremy Richardson, who possessed the electronic device which would grant Perry and Burkett entry back into the estate, where they could finally steal that elusive Camaro. In three days time the killers were apprehended, following an intense shootout with police where Burkett sustained five gunshot wounds. He recieved a life sentence, but Perry - a few months his junior - was sentenced to death. Stotler had been baking cookies when the shotgun was placed to her back.

The most impressive aspect of Into The Abyss (surely the most generic of Herzog film titles; it could describe Aguirre, Wrath Of God (1972), Heart Of Glass (1976) or Grizzly Man (2005), among others) is the way in which Herzog looks to an act of inhumanity and finds two humans; humans who share remorse for their violent, senseless crimes. We walk into the film aware that it takes place on Death Row (Huntsville, Texas; still America's execution capital), and expect to be greeted by monsters. Herzog splits the narrative into six distinct chapters, bookended by a prologue and epilogue, and in the first chapter he outlines the details of Perry and Burkett's crimes, employing archival police footage, news reports and contemporary interviews. It's a horrifying chapter of unimaginable cruelty, and already our subconscious is painting images of burly, cold-eyed musclemen. Cliché has no place in reality. Burkett is mild mannered and approachable - not only articulate, but a deeply thoughtful individual. Were he behind an oak desk, as opposed to bullet proof glass, we might mistake him for a young scholar. Perry is introduced to us similarly, and we immediately warm to his boyish looks and buoyant energy. It is only when Herzog re-states the man's sentence that we remember the brutality with which he undertook Sandra Stotler's execution.

Interestingly, Perry now pleads innocence. Back in 2001 he had confessed to the murders, reportedly leading officers to the crime scene and revealing details that only the perpetrator could know. Evidence was provided to support his claims, and a jury found him guilty. As Herzog meets him, Perry is due to be executed in eight days. This is one of many contradictions - or rather, oddities - presented by Into The Abyss, which in Chapter IV (subtitled 'A Glimmer Of Hope') introduces us to Melyssa Burkett, a campaigner who fell in love with and married Jason while he was in jail. She is convinced, perhaps unreasonably, of his innocence. She speaks of him bashfully, seemingly giddy on her affection for him. I can imagine few couples as in love as these two. This observation took me surprise, as did the revelation that Melyssa is now pregnant (she's coy about the source, but artificial insemination has obviously been approved by the prison). Anyhow, back to Perry. He faces his impending death with remarkable calm, citing God as a reason for his not being afraid. "Paradise awaits one way or the other", he declares. "I tell people all the time, I'm either going home, or Home." This is yet another contradiction. If Perry's initial statements are true, and he did kill three people in cold blood, how can he still believe that God will forgive him, and allow him into heaven? If his current statement is true, why did he testify against himself all those years ago? And finally, if God is merciful and kind, as Reverend Richard Lopez suggests, why did he allow for the deaths of three innocents - why did he not heed the call of Lisa-Stotler Balloun, sister and daughter of the desceased, who also looks to God as a comfort?

That final point is of particular interest to me. Religion is a subject which I find endlessly fascinating and frustrating, and here, without even knowing it, Herzog has crafted a portrait of its infinite paradox. Every subject of the director's lens at some point underlines how God has helped them through their tribulations - including Charles Richardson, brother of the deceased Jeremy, and Delbert Burkett, father of Jason, who is also serving a life sentence for murder. Each and every one of these people sincerely believes in the small-print of their faith, and an eventual afterlife. Each of them has prayed to God, for either forgiveness or consolation. I find this confusing and intriguing. Balloun has placed all of her remaining energy into God, but was it not that very God who took from her both her mother and brother, whom she loved so dearly? I stress that this is not a topic which Herzog engages with in Into The Abyss, but rather an underlying subtext which struck me in unexpectedly profound ways. In a Q&A I attended after the film, Herzog stated that he tried to avoid explicit talk of religion at all times. When Rev. Lopez begins waxing lyrical about the marvels of God's green Earth, he diverts the man's course by simply asking; "Tell me about an encounter with a squirrel?"

Throughout all of this the director keeps himself at a distance from his subjects, never appearing before camera and always delivering his questions with concise, softly-spoken clarity. Often his approach can be dryly funny, in that most Herzog-ian of ways, such as in the scene where he lists Delbert Burkett's academic aspirations, and then details each of his five prison sentences. "What went wrong?", he innocently concludes. Somehow he elicits the most honest answers possible, and uncovers that thing which he is always looking for - ecstatic truth. This is the truth beyond mere "facts." He argues that it is through poetry that human beings can find the greatest possible truth about their existence. As the film closes on a discussion of hummingbirds, I considered that he might just be right.

Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life is released into UK cinemas on March 30th...

Babycall (Pål Sletaune, 2011) Review

Noomi Rapace stars in the snaky chiller/thriller Babycall (2011)...

There's a reason why you've probably never heard of Babycall, writer/director Pål Sletaune's creepy psychosis drama, and that's because it has the least imaginative marketing team in the world. Just look at the evidence. Firstly there's that clunkily translated title which completely fails to establish interest, suggesting something childish or family-oriented. Then there's the embarrassingly generic poster, indicating nothing of plot, genre or tone, and instead relying on the face of its not-quite-A-list star, Noomi Rapace. Lastly there's that cringy tagline - how far would you go for the ones you love? - which is so trite, it almost suggests parody. I won't even go into the J-flavoured trailer, which makes the film look like some kind of cheap, twitchy Ju-On (Shimizu, 2002) knock-off. They might as well have called it We Need To Talk About Anders.

An outlining of its plot might not help matters either, but be aware that Sletaune's chiller has several more tricks up its sleeve than I'm willing to reveal here, and for the most part it's an effectively low-key, often thought-provoking little picture. The basic synopsis goes thusly: single mother Anna (Rapace) relocates her 8-year-old son Anders (Vetle Qvenild Werring) to the outskirts of Oslo, in an attempt to escape from an abusive ex-husband. Located in the middle of a listless tower block, her new apartment's blank interior perfectly reflects Anna's mousy, introverted persona; we imagine her palms sweating constantly, and her soft brown eyes flickering around every corner, eternally paranoid. To make matters worse our fraying protagonist, whose own sanity and stability is called into question after some erratic, semi-schizo behavior, is under close observation from social services, who seem intent on taking Anders away from her. She smothers him with her own anxieties, thinking that a home education will suffice over a state one, and awkwardly forcing him to share her bed (nothing untoward is suggested, but the imagery remains unnerving). It's quite a classical horror movie setup, but Babycall amounts to much, much more than that, and digs below its own sterile surface to explore the complex emotional boundaries of its characters...

Specifically, Babycall could be said to be about the fractured, lonely souls living on society's fringe, afraid to let death define their lives. Anna eventually goes looking for a babycall (baby monitor), and in the electronics store strikes up an awkward conversation with Helge (Kristoffer Joner), a shy gentleman whose mother is dying in hospital. Sadness exudes from these characters, who are attracted to one another by an emotional void which the other might be able to fill. A beautifully judged dinner date explores their reticence, as shades of memory are evoked in a way which feels non-expository, but of course is. Helge reminisces about his youth, recalling his mother's obsessive health concerns, and drawing parallels with Anna's excessive worrying. Of course, we know that she's actually much worse. We've observed her agitation when waiting outside the school gates, counting down the seconds until she can once again hold her son in her arms. But her instincts about Helge ("you're nice") afford Anna some degree of trust in her new environment, and as a result she extends the leash of her son's freedom. It is during these scenes that we really warm to Anna, who could've easily become unlikable in lesser hands than Rapace's - it's her sensitivity, her affection and loyalty, which really let us sympathize with the character.

This sympathy is key to the success of Babycall's latter-half plot developments, as Sletaune begins to ratchet up the tension, slithering between genres with extraordinary precision and grace. The film slips from kitchen-sink drama to suburban chiller without us ever noticing - there's no string-fronted score to emphasize the mounting horror, which we instead grasp through Rapace's panicked gestures and the diluted, blue-hued palette of DP John Andreas Andersen. The film's horror angle is introduced naturalistically, as Anna overhears cries for help from a rogue frequency on the babycall, but a subplot involving a pervy social worker is less developed, and feels like little more than a tacky device on which to pivot a final twist. It's a shame that, in its final fifteen minutes, Babycall completely loses it marbles, piling on twist after clichéd twist, and each as senseless as the last. It's especially disappointing when considering just how finely crafted the first hour was, and how carefully its characters were sketched. For his finale Sletaune introduces ideas of the supernatural, unthreading all of the taut rope which had held his plotting together, and not one frame of it makes a lick of sense. Without wishing to give anything away, the final freeze-frame, looking over a tranquil river where a mother lays a blanket out for her son, forced me to ram a fistful of knuckles into my mouth, as it was all I could do to stop myself from screaming. It's rare that a film of such quiet restraint, thoughtfulness and visual wit could downturn so quickly, and erase almost every ounce of goodwill I'd previously held for it. Babycall achieves this feat with such dizzying abandon that I could have sworn this was its sole purpose all along...

Babycall is released into UK cinemas on March 30th...

The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995) DVD Review

James Duval in The Doom Generation (1995)...

Synopsising The Doom Generation, the second in writer/director Gregg Araki's 'Teen Apocalypse Trilogy', bookended by Totally F***ed Up (1993) and Nowhere (1997), might just be the silliest task I've ever undertaken on this blog. The cliff notes? Three fatalistic teens bonk their way through a murderous, quasi-apocalyptic landscape to the thunderous sound of mid-90's industrial rock. As today's kids would say, WTF?! Consider that the film contains a scene where Quickiemart clerk Cok-suk (21 Jump Street's Dustin Nguyen) has his head decapitated and lobbed onto a hotdog machine, where it remains animated long enough to spew up mounds of chunky green sponge. That should give you a pretty good handle on the film's tone, which has touches of Godard (primary colours, saturated lighting), Lynch (lost highways, chthonic motels) and, well... MTV (everything else). It's scuzzy, sexy and often irritatingly indulgent, but you've certainly never seen another end-of-the-world movie like it...

The film begins in a hellish, strobe-satin nightclub, throbbing to the furious strings of Nine Inch Nails' 'Heresy' (from the astonishing 'Downward Spiral' album, whose title is a fitting parallel to our central trio's trajectory). In an interview on the DVD Araki states that The Doom Generation was his "Nine Inch Nails movie", reflective of his tastes and attitudes at the time, and a rebellion against the "cookie-cutter teen movies" offered up by mainstream Hollywood. Naturally then, the teens here are more Kids (Clark, 1995) than Clueless (Heckerling, 1995), indicative of an aimless, despondent generation happy to blitz their way through life on the fuel of pot and sex. They know their time is up. They knew it from the moment Kurt Cobain pursed his lips against that iconic shotgun barrel. Anyhow, it's time I introduced the characters. Amy (Rose McGowan) and Jordan (James Duval) are young lovers (well, they haven't done it yet), the former a bobbed nihilist, the latter a softly-spoken no-hoper. Into their lives drifts Xavier (Jonathan Schaech), the chiseled, psychotic loner who accidentally implicates them in the Quickiemart murder. Over several days they drive across the US, encountering all manner of kooks, freaks and killers along the way...

And that's basically it. There are times when The Doom Generation feels like little more than a pop video - NIN's promos are evoked throughout, especially 'Sin' and 'Wish' - but there's something oddly perfect about that, especially given Araki's choice of music. So often we see filmmakers dump current radio hits over their work, giving little thought to how it affects the film's internal texture. Here we are treated to a soundscape including Slowdive, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Lush, whose cuts can often be heard on car radios, blaring out of clubs or underscoring a dream sequence. This music defines the characters lives. They are a generation raised on comic-books, satellite television, ultra-violence and pornography. They're angry, and so the music (loud and drenched in reverb) is their only escape. It's entirely fitting that Araki's portrait of them should resemble a pop video. After all, the only adults seen in the film are a pair of TV anchors, who lump the kids together by their image, describing their gothic clothing as that "commonly worn by satanists, homosexuals and other dangerous cults." No wonder this is the path they've chosen...

The film's central relationships are a little sketchily drawn - Amy is initially repulsed by the brash Xavier, then succumbs to his charms - but it's made up for by a trio of great performances. McGowan is especially effective here, chewing on Araki's no-shit dialogue with a compelling blend of bubblegum innocence and apathetic barb, reveling in the opportunity to deliver lines like "eat my fuck" and "you're like a life support system for a cock." Schaech is solid as Xavier, but little more is required of him than to look pretty and enigmatic. Perhaps the hardest role falls with Duval, whose naive spirit is corrupted throughout the course of the film. But the actor never portrays Jordan as a whimpering fool, instead playing him as an introspective, soft-skinned lover. He's the most relatable of the gang, and always the anchor Araki returns to when the plotting falls into outright insanity, as it often does (look out for Parker Posey in a particularly eccentric cameo). I'd have appreciated a little more depth to the love triangle, as our understanding of each character is reduced to bite-size exposition chunks (such as the scene in which Amy reveals her backstory; "My Mom used to be a heroin addict, and now she's a Scientologist."), but the film's focus is on atmosphere, not dialogue.

In this sense we should consider the work of genius Production Designer Thérèse DePrez, whose other film credits include I Shot Andy Warhol (Harron, 1996) and American Splendor (Berman, Pulcini, 2003). Her understanding of Araki's world is impeccably measured, realising his gonzo interiors without ever slipping into outright garishness. Her work is excessive yet controlled, perfectly exemplified by the checkered motel room which looks like something from a Lewis Carroll nightmare, yet its minimalist decor ensures that it's never too much for the eye to take. When she does indulge, like in the blood-red motel room adorned with a deer's head, she's also careful to offset the palette with something softer - in this case the sterile white of an adjoining bathroom. Technically The Doom Generation is perfect, finding the exact shade of light in each scene to complement McGowan's pale skin, lush lips and red-tinted bob, allowing her to just... glow. Even if you object to Araki's moral codes (the Nazi themed ending might give some people trouble), nobody could argue the audacity of his visual arrangements, nor their individuality. Welcome to the shoegaze apocalypse...

The Disc/Extras

A spotless restoration which only raises the question: why no Blu-Ray? Araki's film is so beautiful that it's hard not to feel short-changed by the decision to only re-release it on DVD. For an independent film it looks extraordinary, with the colour and lighting really coming alive in this new edition. The sound is also crisp and clear, especially noticeable when NIN are blasting out full-throttle in the opening scene. On the disc there's a lively, revealing chat with Araki, although the commentary track, with the director and his three stars, is a little disappointing. They have so much fun re-watching the movie and guffawing at its one-liners that they forget to actually, well, commentate, and subsequently it offers nothing revealing to warrant a listen. It's nice to hear how much passion everyone still has for the project, but their frequently overlapping conversation is too chaotic to engage, and ultimately it feels like a wasted opportunity.

The Doom Generation is released on DVD on March 26th...

Love On A Pillow (Roger Vadim, 1962) DVD Review

Brigitte Bardot stars in Love On A Pillow (1962)...

In his 1972 biography Brigitte Bardot: Eternal Sex Goddess, Peter Evans shares a quote about the purring icon from millinery designer Jean Barrate, who compares watching her graceful pirouettes to "observing the magnificent lines of a hammerhead shark from behind bullet-proof glass." Bardot was 14 at the time, but at the age of 28 she took the lead in a featherweight rom-com called Love On A Pillow, in which she played the beautiful socialite Geneviève, obscuring behind her poised, bourgeoisie exterior the full-blooded amour of a Great White. The film's director is Roger "Barbarella" Vadim, her ex-husband, but also the acclaimed auteur behind And God Created... Woman (1956), the incestuous ménage-à-trois picture which established her sex kitten status. Here he frames Bardot like a middle-class angel, in one scene (pictured above) gazing at her bathing nude before the glow of a roaring flame, her silken skin illuminated by its aroused embers. Even if the film isn't up to match, it's one of the sexiest scenes in BB's career.

Geneviève is visiting Paris to collect on the six-figure inheritance left by an obscure (yet rich) aunt, but upon arriving in the city she's drawn into the despairing world of Renaud (Robert Hossein), the suave sociopath whom she saves from suicide. It's one of the odder meet-cutes I can remember. What emerges between the pair isn't so much attraction as perverse fascination, kindled by the apparent danger each holds for the other. For him Geneviève is a pouting blonde sent from the heavens; an intoxicant, like his favoured whiskey, to aid an escape from reality. For her Renaud represents something exotic; an enigma who breaks every standard set by her shallow material lifestyle. She breaks from fiancée Pierre (Jean-Marc Bory) and holes up with the self-loathing drifter, whiling away days by making love and arguing in her lush boutique of an apartment. All the while they fall deeper and deeper into the nihilistic pit formed by Renaud, and as he begins writing crummy detective fiction the happy façade slips away...

As rom-coms go Love On A Pillow is an attractive little trifle, but perhaps it's better approached as some kind of autobiographical fantasy for writer/director Vadim, whose obsession with Bardot ran far beyond their intense, albeit fleeting marriage. The filmmaker first noticed BB when she posed, aged 15, for an Elle cover. She became his pin-up girl, but that wasn't enough for this renowned lothario - he wanted the real thing. They were married shortly after her 18th birthday, but they'd be divorced by the time And God Created... Woman, his paean to her curvy mystique, had wrapped. For years afterward they made films together, and in each one he re-painted her persona, re-addressed his love through the most lavish, bare-skinned fiction possible. Here Vadim's camera trails after Bardot like a love-sick puppy, in one scene applying it in close-up to her plush lips and attentive eyes; Love On A Pillow seems almost like his way of saying, "come back to me." And he's in the film too, of course, represented by the womanizing Renaud, who fights with himself and forces this woman - this rich, well-mothered woman (reflecting Bardot's own upbringing) - to lose her self worth, turning her into little more than his 5'7" plaything.

Godard's Le mépris (1963) would allow Bardot to challenge her star image, but Love On A Pillow best defines her star appeal, as Vadim drapes her in soft, pastel-like tones of green and blue, emphasizing her voluptuous chest and flowing gold locks. Collaborating with DP Armand Thirard (Clouzot's regular cinematographer) the director composes some gorgeous images, especially when playing with soft focus lenses and foregrounding Geneviève in an otherwise obscure frame. Pillow's colours practically bleed from the screen, but then Vadim has always been an extraordinary (and underrated) visual stylist. Watching Bardot friskily vacuuming her apartment in the buff I remembered Barbarella's iconic opening, in which Jane Fonda floats around her zero-gravity boudoir in all her *ahem* glory, and that the scene had appeared not trashy but, well... classy. Vadim achieves much the same effect here, but some poor scripting means that there's precious little else to recommend Pillow for - Bardot's film career was not a shy one, and there's nothing on offer here you can't glimpse elsewhere, and with a better story to boot...

The Disc/Extras

Optimum Entertainment are well known for their high-quality restorations, and although the colours in Love On A Pillow look astonishing (why no Blu-Ray?) there seems to have been some irrecoverable damage done to the print, with some smudging and fading occasionally noticeable in the frame. It's only very minor, but given how lavish the film looks - from sets to costumes to, well, Bardot - the damage appears more prominent. Anyhow, there's very little reason to recommend this disc straight off the shelf as there are no extras to justify its £15.99 RRP; it's the definition of vanilla, not even providing an original trailer or simple stills gallery. A missed opportunity indeed.

Love On A Pillow is released on DVD on March 19th. This review can originally be found at Flickfeast...

Bestiaire (Denis Côté, 2012) Review

A scene from Denis Côté's Bestiaire (2012)...

Canadian auteur Denis Côté has always been fascinated by the people on society's fringe, but in his latest picture - the sort-of-documentary Bestiaire - he challenges our basic perception of the outcast, or more specifically, the voyeur. Across 72 transfixing minutes Côté observes the animals in Quebec's Park Safari, but the topic of his study remains unknown. A little research unearths that the director didn't approach Bestiaire with any thesis, suggesting that the film emerged from his desire to explore "certain energies", and to observe "the relations or maybe even failed encounters between humans and animals." As a documentary it's completely open-ended, free of dialogue, commentary or even subject - what we are watching is a construct, but its content is open to interpretation and debate. For instance, some have suggested that the film presents an anti-zoo stance. Does it? One shot, locked onto a panel of four CCTV cameras, each flickering with the grey image of inmates pacing their cells, might suggest as much, as could the emphasis on a padlock in a later scene, and the lion furiously pawing at its cage doors, crying freedom. Ultimately I believe that Côté's perspective is neutral, but one of Bestiaire's fascinations is deciding when and where (if at all) the director is engaging with what lies before his camera. The film's final third observes the animals during visiting hours (another term suggesting imprisonment), but Côté's choice of lens emphasizes lions and children equally, and one shot - of the kids playing and mimicking each other - might provoke discussion about the borders of captivity; are we trapped in their world, or they in ours? Côté's subjects frequently meet his gaze, and for the bulls at Park Safari, he is the entertainment.

Forty minutes into the film Côté makes his first consciously cinematic transition, fading the image to black and re-opening in a taxidermist's studio. The animals here, as in the zoo, are surveyed through rhythmically arranged static shots, each held for around thirty seconds. I'm still unsure of Côté's intention with these scenes, but they sustained my interest, which was piqued from the opening frame of artists sketching a stuffed deer. It's a most unusual prospect for cinema, the art of the voyeur, to invite an audience into the auditorium to be looked at, and to observe others looking. There is no score here, only the pronounced use of diegetic sound (as in Côté's fiction filmmaking), and often the noises of Park Safari achieve an odd poetry; the clapping of zebra's hooves, for example, which hypnotize like a frenzied tap dance. There's so much to consider in Bestiaire, and yet no real way to sell its fascination to an audience who aren't immediately caught by its premise: exploring the established line of sight between animals and humans. One of my favorite scenes in Côté's Curling (2010), an eerily downbeat study of a father/daughter on the edge of reality, involves an imprisoned tiger, regarded with fearful curiosity by the 12-year-old Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau). In that surreal moment (it's entirely debatable whether the tiger exists) Côté captures an unknowing innocence, and that very quality seems to be his motivation for Bestiaire, a tender portrait of the most beautiful, fragile and complex phenomena on Earth. Life.

Bestiaire premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. A UK release date is yet to be confirmed...

Chung Kuo China (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972) DVD Review

A scene from Antonioni's sprawling epic Chung Kuo China (1972)...

Between the shooting of Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975), Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni was invited by China's Maoist government to film an ethnographic documentary (read: propaganda) celebrating the great Chung Kuo (Middle Empire), the result of which was this controversial three-part epic. The film was rejected by the Chinese government upon completion, branded anti-communist by Chairman Mao, who succeeded in banning it from exhibition. Only in 2004 was Chung Kuo China first screened in Beijing, and it now arrives on UK shores courtesy of Mr Bongo, specialists in world cinema (last year they distributed Martin Scorsese's epic My Voyage To Italy, 1999). Naturally I met news of this release with excitment, but the film - even discounting Antonioni's strictly enforced shooting itinerary, government-imposed - is an incredible disappointment, spanning 220-minutes with what amounts to little more than a collection of holiday snaps...

Admittedly, Antonioni does prefigure this journey with a statement freeing himself of any educational responsibility, admitting that the film was not conceived with the intention of informing, but rather observing. "We're not pretending to understand China", he says, suggesting that the film's ultimate goal is to present "a large collection of faces, gestures and customs." This being the case, what one might hope to find in Chung Kuo China is a portrait of life across the country's various regions; a depiction of their classes, politics, religions and families. Through the Venice-like canals of Suzhou, past the Nanjing bridge and right up to the bustling city of Shanghai, Antonioni leaves no stone unturned, but the smallest of artistic decisions makes this expedition more of a chore than I'd ever have considered possible. So many scenes depend on language - children singing songs for Chairman Mao, the meeting in a Beijing park to discuss art, and a conference, this time in a small agricultural village, to consider the upcoming harvest season - but Antonioni decides not to subtitle their conversations, instead relying on his own dry narration to illustrate each sequence. Could this be to locate us in the director's own foreign shoes? Or perhaps it's another condition of Mao's regime? Either way the audience can only infer so much from gesture, and the feeling of alienation which arises from each scene becomes incredibly wearing over the course of three hours.

Antonioni's subjects are also frequently perplexing, particularly the extended sequence of a young woman undergoing a Caesarean section. The purpose of the scene is to acknowledge Chinese methods of anesthesia (acupuncture), but it runs into such explicit - and unnecessary - detail that I began to ache for a stricter editorial hand, or at least a more focused one. The film really comes alive when exploring the nooks and crannies of each city, such as a beautiful antique trading store in Beijing, or the wonderful performance at a local puppet theatre. It'd also be unfair to deny the sheer power of some of Antonioni's compositions (especially around the Great Wall), and his attention to detail ensures that each location feels well mined by the time we relocate. Chung Kuo is essentially a mosaic, cut to the same dreamlike rhythm of the director's fictional work (notably 1964's The Red Desert), but too often I found myself wishing for something more organized; less sprawling and more adhesive. Observing the culture is inherently interesting, but if we never learn anything about it, how useful can this observation possibly be?

The film might be best watched on a double-bill with Zhang Ke Jia's The World (2004), another ethnographic docu (sort of) about China's The World Theme Park, which showcases miniature reconstructions of global landmarks; The Notre Dame, The Leaning Tower Of Pisa and The Twin Towers ("we still have ours") among them. It's a fascinating little film, mocking of China's aspiration toward Western ideals and technologies, but also of The World itself, which is the country's most profoundly sad modernization. It's designed as a tourist locale, arranged to inspire an interest in culture, but its very existence draws sightseers away from the real China, which becomes increasingly stripped of its own identity year by year. Both films are highly relevant time capsules, but in Chung Kuo China Antonioni is straightjacketed by his hosts. Even so, we can glimpse traces of the world which would provide Ke Jia with his subject 32 years later. Much has changed, but it appears that China is still caught between traditions old and new, wrestling with its own self-image and fighting to build a future it hasn't yet settled on...

The Disc/Extras

Unfortunately the film appears to have suffered irrevocable print damage, exhibiting serious grain and infrequent flickering issues. Antonioni's compositions can be quite striking, but they're dogged by this poor transfer, which I don't doubt Mr Bongo has fought hard to rectify - the damage here has built over year's of negligence. The sound mix, however, is crisp and clear. Perhaps most baffling is the complete lack of extras. There's a fascinating story behind the making of Chung Kuo China, and yet nothing here - no talking heads, no booklet - to shed any light on the rich history of what was once considered a lost masterpiece. The film isn't up to that standard in my opinion, but in any case this release can't shake the feeling of being a bit of a missed opportunity.

Chung Kuo China is released on DVD on March 5th...