EDITOR'S CHOICE NEWS Winston proposes 100 years after Churchill CRICKET CRICKET: Boardman's century boosts Westbury CRICKET: Super Bicester knock holders out of cup CINEMA The Cool School, A Walk into the Sea, Black and White + Gray, and Little Box of Sweets VOTE Should more no cold-calling zones be set up? Yes No Don't know GET OUR NEWS BY E-MAIL Just register

Most read Comments 1 GCSE: Delight as results set record 2 Man stopped rage attack 3 GCSE: Top marks for schools 4 GCSE: Anxious wait ends 5 Detention centre inspires novel 6 Lewis backs boatyard 7 Boy, 14, charged with knife offence 8 Bingo woman wins £61,000 9 Arsonists attack cars in Jericho 10 The Dark Knight Today | 7 Days 1 Boy, 14, charged with knife offence 2 Despair as drug ruled too expensive 3 Police seize 6,000 cars 4 No escort for troops' bodies

Comment

Tom Kalin was part of the 1990s generation of independent American film-makers who promised to bring a touch of intellectual chic to their acerbic studies of bourgeois foible. However, like contemporaries Jon Jost, Hal Hartley and Whit Stillman, Kalin has failed to build on his early promise and it's hard to believe that Savage Grace was made by the same director as Swoon (1992), a stylish biopic of the infamous 1920s Chicago killers, Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb.

Once again, Kalin has chosen to dramatise events involving historical characters. But Antony Baekeland's relationships with his needy mother Barbara and distracted father Brooks seem to matter less than the detailed depiction of the decadence and dysfunction that rent them apart in the decades before Barbara's murder by her son's hand in November 1972. Consequently, instead of a cogent narrative exploring the psychology behind the family's inescapable disintegration, we get a series of tortuous vignettes exquisitely staged in swish settings like London, Paris and New York that are pompously scripted, archly enacted and utterly devoid of anything approaching real life.

The great shame is that the cast keeps suggesting it could have done much more than simply strike pretentious poses. When not queening it over high society or louchely flirting with incest, Julianne Moore permits the occasional glimpse of Barbara's isolation and despair, while Stephen Dillane captures something of Brooks's awareness that he had wasted his life in coasting along on the fortune made by the grandfather who had invented Bakelite.

But neither Barney Clark nor Eddie Redmayne convinces as the feckless Tony, who persuades himself that his parents must be to blame for his own lack of personality and direction. There may well be a fascinating film to be made about the Baekelands, but one suspects that their skeletons would be most tellingly exposed in a dispassionate documentary.

Cuban auteur Tomás Gutiérrez Alea comes much closer to understanding the subtle complexities of class in Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), one of two exceptional oldies back on release in London this week.

Slyly satirical and immensely courageous in its critique of the hollow triumphs of the Castro regime, this landmark of 1960s political cinema is very much a product of its time. Sergio Corrieri excels as the cynic whose fling with teenager Daisy Granados epitomises the marginalisation of the bourgeoisie, while Alea's use of secondary material to counterpoint his fragmented narrative recalls New Wavers like Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais.

However, this dissertation on a self-obsessed writer struggling to adapt to the realities of the revolution that has driven his family into exile and rendered him all-but-extraneous still has a powerful relevance in a world where the democratisation of society has seen ideas replaced by indifference and action by atrophy. Rarely has propaganda conveyed such mixed messages or been so consistently entertaining.

Akira Kurosawa ostensibly took a more populist approach to dissecting Japanese society in Ikiru (1952). But this sublime study of a withered soul is much more than an arthouse tearjerker. Made two years after the structurally innovative Rashomon, this deeply moving melodrama continued Kurosawa's one-man revolt against narrative linearity. He divides the action into three segments that respectively satirise local government bureaucracy, chronicle pen-pusher Takashi Shimura's reaction to the news that he's dying of cancer and reveal how he started serving his community after vowing to live his last days to the full. But, while the tone consistently shifts, Kurosawa sustains his empathetic insight into the essential decency of a man whose atonement for a wasted existence is symbolised by the playground reprise of the melancholic ditty he had sung in the depths of his drunken despair during a wild night on the tiles.

There are sentimental lapses. But this is a masterpiece of humanist cinema and it's a shame that Kurosawa never achieved such cine-intimacy again.

5:09pm Wednesday 9th July 2008

Print

Email this

Comment

Add your comment

Name:
Email: *
Location:
**
	e.g. 123-123
Comment: Please note: All HTML tags will be ignored. Format Text:
By posting a comment, I confirm that I have read and agree to the terms of use. Comments are not moderated but we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention and we may delete inappropriate postings. Please treat other people with respect. You must not post anything that is abusive, indecent, unlawful or defamatory. Remember, you are personally liable for what you post on this site. If you wish to complain about a comment, contact us here.
* Your email address will not be displayed ** To avoid register now or login