Reviews

Hana-Bi convinced me that Takeshi Kitano was an excellent actor, but I was less sure of him as a director. Sonatine convinced me that he's a talented director, too.

Whether acting or behind the camera, understatement seems to be Kitano's strongest asset. It is put to much use in this understated film.

There are some scenes which are visually memorable, such as the firework fight on the beach or the final bloodbath, which is dealt with so obliquely that it's shot from outside the building it takes place in.

Still more impressive are the emotional spaces that the film maps out. Unacted-on feelings and unfelt actions.

Since Sonatine is about a man who find change impossible, I wonder from my Western viewpoint whether it looked ahead in any way to the social change in Japan which has recently been reported.

In any case, after watching Sonatine, I see where Takeshi Kitano's reputation came from.

This is a bleak, occasionally funny film, a little flawed by its obsessive mentality but worth seeing.

We follow an IT trainer barely holding down his job, struggling against loneliness, endlessly diagnosing the pointlessness of it all. Perhaps not entirely new territory for a French film - similar ground was covered not long ago by Cédric Kahn's L'Ennui. But there's enough observational wit here to hold our interest throughout, and the slightly unconvincing mid-section is compensated for by closing scenes that hit the right note.

The character's dislike of women is the film's most disturbing element. His hypotheses, while sometimes wild enough to entertain, are unlikely to be totally shared by the viewer. The shots of trains travelling to industrial parks made me think of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards and if you find something profound about multi-storey car parks, this is the film for you. There are also incidental treats such as the intriguingly dull food that "Our Hero" eats and his disgustingly nicotine-stained fingers.

A broad range of people linked to the current and past techno scene have made it into the film and it would be mean not to note how great Holger Czukay's dancing is. But the publicity for Modulations says it "traces the evolution of electronic music", which is not quite true. There's quite a leap from the jumble of clips involving Pierre Henry and John Cage into the familiar material on disco, Kraftwerk and Derrick May.

A more serious documentary might have challenged what the techno movement has to say about itself. Techno's rhetoric is borrowed from the modernists of the 50s and 60s, but maybe the real story is a more familiar one for pop music: the dancefloor's appetite for the next big thing.

Billed as a highlight of this year's Martell French Film tour of the UK, Fidelity runs for slightly over three hours. But despite its length, it tackles far too much. I could list off a dozen themes from it but it's hard enough making this readable. I liked Sophie Marceau and Pascal Greggory but characterisation is not a strong point of this film.

La Fidélité's ambitions, some of its subject matter, and the fact that it's three hours long, are a bit like another recent French film, Pola X. That film was even more over the top and over-reaching. Also, it didn't have Sophie Marceau, and it was, frankly, mad. So arguably Pola X was a worse flop than this film, but it had visual imagination. Which went a long way, and left me feeling less conned than I did after three hours of this.

I saw Rosetta 3 or 4 months ago and it has stayed vividly in my mind. I would like to respond to two other commentaries here which compare Rosetta to earlier films.

One commentary compares it to Nights of Cabiria. But this is no pastoral fantasy like the Fellini. Another contributor calls Rosetta a fake Bresson. Presumably the point of comparison is with Bresson's Mouchette, and it's a good comparison to make, but I don't think it is one that diminishes Rosetta. Both Mouchette and Rosetta capture the flow of time and the characters' interior worlds realistically, but with realisms which are quite different. Mouchette's struggle is a spiritual one; Rosetta's struggle is with her physical conditions.

To make a comparison of my own, albeit an off-the-wall one, Rosetta's determination is strangely like the pure will-power that Lee Marvin demonstrates, barging into the Organisation's HQ in Point Blank. Maybe this forceful quality is what makes it a "war film".

The film-makers do the opposite of sentimentalising Rosetta's conditions as Fellini would have done. Arguably, they even go past Bresson, if you tend to a materialist rather than a religious point of view. They argue how poverty operates, how surviving it involves anger.

There is one moment when Rosetta slips in a lake and we understand exactly at the moment she does, that she may in fact drown. Not a moment that's easy to forget.