MovieBuff

These just in ...

I’ve been lax in my cinema-going of late. This past month, the Christmas shopping crowds have led me to absent myself from the city centre and my local multiplex. I’m hoping to take in a screening of Flags of Our Fathers tomorrow; my last cinema visit of 2006. So, to clear the decks before my best and worst of the year round-up on New Year’s Eve, here’s the last few stragglers. Two of these should have had stand-alone reviews. What can I say? With work on the novel progressing apace, plus entertaining friends over Christmas and a little soiree planned at MovieBuff Towers for New Year, time has not been on my side …

Children of Men. Alfonso Cuaron’s filmography is proving eclectic to say the least – who else could go from rites-of-passage sex comedy (Y Tu Mama Tambien) to Harry Potter franchise (H.P. and the Something of Whatever). The one constant in all this is a sense of darkness trying to subsume a fragile patina of hope. Children of Men, from the novel by P.D. James, is his darkest work to date, a mordant fantasia on a totalitarian society – but the small core of hope which glimmers dimly at the end is all the more poignant for the darkness that has gone before. Cuaron depicts Britain a few decades hence: there have been no pregnancies, no children born, for eighteen years. The youngest person on earth has just died in a nightclub brawl. Terrorist bombs explode. The government indulges free rein in persecuting ethnic minorities and free-thinkers. Former activist turned desk-jockey Theodore (Clive Owen) finds himself draw back to the cause by his erstwhile lover Julian (Julianne Moore) who is sworn to protect a young woman who has found herself miraculously with child. Now the government and any number of underground factions battle for ownership of the child – not for the fact of its life, but for its importance as a political symbol. Owen turns in the performance of his career, Moore is compelling, and Michael Caine is lively and sympathetic as an ageing hippie. The mise-en-scenes are gritty, in-your-face and urgent, the film-makers’ vision uncompromising, their morality and intelligence evident in every frame.

Pan’s Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro returns to his homeland after two Hollywood outings (Blade 2 and Hellboy) for this Mexican/Spanish co-production. Set in Franco’s Spain, the story centres around a young girl, Ofelia (an astonishing performance from 12-year-old Ivana Baquero), who is sent with her heavily pregnant and recently widowed mother to live with the sadistic Captain Vidal (Sergei Lopez). While Vidal ruthlessly hunts down a network of freedom fighters who have decamped to the hills, Ofelia retreats into a world of fairytales – or rather, the world of fairytales comes creeping into her world. In del Toro’s hands, the brutal realism of the war scenes doesn’t just sit side by side with the fantasy sequences – the two meld into each other, the world of Ofelia’s imagination (or is it?) twisting and turning and reshaping almost in response to the world of Lopez’s tyranny. The imagery is poetical, startling, creepy and challenging by turns. A sense of ambiguity snakes like tendrils through the very fabric of the film. Pan’s Labyrinth is dark, strange, poignant and beautiful. As just about every other reviewer on the face of the planet has pointed out, it’s del Toro’s masterpiece.

29.12.06 23:38