Telezynski Interview.

            Cinema is a notoriously difficult industry in which to break through. Like all art, it is intrinsically subjective, so an enormous amount of hard work, luck and ambition are required if one is to stand out from the crowd. Lincoln-based filmmaker Bertie Telezynski is one such person, a man who at the tender age of 22 has directed four award-winning short films, and is now in pre-production on his debut feature.

            Bertie’s remarkably swift ascent began in his second year of university with the production of King Cone (2009), a short documentary about Gloucestershire’s David Morgan and his record-breaking collection of traffic cones. ‘We entered the BFI Film Futures contest almost on a whim,’ recalls Telezynski. ‘We never expected to win it. After that, things just seemed to snowball. It opened the door to a lot of smaller festivals; we had screenings at the London Short Film Festival and the Screentest Festival in 2010.’

            The success of King Cone was quickly followed up by Launderette (2010), a second documentary produced in compliance with the university’s degree structure. Following the evening denizens of a pokey Oxford launderette, the film provides an often poignant insight into the lives of everyday people. ‘I think the reason Launderette was so successful is because it’s real. Everyone has met people like those in the film, or has heard stories like theirs. The idea that you could find such profound experiences in somewhere as mundane as a launderette really spoke to people.’ The format clearly worked, as Launderette went on to premiere at Edinburgh’s prestigious International Film Festival, as well as winning Bertie his second BFI award in as many years.

            Since achieving so much with his documentaries, Telezynski has turned his hand to the hotly contested territory of narrative cinema, along with frequent collaborator and cinematographer Alex Nevill. His first short, The Siren (2010), achieved considerable success in some of the smaller UK-based film festivals, and Bertie has high hopes for his latest narrative, My Life in Cat Years (2011). ‘It’s always an anxious time, waiting to hear back from the festivals. We’ve set our sights very high this time, but we learnt with King Cone that it pays to be optimistic. I think Cat Years has a good festival life ahead of it. We’ve entered Edinburgh again, along with Venice, Raindance and the BFI London. Getting any of those would be a real achievement.’

            Along with My Life in Cat Years, Telezynski’s graduation piece – ­an insightful documentary entitled Blue and the Bughouse (2011) _ is currently active on the festival circuit. Having now graduated, Bertie has returned to his native Lincoln in order to work on his debut feature. ‘I see film as an amalgamation of all the art forms. You can have an excellent score, script, performance or set design and that may ensure a good film, but to be truly filmic transcends that. You need to tick all the boxes. I fell in love with the organic process inherent in documentary filmmaking and want to bring an element of that to the feature. It’s likely to be less scripted, less structured than I’m used to.’

Bertie on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user2572335

Bertie on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4236958/

Cedar Rapids.

Cedar Rapids (2011)

Dir. Miguel Arteta

15

           

            This week sees the release of Miguel Arteta’s Cedar Rapids (2011) on DVD, a film that hit our screens back in April to almost universally lukewarm acclaim. Cedar Rapids was billed as a Hangover-esque buddy comedy, the sort of film that ordinarily would have slipped beneath my radar like a greased U-Boat had it not been for the added cachet of a Sundance official selection laurel.

            Ed Helms stars as Tim Lippe, a sheltered and childlike man who finds himself the unexpected benefactor of a career-changing opportunity. Lippe is forced to step out of his comfort zone and attend an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; a place of brash personalities and impenetrable cliques.  At first, the convention is an affront to Tim’s delicate sensibilities and a harsh contrast to the sleepy, unchanging world he inhabited back in Wisconsin. With the help of his newfound friends Joan (Anne Heche), Ronald (Isiah Whitlock) and the irrepressible Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), Tim is drawn from his shell and embarks on a life-changing whirlwind of debauchery. Along the way, Lippe is confronted with a number of moral decisions that have a great bearing on his own life, and those of the people around him.

            I was pleasantly surprised by Cedar Rapids. Despite the fact that some of the humour was of the ubiquitous Hangover school, laughs were plentiful, helped considerably by an energetic and charismatic performance from Reilly. The film is primarily a character piece; some of the scenes between Lippe and the seductive, worldly Joan Ostrowski-Fox are very nicely handled and Arteta has done an exemplary job of capturing the nervous, almost surreal excitement of a fledgling relationship. Despite this, Cedar Rapids suffers from a tendency to cross the line into the overblown; it’s let down in parts by some unnecessarily frantic set pieces that disrupt the film’s carefully constructed world. Overall though, Cedar Rapids has more to offer than your standard Hollywood fare, as the Sundance connection would suggest there’s a great deal here for fans of quirky, character-driven comedy.

Gainsbourg.

Film: Gainsbourg

Year of production: 2010

UK Release date: 30^th July 2010

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Certificate: 15

Running time: 117mins

Director: Joann Sfar

Starring: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta

Genre: Biopic

Format: DVD

Country of production: France

Language: French

Writers Name: Joann Sfar

            Gainsbourg is the directorial debut of acclaimed graphic artist Joann Sfar, who took the brave step of bringing to the screen the life of one of France’s most celebrated icons. The film is an adaptation of Sfar’s graphic novel on the French crooner, and benefits from a suitably artistic level of stylisation.

            The film charts the life of Serge Gainsbourg, a musician responsible for penning some of the most memorable melodies to come out of the 1960s. Starting out with his precocious and formative childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris, Gainsbourg follows Serge on his self-destructive path to pop stardom and back, taking in a veritable who’s who of ‘60s pop-culture icons along the way.

           

            Sfar takes an early opportunity to introduce the audience to the major influences in the life of the young Serge. Gainsbourg has an irrepressible creativity, a confrontational nature and, perhaps most importantly, a preoccupation with his body image and identity. The yoke of Nazi occupation is manifest in Serge’s Paris, and his obsession with his own ‘Jewishness’ begins to take physical shape in the form of a grotesque fascist parody that stalks him as he walks the city streets. Eventually, the creature metamorphoses into the hideous ‘Gainsbarre’ (Doug Jones), alter-ego to the real-life Gainsbourg and the literal representation of his darker impulses.

            We are briefly treated to images of Serge as a pupil, where his skills as an artist and willingness to create erotic images for his classmates hint at his future lifestyle. Flash forward to art school, where those selfsame talents, coupled with his burgeoning music career, begin to win Serge many admirers, in spite of his ‘ugly mug’. The film is peppered with appearances by the manipulative spectre of Gainsbarre, whom many viewers will recognise from Doug Jones’ performance as the faun in Pan’s Labyrinth (2007). Gainsbarre begins to coerce Serge into indulging his dark side, and his successes as a musician plot a parallel course to his growing infamy.

            Inflated with his own success and notoriety, Gainsbourg embarks on a series of high-profile affairs and collaborations with some of the most glamorous women of the era; Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis), Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon). The audience are treated to Sfar’s take on the creation of some of Gainsbourg’s most enduring tracks, including ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, ‘Comic Strip’, and ‘Je t’aime… Moi Non Plus’, which he created with these women as his muses and collaborators.

            As Gainsbourg’s career reaches the crest of its mighty arc, Serge finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish himself from Gainsbarre. His relationships begin to implode around him, and he seems to court controversy at every step. Eventually, the cumulative effects of his debauched lifestyle take their toll and Serge suffers a cardiac episode. This marks the downswing of his career and his life spirals towards an inevitably self-destructive climax.

           

            Gainsbourg is a very daring piece of cinema; not often is a biopic so explicitly fantastical. Sfar plays on Gainsbourg’s legendary status to create a film that weaves between the realms of fantasy and reality in its depiction of a real-life icon. It’s peculiar to see Serge, whose life reads like an elaborate fiction anyway, refracted through the imaginative lens of a graphic artist. The scenes with Doug Jones’ Gainsbarre are pure fantasy and the appearance of Bardot in Gainsbourg’s artists’ residence is also inescapably filmic. Despite this, Sfar has a tendency to rationalise also. There are moments, including Serge’s drunken late-night confrontation with an enraged Jane Birkin, when you could be fooled into thinking you were watching a straight biopic. The real-life Gainsbourg was such a larger-than-life figure that he can be lionised and demonised in equal measure. When Sfar strays from this portrayal and seeks to humanise him, the film begins to lose its way. The fantasy and surreal elements of the film are very much integrated into the main narrative, but it is unclear quite what Sfar intended by them. At first, the fantastical scenarios and characters are clearly figments of Serge’s imagination, but as Gainsbarre gains prominence and influence, this becomes less evident. In reality, Gainsbourg used the name to refer to his abhorrent behaviour when drunk, but in keeping with the man’s legend, Sfar has created a Jeykll-and-Hyde-esque dual personality. As a result, Gainsbourg’s onscreen world is somewhat confusing.

            Plaudits are due to Eric Elmosnino, who inhabits Gainsbourg in a wholly believable way. Elmosnino bears more than a passing resemblance to the real-life Serge, and coupled with a good bit of costume design and the ubiquitous Gitanes perched in the corner of his mouth, the similarities are striking. Unfortunately, Elmosnino’s performance is perhaps the only consistent element of the film. He embodies the seemingly effortless cool of the French icon, and the same can be said for Laetitia Casta’s Bardot. Their performances ground the film in a recognisable time and place, but Gainsbourg just seems a little unsure of itself. The fantastical nature of the adaptation deserve complete commitment, but have to battle for screen time with the portrayal of Gainsbourg’s remarkable life. As a result, both suffer.

            Gainsbourg promises a lot, but unfortunately never quite delivers. As one would expect, the soundtrack is fantastic and interwoven with cues taken from the musician’s original work; no fan of Serge’s can fail to be floored when the string section from ‘Initials B.B’ strikes up for the first time. It’s clear that the project has been undertaken with a great deal of love; what the film lacks in succinctness it makes up for in sincerity. Serge lived a fascinating life through some of the most tumultuous years of the 20th century and this is a novel and adventurous re-imagining of that life, but ultimately Gainsbourg feels like what it is; an all too ambitious and confused undertaking for a debut director.

A fortnight in the Orient.

     Last month, I spent a fortnight in China's Zhejiang province, visiting my girlfriend who has been studying there for the better part of a year. There's a saying in China, which translates roughly as 'above is Heaven, below is Hangzhou' and it isn't difficult to see how it might have originated. Zhejiang's capital city is renowned for its beauty throughout China; a prosperous city sprawled laconically around the picturesque West Lake and surround by dreamy, mist - shrouded hills. I've always been a bit of a country boy and tend to feel nervous and claustrophobic in cities, so it was a relief to have fresh air and green spaces within easy reach. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to adjust at first. The City itself has a population of 3.9 million, relatively small by Chinese standards, but still, preposterously, almost four times as populous as Birmingham. To make matters worse, I was visiting during China's annual Dragon Boat Festival, so the region was bloated with domestic tourists. I had to keep reminding myself that I was in a different continent to my own, and to make a conscious effort to assimilate into a drastically different culture. 

     To an outsider, in particular an Englishman, China's cultural nuances can be very difficult to come to terms with. Chinese commuters will think nothing of jostling and pushing to the front of a bus queue or through the doors of a train, and that came as a bit of a shock to my delicate English sensibilities. Worse, though, was their unabashed fascination with Westerners. At first I found the attention novel and flattering; I spent the first three days or so swanning around in my sunglasses being photographed and pretending I was someone important. Very quickly, though, it became wearing. It's one thing to be the focus of peoples' attention in a small, parochial village, but quite another when you're in an enormous, multicultural city  and people are taking pictures of you with their iPhones. It isn't so bad as to be intimidating, but it's certainly invasive. That said, I found that people were uniformly friendly and welcoming; I never felt uneasy as I have in some European cities. Shops stay open later in China, and as a result you'll see families out and about late into the evening. The streets aren't solely the domain of drunks after 11pm as you'd find in the U.K; it's very refreshing to see.

     Unfortunately, I'm not in any position to give a purely unbiased view of Zhejiangese cuisine; being a vegetarian meant that my options were distinctly limited. My Chinese is so terrible as to be borderline offensive, so I was left to sit and smile inanely in restaurants as my girlfriend explained that 'he's a vegetarian... that means he doesn't eat meat' and that 'no, he isn't a monk, he's my boyfriend.' It turns out that a great deal of the flavour in Zhejiang's food is provided by the meat; they don't have the variety and spices of Szechuan or other such regions. As a result, I found myself eating a huge amount of largely flavourless veg. I'm reluctant to admit the amount of times we resorted to eating at Pizza Hut, but if you've ever tried boiled bamboo flesh you'll understand. Zhejiangese cuisine is often described as 'fresh, tender and smooth with a mellow fragrance'; I'm afraid to say the subtleties were somewhat lost on me.

     A mere two hours away from Hangzhou is the mountain resort of Moganshan. Moganshan was a getaway for the wealthy of Shanghai during the early part of the twentieth century, with a considerable number of British and American families establishing summer homes on the cool slopes of the mountain. These wealthy families fled their homes in the late '40s with Communism on the rise, and as a result some of the houses still stand intact, eerily unoccupied and surrounded by overgrown Bamboo. One such building, undoubtedly magnificent in its day, still had shoes stacked neatly in one of the cupboards, gathering dust. It was a truly surreal and affecting sight, like stumbling across a disused film set. The mountain is easily walkable from the village below, even for someone as feeble as me, and the walk itself is beautiful, despite the abundance of insect life and the inescapable reek of rotting bamboo. Despite its relative proximity to Hangzhou, Moganshan was almost deserted at the time of our visit. We stayed in the Moganshan Natural Home Inn, a picturesque and well-appointed hostel in which we were the only guests. The contrast between the bustle of Hangzhou and the calm of the mountain was both marked and welcome.