There’s a scene early in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend in which Russell (Tom Cullen), a handsome, semi-closeted gay man, patrols the local indoor swimming pool where he works. He plods around the pool perimeter and then looks on pensively from the lifeguard’s chair while a younger guy playfully offers a towel to another guy, perhaps his boyfriend. Then there’s a long shot of Russell keeping watch taken from the other end of the pool – arms folded, in the centre of the frame, standing under a sign that says ‘DEEP END’. Just after this we watch his bored, impassive face while he overhears a workmate in the midst of a staffroom brag about how many fingers he can get inside his girlfriend.

The scene reiterates what we already know about Russell: he’s a brooder, he feels like an outsider and he treads an ambivalent line when it comes to the public management of his sexuality; and, after spending the previous night with Glen (Chris New) – a caustic but magnetic art student whose current project involves taping his conquests talking about their night together – he’s in the emotional deep end. Shit is going to float to the surface.

Weekend is a two-hander with a superbly simple narrative about the passionate but short-lived hook up between these two men. It’s an exercise familiar from a lot of other low-budget cinema: the two-people-talking-and-fucking-in-an-apartment movie. Comparisons have been made to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and it’s a valid correlation. Weekend is like Before Sunrise but with more drugs, facial hair, and gritty hand-held camera shots of council estate apartments and restless youth, all of which feel surprisingly authentic and refreshingly un-self-conscious.

This queer brief encounter starts in a trashy gay nightclub in Nottingham on a Friday night and unfolds in real-time increments over the course of the film’s eponymous weekend. Russell is affable but reticent; Glen is rascally and charismatic, but simmering very close to his surface is a vitriol that seems at any moment like it might plunge from droll banter to brittle, aggressive browbeating. Russell has straight friends; Glen has opinions. Glen’s art project is a means for him to publicise and politicise his erotic experiences, whereas Russell, who keeps a more modest, private sex journal on his laptop, seems content to keep these intimate encounters to himself. Initially nervous about talking into Glen’s tape recorder, Russell opens up as the weekend unfolds and the couple are confronted with a stubborn rationale for revealing themselves to one other.

The set-up may sound clichéd, but this weekend-long romance between the idealistic brooder and the passionate sceptic is a textured exploration of its characters’ sexual and political concerns. A credible sense of the emerging amour between Russell and Glen emerges from a quiet accumulation of small, empathic gestures and sparky verbal back-and-forth. Haigh solicits impassioned but brilliantly understated performances from Cullen and New and their performance together adds up to a rather emphatic argument for the verity of ‘onscreen chemistry’. It helps that Haigh and his cinematographer, Ula Pontikos, capture a lot of everyday beauty, including Russell’s thrift-store furnishings and the fetching, bewhiskered male leads. They have also produced one of the hottest gay sex scenes since Shortbus, though with a lot less fanfare and full-frontal fuss.

The Brits are good at this type of lo-fi, script-oriented cinema, and Weekend is a top-notch exemplar of the form. One interviewer recently called Haigh  ‘the Ken Loach of gay cinema’ and there is evidence here of Loach’s verité naturalism and his interest in the everyday intersection of the personal and the political. The staffroom moment is a textbook example: it’s a glimpse of Russell’s dull, alienating life outside of the safe, intimate space of his flat. The yearning to keep returning to the space for talking and sex is the simple, endlessly renewable motive that animates these characters.

Weekend’s director, distributors and critics keep neurotically swearing that the film can be embraced by gay and straight audiences alike. Of course, this is true, but it’s also an anxious platitude used to market a small-budget, gay-themed movie to a broader audience, as if straight filmgoers were so intimidated or stupid they needed to be reminded that a gay love story is still a love story and might nevertheless be pleasurable for them to watch (cf. Brokeback Mountain).

The truth: this is a gay issues movie. Russell’s confessions, Glen’s diatribes, and the couple’s arguments and eventual tendernesses provide a dramatic scaffolding for the airing of key issues in contemporary queer life. Glen, for example, is staunchly anti-monogamy and gets incensed by the polite, neo-liberal status quo that the pro-gay marriage lobby is clamouring for, and the couple debate this matter well beyond their fifth or sixth line of speed. Weekend also dramatises the little ways in which queers have to perform – or may avoid performing – miniature coming-outs in everyday life. Russell is only happy with himself when he’s at home; in the street, he feels exposed and uneasy, a feeling he says is like indigestion. The film is particularly good at illustrating this contrast between the safety and intimacy of his flat, and the awkwardness and latent menace of the external world.

‘Low-budget, independent gay-issues film’ sounds dour and niche and unbelievably boring, but rather than weighing the drama down or diminishing the effectiveness of its exploration of character, Weekend’s political freight enlivens the stakes of this short-lived relationship, which is exactly what good, politicised drama should do.

Dion Kagan lectures in sexuality, screen and cultural studies at Melbourne University.

In her various incarnations as screenwriter, fiction writer and artist, Miranda July has demonstrated a preoccupation with the less-trodden paths of human connection. Take her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which saw a middle-aged man kick off a sexual relationship with two teenagers via signs in the window. Or consider the now archived web project, Learning to Love You More, which assigned community-minded art projects to any willing takers (43. Make an exhibition of the art in your parent’s house. 15. Hang a windchime on a tree in a parking lot.).

So it’s no surprise that July’s new film, The Future, which she wrote, directed and stars in, also draws wiggly lines between the dots. Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) desultorily while away their days, tapping away at laptops and shifting to get comfy on the couch. Their apartment has the feel of having accidentally become a home: piles of cassette tapes are stacked in almost precarious towers, while succulents and coloured stockings proliferate in their respective corners.

This familiarity is neck-and-neck with a gently surging discontent. Sophie, a dance teacher, compulsively rewatches a colleague’s popular YouTube dance video and dreams up her own choreography, while Jason mourns the way his life has plateaued. To ward off the inexorable pull of their future, they decide to adopt a pet, an injured cat named Paw Paw. It’s likely that Paw Paw will die soon, probably within five years: ‘Then we can do whatever we want for the rest of our lives.’ But they’ll be 40 years old in five years, they realise: ‘And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.’

Paw Paw is the hinge on which many viewers’ opinions will swing. Thanks to a tremulous, high-register July voiceover, the cat talks. While waiting in the animal shelter for Sophie and Jason to collect him, Paw Paw mewls intimate, often saccharine, monologues of hope, but his uneasy relationship with time and uncertainty is touchingly explored in these interludes.

For Sophie, time’s getaway act drives her towards another life. She begins an affair with a single father, Marshall (David Warshofsky). Jason takes up a door-to-door job, selling trees. He browses the PennySaver, a classifieds paper, and buys a hairdryer from Joe (Joe Putterlik, whom July actually met through the PennySaver), who writes dirty limericks for his wife. When Sophie begins to tell Jason about her infidelity, he finds he can freeze but not stop time, and he does. But to what avail? Sophie’s life is continuing outside his bubble of denial.

This is a couple whose meandering divergence can be slow and frustrating. They’re wishful but feckless, misguidedly attempting to change their lives. But what makes them sympathetic rather than enraging is that they’re not druggedly drowsy or uncaring – they seem stunned, as if they had been clocked one when they were born and never really recovered. It’s a fine line to tread, and it’s to the credit of Linklater and July that it’s possible to root for Sophie and Jason in their struggles. They’re not virtuoso performances – July’s delivery of dialogue can be distractingly deliberate – but the dynamic between the two is interesting; there isn’t so much a chemistry between the two leads as a kind of parallel travellerhood.

The Future is rewarding cinema, giving you much more than what your loose change might be worth. There’s an originality to many of the film’s gestures, making it read more like an invested attempt to recreate a very particular feeling than a run-of-the-mill couple drama. The film’s organic emotionality is surprisingly tenacious and moving: July’s wayward thirtysomethings fumble their connections so badly only because they mean something.

The Future is on limited release at Cinema Nova. Image © 2010 Razor Film Produktion GmbH and Leopold, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Estelle Tang is Online Editor at Kill Your Darlings.

In her various incarnations as screenwriter, fiction writer and artist, Miranda July has demonstrated a preoccupation with the less-trodden paths of human connection. Take her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which saw a middle-aged man kick off a sexual relationship with two teenagers via signs in the window. Or consider the now archived web project, Learning to Love You More, which assigned community-minded art projects to any willing takers (43. Make an exhibition of the art in your parent’s house. 15. Hang a windchime on a tree in a parking lot.).

So it’s no surprise that July’s new film, The Future, which she wrote, directed and stars in, also draws wiggly lines between the dots. Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) desultorily while away their days, tapping away at laptops and shifting to get comfy on the couch. Their apartment has the feel of having accidentally become a home: piles of cassette tapes are stacked in almost precarious towers, while succulents and coloured stockings proliferate in their respective corners.

This familiarity is neck-and-neck with a gently surging discontent. Sophie, a dance teacher, compulsively rewatches a colleague’s popular YouTube dance video and dreams up her own choreography, while Jason mourns the way his life has plateaued. To ward off the inexorable pull of their future, they decide to adopt a pet, an injured cat named Paw Paw. It’s likely that Paw Paw will die soon, probably within five years: ‘Then we can do whatever we want for the rest of our lives.’ But they’ll be 40 years old in five years, they realise: ‘And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.’

Paw Paw is the hinge on which many viewers’ opinions will swing. Thanks to a tremulous, high-register July voiceover, the cat talks. While waiting in the animal shelter for Sophie and Jason to collect him, Paw Paw mewls intimate, often saccharine, monologues of hope, but his uneasy relationship with time and uncertainty is touchingly explored in these interludes.

For Sophie, time’s getaway act drives her towards another life. She begins an affair with a single father, Marshall (David Warshofsky). Jason takes up a door-to-door job, selling trees. He browses the PennySaver, a classifieds paper, and buys a hairdryer from Joe (Joe Putterlik, whom July actually met through the PennySaver), who writes dirty limericks for his wife. When Sophie begins to tell Jason about her infidelity, he finds he can freeze but not stop time, and he does. But to what avail? Sophie’s life is continuing outside his bubble of denial.

This is a couple whose meandering divergence can be slow and frustrating. They’re wishful but feckless, misguidedly attempting to change their lives. But what makes them sympathetic rather than enraging is that they’re not druggedly drowsy or uncaring – they seem stunned, as if they had been clocked one when they were born and never really recovered. It’s a fine line to tread, and it’s to the credit of Linklater and July that it’s possible to root for Sophie and Jason in their struggles. They’re not virtuoso performances – July’s delivery of dialogue can be distractingly deliberate – but the dynamic between the two is interesting; there isn’t so much a chemistry between the two leads as a kind of parallel travellerhood.

The Future is rewarding cinema, giving you much more than what your loose change might be worth. There’s an originality to many of the film’s gestures, making it read more like an invested attempt to recreate a very particular feeling than a run-of-the-mill couple drama. The film’s organic emotionality is surprisingly tenacious and moving: July’s wayward thirtysomethings fumble their connections so badly only because they mean something.

The Future is on limited release at Cinema Nova. Image © 2010 Razor Film Produktion GmbH and Leopold, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Estelle Tang is Online Editor at Kill Your Darlings.

Naturally, my predilection for any film regarding teenage rebellion has meant that I have chewed my nails through hours of terrible cinema – hello there, Teenage Devil Dolls (1955) – but I’d also argue that some of the most poignant, and uncompromisingly human, films I’ve witnessed also fit into this category. It is not a nostalgic impulse that renders these films so evocative for me; on the contrary, they seem to grow all the more powerful in my adulthood as they are no longer shocking, my memories of youth thoroughly divorced from their allegories. The good ones remind me of some of the things I regrettably lost along the passage of adolescence and why it wouldn’t necessarily do any harm to reclaim them.

Here are three of my favourite teen rebellion films.

Out of The Blue

Dir. Dennis Hopper (1980)

Above merely being my favourite film of this genre, Out of the Blue is, quite frankly, one of the most spectacular films I have ever seen. An oblique nod to the teen musicals of the 1950s; Out of the Blue tells the story of Cebe (Linda Manz) an Elvis aficionado who, by way of a portable cassette player, supplies the film’s soundtrack of Heartbreak Hotel, Teddy Bear and the eponymous Neil Young anthem, My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), which lends the film its title.

With her father, Don (Dennis Hopper), imprisoned after drunkenly crashing his big rig into a school bus, and her mother, Kathy (Sharon Farrell), juggling a job at a perpetually vacant diner with her nasty heroin addiction, Cebe is left to raise herself, emulating her punk idols in the process. Kicking around the overgrown laneways and garishly lit bowling alleys of late ‘70s Vancouver, Cebe can be interpreted both as a literal and metaphorical lamentation for the rock-and-roll optimism and idealism of the 1960s, and its eventual obliteration by the ascendant nihilism of the coming era. Manz is nothing short of dazzling in the role: cigarette-smoking, denim-wearing and swaggering fearlessly through the gritty urban landscape to almost vertiginous effect.

Don’s release from prison serves as the harbinger for impending tragedy, which arrives with shocking effect, but while the undercurrent of malaise in Out of the Blue is memorable, it is not the source of the film’s potency. Running against the stereotypical teen rebellion narrative – its force arising out of moments of sanguineness rather than chaos – Out of the Blue haunts us with its tenderness just as effectively as it troubles us with its nihilism. The real heart of this film is in its vulnerability; the moments of unadulterated intimacy between characters, when they do occur, are as tragic as those scenes of utter discord. How close this family comes to redemption; it is the pendulum that swings throughout the entire narrative, and although we have a hunch as to where it will come to rest, it’s still mesmerising to watch it grind to an inevitable halt.

Over the Edge

Dir. Jonathan Kaplan (1979)

It has been labelled as the quintessential teen rebellion film and it’s pretty easy to see why; Over the Edge is based on genuine events, populated by real teenage actors, and is unabashedly gritty, albeit in an understated way. While many films of this nature are often histrionic, creating caricatures of their protagonists, Over the Edge feels, instead, like a nod to cinéma vérité in its candid portrait of teenage exploits. Drugs, dirty talk, firecrackers, and pushbikes – Over the Edge has, in abundance, all of the necessary ingredients for a successful teen rebellion film.

Although at times it seems to be teetering perilously close to the edge of the telemovie abyss, it miraculously pulls itself back by way of some amazing – and often incongruous – inclusions. Sharp, witty dialogue. So much Cheap Trick. Generous, thoughtful cinematography. A pubescent Matt Dillon sporting a tank top. Indeed, it really is the characters who make this film, and Dillon is superb, cutting his teeth on the role of Richie White; he later went on to play other iconic delinquents, including Rusty James in Rumblefish (1983) and Dallas Winston in The Outsiders (1983). Michael Eric Kramer and Pamela Ludwig also offer up thoroughly convincing representations of the awkwardness and fervency of youth, as ill-fated lovers Carl and Cory.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most interesting, if not crucial, of Kaplan’s characters is that of New Granada, the planned suburban community where the action takes place. It brings to mind the sprawling deserts of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) or the vast plains of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). All dust and open skies, it looms large over the characters, seemingly dwarfing them and their prospect of escape.

It is this element that distinguishes the film from the Fast Times at Ridgemont Highs of the cultural landscape; Over the Edge isn’t a film about rebellion per se, although there is plenty of that, but is rather an examination of the kind of environments that serve to inspire recalcitrance. It takes a certain type of landscape to inculcate, and moreover justify, the fury that sets into motion the iconic rampage at the culmination of the film, and Over the Edge does a remarkable job of showing us exactly what those stark, ghettoised suburbs may look like.

Trust

Dir. Hal Hartley (1990)

I cannot imagine this film ever losing its charm – Hartley is masterful in his rendering of a supercilious Long Island teenager and her remarkable transformation into a pre-eminent ingénue. Adrienne Shelly is hypnotic as Maria, a high-school dropout with a penchant for gaudy outfits, impregnated by her local quarterback, and whose father dies of a heart attack upon hearing the news.

Martin Donovan proves her equal as the ferocious Matthew Slaughter, a local misfit who inspires trepidation amongst their small-minded community and who is waging a permanent war against mediocrity. It is difficult to imagine a more emblematic introduction to Matthew’s character than his first scene in the film – screwing his boss’s head into a table vice following an argument that arises from his reluctance to install inferior hardware in the computers he is employed to build.

This film has so much to offer: Hartley’s signature stilted, almost staccato, dialogue; the otherworldly, bleached high-key lighting; an iconic and mesmerising score.

Trust, while inarguably a tale of rebellion, is also very much a story of absolution. In a way, the narrative inverts the paradigm of the teenage rebellion film altogether, and where rebel protagonists have so often met with violent ends, this film closes with our characters better, happier people than they were when we first met them. Most encouraging is Maria’s progress, her journey – in many ways mimicking the arc of a Bildungsroman – from repellent, obnoxious and brazenly conceding to not ‘know[ing] anything’, she rebuilds herself upon the values of ‘respect, admiration and trust’.

At its core, Trust is a story about conquering ignorance. It is no accident that Maria matures exponentially the moment she begins asking questions; at the film’s conclusion, we find her stronger than Matthew, the man who awoke her interrogating spirit. While it offers a more positive rendition of rebellion than other films, Trust is relentless in its condemnation of an unexamined life and the subjugation of one’s unique values, favouring violence in the place of either such sacrifices.

Zoe Dzunko is a Melbourne writer and the Marketing Coordinator for Kill Your Darlings. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne.

The transposition of a novel to screen always has an odd effect, like seeing a painted portrait move. There’s the vexed question of whether to judge the film on its own merits or in the fidelity to which it accurately translates the essence of the tale, especially one as well loved and well known as a Bronte novel. Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation cleverly works around this problem of familiarity by beginning in medias res and telling the story through flashbacks – giving a disorienting newness to a familiar tale.

What filmic translations of period novels do particularly well is evoke a sense of an era – more potently perhaps than we could ever achieve alone – with sumptuous costumes and period setting. Fukunaga’s film does this beautifully, all wuthering moors and chiaroscuro interiors.

To condense a novel down to film means we necessarily lose parts of the work – but this adaptation feels at times like a SparkNotes guide. Many of the most important scenes are hurried. Though the film lingers on shadowy rooms and lots of running across moors in billowing capes, all the most important moments in the plot – especially those between Jane and Rochester – are too fleeting.

Rochester is that particular breed of smouldering alpha-male – strong, brooding, looks fantastic on a horse – who would be awful if he were your actual boyfriend, but great in prose form. What makes him attractive is a passionate, fiery intensity. Yet there is a distinct lack of passion between the two leads (something of a cinematic feat considering Rochester is played by Michael Fassbender). The famous proposal scene – a culmination of hundreds of pages of yearning in the novel – when it occurs here, evokes more a reaction of surprise than romantic catharsis.

It is the nature of the medium that a film cannot portray interiority as effectively as a novel – but this is a story entirely about interiority. Though Jane and Rochester barely speak, their romance smoulders away in the novel for hundreds of pages.

Yet to reduce the book to just two hours, and focus only on exteriority, means that certain truths in the plot become more apparent, placed as they are upon the barest of cinematic bones. Perhaps unintentionally, this film reveals a truth about the story better than the novel itself.

One of the fascinating things about Jane Eyre – both novel and film – is the way in which Jane is irresistibly attractive to the men she comes into contact with as an adult. She receives proposals from both Rochester and St John Rivers, but she does and says very little (and she sure as hell isn’t winning them over with her hairstyle).

Jane and Rochester actually have very little contact in the novel. Rochester knows almost nothing about Jane – but in the end, he loves her precisely because he doesn’t really know anything about her at all.

What Jane does that is so alluring, it seems to me, is to simply be a mirror for every man she comes into contact with. She has an uncanny ability to reflect back to men the best version of themselves. Jane isn’t a ‘machine without feelings’ but she is as cool and glassy as a mirrored surface. Rochester is indeed ‘transfixed’ by Jane, but it is his own image he is transfixed by.

This makes Rochester’s blindness all the more brilliantly and sadistically ironic, as he now must rely wholly on Jane’s sight. He is quite literally transfixed by her – existing forever within her perception.

Jane Eyre is, in many ways, a flawed film. But this small aspect – however unintentional – made it a rather illuminating translation of the work.

– Bethanie Blanchard is a Melbourne writer and literature PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

Bret Easton Ellis is reportedly working on a screenplay for a shark horror film. The Guardian and various film sites have reported this week that Ellis is collaborating with Paul Schrader (the screenwriter of such films as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) on a shark-infested psychological horror called Bait.

The plot sounds essentially like a cross between Less Than Zero and Jaws. Or a beach-side American Psycho, where the Patrick Bateman character is a shark. I really wish I was making this up.

Of course, Bret Easton Ellis has always been a polarising writer, and hating on Ellis has become something of a sport – particularly following his Imperial Bedrooms tour of Australia in August last year – with those who haven’t read his works usually leading the fray.

Yet, the reports are an interesting twist in an already unusual literary career – suggesting Ellis has followed a long (and destructive) tradition of L.A. writers lured by the siren call of screenwriting.

In Issue Four of Kill Your Darlings I wrote an essay on the impossibility of translating an Ellis novel to screen. The article, ‘Notes From the Underground: Why Bret Easton Ellis Fails On Film’ was a result of attending the Melbourne Underground Film Festival which held as its special event a Bret Easton Ellis retrospective.

As I sat in theatres across Melbourne watching all four screenings of the adaptations of Ellis’s work – Less Than Zero, American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction, and the most recent The Informers – I was struck by how uniformly these films, from different directors and screenwriters, all seem to miss the point, failing to render the works truly. Almost all were box office disasters, despite a myriad of big Hollywood names amongst their collective cast.

Ultimately, I argued, Ellis fails on film because his novels are untranslatable. Ellis’s works were never about character development or narrative progression, but are fundamentally acts in language, written in his signature blank, affectless prose – a pared-down minimalism that has been labeled everything from ‘writing degree less-than-zero’ to ‘zombie prose’.

Yet the real problem with the adaptations has been a uniform shying away from the unsettling darkness so central to the novels – with each film relying instead on satire and parody as a reassuring foil to the violence. And this is where interpretations of Ellis, especially his filmic translations, appear to be stuck.

Indeed, the comments section of the Guardian post in particular have produced some (rather amusing) imaginative parodies of the proposed film , such as this from HisNameIsKittis:

I’m sitting on a surfboard somewhere off Venice Beach, wearing a pair of board shorts from Pierre Cardin. Suddenly a fin the colour of my second-favourite Versace suit cuts through the water. ‘Is that a Great White?’ I say to Nancy, my gym instructor, who I also happen to be fucking this week. She screams as the shark bites through her bronzed, toned thigh. ‘This is making me want sushi,’ I say, chopping out a line of $400-a-gram Colombian on the shark’s rough, sandpapery snout. ‘Can we get a table at Katangi for tonight?’ ‘No-one can get a table at Katangi. Not even Steven Spielberg,’ says the shark.

Ellis’s style lends itself to parody because it’s so distinctive – and there have been some very successful video spoofs of Ellis’s aesthetic, including the Funny or Die short All That Glitters which Ellis rather good-naturedly took part in. Yet they simply underline Patrick Bateman’s oft-quoted assessment that ‘Surface, surface, surface is all that anyone found meaning in’.

For an author so burned by the filmic translation of his novels that his most recent work Imperial Bedrooms is a kind of extended literary critique of the Less Than Zero film, it is difficult to see why Ellis would ever want to work in the cinematic medium. Especially seeing his first foray into screen writing himself – a translation of his own short story collection The Informers – resulted, ironically, in not only the least successful of all the adaptations of his works, but a film so widely panned it was nominated as a contender for the Worst Film of All Time. (Although, the failure of this film has been widely credited to the director and producer for a number of reasons – it’s interesting to read Ellis’s own comments on this here)

But screenwriting is apparently where Ellis is heading. Indeed, the final line of Imperial Bedrooms: ‘1985-2010’ have led many to speculate that this is a veiled authorial RIP to his career as a novelist.

Ellis has confirmed he is working on a screen play for The Golden Suicides – a Vanity Fair essay on the tragic double-suicide of creative couple Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. And now, a shark film?

L.A. has been mythologised as the place to which writers are lured and ensnared, their talents wasted at the altar of the studio machine. As Mike Davis wrote in his seminal work on L.A. City of Quartz, ‘Fused into a single montage image are Fitzgerald reduced to a drunken hack, West rushing to his own apocalypse, Faulkner rewriting second-rate scripts, Brecht raging against the mutilation of his work, the Hollywood Ten on their way to prison, Didion on the verge of a nervous breakdown’. And so Ellis falls down the rabbit hole too.

Ellis’s seemingly-autobiographical Lunar Park begins: ‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself’. His opening lines have always been significant, reverberating throughout the novels and taking on a weight of meaning with each repetition. Yet these lines now seem particularly prescient. If Bait turns out to be as awful as it sounds, Ellis is descending into far worse than an impression of himself. He’ll be doing an awfully bad parody.

– Bethanie Blanchard is a Melbourne writer and literature PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

At first glance Barney’s Version appears to be a cynical comic reply to the false promises of Hollywood romance narratives. A crude, brash and at times grotesque Barney Panofsky (played by Paul Giamatti) takes the viewer through his three failed marriages and the unsolved disappearance of his best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) in a series of extended flashbacks. The film projects Barney’s self-aware and derisive worldview: he drinks (a lot) at Grumpy’s Bar, and his television production company, making C-grade soap operas, is called ‘Totally Unnecessary Productions’. However, far from being a satire deriding love per se, Barney’s Version builds on the layers of its main protagonist’s relationships to reveal a beautifully imperfect love story in his third marriage; the result is unexpectedly breathtaking and devastating.

Barney’s Version is directed by Richard J. Lewis, whose credits include years of work in television and two feature films. It was adapted for the screen by newcomer Michael Konyves from the acclaimed novel of the same name, by Jewish-Canadian author Mordecai Richler. Although he is not widely known in Australia, Richler is a cultural icon in his native Canada. The novel Barney’s Version (1997) was a massive hit in both Canada and the United States, and Richler was connected to the making of the film before his death in 2001. Thus, taking over a decade to finally come together, the film was a labour of love for all involved.

Widespread adoration for Richler and his work attracted an incredible ensemble cast to the project. In the corners of Barney’s life are some formidable sparring partners: Dustin Hoffman as his straight-talking and devoted father Izzy; Minnie Driver as his hilarious second wife, a ‘Jewish princess’ simply known as ‘the Second Mrs P’; English actress Rosamund Pike as his beloved third wife Miriam; and Scott Speedman as his ailing (if slightly unconvincing) friend Boogie. Indeed, the bulk of performances in this film are deserving of the highest praise – especially those of Giamatti and Hoffman as damaged individuals in a fiercely loyal partnership.

The pathos in Giamatti’s performance is exceptional and guides the overall tone of the film: when faced with the death of someone close to him, he laughs at its absurdity and weeps for his loss all at once. This ambivalence and intensity makes Barney (and the film) constantly beguiling and at times distressing to behold, for he seems so manifestly real. Crucially, it is the complex humanity in Giamatti’s performance that also allows the viewer to go along with a key element of the film, which in the hands of a lesser actor might be somewhat baffling – namely, that the unattractive and often abrasive Barney is the romantic lead and, ultimately, the hero of the story.

More precisely, Barney is a romantic anti-hero of the first order: he is not especially talented or good-looking in any conventional sense, and he has a serious drinking problem. Vitally, though, it is to Giamatti’s credit that Barney as romantic lead does not come across as another example of an unappealing man being incongruously attractive to a bevy of young, beautiful women. Rather, the viewer believes whole-heartedly in the realism of Barney’s relationships because, despite his obvious faults, he can also be entirely charming, spontaneous and warm. It is plain too that behind Barney’s gruff exterior lies a deep romantic longing for permanent amour fou; as his first wife says, ‘Barney, you really do wear your heart on your sleeve’.

As the film progresses, Barney’s years of alcohol abuse come to affect his ability to remember mundane details, and there is a sense that his crippling melancholia perhaps makes Miriam appear more perfect than she actually was. However, that Barney is not necessarily a reliable source is neither here nor there: this is, after all, his version.

In the end, the power of this film lies in the heart-rending way that minute details come to reveal deep familiarities and affection between people. For, as Barney’s mind becomes increasingly addled, he attaches grave importance to small, previously taken-for-granted things, like being able to recall Miriam’s phone number. Indeed, the big disappointment of Barney’s life turns out not to be his three ‘failed’ marriages, but the gradual failure of his being able to remember tiny particulars about Miriam and their children. Thus, there is a sort of quotidian tragedy to this film, the effects of which creep up on the viewer and grab you by the throat. That is to say, for all the extraordinary satire in Barney’s Version, it is the way it explores the everyday disappointments of love and ageing that remains holding you long after the credits have rolled: consider yourself warned.

Kate Harper studied Cinema at the University of Melbourne and now works as a freelance writer.

In 1955 Allen Ginsberg read his then unpublished poem Howl to an audience including Jack Kerouac at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was, in retrospect, a symbolic moment of social and artistic upheaval: for the first time, the dislocation and unease that young post-World War II Americans were feeling was reflected back to them, using a new language they identified with. Howl was immediate, sensuous, and ‘crude’. It was this uninhibited language that landed the poem’s eventual publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on trial for ‘publishing obscene material’ in 1957.

These events – the first public reading of Howl and, later, the obscenity trial – form the basis for directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s latest collaboration, Howl, starring James Franco as a young Ginsberg. Best known for their work in documentaries, especially the cult film The Celluloid Closet (1995), Howl is a departure for Epstein and Friedman. Here, as Friedman has said, ‘we had to liberate our thinking and expand our definition of what’s a documentary? What’s reality? What’s true storytelling?’ The end result is a genre-bending, non-linear and stylistically varied biopic, merging surrealism-inspired animation with archival footage and fictional recreations to examine only a small segment of Ginsberg’s early career – the birth of the poem itself and its socio-cultural importance in the obscenity trial.

The film – like the poem – is organised in four sections, all continually overlapping and stylistically unique. First: Ginsberg reading his poem at the Six Gallery, shot in black and white; second: the obscenity trial, in colour; third: an imagined interview with Ginsberg at his home, shot as a disjointed monologue; and fourth: the poem itself, narrated by Franco and set to the hallucinogenic animations of Eric Drooker.

This diversity in narrative and stylistic elements work together to deny the viewer a comfortable realist depiction of Ginsberg and the poem: Ray or Bright Star this is not. Indeed, the film deliberately eschews the conventions that usually allow us to ‘get under the skin’ of the artist: here, Ginsberg functions more as a symbol of and mouthpiece for creative and cultural liberation rather than anything approximating a ‘real’ person.

This is despite the fact that Franco’s performance is undeniably strong, nuanced and considered. Like Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, which is currently screening Australia-wide, Howl is a film that showcases his versatility as an actor. He spends much of Howl speaking almost directly to the viewer, delivering a stream-of-consciousness monologue to an invisible interviewer and recreating Ginsberg’s infamous first reading at Six Gallery. But, although he renders Ginsberg’s cadence of speech perfectly, these lengthy points in the film – that do add to the overall picture of the poet-philosopher – are not the most memorable: Ginsberg so frequently speaks in a one-way exchange that the viewer becomes detached.

The few glimpses we are given of the man behind the symbol occur in the intimate exchanges between Ginsberg and his lovers, which are also Franco’s strongest moments in the film. Indeed, the first time Ginsberg ‘is shown love’, as he says, when Neal Cassady (played by Jon Prescott) puts his arms around him in bed, is heart-wrenchingly tender and beautiful. But, in truth, instances like this one in the film are far and few between.

Nonetheless, the fact that Ginsberg never comes to life for very long in Howl – despite Franco’s assured performance – does not diminish the film’s overall intention: real-life people and events from the past are only important in so far as they bring to light certain themes. In this vein, Howl uses the actual transcripts from the original obscenity trial to powerfully highlight the fallibility of criteria used to justify censorship. Whether one is able to ‘objectively determine the value’ of a work art – the governing principle of censorship – is shown as inherently flawed; we all approach a piece of art with our own inescapable subjectivity, which colours our judgment. Epstein and Friedman link this broader theme of ideological censorship to the realm of the personal, exploring the fundamental difficulties associated with having to censor one’s own homosexuality – a theme they also dealt with in The Celluloid Closet.

Ultimately, Howl is not a biopic that tries to immerse viewers in the intimate world of its real-life protagonists, but rather in the issues that surround them. And, although the film does not come close to achieving the immediacy of Ginsberg’s poem, it does refuse to entomb the poem in one (realist) style. Instead, its stylistic verve attempts to provide a multifaceted view of Ginsberg and Howl as dynamic cultural symbols. This refusal on the part of the filmmakers to conform to the conventions of genre and tradition seems like something Ginsberg would have applauded.

Kate Harper studied cinema at the University of Melbourne and now works as a freelance writer.

The Hedgehog is French director Mona Achache’s first feature film and is an impressive debut. Adapted for the screen by Achache and based on the internationally acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, it is a darkly comic and poignant tale about class, misrecognition and a child’s insight. Set in a wealthy Parisian apartment block, the film peels away the layers of class and conceit that have encased the life of the building’s live-in concierge, Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko).

We first meet her neighbour Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic); an emotionally neglected child who has decided to kill herself on her twelfth birthday. She is making a film to document, as she says, ‘why life is absurd’, and much of The Hedgehog is seen through the lens of her camera and thus from her perspective. It is the gaze of a child who resents the adult world, narrating in whispers behind the camera what she perceives to be its hypocrisy and tedium with utmost disgust.

As Paloma’s planned suicide draws near a new and intriguing neighbour, Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa), moves in and they are instantly caught in a web of mutual fascination for Renée. In their refusal to see Renée defined solely by her occupation and class, a replaceable cog in the building’s mechanics, they uncover her furtive lust for literature and film.

Achache brings a sensitive balance to this adaptation, astutely merging distinct stylistic elements. The Hedgehog is imbued with a robust sense of realism from the start, when Paloma introduces herself in front of an old video camera before moving around to film a satirical cinéma vérité–style documentary of her dysfunctional family. Then, as the film progresses, animation is used expressively to breathe life into Paloma’s world – she inks in days on a calendar that are animated like a living storyboard. This technique does not evoke astonishing realms for the protagonists’ escape, but reflects with a child’s imaginative clarity the way things actually are and a hope for what they might become.

At its heart The Hedgehog is about the dangers of mistaking a person’s class for their whole being, so its success relies on the actors’ ability to suggest complex landscapes beneath the surface. In this regard, Josiane Balasko’s performance as Renée is particularly convincing. She skilfully conveys an inner elegance and intellect, bubbling beneath the surface of her outer performance as the self-effacing concierge. Togo Igawa’s portrayal of Kakuro is likewise impressive, for he radiates an inner calm and acceptance that appears not as a result of his character’s wealth, but as a consequence of having experienced deep personal losses. Indeed, all the performances in this ensemble piece are strong, with Garance Le Guillermic surprisingly likeable as the petulant but sensitive Paloma.

Adapting a beloved novel for the screen is a risky business and some fans may have problems with the film’s departures from Barbery’s original. Unlike the novel, the film gives us only limited access into Renée’s acute understandings of philosophy and her awareness that she is playing a socially constructed role. However, it is to Achache’s credit that she chose to moderate Paloma’s philosophising for the screen. Without losing any of Paloma’s overall function in the novel, Achache’s screenplay constructs a more recognisable character for the requirements of a very different medium. And despite differences in form and detail the film remains faithful to the overall narrative and thematic impetus of Barbery’s novel, an ambivalent contemporary parable about scratching below the surface of class conceits to discover oneself.

Kate Harper completed Honours in Cinema Studies at The University of Melbourne and now works as a freelance writer.

This gently illuminating documentary from filmmakers Masha and Yonathan Zur casts its gaze upon the life of critically acclaimed Israeli writer and political commentator Amos Oz. Drawing deeply from his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, the film paints a thoughtfully evocative portrait of the eminent author and the personal, philosophical and political dreams that traverse, and haunt, his work.

Oz is renowned for his fiercely unequivocal political views; he is a stalwart proponent of a two-state solution for the Israel–Palestine issue, and as such his politics have sparked controversy in his homeland. Oz’s outspoken approach has seen him marginalised on both sides of the ideological chasm, though his articulate candour, humour and frank acknowledgement of the often-nightmarish reality of everyday life for many in the Middle East are an invaluable contribution to the issue. Oz likens the two-state solution to a patient contemplating the amputation of a limb: it entails a loss, but life is preserved in the process.

Throughout his career Oz’s fiction has been noted for its compassion, humanism and insight into human nature, and his political and philosophical endeavours share this focus. In this film Masha and Yonathan Zur follow Oz as he travels from Israel to New York and Europe, delving into the public and personal facets of his life and unearthing the roots of his passions and preoccupations. Utilising voice-over excerpts from A Tale of Love and Darkness, filmed lectures, interviews, and conversations between Oz and various writers, politicians and intellectuals, the film offers a rare insight into the evolutionary trajectory of his thought. Oz speaks openly and elegantly about his childhood in Jerusalem in the 1940s, and of his parents – idealistic Zionist immigrants from Poland – and especially his mother Fania, who committed suicide when Oz was twelve years old. These formative experiences provide a thematic base which gradually unfurls to incorporate Oz’s views on writing, identity, anti-Semitism, colonialism, politics, and his hopes for the future of Israel.

Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams is unobtrusively filmed, and the viewer feels a genuine sense of intimacy with the dynamic Oz. Archival footage from pre-war Europe and British-administered Jerusalem of the 1930s and 40s is delicately combined with family photographs to vividly conjure two lost worlds: the thriving social and intellectual Jewish life of early 20^th Century Poland, and the dream-filled first days of the State of Israel.

According to Oz, however, the taste of disappointment is in the nature of dreams. If the State of Israel is a web spun from the realisation of many disparate, competing dreams, then disillusionment and thwarted hopes are destined to be the nation’s lot – as reality can never be perfect. Oz tackles this bind with fervent pragmatism and unswerving humanism. This documentary is a moving portrait of a vibrant man whose constant refusal to be blinded by a politics of religion and place is inspirational stuff indeed.