Fair to say, Jennifer Lynch is her father’s daughter. Surveillance, her first film in 15 years since the abortive Boxing Helena, opens with a terrifying sequence: in the middle of the night, a couple wake to find masked intruders in their bedroom. The man is brutally beaten to death, while the woman is chased screaming down the road outside… Twisted with black comedy, off-kilter performances, unsettling sound design and jolts of violence, Lynch’s eminently Lynchian psycho-thriller is far better than its fairly predictable final rug-pull. As FBI agents Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond interrogate the survivors of a roadside killing, Lynch’s film mutates through flashbacks into a dark, minor pleasure. Look out for the midnight mirror-image of Superbad’s slacker cops.
LWLies sat down with Mark Damon (the uber-producer of Das Boot, The Lost Boys and Monster) to hear about his remake of Fritz Lang’s Beyond A Reasonable Doubt starring Michael Douglas and to get the scoop that he’s casting Bruce Willis in a “Sixth Sense-style” project that’s one of the best scripts he’s ever read. Oh, and apparently, producing shag-a-thon drama 9 ½ Weeks was a nightmare. But he doesn’t like talking about it.
Right now, we’re worried. Four-and-a-half-hours is a long time to be sat in a cinema. But that’s exactly how long tonight’s back-to-back screening of Steven Soderbergh’s Che two-parter will last. Benicio del Toro stars as Cuba’s iconic revolutionary, The Argentine and Guerilla unpack his life story. There’s talk that Steven Soderbergh’s most serious, most ambitious film since Traffic could be edited into one three-hour epic for its cinema release. That, alas, will come too late for our arses.
Other stuff we saw today includes:
Los Bastardos (Dir. Amat Escalante)
With its long takes and precise cinematography, Los Bastardos is somewhat reminiscent of a Gus Van Sant movie. And a bad one. Two young Mexicans living in southern California are looking for cash-in-hand work. Mostly they take on labouring jobs but the pay isn’t good, so when they’re asked by a man to kill his wife, they grab a shotgun and head on over to her place. The youths break in on a night when their target is home alone and has decided, curiously, to smoke some crack. What follows is 99% tedious, 1% shocking, and 100% forgettable.
Delta (Dir. Kornel Mundruczo)
Definitely one of the highlights of the festival so far, Mundruczo’s somber tale is of a young man who returns to his homeland in the delta, a series of labyrinthine waterways. There he meets a sister that he never knew existed, and the pair form a close bond. They begin to build a secluded house to live in and all seems well, but unbeknownst to them the locals have decided that their behaviour is intolerable. Delta is beautiful and serene, yet doesn’t shy away from delivering tough emotional punches. Sprinkled with some of the best scenes of the festival so far, Delta is an absolute treat.
O’Horten (Dir. Bent Hamer)
Bent Hamer’s latest is a curious oddity. Odd Horten (and he is most certainly odd) is a Norwegian train driver, retiring after 40 years of service. Before the morning of his last journey, a bizarre occurrence (involving some scaffolding, a young boy and a drum kit) sees him late for his train departure. Unfazed, Horten spends the rest of the movie ambling around, wearing stilettos, falling asleep in saunas, ski jumping, driving cars with his eyes closed… The word ‘random’ doesn’t even begin to sum it up. The word ‘average’ sadly does.
