Alexandra's Project

[Rolf De Heer, 2003, Australia, rating: MA, running time: 103 minutes]

Alexandra’s Project opens in the strange half-light of early morning, camera tracking low through suburbia. An ominous electronic pulse builds among the waking sounds of insects, birds, animals. Welcome to another dark suburban vision by director Rolf De Heer.

Steve (Gary Sweet) wakes in one of a string of identical townhouses to his two happy children jumping on to his bed with his birthday presents. His wife Alexandra (Helen Buday) has been up for a few minutes, spitting on her reflection in the bathroom mirror with a mixture of determination and self-loathing. The pressure of something trying to break through the surface tension of this apparently ordinary family is palpable.

De Heer scatters clues (or red herrings?) in these first few minutes. We guess that Steve is responsible for the house’s high security – electronic locking blinds, chains and deadlocks. He apparently pays all the household bills. His physical presence around Alexandra seems to intimidate her. Next-door neighbour Bill (Bogdan Koca) presents an absurd if strangely ominous figure. The film presents many questions of meaning and interpretation – not all of which are answered, or even answerable.

Steve leaves for his work as a human resources manager in the city, while Alexandra prepares his birthday surprise for that night. He arrives home to a darkened, empty house with a fridge full of beer, and a videotape from Alexandra. Even these peculiar events take time to shake Steve’s conviction that his suburban reality is inviolable. But the videotaped birthday greetings from his wife and children soon take a dark turn. Alarmed, he realises that his key won’t unlock the doors from the inside, that the blinds are locked closed, and there is no escape from watching his wife’s ‘project’ until the very end.

Alexandra’s tape makes compelling viewing. Like Steve, the viewer is locked in their chair by her saying, and doing, some extremely confronting things. Alexandra’s theme is not unfamiliar, voicing something hidden in many relationships – the lack of communication, sexual intimacy, trust and respect. In this final conversation between them, Alexandra finds her voice, Steve listens, and a genuinely visceral response is forced from him - speaking, crying, shouting in pain at the taped revelations. It is tragic, we at first think, that Alexandra cannot see his reaction to her savage performance.

Rolf De Heer originally planned the idea of a woman talking to a video camera as a possible film to be made for less than $200,000. Eventually, it was shot in a studio for $2m. Studio shooting has allowed the film-makers quite a creative use of light and shadow, a key element in the film’s imprisonment theme. Just under a third of the shoot was devoted to the video footage of Helen Buday who operated the camera herself, as Alexandra would have done. The footage reveals an emotionally and sexually explicit performance that several other actresses ultimately couldn’t bring themselves to take on. Gary Sweet did not see the video footage until the film camera rolled on his character’s reaction to it – a technique which no doubt assisted his very honest and powerful response. And Bogdan Koca plays an interesting counterpoint as the puzzling neighbour Bill. Bill’s story is equally as complex as Gary’s perhaps, but successfully told in only a few scenes and lines.

Alexandra’s Project will spark many debates. Is Steve a monster, or a child? Is Alexandra mad, or maddened? Is the film expositional, or exploitative? Is the idea substantial, or substantiated, enough to carry a feature film? Those interested in dark visions of the sexual politics of relationships (Lantana comes to mind) will find plenty of food for thought here.

3 flims.

Beowulf

Synopsis: An animated adaptation of the story of Beowulf, the famed warrior who must fight and defeat a series of monsters. [Robert Zemeckis, 2007, USA, rating: M, running time: 113 minutes]

Beowulf is a zesty adaptation of the 8th century English epic poem. The eponymous hero of the Geats saves a Danish kingdom from the monster Grendel, then Grendel’s mother and, finally, a dragon. It’s a swashbuckling tale of derring-do, Scandinavian-style, distinguished by 8th century source material and a strong cast. Anthony Hopkins plays the drunkard King with Robin Wright Penn as his sorrowful Queen and Ray Winstone in a surprising show as a towering blonde hero. Crispin Glover, whilst unrecognizable, brings a keen anguish to the monstrous Grendel, with Angelina Jolie as his beautifully monstrous demon mother.

But something is a little fishy about this animated adaptation. There is some controversy as to whether Zemeckis’ approach - also used in his Polar Express (2004) - should even be called animation, as it is based on actors in motion-capture suits with CGI effects recreating them on screen. This revolutionizes production with no need for sets, costume, or makeup. Youth and muscles, such as transformed Ray Winstone, can be added where needed. The final result has been converted to an intense 3D experience at Imax or selected cinemas – don the polarized ‘sun-glasses’ and see the film pop out of the screen. It’s nothing like the green and red tinged days of 3D Hitchcock!

Despite these novelties, live action may have given the film more punch. Internet trailers show an intriguingly blended photo-realistic yet fantastic style but the same images on the vast screen highlight the technical artifice, occasionally to a distracting degree. There is also a degree of distracting artifice to the adaptation of the original story. It may be based on a grisly, life-and-death tale yet it has a fair share of strangely cheesy moments as Beowulf fights Grendell in the buff or her mother strokes his sword. Beowulf’s fall to temptation, which brings with it a vengeful dragon, is an interesting twist, but unrelated to the epic.

Beowulf was a poem about a hero but Zemeckis’ film may not be doing it justice. It has moments of greatness, just not enough of them.

3 flims.

Becoming Jane

Synopsis: Based on an book of the same name, the film explores Jane Austen’s emergence from adolescence into writer, woman, lover. [Julian Jarrold, 2007, UK, rating: PG, running time: 120 minutes]

Becoming Jane is a little like Pride and Prejudice through the looking glass. Inspired by an academic biography of the same name, it suggests that Austen’s novels give clues to at least some pivotal events in her real life that consequently shaped her fiction. The film does not look or feel all that dissimilar from the various Austen period dramas that have come before it, but the twist that the real life dimension serves up to the story of a great romance gives it a note of distinction.

Anne Hathaway’s Jane Austen is a likeable heroine, with a perfect Emma Thompsonish accent. She lives with her sister and brothers in somewhat impecunious obscurity with their father (the local priest) and mother (James Cromwell and Julie Walters). The dashing figure of Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) breaks into the local social life and more slowly into Jane’s affections.

Cast as something of the Darcy that would later woo Eliza Bennett, Lefroy follows a similar path of disdain followed by admiration and passion. Like Darcy, Lefroy is beset by an overbearing patron (Ian Richardson). Yet it is the elderly relation (Maggie Smith) of another of Jane’s suitors who brings to mind the character of Darcy’s aunt, as well as providing some of the film’s classic scenes. There are also references to other works, such as Jane’s glamorous friend Eliza de Feuillide who perhaps inspired Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park.

Despite these biographical reversals of fiction into ‘fact’, Becoming Jane is a convincing history of a vivacious, slightly audacious young woman determined to be true to herself. Jane’s vibrant imagination would take the events and turns of phrase around her as inspiration for some of the great novels of the English language. The film may not be a work of art of similar standing, but it still manages to entertain and uplift.

3 flims.

Bad Santa

Synopsis: Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) and his ‘little person’ elf (Tony Cox) are, in fact, foul-mouthed safe-crackers whose disguise allows them to case department stores for several days before robbing them. The plot thickens when Santa meets Santa-fetishist Sue (Lauren Graham), an over-zealous security boss (Bernie Mac), a manager with delicate sensitivities (John Ritter) and a strange little boy (Bret Kelly). Be ready for lashings of uncensored Southpark-like humour. [Terry Zwigoff, 2003, USA, rating: MA, running time: 93 minutes]

Zwigoff proves himself nothing if not versatile in following up the insightful coming-of-age story of Ghost World with a bad-taste Santa black comedy. There’s little subtlety about this latest effort. Unless having your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon, wrapped around a large brick, could be considered subtle. This Santa is something like taking Billy Bob Thornton’s character from the refreshingly funny Bandits, adding sex/alcohol addictions, riddling his dialogue with expletives, and hoping you end up with something like a live-action Southpark episode.

Bad Santa seems largely targeted to devotees of American butt-jokes and the like, with a anti-consumer, anti-normality message for the art-house crowd. Yet the film’s language was heavily edited in its mainstream American release. If you watch its American trailer, you’ll hardly recognize it as a preview of the film screening here. It’s ironic that something fine-tuned for the American sense of humour is most widely available outside the good ol’ conservative US of A. For the record, someone on the internet with too much time on their hands has recorded that the film has 170 ‘fucks’, 74 ‘shits’, 31 ‘arses’, 10 ‘bitches, yet only 1 ‘bastard’ in various permutations. Only about 50-75% of them are funny, which makes the rest kinda tedious.

Outcry about Bad Santa may have added to the wedge between Disney’s leaders and the Weinstein brothers, who run Disney's Miramax subsidiary. Relationships were already a little chilly after Fahrenheit 9/11. They must be positively frosty now, with Disney executives reported to be ‘totally horrified’ at the first screening. I mean, Santa having anal sex in the changerooms near the lines of children at his department store grotto would rattle anyone, even without the “By the time I’ve finished, you won’t shit right for a week” line. I was kind of distracted by the little old lady sitting in my row at the cinema, and wondering what she was thinking. I was also wondering whether Zwigoff’s film about the perverse world of cartoonist Robert Crumb inspired this particular vision.

Bill Murray was interested in playing Santa, but did Lost in Translation instead. Thornton is a good comic actor with some great timing and delivery, but Bad Santa would probably have succeeded far better with a satirical emphasis, some smarter ideas, and Murray’s lighter touch. Still, it has some inspired touches, like Bernie Mac’s ability to eat an orange very amusingly. The Kid’s wide-eyed innocence also works. When Santa, The Kid, and the Midget face off in the boxing ring I had tears of laughter rolling down my aching cheeks. And Lauren Graham adds some sexy warmth to an otherwise often callously-ugly black comedy.

Let’s face it, shit happens when you party naked.

3 flims.