Vinyan

This is a reappraisal of a review I originally posted in August last year. That piece was based on a single viewing of ‘Vinyan’ on FilmFour, interrupted by adverts, very late at night. I’ve since had the opportunity to watch it, in the proper aspect ratio, without interruptions and in the context of ‘A Wonderful Love’ and ‘Calvaire’.

‘Vinyan’ marks a progression – and a divergence – from ‘A Wonderful Love’ and ‘Calvaire’. In the former, Miss Lara believes a dying male stripper to be the partner she’s never had and blithely acts out their life together, seemingly blind to the simple fact that the guy sitting on her sofa has a fork in his throat and no vital signs. In the latter, Bartel believes a stranded lounge singer to be the wife who left him years ago and blithely acts out their life together, seemingly blind to the simple fact that the guy sitting opposite him for Christmas dinner is just that: a guy. A dude, a bloke, a fella. Adam’s apple; ability to write his name in the snow; Y chromosome present and correct.

The deeper connection between these two works – the wellspring from which both films draw their humour and their horror – is the utter conviction Miss Lara and Bartel have that their perspective isn’t just the right one but the only one.

In ‘Vinyan’, bereaved aid workers Paul and Jeanne Bellmer (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart) believe that a blurry figure glimpsed briefly in a snippet of handheld camcorder footage is their son, lost in a tsunami, and risk everything – financially, emotionally and in terms of their sanity – to find him. Already things differ from ‘A Wonderful Love’ and ‘Calvaire’: those films dealt with loneliness; ‘Vinyan’ deals with grief.

Paul and Jeanne are at a fundraiser for a project to assist a village of abandoned children in Burma, when they see the footage in question. Their host is casually describing how the only way into the region was to pay for the services of a Triad boss, Thaksin Gao (Petch Osathanugrah), to escort him upriver, when Jeanne flips out. She is immediately convinced that one of the children, out of focus and not even facing the camera, is her son.

During the taxi ride home, Paul is sceptical and tries to reason with her. And here the second difference from du Welz’s previous works: a dissenter to the protagonist’s unshakeable convictions. A dissenter, yes; but a dissuader, no. Jeanne plunges into the criminal underworld to locate Gao. Paul, reluctantly and with increasing frustration, follows. Paying Gao an absurd amount, they set out on a journey that comes across as ‘Heart of Darkness’ by way of ‘Don’t Look Now’ with an ending that Ruggero Deodato is probably still kicking himself for not coming up with.

The pivotal scene synthesizes the film’s themes of loss, grief and desperation in a moment of visual poetry and unexpected calm (much of ‘Vinyan’, particularly in dealing with Paul and Jeanne’s fractured relationship, is pitched at a borderline hysterical level): on a moonlit beach, Gao and some of his colleagues release lanterns to into the sky, offerings to those who have died badly, whose souls cannot make the transition to the next world. They are called vinyan, he tells Jeanne: tormented and angry ghosts. Gao asks her to release a lantern. She replies that she doesn’t need to: her son is not dead; she’s convinced of it. Gao shakes his head. “For me,” he says. Fragile, paper-thin lanterns, ablaze with light, fill the sky above them, reflections dotting the ink-black water as they drift ever higher.

This introduces an enigma that, for me, defines the film. Whose troubled and malicious spirit does the title refer to? Is it Paul and Jeanne’s son? Or, allowing for Gao’s intimation that one’s spirit can be vinyan whilst one is still alive – perhaps in anticipation of a bad end (or, as is evident in Jeanne’s withdrawn and unhinged behaviour, because an agitation of the mind) – does it refer to Paul or Jeanne?

Or is the children, feral and disturbing and making the chavs in ‘Eden Lake’ look like a bunch of girl scouts, they encounter in the depths of the jungle, their faces painted and their laughter devoid of anything human?

As I said in the original article, which I’ve pretty much repeated wholesale for the last few paragraphs, I still think there are minor flaws: the hamfisted foley work that ensures car engines, rainfall, footsteps and noises of the jungle overwhelm the soundtrack in scene after scene so that entire screeds of dialogue are rendered difficult to hear or, in some instances, completely incomprehensible. This especially doesn’t help when Beart’s accent is so heavy that some of her line-readings are murky (she seemed to demonstrate a better facility in English language dialogue in, of all things, ‘Mission: Impossible’). The film’s first third in particular functions at the histrionic level mentioned earlier, although this does contrast well with Jeanne’s withdrawal into the crumbling façade of her own mind in the latter scenes.

However, these things bothered me less second time around. I wonder, also, if the exaggerated foley work and the histrionic performances were a deliberate aesthetic choice on du Welz’s part. Whether he intended them to emphasize Paul and Jeanne’s disconnection from the world around them (be it the , ahem, civilized world at the start of the film or the festering jungle at the end).

Benoit Debie’s cinematography is excellent, capturing a sense of alien-ness in the river and the landscape that’s almost Herzogian. Sewell, so often cast as a villain, proves that he can essay an everyman role very effectively. Beart makes an unlikeable character memorable. And Osathanugrah’s gets a man-of-the-match award: as the curiously sanguine gang boss, he steals every scene he’s in. Du Welz paces the film well, the feverish grip of Jeanne’s obsessive communicated with slam-bang intensity, dream sequences and hallucinations intermingling with the actuality of the Bellmers’ quest, a stomach-churning sense of something darkly inevitable waiting for them, and a jarring transition into grand guignol territory at the very end providing a not-entirely-unpredictable but still uncomfortable conclusion.

And then there’s that final shot.

‘Vinyan’ achieves an atmosphere of eerie dread, a fog-like sense of something unwholesome that drifts through the very celluloid of the film. It also achieves a slow and hypnotically awful depiction of a character’s mind folding in on itself under the weight of grief.

It’s as brilliant and enigmatic as ‘Calvaire’ and if none of the dark humour of that film is present, then perhaps that’s only because of the subject matter. One thing I’m certain of: I can’t wait for du Welz’s next film.

Vinyan

When Fabrice du Welz’s ‘Vinyan’ was released in the UK about a year ago, it was marketed as a horror movie. I read a lot of negative reviews: indifferent performances, unsympathetic characters, a meandering first hour, an abrupt lurch into brutality during the final stretches, a befuddling ending.

Except for the befuddling ending part, those exact criticisms could be applied to ‘Wolf Creek’ – and that 90% dull and 10% tense and grimly nasty little number had garnered appreciative reviews and done pretty well at the box office.

So when ‘Vinyan’ aired on Film Four a couple of nights ago, I settled down with a large glass of red and minimal expectations. Two hours later, in the early hours of the morning with Mrs Agitation soundly asleep and every tiny sound from next door or out on the street pricking the hairs on the back of my neck, I switched the bedside light off and drew the covers over me, thoroughly creeped out.


‘Vinyan’ isn’t a perfect film, and I can see why its final shot leaves many people cold, but damned if it isn’t an underdog that’s worth banging the drum for. At its best, ‘Vinyan’ achieves an atmosphere of eerie dread, a fog-like sense of something unwholesome that drifts through the very celluloid of the film. It also achieves a slow and hypnotically awful depiction of a character’s mind folding in on itself under the weight of grief.

The plot concerns aid workers Paul and Jeanne Bellmer (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart), whose son was lost in a tsunami six months before the film opens. At a fundraiser for a project to assist a village of abandoned children in Burma, their host shows some grainy footage of the village in question and describes how the only way into the region was to pay for the services of a Triad boss, Thaksin Gao (Petch Osathanugrah), to escort him upriver. Seemingly apropos of nothing, Jeanne flips out. She becomes convinced that one of the children in the footage, out of focus and not even facing the camera, is her missing son.

During the taxi ride home, Paul is sceptical and tries to reason with her. But Jeanne’s is in the grip of a fully-formed obsession and plunges into the criminal underworld to locate Gao. Paul, reluctantly and with increasing frustration, follows. Paying Gao an absurd amount, they set out on a journey that comes across as ‘Heart of Darkness’ by way of ‘Don’t Look Now’ with an ending that Ruggero Deodato is probably still kicking himself for not coming up with.


The pivotal scene synthesizes the film’s themes of loss, grief and desperation in a moment of visual poetry and unexpected calm (much of ‘Vinyan’, particularly in dealing with Paul and Jeanne’s fractured relationship, is pitched at a borderline hysterical level): on a moonlit beach, Gao and some of his colleagues release lanterns to into the sky, offerings to those who have died badly, whose souls cannot make the transition to the next world. They are called vinyan, he tells Jeanne: tormented and angry ghosts. Gao asks her to release a lantern. She replies that she doesn’t need to: her son is not dead; she’s convinced of it. Gao shakes his head. “For me,” he says. Fragile, paper-thin lanterns, ablaze with light, fill the sky above them, reflections dotting the ink-black water as they drift ever higher.

This introduces an enigma that, for me, defines the film. Whose troubled and malicious spirit does the title refer to? Is it Paul and Jeanne’s son? Or, allowing for Gao’s intimation that one’s spirit can be vinyan whilst one is still alive – perhaps in anticipation of a bad end (or, as is evident in Jeanne’s withdrawn and unhinged behaviour, because of an agitation of the mind) – does it refer to Paul or Jeanne?

Or is the children, feral and disturbing and making the chavs in ‘Eden Lake’ look like a bunch of girl scouts, they encounter in the depths of the jungle, their faces painted and their laughter devoid of anything human?

I said there were faults with the film, and there are. The foley work is ludicrously overdone, car engines, rainfall, footsteps and noises of the jungle overwhelming the soundtrack in scene after scene so that entire screeds of dialogue are rendered difficult to hear or, in some instances, completely incomprehensible. This especially doesn’t help when Beart’s accent is so heavy that some of her line-readings are murky (she seemed to demonstrate a better facility in English language dialogue in, of all things, ‘Mission: Impossible’). The film’s first third in particular functions at the histrionic level mentioned earlier, although this does contrast well with Jeanne’s withdrawal into the crumbling façade of her own mind in the latter scenes.

On the plus side, Benoit Debie’s cinematography is excellent, capturing a sense of alien-ness in the river and the landscape that’s almost Herzogian. The performances are good (Sewell, so often cast as a villain, proves that he can essay an everyman role very effectively) and in Osathanugrah’s case excellent – as the curiously sanguine gang boss, he steals every scene he’s in. Du Welz paces the film well, the feverish grip of Jeanne’s obsessive communicated with slam-bang intensity, dream sequences and hallucinations intermingling with the actuality of the Bellmers’ quest, a stomach-churning sense of something darkly inevitable waiting for them, and a jarring transition into grand guignol territory at the very end providing a not-entirely-unpredictable but still uncomfortable conclusion.

And then there’s that final shot.

‘Vinyan’ is a very good film that only just falls short of greatness. There seem to be a lot of people out there who didn’t like it. But maybe that provides the measure of the film: it gets under the skin, lodges itself in the back of the mind and leaves a nasty little imprint on the memory.

Dark City

At midnight, the city shuts down. Cars stop as if their engines have died. Elevated trains slow to a halt. People sleep. Silence settles. Everything is held in stasis.



This is when The Strangers conduct their experiments. This is when the city morphs and changes and things are rendered different. This is when an ordinary joe working a dead end job might wake up in an elegant townhouse to a life of luxury. For a while, at least. Until Dr Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) turns up again and selects a syringe from his medical bag. And with that injection, a new life, a new personality, a new set of memories.

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a state of panic. He finds himself in a dingy apartment, immersed in a bathful of tepid and discoloured water. He remembers nothing. A suitcase embossed with the initials K.H. and a postcard from a coastal resort are the only clues he has to who and where he is.

A phone call alerts him to a matter of greater concern: he's a wanted man. He goes on the lam. Hassled by the cops, he's helped out of a tight spot by accommodating call girl May (Melissa George). She's sultry and voluptuous, but she's not the woman in the photograph in John's wallet. And besides, the dead girl in the apartment he's just fled suggests he might be a danger to her. He leaves.

Murdoch's wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) is approached by Dr Schreber and Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt). A nightclub singer whose repertoire of torch numbers reflects the pain of her break-up with John, she believes she can offer little or no help to either man.

The doctor and inspector have different agendas. Schreber has been assisting The Strangers in their experiments. He has a paid a price but inveigled himself into a position which even The Strangers have underestimated his potential to exploit. Bumstead is doggedly investigating a series of murders. His colleague Detective Walenski (Colin Friels) has been driven insane. But not, as Bumstead might think, by the case.

Alex Proyas's genre-bending cult classic predates 'The Matrix' by a year in its fusion of sci-fi and film noir tropes. It belongs equally to strands of cinema encompassing the innocent-man-accused chase thrillers of Hitchcock and the dystopian cityscapes of Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis'. Its mise-en-scenes abound with clues and symbols, its narrative unravelling through a maze of shadowy streets, dark doorways and confined spaces. Its protagonists conform to genre stereotypes (as The Strangers mean them to) but wear their humanity with a sense of hard-won of pragmatism. Bumstead is a journeyman copper who goes looking for facts and uncovers the truth. Emma has the look of a smouldering femme fatale and the heart of a romantic heroine. John is a confused innocent, lost and alone, with more power than even he realises.

'Dark City' is a low-key character piece realised on an epic scale. It found little favour at the box office, whereas the Wachowski brothers' adrenaline rush of high-wire stunts and Philosophy 101 made a killing. I don't begrudge 'The Matrix' its success - its terrific entertainment and holds a place in my affections which not even the leaden and pretentious self-indulgence of the sequels can dislodge - but I prefer 'Dark City'. It doesn't want to be cool and iconic and kick-ass. Its happy to stick to the shadows in a rain-wet and neon-drenched alleyway. Its images are darker and resonate longer in the memory. Did I mention that it predated 'The Matrix' by a year? Its poetic and haunting final image predates 'Requiem for a Dream' by two.