Jason Bourne

In one respect, ‘Jason Bourne’ simply offers more of the same: foot chase, bike chase, car chase, hand-to-hand fighting, tradecraft vs technology, big crowd scenes, yet another piece of the Bourne backstory jigsaw slotted into place. And it would be easy – and lazy – to leave an appraisal of the film at that.

The first debate any reviewer of ‘Jason Bourne’ needs to engage in – of more paramount importance, even, that “by Christ, that title’s lousy, why didn’t they just stick a polysyllabic noun after the dude’s name and respect tradition?” – is whether more of the same is necessarily a bad thing.

With only millimetric tweaks to the formula decade on decade, the Bond juggernaut has made enough money at the box office across half a century to buy out Croesus, bankrupt the Sultan of Brunei and play my-bank-account’s-bigger-than-your-bank-account with J.K. Rowling; and done so on more of the same. Harry Potter? More of the same for seven consecutive terms. Horror movie franchises? ‘Halloween’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ notched up double-figures and then got rebooted. More of the same.

Yes, ‘Jason Bourne’ deals in precisely the logistically jaw-dropping set pieces, individual vs the system battle of wits, and hyper-kinetically edited action that you’d want – nay demand – from the series; and let’s face it, Paul Greengrass defined the Bourne aesthetic with his first throw of the dice on ‘The Bourne Supremacy’. Technically, ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ was an exercise in more of the same, and it remains the series’s high point.

The second debate is whether, almost a decade on from ‘Ultimatum’ and coming after Tony Gilroy’s formulaic (in a bad way) ‘The Bourne Legacy’, ‘Jason Bourne’ has any contemporary relevance. Or is this just the Matt and Paul nostalgia show? The answer to this one isn’t quite as clear cut.

‘Jason Bourne’ finds our buffed up anti-hero off the grid and dispiritingly reduced to bare-knuckle fighting in sundry European shitholes to earn a living. The decade that’s passed since ‘Ultimatum’ hasn’t been particularly kind to Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), either. She’s ex-CIA, embittered, and working for an Assange-kind reactionary hacker. Her penetration of CIA files pertaining to Treadstone, Blackbriar, Outcome and black ops imperative du jour Ironhand is the spark that ignites the film’s narrative. Not only does she pull down some serious heat on herself – in the former of CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and ruthlessly ambitious Cyber Ops head Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) – but uncovers a crucial piece of information regarding Bourne’s recruitment to Treadstone. She makes contact with Bourne and the pair meet in Athens as an anti-government protest explodes into rioting. Into an already volatile situation comes The Asset (Vincent Cassel), under orders from Dewey and with his own agenda vis-à-vis eliminating Bourne.

This is good stuff, as labyrinthine and steeped in conspiracy as any of the previous instalments. Then Greengrass throws into the mix a sub-plot (which swiftly tries to interpose itself as the main plot) about a social media corporation called Deep Dream, run by visionary geek Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) who owes his success to favours and fund money provided by Dewey. Which immediately ties the film to the already tired “hey let’s use IT to spy on everyone in the whole wide world and if necessary assassinate them” narrative of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and ‘Spectre’. A decade ago, Bond was playing catch-up with Bourne – it shouldn’t be the other way round.

It would be a cheap shot to describe ‘Jason Bourne’ as Bourne for the Twitter generation – it’s too smart for that; too well-crafted. The Athens sequence, as Bourne tries to extract Nicky from a city in chaos, comes a close second to the Waterloo station set-piece in ‘Ultimatum’ as Greengrass’s defining moment as Bourne director. The Las Vegas set car chase that powers Bourne towards his final confrontation is first class action cinema. Even the “CIA is run by murderous villains” formula gets a new spin with Vikander’s ambivalent character on course for the careerist coup in the final act.

How much more mileage the character has remains to be seen – ‘Jason Bourne’ sows enough seeds to structure at least one more film around – but with Damon still delivering the goods in his signature role and Greengrass’s superb craftsmanship and innate understanding of pace and tension, I’m happy to keep on taking the ride. Just sort the fucking title out next time, though, guys.

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1

Here’s irony for you: ‘Mesrine: Killer Instinct’, at 110 minutes, could have done with being at least half an hour longer to develop and expand the material; to give a real sense of the period of time that the film covers; while on the other hand the sluggish ‘Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1’, at two hours ten minutes, could have done with being at least twenty minutes shorter.

Although ‘Public Enemy’ adheres to the same tick-box approach to the narrative of Jacques Mesrine’s life, presenting us with a “greatest hits” compilation of prison breaks, shoot outs, verbal sparrings with judges and brutal retribution on gentlemen of the press who dare paint him as anything other than the Robin Hood figure he seems to believe he is, what makes it such a long haul is its inherent lack of suspense. We know how it’s going to end.

‘Killer Instinct’ opens with a terrific split screen sequence in which Mesrine and vampish consort Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier) attempt a low-key flight from Paris, only to be ambushed by a bunch of gunmen in the back of a truck. The rest of ‘Killer Instinct’ plays out in defiance of its protagonist’s fate, and it’s precisely this attitude that gives the film its power.

‘Public Enemy’ starts with the bullet-riddled body of Mesrine being removed from his car, crime scene tape around the scene and police officers keeping the crowds back. The architect of this coup de grace is immediately revealed as Commissaire Broussard (Olivier Gourmet). A flashback has Mesrine being interrogated by Broussard post-arrest. Something about the structure the film falls into annoys already. It’s too self-conscious. Mesrine’s almost good-natured bantering with Broussard is evidently meant to come off as poignant or ironic in light of his inevitable demise as a result of Broussard’s operation, but it just reinforces the sense that ‘Public Enemy’ is a long haul towards a denouement we watched one movie ago.

I’ve watched the film twice now and really wanted to like it both times. And there are some effective moments – such as Mesrine playing to the gallery at a retrial, taking the piss out of the judge prior to pulling off a risky but ballsy escape – but there’s barely a frame that doesn’t betray how enamoured director Jean-François Richet has become with his subject. Two examples: Mesrine post-jailbreak romping with a couple of hookers while fellow escapee François Besse (Mathieu Alamric) tuts and shakes his head; and Mesrine coercing a family to get him through a roadblock, making the children laugh and giving the parents a big wad of cash as a thank you. The first example essentially says (adopts Cockney accent) “Oy oy saveloy, one o’ the lads, innit? He shoots he scores. Get in there, son, it’s yer birthday.” The second would have you believe (same accent) “Gor blimey, guv, that Mesrine geezer, he’s yer axshul bleedin’ Robin Hood, innit, stealin’ from the rich ‘n’ givin’ to the poor, Gawd bless him!” Both sentiments are total bollocks.

Late in the game, Richet seems to remember that Mesrine was stone-cold killer and throws in a weirdly protracted sequence in which the gangster lures a journalist who has impugned him a print with the promise of an exclusive interview only to deliver a beating and a burial alive. It’s a stark reminder of Mesrine as a dangerous and unpredictable man, and gives some indication of how dark and nasty ‘Public Enemy’ could have been, but coming after so much larking around and rose-tinted adulation, it just seems awkward.

Cassel remains just as compelling in the lead role, so often rising above the script’s deficiencies; he really is one of the best actors in the business. The period evocation, here focusing on the 70s, is just as detailed and evocative as in ‘Killer Instinct’. And Ludivine Sagnier doesn’t just provide the romantic interest but matches Mesrine in all manner of badassery. She alone gives the film a frisson no-one else achieves.

If Cassel’s Mesrine would sell his grandmother down the river to pull off a bank job or instigate a prison break, Sagnier’s Sylvia would make a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window. I know who I’d throw in my lot with.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

 

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Jacques Mesrine can probably still lay claim – for all that he died over 30 years ago – to the title of “France’s most notorious criminal”. A bank robber, kidnapper, ice-cold killer, accomplished jail-breaker, memoirist, self-styled political activist, something of a master of disguise and an all-round bad mo’ fo’, it was inevitable that someone would make a movie about him.

Indeed, the first cinematic attempt to capture his life and crimes came just five years after his death: ‘Mesrine’, written and directed by André Génovès, starred Nicolas Silberg as Mesrine and concentrated on the last 18 months of his life, from his escape from La Santé prison to his death in a police operation that was little more than a sanctioned assassination.

In 2008, Jean-François Richet premiered his two-part biopic with Vincent Cassel in the lead role. Unlike Génovès’s film, Richet’s epic covers the entirety of Mesrine’s widely-reported career, kicking off in the late 50s as he returns from military service in Algeria and gets in involved in the Parisian underworld under the aegis of mob boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu).

 

An early scene has a uniformed Mesrine standing guard while a couple of other soldiers brutally interrogate an Algerian freedom fighter over the location of an incendiary device. The prisoner’s sister is hauled in and Mesrine is ordered to shoot her. Instead, he blows away the terrorist. It’s a histrionic and utterly uncontextualised scene (Mesrine’s political ideals don’t surface till the second film and he doesn’t really act on them other than talking about getting involved with the Red Brigade), and I can’t help feeling that, as with much in both films, it merely serves to tick a box as Richet waltzes us through a Jacques Mesrine “greatest hits” compilation.

‘Killer Instinct’ just about makes the dance worthwhile. Richet nails the late 50s/early 60s period recreation as Mesrine embraces the criminal lifestyle, gets involved with the good-natured Sofia (Elena Anaya) and tries to reform after a prison sentence for armed robbery; redundancy and the lure of easy money by hooking up with his erstwhile cronies combine to drive him back to a life of crime.

Richet plays much of this in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville. An interlude in Canada and the US – Mesrine accompanied by new girlfriend Jeanne (Cecile de France) – lets the director cut loose with some explicitly American iconography, which in one respect is apposite since Melville himself rooted his aesthetic in American crime cinema and in another is completely hackneyed due to the over-reliance on Bonnie and Clyde style tropes.

 

An abrupt shift into the prison break genre follows when Mesrine is arrested, extradited to Quebec and sentenced to the St-Vincent-de-Paul maximum security facility. This section plays like ‘Midnight Express’ as sadistic guards routinely beat the shit out of Mesrine and hose him down with jets of cold water. His escape is so laughably easy that it makes ‘Two Way Stretch’ look like ‘The Shawshank Redemption’; if you didn’t know it was based on fact, you’d find your suspension of disbelief stretched to breaking point.

Ranking equally in the this-would-be-fucking-ludicrous-if-it-hadn-t-actually-happened stakes is the climactic scene where Mesrine and fellow escapee Jean-Paul Mercier (Roy Dupuis) attempt to spring their fellow prisoners, provoking a gun battle with the prison guards and sustaining injuries but failing in their intent.

Richet compresses a hell of a lot of incident into 110 minutes. ‘Killer Instinct’ occasionally feels like it ought to be a two and half hour movie, with the narrative and the passage of time and the character interrelationships having the proper time to breathe and make sense and be developed. Instead, a sense of truncation lies heavily across the production. Script and editing conspire to ellipsis. Ultimately, the production design, the period recreation and Cassel’s flamboyant central performance carry it. No classic, but enough decent material to perk one’s interest for part two.

Black Swan

I was going to save this review to bulk out the small amount of pre-prepared material I have for the next couple of weeks while I take some time out from film reviewing to work on the novel; however, I figured it would be better to post it now, ahead of the Oscar brouhaha.

Early in Darren Aronofsky’s stone-cold modern classic ‘Black Swan’, impresario Tomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) offers a 72-word synopsis of Tchaikovsky’s eternally popular ballet ‘Swan Lake’:

“We all know the story. Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan. She desires freedom but only true love can break the spell. Her wish is nearly granted in the form of a prince, but before he can declare his love her lustful twin, the black swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated the white swan leaps of a cliff killing herself and, in death, finds freedom.”

Leroy’s intent is for his ailing ballet company to present a new version of ‘Swan Lake’. Although he admits that “it’s been done to death”, his idea is to “strip it down, make it visceral”. With prima ballerina Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) retiring from the company under a storm of bad feeling, Leroy also intends on using ‘Swan Lake’ as the debut of his next leading lady. Tensions are running high as the ballerinas vie for the role.

While Leroy delivers the above synopsis, he walks among the ranks, all of them primping and preening and trying to catch his attention as they practice at the barre. He steps some of the women on shoulder. They beam with smug superiority. After he concludes his address, Leroy instructs all those he tapped to continue with their scheduled rehearsals that afternoon; the others are to attend for auditions for the Swan Queen. The smug looks vanish.

This scene is the first of many that play with expectations, pull the rug from under the audience’s (and the characters’) perceptions, and explore the theme of dualism. Even the title adheres to this aesthetic. The White Swan is the heroine of ‘Swan Lake’, the Black Swan the villainess. That both are danced by the same ballerina is the very core of the film. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a naïve but determined member of the company. Her entire life, shaped by the obsessive influence of her ex-ballerina mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), has led her to this audition. Damaged feet, broken toenails, endless hours at the barre, punishing self-discipline, a total negation of a social life, friends, romance. And while Leroy can’t fault the precision and perfection of her technique – Nina’s got the White Swan in the bag, no question – his big concern is whether she can convince as the Black Swan; whether she can be sensual, unpredictable and seductive. Whether she can lose control.

If duality is the aesthetic, this is the dynamic.

As Leroy – through highly questionable means (I rather think if he pulled any of his shit with the Bolshoi, there’d the sexual harassment accusations all over the place) – drives Nina towards a breakthrough as the Black Swan, the psychological implications begin to take their toll. Nina develops a rash on her shoulder which seems to be sprouting something; her already brittle relationship with Erica approaches breaking point; and she alternates between being paranoid about and attracted to Lily (Mila Kunis), a fellow ballerina who has none of the precision and control required for the White Swan, but whose sensuality and determinism to live in the moment tick all of the boxes for the Black Swan.

Aronofsky’s film – for my money his best yet, and that’s saying something for the guy who made ‘Pi’, ‘Requiem for a Dream’, ‘The Fountain’ and ‘The Wrestler’ – is at one and the same time the best film about ballet since ‘The Red Shoes’, the most visceral body horror picture this side of David Cronenberg and an astonishingly accomplished extended visual metaphor for the incremental and ultimately terrifyingly emergence of the protagonist’s dark side. A scene, during Nina’s climatic performance of ‘Swan Lake’, where she literally becomes the Black Swan is as daring, breathtaking and magnificently accomplished as anything I’ve seen on the big screen.

Moreover, this is a film which will richly reward repeated viewings. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite as enigmatic and ripe for debating since Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’. The big question here is: how much of what happens is in Nina’s mind? And how much is the actuality which feeds her state of mind? You could watch ‘Black Swan’ a thousand times and still be debating it. In the future, book length theses will be written on this film. A myriad different conclusions will be arrived at. They’ll all be just as valid.

Aronofsky’s direction is astounding. His exerts complete control of the material, knowing far more intuitively than his heroine just when to cut loose with the visceral imagery, jarringly effective juxtapositions and the sometimes outrageous but always perfectly contextualized set-pieces. His use of black and white (the palette that defines ‘Black Swan’ so overwhelmingly that you could almost start to believe it was actually filmed in monochrome) purposefully evokes the central dynamic in frame after frame. Not just the tendency of Nina to wear white and Lily black (culminating in a metaphor redolent of troilism where Nina dons a black top of Lily’s over her own white tee-shirt) but the white walls and black doors of Nina’s apartment building, the harsh white lights of the ballet studio which are suddenly extinguished plunging the protagonists into darkness (tellingly, this happens twice); the equally harsh lights and shadowy corners of both the subway and the nocturnal streets Nina takes to get home; the dominant colours of the canvases Erica paints; the décor of Tomas’s apartment.

And then, in what can only be an homage to Powell and Pressburger’s classic, there are the sudden and garish splashes of red. The tube of lipstick Nina steals from Beth’s dressing room; the red-lipstick scrawled “whore” that Nina finds on her mirror after it’s announced she’s won the role of the Swan Queen (endlessly debatable question #1: did she write this herself?); the rash on Nina’s shoulder; the blood from her broken toenails; the red strobe lights in the disco she goes to with Lily (a scene so elliptically edited that Nina and Lily seem to merge before your eyes); a nail file coated with blood; Nina herself bathed in red backstage.

I don’t think there’s a single image in ‘Black Swan’ that doesn’t contribute to the overall meaning and/or enigma of the film (the use of mirrors is explicitly apparent). The same applies to character names. There’s a tinge of the Scottish to Beth Macintyre’s name, bringing to mind the beautiful and incredibly talented Moira Shearer, one of the most famous British ballerinas, the star of ‘The Red Shoes’ and an acclaimed actress in her own right. The fact that Beth is the outgoing prima ballerina in ‘Black Swan’, her departure leaving the stage free for a very different new soloist, is Aronofsky’s first hint to audiences that his film is going to be a very different beast to Powell and Pressburger’s. Tomas Leroy’s surname is a play on “le roi”, which is French for “the king”, indicating that while Nina may have been “crowned” (ie. picked as) the Swan Queen, the impresario still holds sway over her as he does the rest of the company. Nina and Lily have remarkably similar names: four letters, with the same first letter/third letter repetition and the same vowel as the second letter. Nina is Spanish for “girl”, appropriate to the character since her life has been subjugated to her mother’s demands. Lily is more ironic, since it means innocence, purity and beauty. A case of one out of three ain’t bad as far as the Lily of the film is concerned (or is Lily symbolic of all three and it’s just Nina’s fracturing state of mind that imposes the sensuality and promiscuity on her? Endlessly debatable question #2.)

The performances match the brilliance of Aronofsky’s direction. Portman has never been better, Kunis is a revelation, Hershey delivers a turn that’s as quietly terrifying as Billie Whitelaw in ‘The Omen’, and Cassel proves (if proof were needed) why he’s one of the best actors working today. OST providers Clint Mansell and Matt Dunkley provide an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ so cleverly done that it’s impossible to see (or should that be “hear”) the joins, while cinematographer Matthew Libatique handles the palette and the visual cues in beautifully understated style, as well as taking his camera right into the middle of the ballet (Portman utterly utterly utterly convinces) to create a swirling and vertiginous immersion in the intensity and pain of the performance.

Looking back at the 1,400 words I’ve just written, it’s a testament to the magnificence of ‘Black Swan’ that I got so much out of the film on my first viewing and that I’m counting the minutes till it’s out on DVD and I can reapproach it and re-engage with its enigmas and its visceral brutality and, despite everything, its soaring flights of undeniable beauty. ‘Black Swan’ is about as perfect as the art of cinema gets.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: Sheitan

A word on the title: “sheitan” is an Islamic word for Satan and not, as I originally thought, a Yorkshireman’s capsule review of the movie (“that French film was a shite ’un”). Which, to be honest, was what I was thinking during the first ten or fifteen minutes.

‘Sheitan’ starts on the evening of 23 December (the date’s important) at the Club Styxx (I’d normally interject a parenthetical “geddit?” at this point, only director Kim Chapiron lays it on so heavy-handedly there’s nothing to get). Our, ahem, heroes are hogging a corner table, eyeing up the talent and royally pissing off the management for not adhering to the two-drink minimum (mainly because they’re skint). Let’s make the introductions. Meet Thai (Nicolas Le Phat Tan): half-French, half-Chinese, shaven-headed, perpetually up for a fight, regards women as sexual objects. Meet Ladj (Ladj Ly): Franco-African, slightly more level-headed than Thai, actually quite philosophical at times, current interests: fielding a constant stream of calls from his girlfriend while trying to bed foxy barmaid Yasmine (Leila Bekhti). Meet Bart (Olivier Barthelemy): white trash loser whom we first meet trying to chat up a girl by calling her “bitch” and getting a bottle broken over his head by one of the bouncers when declines to stop hassling her and get back in line like he’s been told.

(I mention the question of ethnicity for a reason, btw.)

So: this bunch of charmers bump into slumming-it posh girl Eve (Roxane Mesquida) whom Thai decides he wants to knock boots with. Following Bart’s bottle-aided expulsion from Club Styxx (home to the world’s worst DJ) …

… Eve invites the gang to her palatial home in the country, intimating that she’s got the place to herself. Thai and Bart, immediately anticipating that these kind of shenanigans will ensue …

… don’t need asking twice. Yasmine’s got off her shift and is tagging along, so it’s decision made for Ladj as well. One problem: Ladj’s pimped-up GTi is out of fuel. So they rob a petrol station, then it’s off to Eve’s place.

It’s here that they meet Joseph (Vincent Cassel), who Eve introduces as the caretaker. And it was also at this point – after the crude, misogynistic dialogue; the two-dimensional characters; the crap dance music; and the in-yer-face, style-over-substance, too-cool-for-school artifice of the aesthetic – that I stopped shaking my head sadly at the film’s commitment to mediocrity and actually started enjoying it.

Part of the fun is in watching Thai, Ladj and Bart – “fake tough guys” as Joe Pesci would no doubt deem them – experience a sudden depletion in the cojones department as soon as they encounter the cheerfully sinister Joseph. And I gotta say: kudos to Vincent Cassel. Between this and his blistering turn in the ‘Mesrine’ films, the man has justified the fact that he’s married to Monica Bellucci. This is something I do not say lightly.

Joseph is proof of Shakespeare’s adage that “a man may smile, and smile, and be a villain”. Joseph has a smile for everyone. He’s accommodating to the point of overbearing. When the priapic but eternally backed-up Bart ogles the hot-pants clad derriere of village girl Jeanne (Julie Marie-Parmentier), Joseph unhesitatingly offers, in not so many words, to pimp her out. Jeanne herself proves more than willing. The small matter that she’s Joseph’s niece, however, cools Bart’s ardour somewhat.

(There’s a certain interrelatedness as regards the villagers. I mention this in passing.)

Joseph’s also got a friendly word for everyone, be it “little Turk” when he’s talking to Yasmine, “chink” in relation to Thai or dropping the N-word bomb in front of Ladj. And yet there’s no malice when he says any of these things. No malice, either, when he … ah, but that would be telling.

To use another of my occasional critical phrases (y’know, the kind that keep my name out of Sight & Sound), the home stretch of ‘Sheitan’ is batshit crazy. In a film that has gleefully flipped the birdy to its audience and randomly shifted the goalposts from word go – seguing demonically from Shane-Meadows-goes-Euro “yoof” movie to Zalman King-lite (will the low-class oiks get their end away with the high-class girl?) by way of ‘Deliverance’-on-the-Loire – the most bizarre transition is when the film lurches into out-and-out horror (albeit tinged with black comedy) then concludes abruptly and hilariously with the revelation that the whole demented exercise is quite simply a nativity tale.

A dark and twisted one.