There is probably no more emotional subject than lost family, the search for a mother, and the hope of re-unification of parent and child. This Russian film, set in the grime and grit of a bleak wintry Russian landscape, is – with the exception of the last few moments – a gripping and superbly accomplished story about a young boy’s search for a mother he has never known, but only seen in his dreams. Director Andrei Kravchuk creates an astonishingly real yet tender world, at the centre of which is a small boy Vanya, brilliantly brought to life by Kolya Spiridonov.
Vanya is only six years old and one of many orphans living in a harsh schizophrenic world of bedtime stories and teenage prostitution. He and the other castaways in his seedy rural orphanage idle away their time waiting for an inevitable future of petty crime and vagrancy. They are carelessly presided over by drunken officials who leave the orphanage to be managed by the older boys who run rackets and hand out beatings for non-compliance with their adolescent rules. The only way out of this harsh reality is the unlikely prospect of adoption by a wealthy overseas family. When an Italian couple chooses Vanya, he has two months to get used to the idea of leaving everything he has ever known before his new parents return to collect him.
But when another mother comes to the orphanage too late to reclaim her son who has already been adopted out, Vanya comes to imagine that he too may have a real mother somewhere – the one he dreams of - and he sets out to find her, with children traffickers and corrupt police on his trail.
What is astonishing about the film is how all the characters in the story come fully drawn. In an instant we feel that the people of this world – however small their part in Vanya’s journey - are laden with life, its small joys and its burdens. There is a similar solemn depth to the cinematography, often shot for poignancy through glass windows or framed by doors, the way a child might view the harsh adult world outside. The performances, big and small alike, are exceptional, real and knowing, and help Kravchuk and his writer Andrei Romanov create a Dickensian modern Russia with great care and an eye for detail. I have to admit though to being surprised that this level of care didn’t extend to the very ending of the film which – without giving anything away – closed the story in a manner very different to the way the rest of it was played out on screen. Despite this, it remains a beautiful and touching film.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Review of 'The Dead Girl'
Films with multiple intersecting storylines often sacrifice character complexity in order to cover the extra ground of the narrative. Not so with the moody and tragic story of The Dead Girl. In a stunning debut as writer/director, Karen Moncrieff keeps the story simple and creates five compelling female roles in a film about faded hopes, longing and the hollow reality of lives gone awry.
Australian Toni Collette is looking after her spiteful mother in a small town when she stumbles across the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and dumped in a field. The discovery is enough to make her re-think her life and she sees an opportunity for change in the form of an obsessive delivery man (Josh Brolin). Meanwhile, the body of the dead girl ends up at the city morgue where a forensics student (Rose Byrne) hopes that it is her sister, missing for 15 years. But when the real girl’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives, we start to learn what really happened on that fateful last day of the dead girl’s (Brittany Murphy) life. Housewife (Mary Beth Hurt), in a truly mesmerizing performance as an unloved and dismal wife, helps put the final piece of the bleak and fractured jigsaw together.
Although some of the stories are forced a little in places to maintain the connections between characters, the performances – particularly from Collette and Hurt – keep you totally engrossed in the gloomy space that this film inhabits. These are women living at the dimly lit end of social consequence: without families, partners who care, or independence. Ultimately they have few choices in their damaged lives, and the dead girl who lies in the field is more than a simple narrative link between them.
The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Michael Grady, with much of the action taking place at night where these troubled and complex characters move between the light and the shadow, hiding their inadequacies from the world. A haunting musical score from Adam Gorgoni completes the moody candid sadness of the film.
Australian Toni Collette is looking after her spiteful mother in a small town when she stumbles across the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and dumped in a field. The discovery is enough to make her re-think her life and she sees an opportunity for change in the form of an obsessive delivery man (Josh Brolin). Meanwhile, the body of the dead girl ends up at the city morgue where a forensics student (Rose Byrne) hopes that it is her sister, missing for 15 years. But when the real girl’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives, we start to learn what really happened on that fateful last day of the dead girl’s (Brittany Murphy) life. Housewife (Mary Beth Hurt), in a truly mesmerizing performance as an unloved and dismal wife, helps put the final piece of the bleak and fractured jigsaw together.
Although some of the stories are forced a little in places to maintain the connections between characters, the performances – particularly from Collette and Hurt – keep you totally engrossed in the gloomy space that this film inhabits. These are women living at the dimly lit end of social consequence: without families, partners who care, or independence. Ultimately they have few choices in their damaged lives, and the dead girl who lies in the field is more than a simple narrative link between them.
The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Michael Grady, with much of the action taking place at night where these troubled and complex characters move between the light and the shadow, hiding their inadequacies from the world. A haunting musical score from Adam Gorgoni completes the moody candid sadness of the film.
Burke & Wills - An Interview with Mathew Zeremes
What do you do when you’re fresh out of acting school and can’t get a lead role in a feature film? This was the question facing Oliver Torr and Matt Zeremes, graduates from the Queensland University of Technology. The answer they came up with was to write, finance and direct their own film – now a festival hit called Burke & Wills.
Zeremes is totally down-to-earth about how it happened. “Ollie and I just got out of acting school, and were trying to do as much proactive stuff as we could to get our careers going,” he says. “We’d got a spot at a theatre to put on a play we were working on about two guys called Burke and Wills who share a house. Then one day Ollie said to me ‘this would work pretty well as a film’ and I agreed.” The two actors, who’d met in Brisbane, sprang into action immediately. “That afternoon I was ringing around getting quotes for film and camera hire,” says Zeremes who plays Wills. Five weeks later they we ready to start shooting.
It’s a story of guerrilla filmmaking at its best: two driven actors with a clear idea of what they wanted and a simple yet compelling story to work with. They made the film for less than $20,000.“We knew the kind of film we wanted to make and we changed the original story quite a bit because we were now working with cinema”, says Zeremes. “The play was lighter. For the film we wanted something more dramatic but with touches of humour. We also started adding things that would really challenge us as actors. It seemed a perfect opportunity and silly not to play to our strength.”
The result is an intense character study of two young men who share a house in suburban Sydney. Burke is unemployed and dreams of travel and girls. Wills is less wistful, a troubled soul who seems nourished only by visits to his grandmother. As Burke seems to grow, Wills slides into the darker spaces of life. It’s a candid drama, laced with a black, honest humour. But the most distinctive feature of the film is its style, shot in black and white with long takes using wide-angle lenses. The final look is reminiscent of some of Jim Jarmusch’s films – Coffee and Cigarettes or Stranger Than Paradise. Yet what drove the style was the need to keep the budget down. “ We were quite insistent that we shot on film,” says Zeremes, “but we could only afford 20 rolls.” So the two first time directors realised that they would have to minimise shooting, filming as many of the scenes as possible with one shot and in one take. As an actor, Zeremes was happy with this limitation, one that would turn many film directors off. “We knew very early on that we had to play with fixed cameras and wide lenses. This set up a space a bit like a theatre, and as long as the actors stayed within the boundaries it worked really well.”
Despite the choice of name for the film, there is no particular connection to the Australian pioneers who died in the outback. “Things didn’t work out so well for the explorers,” says Zeremes, “and they don’t work out so well for our characters, but really we just liked the way that the names worked together. They’re the kind of names people take notice of.”
Yet when the film was finished in 2004, there weren’t many people taking notice of it. Zeremes was worried. “We entered a few festivals and shopped it around to Australian distributors. We had one screening, but nothing eventuated,” he says. “After two years, we thought that maybe it had run its course.” As a last hope, they sent the film to the Tribecca Film Festival based in New York. Then they forgot about it. “Out of the blue we got a call that we’d been accepted,” says Zeremes. “They flew us over there and we had four screenings that were all packed. It was the first time we’d screened the film in front of people, and suddenly we knew that we had a film that worked when people laughed in the right spots. It was amazing.”
After the success of Tribecca, the Australian media showed strong interest in the film and this helped to finally secure a distribution deal. Zeremes now realises how much work is needed once a film is finished. “I think that if we’d known what had to be done before we started, we wouldn’t have done it. It’s such a hard thing, but we just learnt everything on the job.”
And although the learning is proving useful for the next film project, the pair is finding it difficult to get finance. “Even though people know who we are now, it’s tough,” says Zeremes. A second script is ready to go, one that places them once again in the lead roles. But Zeremes wont let a little problem like money get in the way.” We directed and produced Burke & Wills because of our desire to play a lead role on film. We’re certainly happy to do that again if we need to.”
Zeremes is totally down-to-earth about how it happened. “Ollie and I just got out of acting school, and were trying to do as much proactive stuff as we could to get our careers going,” he says. “We’d got a spot at a theatre to put on a play we were working on about two guys called Burke and Wills who share a house. Then one day Ollie said to me ‘this would work pretty well as a film’ and I agreed.” The two actors, who’d met in Brisbane, sprang into action immediately. “That afternoon I was ringing around getting quotes for film and camera hire,” says Zeremes who plays Wills. Five weeks later they we ready to start shooting.
It’s a story of guerrilla filmmaking at its best: two driven actors with a clear idea of what they wanted and a simple yet compelling story to work with. They made the film for less than $20,000.“We knew the kind of film we wanted to make and we changed the original story quite a bit because we were now working with cinema”, says Zeremes. “The play was lighter. For the film we wanted something more dramatic but with touches of humour. We also started adding things that would really challenge us as actors. It seemed a perfect opportunity and silly not to play to our strength.”
The result is an intense character study of two young men who share a house in suburban Sydney. Burke is unemployed and dreams of travel and girls. Wills is less wistful, a troubled soul who seems nourished only by visits to his grandmother. As Burke seems to grow, Wills slides into the darker spaces of life. It’s a candid drama, laced with a black, honest humour. But the most distinctive feature of the film is its style, shot in black and white with long takes using wide-angle lenses. The final look is reminiscent of some of Jim Jarmusch’s films – Coffee and Cigarettes or Stranger Than Paradise. Yet what drove the style was the need to keep the budget down. “ We were quite insistent that we shot on film,” says Zeremes, “but we could only afford 20 rolls.” So the two first time directors realised that they would have to minimise shooting, filming as many of the scenes as possible with one shot and in one take. As an actor, Zeremes was happy with this limitation, one that would turn many film directors off. “We knew very early on that we had to play with fixed cameras and wide lenses. This set up a space a bit like a theatre, and as long as the actors stayed within the boundaries it worked really well.”
Despite the choice of name for the film, there is no particular connection to the Australian pioneers who died in the outback. “Things didn’t work out so well for the explorers,” says Zeremes, “and they don’t work out so well for our characters, but really we just liked the way that the names worked together. They’re the kind of names people take notice of.”
Yet when the film was finished in 2004, there weren’t many people taking notice of it. Zeremes was worried. “We entered a few festivals and shopped it around to Australian distributors. We had one screening, but nothing eventuated,” he says. “After two years, we thought that maybe it had run its course.” As a last hope, they sent the film to the Tribecca Film Festival based in New York. Then they forgot about it. “Out of the blue we got a call that we’d been accepted,” says Zeremes. “They flew us over there and we had four screenings that were all packed. It was the first time we’d screened the film in front of people, and suddenly we knew that we had a film that worked when people laughed in the right spots. It was amazing.”
After the success of Tribecca, the Australian media showed strong interest in the film and this helped to finally secure a distribution deal. Zeremes now realises how much work is needed once a film is finished. “I think that if we’d known what had to be done before we started, we wouldn’t have done it. It’s such a hard thing, but we just learnt everything on the job.”
And although the learning is proving useful for the next film project, the pair is finding it difficult to get finance. “Even though people know who we are now, it’s tough,” says Zeremes. A second script is ready to go, one that places them once again in the lead roles. But Zeremes wont let a little problem like money get in the way.” We directed and produced Burke & Wills because of our desire to play a lead role on film. We’re certainly happy to do that again if we need to.”
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