Lose your Head

A German thriller set in Berlin about a young Spanish tourist who comes for the music, drugs and sex and ends up getting much more than he bargained for.  Marko Mandic plays the weird and violent Eastern European, more effectively and less of a cliché than you might imagine. Fernando Tielve is strangely convincing as the nerdish and bewitched Luis even if the logic of his presence there is not always so clear.  Excellent photography, good music and an uncanny sense of danger makes this a better film than I expected but far from being anything great.  Nevertheless, portraying this down side of the Berlin scene is a good thing.

★★

Monster Pies

Australian coming-of-age film on a very low budget.  Director Lee Galea does a sort of male Romeo and Juliet number as love between two boys in a Melbourne High School is thwarted by bizarre family issues.  It meanders along until the last quarter which takes an even darker turn and somehow gives the film the punch it was needing.  Tristan Barr and Lucas Linehan are quietly compelling in the leads.

★★

Floating Skyscrapers

 

This Polish film about a swimmer who seems to be all set with live-in girlfriend and the chance of being selected for the national team but who suddenly finds himself attracted to a man is a strange work that scores more for its décor and photography than for its story. Tomasz Wasilewski creates a Warsaw that is all cold architectural lines despite the modern flats and motorways in between the Soviet blocs and the lack of warmth and compassion among the people hardly less conservative than in the past makes for a cold forbidding setting.  Difficult therefore for Kuba (a fit Mateusz Banasiuk) to confront his burgeoning homosexuality.  Girlfriend Sylwie played effectively by Marta Nieradkiewicz is trying to hold on to the relationship.  Kuba’s mother butts in with her clinging needs as well.  A sad story in the end, perhaps rather generalised and rather unfair one suspects towards modern Poland.  The technical side is good.

★★  +

Trance

Danny Boyle’s latest offering is a competent thriller about heists in the art world and hypnosis.  It allows for a puzzle of a screenplay to unravel as we watch.  James McAvoy is the Everyman at the centre of the film while Vincent Cassell with a strange British accent is the main crim and a statuesque Rosario Dawson is the hypnotist.  But all is not as it seems.  I liked Dawson best of the cast and I liked the photography, direction and music.  But efficient as it was, I did not feel at all gripped by this.

★★★

Pit Stop

Indy American feature set in Austin Texas and thereabouts.  Gabe and Ernesto are two mature gay men each with their own relationship issues.  They would be a perfect couple but will circumstances lead them to cross paths.  Yen Tan crafts a small, sensitive movie about living in small-town USA with limited options and focuses on people trying to live their lives as best they can.  Hutch shoots very poetically and there is nice soft music by Curtis Heath.

★★+

Les Grandes Ondes

A strange satire from Switzerland about a team of journalists who get caught up by chance in the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 and find their lives forever transformed unexpectedly by the experience.  Swiss humour must be an acquired taste in some respects because while there are some nice touches of satire and some shrewd observations about the media and about societies, this film also has rather meandering moments in which you wonder where we are going.  Valerie Donzelli and Michel Vuillermoz lead the cast and I thought Francisco Belard as their young translator was quite a find. The director has issues with anachronisms which are difficult to edit out in a small budget film attempting to “recreate” a revolutionary period.  While it wouldn’t win any prizes for me, this film was a nice trip back to Portugal and did at least keep you a little intrigued.

★★

El muerto y ser feliz

Javier Rebollo is one of the directors who are undoubtedly leading a generational change in Spain.  This is the second film I have seen of his this year and while they are smallish affairs, there is an originality and a humanity in them that is notable.  In this film, José Sacristán gives a well-rounded performance as Santos, a 70 plus ex hitman who discharges himself from a Buenos Aires hospital, equips himself with some morphine that a sympathetic nurse gives him and hits the road. In this road movie around Argentina he encounters a companion in the form of Erika (Roxana Blanco) who is also on the run from family and love issues.  The film heads slowly and surely towards the demise of Santos in the same way as a dying animal seeks a place to make its final bed.  For all that, the mood is quite light, the plot is not always predictable and the really only irritating feature is the overuse of a voiceover which supposedly was designed to contrast with the sympathy that Sacristàn’s performance attracts in the audience.  I liked this better than I expected and thought it captured a certain something of Argentina in these days as well.

★★★

La Partida (The Last Match)

The English title rather sums up this slice of Cuban life.  It is one of the modern tragedies of the Communist world which has led to people selling their bodies, desperate for money or escape.  The story here is somewhat hackneyed and at times rather forced but its value lies in showing a reality of Cuba – the lack of food and possessions, the underground buying and selling of goods, the desire to find a way out whatever way you can and the prostitution.  Reinier (Reinier Diaz) is a rent boy who has a wife and child and wants to get out – maybe via the local national soccer team.  Trouble is that his nocturnal activities on the Malecon picking up rich foreigners are wearing him out.  Yosvani (Milton Garcia) is also engaged and has a greasy father-in-law who is making big on export-import deals.  Somehow, a spark ignites between the two young men who then start a passionate romance that apart from being clandestine, seems blocked in every direction and leads eventually to a rather melodramatic ending. As a film it is no great shakes, as a document of acne-skinned lithe young Cubans, their daily struggles (see the forever laundering wives) and the obsession with money, it is good.

★★+