The Salt of Life.

Gianni daydream!

What has a gentle Italian movie about a depressed middle aged man, who looks after his 90 year old mother and three additional old women in a shabby fourth floor flat in a deserted small town during the mid August holiday period, and the award winning Gomorrah (2008) a film about organised crime in Naples? Gianni Di Gregorio the co-screenwriter of this violent true to life gangster movie is the director, screenwriter, central character and provider of the previously mentioned shabby fourth floor flat in 2008s Mid August Lunch. Gregorio plays Gianni unemployed cash strapped bachelor in his late 50’s whose vocation in life consists of taking care of his wrinkled but sprightly old mother. His meagre pleasures consist of smoking, drinking copious amounts of wine and cooking. Life gets complicated when both the administrator of the building and his Doctor make it financially worth while for him to look after their elderly relatives for a short period of time during the August holidays. This warm genuine film treats the subject of old age sympathetically and provides us, the audience, with a gently entertaining light-hearted movie.

Back to real life....

The success of his directorial debut made it a lot easier for Gianni Di Gregorio to finance his follow-up movie The Salt of Life (2011) again a film that successfully deals with some of life’s small everyday problems. As in his previous film Gregorio plays a character called Gianni, a 64 year-old retiree who like many people his age has become translucent to others and has a problem coming to terms with his age and the fact that women no longer look at him. This frightening realisation came to the director who wrote his latest story to exorcise and make light of this ‘tragedy’ realising that one of the only vice’s left to him was voyeurism! But this is only one of Gianni’s problems! He is part of the first generation to reach retirement age and still have parents alive therefore there’s constant demands on him from his aristocratic spendthrift mother (played again by the 95 year-old Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni) who seems hell bent on disposing of her sons much needed inheritance; a wife who is more of a patronizing friend than a romantic partner; a daughter with a slacker boyfriend whom Gianni unwillingly befriends; and a wild young neighbor who sees him merely as her dog walker. But our frustrated retiree is determined to ensnare a beautiful younger woman and romance her on the sun-drenched streets of Trastevere.

Teresa's slacker boyfriend may not be the right person to advise Gianni on his fitness regime.

Again we have a warm and witty portrayal of old age where no matter how polite and gracious you are, your just not going to pull! The key scene is where Gianni goes to a bar with his friend and speaks to the attractive lady behind the bar and gets no response what so ever, not even a smile (its surprising how even a wee smile from a lady can make the day of a gentlemen of a certain age!) This autobiographical story takes a lot of things from Di Gregorio’s own life including the his own daughter Teresa who plays his on screen daughter, the small black dog which is his own animal and even the filming took place where he used to live.

A man's best friend is his wild young neighbour's dog.

A lot of this films genuine warmth comes from the use of natural lighting and the non-use of filters, improvisation with the actors encouraged to act out the sense of the scene rather than a precise script and storyboard. The cast where chosen for there strong personalities and there likeness to their on screen characters. The contempory mix of the films soundtrack, which includes a lovely touch of gypsy music, is used to underscore the sense and feeling of Di Gregorio’s story.  I would certainly recommend this very agreeable film, if you missed it on its initial release its now available on DVD. 

Gianni with the 95 year old Valeria de Franciscus who plays his mother.

Nostalgia for the Light.

sad and moving at times....

Stunning visuals and some great views of the cosmos do not save Patricio Guzman’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010) from being a very hard and at times tedious watch. The problem being that it tries to involve to many subjects. Set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, famed for being the most arid area on earth, it certainly resembles the pictures we are getting back from Mars, it attempts to connect Chiles recent political past with an array of deep-space telescopes and involves both archeologists and astronomers in a search for clues to the origins of the universe!  

Just some of the Disappeared.

Although its 92-minute running time did seem an awfully long while it become more interesting and in fact very moving when Guzman interviewed the wives and sisters of Pinochet’s 60000 missing citizens. So-called political prisoners who were held in a former mining camp located in the desert and were executed and dumped in mass graves. To prevent the corpses from being used as evidence against the Pinochet regime they were dug up and the remains scattered across the desert.  The only thing that seemed to connect the different strand’s of this film was the Atacama Desert, but I for one would have preferred if Guzman had concentrated on the atrocities and the families (mainly women) who still to this day search for their missing relatives. Thatcher should have been more selective in who she called ‘friend’. 

Pinochet  just added barbed wire to the mining camp located in the desert.

As Tears Go By.

Ah Wah and Ngor.

Considered as a energetic reworking of Martin Scorsese’s 1975 classic Mean Streets Wong Kar-wai's directorial feature debut As Tears Go By (1988) revolves around a small time gangster, Ah Wah, who spends most of his time trying to keep his ‘brother’ Fly (Jacky Cheung) out of trouble to the detriment of his on/off love affair with his cousin Ngor who has recently arrived to stay in his flat to be close to the hospital where she is receiving treatment for an illness. For Wong it’s a relatively conventional Asian gangster film made before he linked up with cinematographer Christopher Doyle and before he developed many of his trademarks that were to become pronounced in his breakthrough film Chungking Express (1994).

Rival gangster meet to sort out there differences.

The film stars Andy Lau, best known for his roles in films like Fulltime Killer (2001), the Infernal Affair’s trilogy (2002-2003) House of the Flying Daggers (2004) and the recently released A Simple Life (2011), as Ah Wah with Ngor played by Maggie Cheung who was born in Hong Kong but raised in England and has appeared in four other Wong Kar-wai movies Ashes of Time Redux (2008), 2046 (2004, In the Mood for Love (2000) and Days of Being Wild (1990). She has also appeared in two of her ex-husband’s Olivier Assayas films Irma Vep (1996) and Clean (2004).

Maggie Cheung.

Focusing on vengeance and violence this tough gritty movie has a different feel to his later films but is none the worse for it, in fact it’s a great deal better that a lot of other Asian gangster movies and certainly would appeal to lovers of that genre along with Wong’s many fans.

Andy Lau.

The Gene Generation.

The comic book Michelle.

Described as an underground subculture cyberpunk movie and directed by Pearry Teo, the first Singaporean movie director to make a Hollywood film, The Gene Generation (2007) is based on the comic book series The DNA Hacker Chronicles.

Set in the dark decadent world of what is depicted as mankind’s future we find ourselves close to extinction. Forced to implement a controversial Natural Selection process, the government has built a wall surrounding Olympia, the last city on earth. By a careful selection process using our genes and DNA, the Kalafkan Government chose only the best and most promising to survive the impending destruction. This process has led to a crime known as DNA Hacking, where people steal genes and DNA in hopes of qualifying for the new citizenship and a chance to enter the promised new city of Demeter. The government employ’s assassins to take out and kill these hackers. In exchange, the assassins are granted entry to Demeter, if they earn enough money! One such killer is Michelle (Bai Ling) who with her younger brother wishes to leave the city and settle for a different lifestyle, but she has a problem, her brother Jackie (Parry Shen), who gets himself indebted to a merciless gang of Loan Sharks, stretches Michelle’s skills as a killer and steals her hard earned money to pay his debts.  Into this mix comes the last of the original Hayden Technologies DNA scientists, Christian (Alec Newman) with whom Michelle falls in love leading to a mix of emotions and even more gruesome killings.

Bai Ling as Michelle.

Generally enjoyable mainly because of the lead character Michelle, played by the attractive Chinese bisexual actress Bai Ling (Dumplings 2004), and the astonishing costumes she wears. But the movie does have its drawbacks, a visual style that at times is far too dark, a plot that’s a little incoherent and some characters that are no way as convincing as the lead. But as I said previously well worth watching for the great female B-movie character.

The movie poster.

The Invisible Frame (2009) and Cycling the Frame (1988)

From West to East 

Following on from the end of World War Two, on October 7, 1949, The United States of America, Britain, France, and Russia agreed to divide Germany into four sectors. Three of the Sector’s were joined together to form The Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany. The Soviet part became The German Democratic Republic of East Germany (GDR).  The city of Berlin, which was located in the heart of the Soviet Sector, was divided in the same way except that in 1961 a physical border was erected around the western section of the city something that became known as the Berlin Wall.  This division between the two sectors remained in place until November 1989; on July 1^st 1990 the complete reunification of Germany took place.

The Checkpoint Charlie Standoff 1961.

A year before the wall was breached in 1988, actress Tilda Swinton toured around its boundary on a bicycle accompanied by a film making team led by Berlin based writer and director Cynthia Beatt. At this time the filmmakers had no idea that within a very short time after their documentary was completed the Wall would no longer be the formidable impasse it had been for the previous 27 years. This film, Cycling the Frame (1988), originally made for German television, is now a rather fascinating modern historical artifact. 

Some sections of the wall remain in Berlin as a tourist attraction.

One of the last remaining watch towers.  

The East Side Gallery.

21 years later in June 2009 both Tilda Swinton and Cynthia Beatt revisit the 160-kilometre bike tour following the same route as the previous documentary, but this time filming from both sides of the former Wall. The Invisible Frame (2009) starts once again from the Brandenburg Gate but this time there no concrete fortification to stop our progress only a line in the roadway to mark the original barrier. Beatt documentary now shows a more vibrant Berlin of new buildings and developments. A city that has had inordinate sums of capitalist finance pumped in making it a most interesting place to visit and one which you can still witness the attempt to forge a state-run utopia.

A Trabi bursts through the wall! 

Brandenburg Gate 1989.

Brandenburg Gate 2012.

Both of these films have been released on a single DVD allowing you to watch the earlier one before comparing it to the longer and later documentary. Both have minimal dialog and next to no explanation, which if you have little or no idea of the cities geography could make it difficult to follow the locations. As way of compensation the camera work on both films is excellent and the eccentricity of the younger Tilda Swinton is a real bonus.  

The last remaining Soviet car park in Berlin.

Modern Berlin.