Sydney Film Festival Focus: 'Shotgun Stories'

Dir. Jeff Nichols, starring Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs, Glenda Pannell, Lynnsee Provence…

Shotgun Stories is the debut feature from Arkansas native Jeff Nichols. This exceptional film centres around two groups of half brothers and follows them through the violent and traumatic feud that breaks out between them following their father’s funeral. Boy (Douglas Ligon), Son (Michael Shannon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) are the unwanted children, abandoned by their father and bought up by a hateful mother. When their father dies, the three brothers show up to the funeral much to the aggravation of their father’s other children. Son speaks ill of his father and spits on his grave. Thus, the tension that exists between the two families of half brothers, who shared a father and nothing else, becomes a violent explosion of hate and blame.

The film is told from the perspectives of Son, Boy and Kid. Son Hayes is the leader of the brothers and takes on a paternal role. All three brothers look out for each other and rely on a strong unspoken love which binds them together. The fact that their relationship is so deep and yet requires no words is indicative of the film itself. By relying strongly on a sense of place, this film is not only a family saga but also a portrayal of men in America’s south. Often in film these kinds of men become caricatures, hard drinking, rough and not too bright. Shotgun Stories seeks to explore more of the reality of a hard blue collar southern existence. It manages to bring into focus the ways in which these men are a product of their environment and are not to be dismissed as a ‘type’ but seen as real people struggling with their place in the world. That the film succeeds in making these men into real and recognizable people is partly due to the great script and direction by Nichols and is in equal measure due to the moving performances given by the remarkably talented cast.

The long deserted streets of the town in which the story takes place focuses attention on the loneliness inherent in the way people interact within the film. The emptiness of the town prompts one of the brothers to note that they seem like the only people in the town and it feels like they own it. "If I owned this town, I’d sell it" replies another of the brothers. The comment is both funny and heartbreaking because you get the sense that they will never leave. Son, Boy and Kid are tied to this place by more than just circumstance. They are part of the landscape – the wide spaces and male dominated law of the land is the world that they know and understand.

These characters are overcome with the need for revenge in the blood war which breaks out between the two families. However, Nichols succeeds in subverting our expectations in the way in which we connect with these characters who in another film may have been portrayed as one-dimensional killers. Nichols has said he wanted to re-evaluate the nature of revenge in cinema – instead of wanting the protagonists to succeed in their quest for vengeance, you are hoping that they will walk away and end the vicious cycle in which they are caught. You constantly hope that they will rebel against what is expected of them and give themselves a chance at survival.

This is a personal and emotional film which, while it has only been shown at four festivals so far, deserves widespread distribution. Do yourself a favor and track down this movie because it will affect you in a way that only truly great cinema does. When I walked out of the film I was surprised to find myself in the middle of rainy Sydney when I had been so caught up in the lives of the men who inhabit the sun-drenched landscape of the American south.

Shotgun Stories premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and is screening as part of the ‘World Views’ Strand at the Sydney Film Festival. Jeff Nichols was recently been awarded the New American Cinema Award at the Seattle Film Festival.

Sydney Film Festival Focus: 'Views Of A Retired Night Porter'

In the short film Views Of A Retired Night Porter (2006), which is currently screening at the Sydney Film Festival, Austrian director Andreas Horvath follows on from the 1977 short, From A Night Porters Point of View by legendary filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski. Thirty years on, Horvath catches up with the night porter (or security guard) whose day to day life formed the basis for Kieslowski’s film.

Views of a Retired Night Porter follows much the same vein as Kieslowski’s film. We are reacquainted with this fascinating character by following him throughout his everyday life. While the original film was an understated affair – subdued and very much a product of the grey era of eastern-European Communism, Horvath’s film presents us with a contemporary film both in terms of style and content. We watch the porter in his colour drenched apartment, observing him in his own microcosm as he chain smokes, watches cowboy movies, visits his wife’s grave and talks about what is wrong with the world today. The long stretches of silence and intense observation combine to provide a strange sense of familiarity and distance simultaneously. This is evidenced in a prolonged scene where we watch him eat his lunch alone at his kitchen table; the camera watches the porter in tight close-up, pulling away to reveal an elderly man alone and out of synch with the world around him.

Horvath sits back and allows the former-night porter to reminisce about the glory days of Communist Poland when strict political rule kept everything within a tight structure and left little room for social criticism or change. This is a man who reveled in the minor power he wielded as the night porter of a factory and who as a willing volunteer for the government would, as a hobby, report and fine anglers fishing without a license.

The porter is a mass of contradictions, his love of the Communist past, and vicious views on capital punishment and individual freedom collide head on with his obvious love for his deceased wife and sly sense of humour. This humour emerges particularly in his recounting of stories in which he employs transparent double standards and rationalisations for his behaviour. He tells of his love of catching fishermen without licenses and confiscating their rods while chuckling at the fact that he was caught for the same crime himself.

While it would be easy to paint the porter as a simple man who looked to the authoritative structure of Communism to provide direction and a way of life, this reading would ignore his skewed humanity which is what makes you like him even as you are repelled by his political views. Views of A Retired Night Porter viewed in conjunction with Kieslowski’s A Night Porter’s Point of View operates as a character study of a man who over 30 years has changed little and has resisted social change as much as possible. Though this man comes across as one born of structure, with no regard for individuality - these quiet films seek to show the complexitities of a man of a defined era living both within and outside his own time. These touching portraits provide a lasting glimpse into one man’s life and are well worth seeing if you get the chance.

Views Of A Retired Night Porter is screening with A Night Porters Point Of View as part of the Red Hot Doc strand at the 2007 Sydney Film Festival.

Shipwrecked: Pirates of the Carribbean - At Worlds End

Dir. Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Keira Knightly, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgard, Naomie Harris…

Having missed the middle episode of this frothy saga I was looking forward to being thrust back into the dominion of the Pirate Code and more precisely, the chance to revel in the camp swaggering of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. Unfortunately, the third and supposedly last installment of this trilogy is disappointing, failing as it does to please even die hard fans due to its overwrought scripting and epic running time.

The first film set a high standard, hitting on a satisfying formula of drama, comedy and swashbuckling, becoming a deserving hit in the process. While The Curse of the Black Pearl played up the theatre of piracy – due mostly to the skills of Depp – it never lost out to fantasy, keeping the action within a recognisable world despite various members of the undead floating around. It is this that is one of the major problems with At Worlds End. The plethora of monsters, squid-headed evil-doers, sea goddesses and the like all serve as a distraction from the familiar faces from the previous installments. If anything, the film suffers from too many characters and not enough character development.

Captain Sparrow is marginalised and repetitive, and at times Depp seems to be just going through the motions, relying on the surface charm of his creation. In fact for the first 35 minutes of the film Sparrow is nowhere to be found as Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Elizabeth (Keira Knightly) and Will (Orlando Bloom) journey to retrieve him from Davy Jones Locker – apparently a form of pirate purgatory. Since Depp is the main drawcard of the franchise it seems foolish to keep him absent for such a large chunk of the movie. His absence is particularly notable since those characters that we are forced to accompany during this time (with the exception of Rush’s Barbossa) are so dull and wooden as to make you wish they had been drowned at sea or died of rabies from a monkey bite somewhere earlier in the adventure.

This is a film with no clear idea of what it wants to be – at times reaching for a mix of high melodrama, comedy and action only to be unceremoniously dumped back into a mish mash of unintelligible narrative twists and pratfalls. It is an exhausting feat trying to keep track of the many characters, constant back stabbings and changes of allegiance that form the majority of the story in expectation of the final payoff, which incidentally isn’t worth the effort. There are so many threads to follow it is nearly impossible to sit back and let the film make you forget about the running time of nearly 3 hours.

At World’s End is overproduced and unnecessarily packs the film to breaking point with famous faces, in-jokes and various unrelated flights of fancy in an attempt to outdo the last installment in every way. Perhaps too much money and too many recognisable actors all vying for screen time goes some way to explaining the lack of focus and corny out of place scenes, such as those showing Sparrow hallucinating multiples of himself while captive in Davy Jones’ Locker.

While the film looks the part, its glossy blockbuster sheen is tarnished by the excessive use of special effects which end up looking somewhat cartoonish and go on for far too long – contributing to the prolonged running time.

The final battle is relentlessly stupid and uninspiring, particularly for a film which has spent two hours leading up to this final stand, as pirates of the world unite to save themselves from extinction. Not only are we expected to believe that one pirate ship can defeat the entire British navy (while all the other pirate ships stand by to cheer) we are also treated – mid-fight - to the release of a sea goddess (Naomie Harris) from her human bonds. This appears to have no lasting impact except for the welcome separation of two of the most vapid and serially dull lovers ever to cross the screen – Will and Elizabeth.

By the end of this film you will be hoping that Keith Richards (in a highly publicised but ultimately dull cameo) as the Keeper of the Pirate Code will uncover a rule banning the further production of Pirates of the Caribbean movies. After listening to an audience laugh in all the wrong places and noting more than a few people squeezing out for toilet breaks, my recommendation is to wait for DVD or simply sail past this forgettable blockbuster.