Carl Nilsson-Polias

Take several established directors.
Add a handful of legendary actors (with a sprinkle of fashionable ones).
Fold in some cobble stones and avenues.
Add it to a well-greased pan, splash it with Pernod and put it into a fan-forced oven.
Remove it before it’s fully baked and serve with 4kg of icing sugar.

If you like the sound of that, you’ll like Paris, Je T’Aime. If the idea of a frivolous confection for the whole family doesn’t get you salivating, steer clear.

It’s not all saccharine nonsense though, some of the short-films in this compendium work hard to redeem the rest. Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles provide a profoundly simple vignette of a young mother from the banlieue and Alexander Payne’s 14ème Arrondissement, which closes the film, is all the more remarkable in its monotone melancholia when set in relief against the heartless fancies before it.

Stylistically, the film is much of a muchness. France’s cinematic aesthetes like Jeunet, Besson and Ozon are notably missing. So, it’s left to Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle to add some surreal panache and, unfortunately, it’s just a silly muddle.

At least on DVD, you can skip to the good stuff.

Noise is hardly an underrated film. It earned its makers a host of major nominations and some very handy wins. Yet, somehow, the rumble of critical acclaim wasn’t enough to launch the film with quite the stratospheric trajectory it seemed to deserve. Nevertheless, for those of us who simply missed out during its time in the cinema, there is now a 2-disc Madman release to let us in on what everyone else was so impressed by.

Director Matthew Saville grew up in Adelaide, attending the same high school as Scott Hicks, before joining the typical eastward migration to Melbourne, eventually studying film at VCA at the ripe old age of 29. After a steady career in the screen industry in various guises, Noise is his feature film debut. And a more accomplished debut is hard to imagine.

After the opening credits, which are set against a blurred and fidgeting nightscape, the first scene drops us into a familiar Melbourne world: the Flinders Street Station subway at night, a dank corridor to a distant platform, a young woman with big headphones wrapping her in a private world of sound. What follows is far from familiar – a film that is extraordinary in its chilling audacity and in its deep tension.

Saville wrote and directed the film but he is a wise collaborator as much as an auteur. His partner and composer, Bryony Marks, provides a brilliant score that is at times as scabrously atonal as Penderecki. His Hungarian-born cinematographer, László Baranyai, fills the crisp film stock with a short depth of field that keeps the action confrontingly immediate and dislocated. Sound designer Emma Bortignon’s brief, to convey the internal struggle of a tinnitus-sufferer, is unnervingly well-executed.

The onscreen talent is equally as important. Saville worked with several of the actors on earlier projects and you sense a common understanding of what the film is trying to achieve. Maude Davey, former Artistic Director of Vitalstatistix and a first-rate animateur, is blissfully believable in a minor role as a rollerblading policewoman, while Luke Elliot is an endearingly gelatinous hulk of grieving husband.

Brendan Cowell is, for want of a better term, the anti-hero of the story. A naturally intelligent presence, his character’s reserve and egotism suggest a mind unwilling to reveal its complexity to the simple world around it. Yet his character, a plodding policeman, is far from a bright spark. Cowell extends his vowel sounds into a drawl of apathetic, self-satisfied Australianness that grates itself against naïfs and sociopaths alike.

Though I’ve chosen not to expound it, the film’s plot is not so much a detective story as a thriller. Cowell is a protagonist in the way slow-moving astral bodies can be – he draws the cosmos to him with only a small desire to do anything about it. Yet, despite his faults, despite his sloth, he is redeemed both in his own eyes and the eyes of those around him.

The Meat Market is one of Melbourne’s most beautiful venues. The cast iron meat hooks are still on the beams, the names of the butchers are still painted in copperplate and the arches of the central arcade give a classical lift to proceedings. Nestled in North Melbourne, the hall has been given a facelift for the Beck’s Bar tag, with a swish bar that screams German efficiency and a line-up of musicians aimed to please the stovepipe generation.

Brazil’s mystique never seems to waver. From baile funk to waxing, the West loves to aspire to its sweaty-wet sultriness and lime-infused cool. With roots firmly placed in her home country’s inimitable tradition of gentle guitar and vocals, Badi Assad sets herself her apart from the bossa nova crowd with acrobatic guitar and vocal idiosyncrasies that make you wonder whether Ani Difranco and Bobby McFerrin didn’t have a lovechild after all. She has a disarming lightness of being and sings of hummingbird kisses but she also has a bold knack for covers that matches the vaunted Bowie-turns of her compatriot Seu Jorge. With gleeful abandon she clicks, ululates and birdcalls her way through U2, Björk and Tori Amos numbers, while plucking and strumming the guitar with the finesse of a classical purist.

Striking a very different musical impression are the Mexican electro-poppers Kinky. With enough masculine energy to topple a junta, the quintet take to the stage with a brand of danceable rock that is one part Corona, two parts Tequila and three sheets to the wind. Unfortunately, the crowd was under capacity, so the full force of messy gyration was a little underwhelming but Kinky were unfazed. The diminutive front man, Gilberto Cerezo, who looked like Lord Byron had met a toreador and nicked his clothes, blasted out some trumpet along with some lyrics, but that was where the Mariachi influence started and thankfully finished. At their best, the group slide from metal guitar solos into screaming techno sirens with nary a pause to dodge the genre police. At their worst, they hammer out banal English words and fuzzy rock. Nevertheless, their musical highs and fancy lightshow suggested a capacity for engaging mayhem along the lines of CSS sans the feminine irony.

And, as for the Beck’s Bar, it should be positively pumping on Saturday night for the closing night party. Judging by last year’s balltearer of a shindig, Kristy Edmunds should be in a very good mood and keen for hugs at 3am, so get yourselves to some more shows and scope out which artist you want to take home next weekend - there’s $10 in it if anyone can get Merce Cunningham’s number.

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

100 Days, 100 Nights

Roll me up in some gold lamé, serve me up some sweet home cooking and call me your big daddy, because Sharon Jones has filled my glass with funk anticipation. From the first brassy intro to the last full-band fade-out, the album 100 Days, 100 Nights has the authenticity of soulful Motown down to the semi quaver. Amy Winehouse is in rehab and the pop world seems ready for a soul revival, so into the breach steps the buxom frame of Jones with a big Georgian voice to match the tight Dap-Kings sound. Ten tracks of blissful bari sax underscoring desperate love, honky-tonk piano and finger-licking guitar riffs. The album is out now (you can easily whet your appetite at YouTube) and there’s talk of a tour in early 2008, so keep your ears to the ground and your dancing shoes ready.

This film is a devastatingly good example of storytelling that is both potent drama and documentary. The documentary-as-film paradigm has gained momentum as audiences realise that the social milieu of the cinema is more conducive to collective outrage or edification than the isolating domain of television. Nevertheless, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s film is strong enough to survive the transfer to the living room. It tells the story of three lads from Birmingham who return to their roots in Pakistan for a wedding soon after the September 11 attacks, only to find themselves two months later in the custody of the US military.

To begin with, the plot runs at an electric pace and the filmmakers aren’t afraid to lunge from one circumstance to another without too much time given to exposition. This leaves holes in the thread of events. The boys decide to head into Afghanistan with little more in mind than the size of the local naan and the prospect of “helping the people” in some indistinct manner. Is the obfuscation a sign of concealed guilt or is it a dark joke about the possible links between Guantanamo Bay and baking? To me, there is something plausible about the boys’ naivety and the confusing turmoil of the region landing them in a travelling daze. It seems, moreover, to be a ploy on the part of the filmmakers to demonstrate how easy it is to be caught in the whirlwind of geopolitical machinations when one doesn’t consider every possible consequence.

The heart and guts of the film are the scenes after the boys’ incarceration. Their treatment at the hands of the Northern Alliance and then the US Marines is horrifying and torturous to watch. One is helpless, just as the young men are. The frustration of the prisoners as they are asked the same leading questions over and over again in various situations of duress reveals the fundamental fallacy of the presumption of guilt. Indeed, not only does the film display the sheer weight of inhumanity perpetrated in the name of “honour” and “freedom” it also shows the arrogant inefficacy of a system that is determined to see enemies at every corner without recourse to old-fashioned concepts such as evidence or justice.

Monster movies are generally a critically maligned genre. But that’s because monster movies generally have all the cinematic quality of a two-week-old lamb kebab. On the other hand, Korean cinema is the hottest thing around the festival circuit. So, what do you get when you synergise it up with a Korean monster flick? You get The Host, which is about as fine a monster film as you will see this decade.

The setting is Seoul or, more specifically, the Han River. The monster itself is a kind of giant mutated axolotl with a gift for gymnastics, a multi-faceted jaw that would make a dentist cream their pants and a capricious disposition. The hero, of sorts, is a blonde-tipped slob named Gang-du, who somehow managed to father a daughter about a dozen years ago but now finds it difficult just to stay awake. When Gang-du’s daughter is taken by the monster, the whole family—father, uncle, aunt and grandfather—pitch in to rescue her.

For those in the mood for a splatter-fest, The Host won’t deliver—the horror is largely in the humanity around the monster, not in blood and guts. Nevertheless, the monster itself is a work of organically goopy delight and has enough of an appetite for flesh to justify the two-hour running time.

Like Breath, another Korean film that screened at this year’s Melbourne Film Festival, The Host glides from pathos to humour in the blink of an eye. Indeed, it is its perfect balance of audacious satire and heartfelt honesty that lifts the film out of being a simple genre flick. At the moments which, in an American movie, would be the most cloyingly sentimental, director Joon-ho Bong isn’t afraid to undercut the mood with slapstick, before quickly getting back to the thrust and drive of the narrative. In terms of satire, it is clear from the start that authority figures of any kind are likely to be either foolish or downright negligent—led by their hubris into errors of catastrophic scale. So, it is left to the family and their inventiveness to seek out the monster and bring an end to the chaos.

While the big dance number at this year’s Melbourne Arts Festival has to be the Merce Cunningham residency, there are some other equally remarkable choreographers on show. Take Jérôme Bel for instance, the enfant terrible of French contemporary dance, whose work has garnered that heady mix of consternation, castigation and celebration synonymous with avant-garde.

A relatively small number of Melburnians saw Bel’s work at last year’s festival, when he appeared in a short run of Pichet Klunchun and Myself. That show, one of my personal favourites in a strong field, was a two-way interview between Bel and Klunchun, a classical Thai dancer. It placed the two artists on a bare stage, with nothing but bottled water, chairs and a laptop to call their own. In a little over an hour, they queried and conversed their way into some kind of mutual understanding of each other’s work to which we were also privy.

I spoke to Bel by phone from his home in Paris and, thanks to the time difference, his watch had just ticked over to 9am, which was, he noted with a dry rasp, an early start to the day. I began by asking him whether the person on stage with Pichet Klunchun was actually Jérôme Bel or a persona he invented for the purposes of the piece. “It’s me!” he laughed, then extrapolated: the piece that eventuated was not the original design, Bel was supposed to choreograph a solo work for Klunchun to perform at the Bangkok Festival but, because of chronic traffic jams and his cab driver getting lost, the ten scheduled rehearsals quickly diminished to only four. With opening night looming, the two had so far only talked and so, out of necessity as much as anything, created a work that opened the fourth wall to their rehearsal room and exposed their process as individuals and collaborators to the public. As to the identity of his on-stage self, Bel is gleefully assuring that there is no pretence. For someone who had become uncomfortable performing, he found the piece a liberating avenue to be himself on stage.

One of the strongest aspects of Pichet Klunchun and Myself was its dramaturgical coherency and efficiency. Bel emphasised that while aspects of the piece are still developing from season to season, the structuring of it as a strict two-sided interview rather than a free-form dialogue maintains an inherent tautness. It is, in his words, a case of “structure and freedom” rather than “structure and sadness”—a reference to Lucy Guerin’s work from last year’s Melbourne Festival that Bel missed seeing but whose title he clearly loved.

I wondered whether, though there has been no opportunity for further collaborative works, his time with Klunchun and their repeated conversations between Occident and Orient had impacted on Bel’s outlook on his work. After a moment’s thought, his response was emphatic, “yes, it has changed the paradigm of my work completely.” Previously, his work was trying to engage the political on stage but always with a sense of “how will Jérôme Bel do this?” Now, his emphasis has shifted towards an interest in the Other, in interviewing others for their ideas, rather than being constantly concerned with the “Jérôme Bel” of the third person.

His ability to deconstruct himself in an interview with such vigour is the sign not only of his intellectual credentials but a confidence in his capacity to bring these ideas to bear in his work. Indeed, his development from a dancer to choreographer was a thoroughly intellectual migration. He worked as a dancer for many years, an experience he urbanely sums up like so, “dance, dance, dance, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, feel, feel, feel, express, express, express.” But amidst all the merriness and expressiveness, Bel felt something was amiss. While some would start reading their horoscopes a little more intensely or take up tarot cards, he took up books by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. From post-structuralism to discourse theory, these big men of French philosophy and linguistics gave Bel reason to pause and, like Descartes, be certain only of his doubt.

From this departure point of doubt, Bel wondered how he could intellectualise dance. In order to link thought to dance, to mesh the physical and the cognitive in his work, he felt that something radical was needed. He began with the notion of erasure, “to bring the mind on stage, I had to remove the physical.” For those familiar with Derrida’s work, the notion of erasure (sous rature) is of course a central concept underpinning his deconstruction of signifiers. For those unfamiliar with Derrida, it would be an impossibly long day in the office if I were to try to decode that last sentence. In any case, the point for Bel in bringing deconstruction to dance was that it would make people look twice and hopefully reconsider what was being attempted on stage. In his excitement at piecing this together for me, Bel worked his way down a cul-de-sac of logic and came up with the phrase “physical discourse” before exclaiming, “No! That’s an impossibility.” But there was a discourse of some kind, or at least a problematising of contemporary dance. However, this process of erasure is also a limitation—if the only way for Bel to bring thought on stage is through subtraction, eventually he arrives at zero. In this respect, Bel cites his heroes, William Forsythe and Trisha Brown, as choreographers who manage to make “thinking dance” without subtraction.

This limitation that Bel discovered in his own methodology has, in concert with the revelations of his work with Pichet Klunchun, moved him further away from dance and closer to language-based theatre. Describing his experience of choreography, he noted that typical rehearsals are largely talk and that there is a sudden break with that when it comes time for performance—the dancers, who are normally verbal interlocutors with one another, become mute in front of the audience. Bel feels that the performances should reflect the rehearsals, just as it did so clearly in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. But “I won’t direct Chekhov or Beckett” he assures me, though he has been offered the chance. Indeed, his move to theatre is not so much about directing but about devising. He has a fundamental suspicion of printed texts, feeling that the (absent) playwright can still exert an unacceptable “authority” over performers and directors. So, in response, he imagines a theatre of oral authorship, where the performers are the living writers of a language whose existence is isolated to performance and not reproduced in printed forms. In other words, the performance is always “live”, always focused on performance rather than adaptation. Clearly there are precedents for this kind of work in theatre’s long history but that is not to say that what Bel is working towards is somehow redundant, if only for the sheer passion and experience that he brings. Bel speaks with the eager and mercurial energy of someone still in that luscious moment of epiphany. Consumed by remounts and touring, he has not had the opportunity to put his new paradigm in motion, but his previous paradigm will be here for our enjoyment (or enervation) come October.

In the midst of rehearsals for his upcoming Melbourne Arts Festival production, This Show Is About People, Shaun Parker took time out to talk to us about the work and what brought him to it.

Parker graduated from the VCA dance school in 1992 and is credited as the director-choreographer of This Show Is About People but, as became clear in our conversation, music and song has been just as vital as dance in shaping his artistic vision. In his childhood, up until the age of seven, Parker struggled with a speech impediment. However, his mother quickly noticed that his stutters vanished whenever he joined in with the songs on Playschool and thus began his continuing fascination with song. While working as a dancer with Meryl Tankard’s ADT in Adelaide, Parker researched mediaeval music. Being a natural countertenor, Parker’s voice was inherently suited to the style and he was taken under the wing of Leslie Lewis who developed his knowledge of baroque and early music. Parker’s talents as a singer led him into work with groups like Adelaide Baroque and artists like that doyenne of avant-garde voice, Meredith Monk.

In This Show Is About People, Parker’s passions for music and dance have come together in a thoroughly entwined manner. Of course, dance and music are hardly odd bedfellows, but Parker started this project with the conceptual undertaking of using live music and dance as interactive elements that, through the development process, would react with each other in a loop of mutual inspiration. This development of the project began well over two years ago with an initial three weeks of work in January 2005. A collaborative understanding of the rehearsal room was key, especially in this early phase, and Parker was keen to have the idiosyncrasies of the dancers feed into the work. He set tasks for them, with each individual’s personal style and background ensuring a plurality of responses. At the same time, musicians came into the process on a regular basis in order to begin matching the growing physical vocabulary of the group to songs.

A year later, Parker returned to the project with a further fortnight of development, this time focused on music. During his seven year stint with Tankard at ADT, Parker was involved with the production and tour of Songs with Mara, which brought him into contact with Mara and Llew Kiek—musicians who are now the musical directors of This Show Is About People. Their involvement ensures that the show is steeped in the rich vocal heritage of Bulgaria, but their work with Parker has been as much about finding a coherency for the musical smorgasbord that has made its way into the show: word art, beat box, baroque, Hawaiian slide guitar and pop. And now, with only weeks to go until the world premiere at the Melbourne Festival, director, musicians and dancers alike are applying the finishing touches to Parker’s debut major-cast work.

In Kristy Edmunds’ recent chat with Spark Online, she stressed how important it was for the local artists she commissions to have a confidence in their vision and aesthetic. In Parker’s case, seventeen years in the dance world has given him the opportunity to absorb the processes of many significant choreographers. He is a strong believer in aspiring choreographers taking the time to dance and learn through rehearsal and performance before looking to stamp their own footprint.

Indeed, the harsh realities of the arts world can be a daunting slap in the face for the unseasoned. Making This Show Is About People a reality has taken Parker several failed grant applications and several successful ones over the course of several years. Keeping a large-scale project such as this one afloat for so long has at times felt overwhelming for him. Nevertheless, he has been staying afloat and supporting his family thanks to a Robert Helpmann Scholarship from Arts NSW and the fiscal bonuses of commercials and film work. In the end, it was Edmunds’ support that guaranteed Parker’s hard work would receive an audience.

The effect his work has on an audience—its capacity to transform them—is fundamental to Parker’s approach. He wants This Show Is About People to be viscerally engaging and thought-provoking, with meaning that is neither obscure nor ham-fisted. From a thematic point of view, the piece began its evolution around various perceived dualities: life/death-afterlife, religion/war, violence/undoing it, man/woman. They are grand themes all and it is an ambitious undertaking to render such weighty matters in a coherent and unsentimental manner, but for Parker they are tied together.

Why belong? This seems to be the question at the heart of Parker’s investigation of the human condition. The answer for him has been an optimistic affirmation rather than a bleak abyss, though Parker is quick to point out the distinction between optimism and cheesiness—there will, we can thankfully assume, be no Hallmark cards folded in with the program.

This Show Is About People will play from Thursday October 11 to Sunday October 14 at the Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre as part of the 2007 Melbourne International Arts Festival. Further festival dates in other cities can be anticipated in 2008-2010.

In a wasteland of monochromatic post-industrial dullness we see fleeting moments of quiet desperation, quixotic humour and heaving torpor. It’s kind of like Samuel Beckett went to Ikea and came back with everything and a kitchen sink. The characters are beautifully realised archetypes and their stories, unravelled across intersecting vignettes, present modern maladies and ennui with a dark but often funny zeal. Underneath it all, the filmmaker Roy Andersson sprinkles political references with a prophetic doomsday mentality. There are swastikas hiding in the most delicious of homes, death is waiting around the corner, racism is only a haircut away and love seems the hardest thing to find. However, it isn’t all grim mortality on show. Indeed, there are moments of hilarity, musical interludes and a witty precision in every department of the film, from the set dressing to the performances. It’s hard to see this film joining the ranks of quirky Swedish movie success stories (think As it is in Heaven) if only because it’s perhaps a little too bleak for mainstream distribution, so catch it at MIFF this Sunday while you can.

Screening at Regent: Sun, 12th 2007f August, 11:00 AM

Theo van Gogh’s legacy as a filmmaker is darkly tied to the tragic end of his life but as Interview illustrates, his sense of humour is equally worthy of our attention. The film has the deceptively simple structure of a two-hander conversation that, in its rich text and complex psychological games, unearths a complex thematic through-line. Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller play wonderfully off each other as determinedly opposing but complementary members of society. He is a middle-aged, alcoholic, cynical, self-serving political journalist. She is a young, coke-snorting, blonde, self-serving starlet. At least they have one thing in common from the outset. The battleground is sexual, gendered and all about the assumptions and haunted pasts that encumber both the characters and the audience. Throughout the film van Gogh’s spectre looms, with plenty of self-referential details in the set dressing, but Buscemi has made the film not as a cloying tribute but as the sinisterly creeping satire and provocative set piece that van Gogh would have wanted.

Screening at Greater Union: Fri, 10th of August, 9:00 PM