You might have noticed PPH has been a bit quiet recently; this lack of activity can be attributed to a nasty combination of extreme business in other areas and le flu d’homme (translation: quite a bad cold that won’t go away).

However, PPH will return with exciting new content next week, and I’m also excited to say that we (by which I mean, I) will be present in my Permanent Plastic guise at the 5th BFI Future Film Festival next weekend (18-19 February) running blogging workshops. More information will follow, but it would be great to see you down there at London’s BFI Southbank, so mark it in your diaries!

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this amazingly, ridiculously brilliant clip from the unsung comedy genius Fred Willard in Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. “I CAN’T DO MY WERRRK!”

My heart always sinks slightly when I realise a film has been made by a debut writer-director. In most cases these hyphenates are very capable at punching out the words and are no slouch behind the camera, but combining the two disciplines for the first time usually leads to a worrying lack of distance from their material, and an inability to know what works well and what doesn’t. This usually becomes most apparent in the last 20 minutes of the film when the viewer’s buttock muscles determine that a more objective eye would have pruned away some of the stuff that the cutting-room floor was crying out for.

Patrick Stettner proves a very welcome exception to the rule. The Business of Strangers is an assured and compelling piece of work that weighs in at a nicely lean 84 minutes. Despite being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and winning Stockard Channing the London Critics’ Circle award for Best Actress, it made little impact at the box-office and failed to lead on to greater things for Stettner, whose only subsequent bash at direction was the distinctly underwhelming The Night Listener. But let’s not hold that against him. The Business of Strangers is just as perceptive as Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men (another writer/director’s debut that explored power games in the workplace with a sexual twist) but without the characteristically bitter aftertaste of the LaBute recipe.

As brilliant as she is, Stockard Channing’s award (and nominations from other bodies) feels acutely unjust with respect to this film. It is the sparky interaction with the equally brilliant Julia Stiles that lingers long after the copyright information has disappeared off the top of the screen. Elsewhere on this blog, I have written about the ‘first female buddy movie’ in which the two actresses flounder in underwritten and over-directed material. The chief pleasure with The Business of Strangers is in watching two actresses at the top of their game, letting rip in roles that are perfectly in sync with their talents.

The opening scenes act like a dry run for Up in the Air. Stockard Channing plays Julie, a high-ranking, high maintenance businesswoman, inhabiting the same platinum air miles, executive hotel suite, hand-baggage-only milieu as George Clooney in the later film. She power-strides from airport to boardroom to hotel-room, wheeling her perfectly packed existence behind her, mobile phone clamped to her ear, the omnipresent muzak reverberating in her wake. Julie is a woman who has sacrificed much for her success: fearing for her job when one of her superiors calls an unexpected meeting, it is her therapist whom she phones for support. Learning instead that she is to be made CEO, her secretary is the only one she cares to share the good news with.

"Channing and Stiles are both superb, exuding intelligence and shouldering the film effortlessly between them"

Julia Stiles is Paula, a subordinate of Julie, but only in terms of job description. Her first encounter with Julie is brief: she is 45 minutes late for a meeting and, without being able to offer an explanation, summarily fired. Later, quietly basking in the glow of her promotion, Julie hears Paula yell a typically uncompromising “Fuck off!” at a man in her hotel bar. The dynamic of this second meeting is fascinating as the women jockey for the upper hand. When Julie attempts to apologise for the earlier firing without actually saying sorry and by offering a drink, Paula picks the most expensive cognac on the menu – ‘A double’ – shooting her superior the cockiest look in her repertoire. The woman she refers to as ‘überfrau’ is not to be allowed to diminish her again.

As the alcohol lubricates the friction between them, Paula admits that her real love is non-fiction writing: “The whole fiction thing is too neat – I like the sloppiness of real life.” Which is pretty much the feel of the evening that these two women spend together. Their relationship shifts constantly, with Paula an unpredictable catalyst. Sporting a spider tattoo in the nape of her neck, she gives the impression of spinning her own web, veering from arrogant to vulnerable via reckless and flirtatious. “You know a number of pornos are directed by women? They’re very similar but there’s less sex and more foreplay…”, challenging Julie with another of those meaningful looks. There is a palpable sexual undercurrent as they scandalise the occupants of a lift by joking about strap-ons and fool around in the hotel pool, but how seriously are we to take either of their intentions?

It would be unfair to reveal much more about plot, but suffice to say the dynamic changes markedly when a slick headhunting colleague of Julie’s oils his way into their company. There is a marvellous moment of transition when the women enter an area of the hotel under construction and are illuminated by a plane taking off from the nearby airport. Stettner uses slow motion and an ominous music cue to indicate that the larky power games are about to be played for higher stakes. And as scotches are downed, pills are popped and inhibitions are dulled, the boundaries that divide the poor girl made good and the slumming rich girl become increasingly indistinct.

Channing and Stiles are both superb, exuding intelligence and shouldering the film effortlessly between them. Hollywood should be ashamed that their talents have been so neglected. To watch Julia Stiles slump from her purple patch a decade ago to playing a barely-there character in the Bourne films and the lead in (shudder) The Omen remake is bitter proof that talent alone is not enough. And although I am aware that Stockard Channing has done something called The West Wing and won an award or two for it, what we really want to see is Rizzo clutching her Oscar, clad in Pink Lady jacket, cigarette dangling from lip – right?

Contributor Fintan McDonagh can be followed on Twitter @Fintalloneword.

‘The mythological ground of Art is littered with the scattered corpses of lost heroes and heroines.’

So we might be heard to remark, downing a last pint of bitter with the rabble in our local Public House before kicking off another opium-fuelled, semi-apocalyptic night of gambling and debauchery at the Notting Hill Bear-Baiting Pit to the soundtrack of Jim Morrison as read by William Burroughs.

Our modern era tends to fetishise the Romantic cult of the tragic and self-destructive lone genius. It’s a familiar legend and often takes two distinctive forms: In the one, a young flame burns bright and fast, and is extinguished early (think Byron, River Phoenix, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amy Winehouse); in the second the artist’s talent is only fully appreciated after their anonymous death (think Kafka, Arthur Russell, Van Gogh, John Kennedy Toole).

In both of these forms the artist appears as an elevated ephemeral presence. Their death is often portrayed as being somehow synonymous with their art, as though in the pursuit of that art they really had no other option but to live fast and die young. Often, in hindsight, they are seen as doomed before they started: silent, enigmatic, unknowable. In the latter form (the Kafka-Russell-Van Gogh form), this inscrutable muteness stems largely from the fact that the artist was never given the chance to exist in the public sphere –limited (or no) words beyond their work, no interviews, no way of being seen from other angles; in the former, the enigma is retained and fostered through the alluring tragedy of a young death – the artist never had the chance to exist in public whilst growing old.[1]

Jean Vigo, director of L’Atalante has a little of each of these forms in him, and a third, having died both as a young and mostly unrecognised talent, and directly in the pursuit of his art.[2] The supposed tragedy of his existence[3] (which takes as its basis the assumption that the sum of a life is simply the ‘things that happen’ to a person as opposed to the journey and growth of one’s spiritual and emotional character) can lead to critical portrayals of his human qualities (and from there, his work) that are neither accurate, nor essentially in keeping with what we can tell about his perspective on the world as evidenced through his films and writings and as recalled by his friends.[4]

Here we find that Vigo belongs on a different list. On the whole the majority of critical responses linger, not on his definitive genius, but on his potential for genius. There’s often a tacit acknowledgement that what remains (ie the work itself) is in itself by no means fully expressive of what he seemed capable of.

This is obviously a very confusing standpoint. If Vigo did not produce the goods[5] then is his legend founded wholly on the tragedy of his death? And if this is indeed the case, could we all not be appreciated many years after we die?

It is clear that the ‘tragic’ reading[6] of his life might initially have been the only reason Vigo’s films, not only continued to linger, but also gained a significant following in the decade after his death. But it is clearly only possible to consider his legend from the perspective of what is there to be seen. Similarly, to speak of the films Vigo might have made had he not died so young, as many rapt fans are wont to do, is as pointless an act of imagination as to speculate on, say, what a Unicorn might enjoy eating for breakfast (pancakes).

‘As for L’Atalante, there are as many ways to love it as there are ways to love.’[7]

L’Atalante is the kind of film that fans tend to whisper about in tones of hushed reverence. Those who don’t ‘get it’ decry it loudly as over-rated nonsense. Some postulate that Vigo’s previous film Zéro de Conduite is his real masterpiece and more truly representative of his anarchist social-political character. It’s an argument that has raged since L’Atalante’s 1934 press screening, subsequent theatrical recut, and ultimate commercial failure: is it actually any good? Or just flashes of a good film? And does it represent Vigo the man? In this context, I think it appropriate to comment from a particularly personal standpoint on what it was about this curious, strange and tender film that affected me.

As a first-time viewer what really strikes you first about the film is the lightness of directorial touch. Vigo wasn’t purist avant-garde, but a firm advocate of socially committed experimental cinema. From this standpoint we get a lot of documentary-esque shots of barges and the French canal system. Vigo’s director of photography was Boris Kaufman, who went on to win an Oscar for the cinematography in On the Waterfront, and if there was to be nothing else worth seeing in the film it is stunningly shot.

This very authentic sense (one might consider it as an expression of Vigo’s social conscience – for example, the film uses shots real unemployment lines to touch on the economic crisis of the time) is offset by a tremendously playful script and warm, open performances from the cast. Much has been written about the tour de force performance Vigo coaxed out of Michel Simon as the old Seadog Pére Jules, but Jean Dasté as the inexperienced, clumsily-loving Jean and, in particular Dita Parlo as the by turns innocent and curious, erotic and feline Juliette are stunning. There’s an abundance of comedy throughout the film. On the kinds of issues that, even today, are often naturally approached from a moralising and judgemental position, the film is surprisingly neutral. This neutrality makes it feel strangely contemporary – not even contemporary – something still existing beyond, in a more enlightened future. Its approach to gender relations, and in particular its approach to the idea of what love might be or mean is way ahead of its time. It could almost act as a manifesto on gender equality.[8]

On paper Vigo’s last film is a very simple love story (‘run of the mill’, as described by film blogger James Travers). The script – a nothing piece by a man called Jean Guinée – was given to Vigo by his producer and ardent supporter Jacques-Louis Nounez with the intention of keeping him out of trouble (Zéro de Conduite had been banned for subversive content)

This original screenplay was so stolid and moralising in tone that the radical Vigo apparently exclaimed: ‘What the fuck do you want me to do with this – it’s Sunday school stuff.’[9] But some days later he had suddenly and unexpectedly become excited at the idea of filming it, having apparently found a way to operate within its template.[10]

In fact, all he ultimately kept was the bare bones of the plot. All the moralising overtones of the Guinée script were not simply abandoned but operated against. Out of a traditional Romantic tale full of petit-borgeouis moralising, Vigo created something that could easily be called subversive. By eschewing the traditionalist moral ‘lessons’ of the parable, whilst keeping the traditional format of the plot, Vigo transformed a rather conventional love story into simply: love, rendered.

‘Don’t write love poems…’

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes that love is the hardest subject to breach – it’s necessary to wait until one’s talent is fully formed to even think of making an attempt.[11]

Vigo is often described as a visual poet. In contrast to what might be implied when critics write extensively of his potential, his talent was certainly fully formed at the point of making L’Atalante. Alone, the film stands as an effervescent affirmation of non-judgemental love – a testament to the necessity of independence and equality. Considering the time it was made, but also the incredible difficulty of the shoot (Vigo directed most of the film from a stretcher) and his relative inexperience, it’s quite an astonishing achievement. As Marina Warner notes in her fantastically perceptive book for the BFI: ‘Vigo’s complete transformation of pessimism into hope fulfils the conditions of classical romance, of course, but it also proposes a modern strategy to the dilemmas of life and love, as opposed to morbidity and misogyny. Paradoxically, his romance represents a turning away from romanticism.’

To attempt to go into further depth about this film would surely take a much longer article, and would, I’m afraid, make something of a love poet of me. In that sense it might also (and with justification) be read as contrary to the (somewhat contradictory) point this author offers, and in steadfast opposition to the advice of Rilke – my skills notwithstanding. Best then to leave on one last quote from one of the film’s other admirers:

‘L’Atalante is a film whose feet smell.’

So said Francois Truffaut, and I can’t think of a more fitting appraisal. This statement is not simply an affectionate comment on the fact that the film is flawed. It touches on Vigo’s inclusion of a hardened reality and a social/political message at the heart of a love story. It also implies, indirectly, the film’s most subversive message: that there is joy to be taken from the smell of feet. More, that there is nothing really beyond the fact that nothing is perfect: the willing acceptance of flaws is all there is. Idealisation, then, is a misnomer when real life is so much fuller.

The difficulty in writing about L’Atalante has not been finding words. Quite the opposite: the difficulty for me has been attempting to present a balanced and realistic portrait of an actual film that can actually be seen in an actual cinema – within the confines of a word limit, and without going overboard with my evident enthusiasm.[12]

Finally I would say that, especially when considering the absence of a current DVD edition of the film, L’Atalante’s extended run at the BFI Southbank should be a cause for celebration. I would recommend anyone with a passionate interest in film to take the opportunity to see this on the big screen.

Thankfully, the title of Roman Polanski’s brisk, four-character comedy of manners Carnage is the most distressing thing about it. A Manhattan-set adaptation of Yazmina Reza’s French play The God of Carnage, this sneaky chamber piece casts a beady eye over the fallout of an incident in which one schoolboy injures the other with a branch. In a nice touch, the incident is shown underneath the opening credits in a distant, Michael Haneke-esque long take.

The boys’ parents (the perpetrator’s played by Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, the victim’s John C Reilly and Jodie Foster) convene to sort out the mess, but before long they are arguing with other, and riffing on all sorts of issues of parenting, class, wealth and relationships. Also, it seems that deep down, they all really, really hate each other.

At just 79 minutes, Carnage is lean, but even so starts to feel a little stretched by the end, as the escalating hysteria of the characters (inspired by copious whisky consumption) becomes a touch enervating. The underlying theme is that adults are just as capable of behaving as appallingly as children, and the cast demonstrate this with absolute relish. Christoph Waltz has a field day as the unctuous, smug lawyer Alan, and Kate Winslet gives brilliant drunk. Jodie Foster’s portrayal of a neurotic writer feels rather forced, but it’s a type of role I’ve never seen her play before, and is least a refreshing change. John C Reilly is also excellent, but may need to consider disassociating himself from roles in films which feature subplots about cruelty toward hamsters (see this and We Need To Talk About Kevin). The RSCPA will be onto him before long.

Although (*COLOSSAL INSIGHT ALERT*) Carnage feels rather stagey and a tad contrived, the dialogue is sharp, the apartment set feels appropriately claustrophobic and there are plenty of laughs to be had, the majority of them excruciating. Fans of movie vomiting scenes will also be delighted to find there is a sequence (sickuence?) which nearly matches that of Team America: World Police for comedy/gross-out value.

18-19 February 2012 @ BFI Southbank

The 5th BFI Future Film Festival takes place at the BFI Southbank across the weekend of 18-19 February, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to promote the amazing competition that they’re running, aimed at budding young filmmakers.

Over to the guys at FFF:

As part of this year’s Future Film Festival, Doc Next Network is hosting the Pitching Masterclass with an industry professional. Before the event, we’re asking you to send us a 140 character pitch for a documentary you’d like to make, either by Twitter @BFI with the hashtag #FFPitch, or in an email to futurefilminstitute@bfi.org.uk by Wednesday 8 February.

We will then select six finalists, who will be invited to the Festival and given a free weekend pass. These finalists will have to pitch live at the end of the masterclass, and The Winning Pitch will get the opportunity to go to a filmmaking workshop with one of our partners in Amsterdam, Spain, Poland or Turkey, expenses paid!

Terms & Conditions
• To enter the competition you must be aged 15-25 years old
• Travel to the Festival is not included
• You must be able to attend the Pitching Masterclass on Sunday 19 February at BFI Southbank
• Deadline for entries is Wednesday 8 February
• Winners will be notified on Monday 13 February
• Expenses will be paid up to a value of £500

So get involved, and good luck!

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a mostly gripping, yet slightly smoke-and-mirrors study of one young woman’s psychological distress following a traumatic experience, marked by an excellent central performance from newcomer Elizabeth Olsen (yes, younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley).

The film begins with our heroine Martha escaping a commune in the Catskills to find refuge in the house inhabited by her elder sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (played by the very English Hugh Dancy). Gradually, it is revealed that the troubled Martha has extricated herself from a sinister cult presided over by the shamanic Patrick (John Hawkes) and populated by a host of servile young women and none-too-bright young bucks.

The film cross-cuts back and forth from past to present, augmented by some terrific, slinky transitions from editor Zachary Stuart-Pontier that blur the line between real and imagined, while an abstract threat constantly lingers in the background thanks to the atmospheric use of sound and a discordant score.

Olsen is superb, alternately fierce, cocksure, naive and vulnerable, and it will be no surprise if lazy journalists (not me, you understand) begin to refer to her as this year’s Jennifer Lawrence who, of course, gave good woman-in-backwoods-peril opposite Hawkes in the Oscar-nominated indie Winter’s Bone. Hawkes as Patrick cuts a wiry, even disturbingly thin, figure and has a charismatic verve, though his rent-a-cult aphorisms begin to pall after a while, and the commune and its inner workings are particularly – and disappointingly – thinly drawn.

Within this tense thriller lie some interesting themes, for example the binary opposition of Martha’s past and present living conditions. A heavily influenced and naive Martha seems to conflate the rural simplicity and routine of the commune with freedom despite the various abuses she has suffered, and rebels against the monotonous materialism personified by the bland domesticity of Sarah and Ted’s married life. Dancy (whose stiff, declamatory Englishness is used for something approaching comic effect) delivers a pompous dinner table defence of capitalism which goes some way to underlining her mistrust of such conformist living.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, however, is far from perfect. Even with the knowledge that much of what happens is filtered through the unreliable psychological state of our heroine, there are one or two staggering plot inconsistencies that undermine the drama to damaging effect. It would be wrong to give too much away, but you will certainly be wondering why the cult let Martha get away so easily when you find out what they’ve been up to, and perhaps even more frustrating is Lucy’s howlingly irritating disinterest in finding out about the details of her younger sister’s ordeal – it takes over an hour for her to conclude that the clearly distressed Martha “might need help”, and she never seriously enquires about what she has been through.

Despite its flaws, Martha Marcy May Marlene is well worth seeing, and marks a promising debut for writer-director Sean Durkin, provided he goes down the route of adding a bit more substance to his films.

Yeah it’s the same guy. Apparently he won the Best Actor award at the Manhattan Film Festival last year for his part as a German in 1940s Russia in a film called Under Jakob’s Ladder. Well I never.

Source: The Sun

Lovers of maps (you know who you are): attention! If you’ve ever suspected that Google Maps or the like could be the stuff of cinematographic beauty, then Patience (After Sebald) could be the film for you. For non map fetishists, beginning a documentary with screenshots of Google Maps and a rather RP voice-over may be the ultimate filmic turn off. But what this film requires – as the title suggests – is a little patience, if you’re prepared to breeze past geographical geek-offs and literary discussions on the nature of time, memory and landscape, that is. Patience is a richly rewarding exploration of the German academic and writer W. G. Sebald’s famous and utterly idiosyncratic novel ‘The Rings of Saturn’ (1995).

Patience (After Sebald) is a literary film essay from Grierson award-winning documentarian Grant Gee, known for his music documentaries on Radiohead (Meeting People is Easy) and Joy Division (Joy Division). Gee presents a mostly black-and-white exploration of Sebald’s famous book, which charts a meditative and melancholic walk along the East Anglian landscape. Titled in the original German as ‘Eine Enlische Wallfahrt’ (‘An English Pilgrimage’), the novel charts the physical and mental meanders of a mind hoping to dispel “the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work”.

Those who haven’t read or engaged with Sebald may struggle to find a way into this film, which incorporates actual footage of the director’s walk from Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay, with various artists and writers’ interviewed responses to the work, from Andrew Motion and Tacita Dean to Robert Macfarlane and Marina Warner. However, in the name of research, I showed Patience to a Sebald virgin, and she adored the look and feel of the film even if she stumbled on various literary references or Sebaldian points of humour.

W. G. Sebald was born in Bavaria in 1944, and died in a car crash in East Anglia in 2001, aged only 57. His father joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and remained in the Wehrmacht; Holocaust war guilt and themes of memory and forgetfulness are powerful presences in the works of a man who famously stated: “I don’t think one can write from a compromised moral position”. Sebald (known as ‘Max’ to his friends, in case you get confused in the first fifteen minutes of the film like I did) studied German literature at the University of Freiburg, and eventually settled permanently in England, where he taught at the University of East Anglia.

While the film may explore the unclassifiable nature of Sebald’s works – that particularly idiosyncratic style of his which takes in elements of the travel memoir, the history book, Holocaust literature, biography, comic prose, poetry, the essay, and photography – the style of the film itself is disappointingly unexperimental. Rather than seeking to reinterpret the text or bring to the film the very disparate elements of Sebald’s style, Gee sticks to a very linear documentary form, which is rooted in the text (showing page numbers whenever the actor Jonathan Pryce reads parts of the text), and in the walk itself. With various artistic talking heads providing most of the narrative for the documentary, the overall effect is one of a straight-up-and-down BBC4 documentary, albeit one with the occasional artistic fugue or moment of startling brilliance.

However, what Gee does capture so artfully is the peculiarly melancholic atmosphere of the novel, something Sebald partly achieves through his interweaving of prose and image. Gee sticks to a grainy black and white palette, often overlaid with mid-frame video shots to recreate the look of a Sebaldian page. This works particularly well when the Sebald scholar Lise Patt explains to us her thoughts on what the continuous imagery in ‘Rings of Saturn’ represents, suggesting one image is linked to another in notably symbolic ways, and that its up to the audience to tease it out. This is where Gee’s choice of title really comes into its own. If you’ve read Sebald, you’ll more than likely have experienced the unusual rhythm of his prose. Digression follows digression in a seemingly intangible manner; thought seamlessly weaves into thought in such a delicate way that you find yourself having arrived at point C with no idea how you moved from point A and B. And the prose gallops. Everyone I know who’s read a Sebald has done so in two days. What Lise Patt, and the film itself, suggests, is an exercise in patience – watching this film, walking the walk, and reading the book, should be a meditative exercise. Mind maps of ideas tracked in the novel, literary maps of the locations explored, the concentration of mentions of death, the transition from one image to the other – the film asks us to requestion our own reading style in order to squeeze out meaning and inference from Sebald’s text.

The film suffers from too many interviews, and as such threatens to lose it’s audience’s interest towards the end. Gee is at his best when capturing on camera the physicality and nebulousness of the East Anglian landscape. Sebald is obsessed with the physicality of natural phenomena – fog, mist, cloud, vapour and spume are explored by him as elements on the borderline between being and nothingness – and similarly amorphous elements emerge from Gee’s film, especially that particularly grey misty British sky we so love to hate. Gee overlaps outdoor noises of birds, waves breaking on the shore and road sounds with the interview voices of talking heads.

Shots from the film become reinterpretations of Sebald’s literary and mental landscapes; the writer’s photographs coming to life through a 21^st century lens. This is a beautiful if unimaginative documentary about one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

Patience (After Sebald) is in cinemas now, released by Soda Pictures. Contributor Sophia Satchell-Baeza can be followed on Twitter @SophiaSB1.

There’s no doubt that Shame is a bold, captivating portrait of a sex addict’s life in New York. The visual style is stunning, Michael Fassbender’s performance – bizarrely unrecognized by the Academy – is mesmerising, and the film really captures the essence of New York onscreen. But its portrayal of women is less than flattering, and this is worth noting. Yes, the focus is on the character of Brandon and his addiction, so we are meant to sympathise with him and see women through his eyes. Fair enough. And Brandon’s no misogynist – he’s certainly the good guy when contrasted with his lecherous married boss. Still, does a film about a man’s sex addiction have to keep female perspectives so muted to tell its story? I think in 2012 we could do a bit better.

You’ve got to admit it’s an awkward one for heterosexual women watching the film, for whom Brandon is a real-life nightmare. Brandon seems like such a catch; an attractive and considerate man, however, he finds open communication difficult, is intensely emotionally unavailable and has a voracious sexual appetite (albeit to a pathological degree). Any ladies out there, hands up if you’ve been with such a man? The memories aren’t pleasant, I’m sure. Women who’ve had such experiences learn to go into defensive mode around men like Brandon, but the film skilfully forces its audience to put their guards down. Nevertheless, the result happens to be those women feeling male domination all over again.

Of course the film needs to include women who fulfil Brandon’s desires – but there are two key female characters who provide important counterpoints to this, women in his world whose voices he actually hears: his colleague Marianne (Nicole Beharie) and more crucially, his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Yet the contrast between these two and all the other women is simply not strong enough to make a difference; not enough to un-mute women in his story.

It’s unfortunate that our introduction to Marianne is sexualised early on when Brandon fantasises about her naked while checking her out at the office; from that point on, we already know that their fledgling relationship is likely to be doomed. During their one and only date Marianne establishes herself as a smart, sensitive girl who doesn’t automatically swoon in Brandon’s presence. However in the aborted sex scene which follows, the camera is statically dispassionate, automatically prioritizing Fassbender (because we know him better) and denying us access to Marianne’s feelings while she struggles to get close to him. Sure, Brandon’s breakdown feels remote but Marianne’s reaction manages to be even more obscured. At this crucial moment, she seems more like a plot device exposing Brandon’s frailties rather than a living, breathing woman.

Sissy’s voice could have added greater balance to an uneven film, yet she is also reduced to functioning as a narrative mechanism rather than a full character. As with Marianne, the film introduces her to us in a way that undercuts her; we first hear Sissy on Brandon’s answerphone, and it’s left ambiguous whether she’s another of his female conquests or someone more substantial. It’s a provocative choice but it also throws her character under the bus – she’s initially presented as an unhinged sexual threat to Brandon so explicitly that it’s difficult to see her side of the story without prejudice.

When Brandon bursts into the bathroom because he thinks Sissy’s an intruder, she doesn’t cover herself up. If Sissy had been a bit less brazen, covering herself up partially yet still enough to make Brandon uncomfortable, we might care about her a bit more. I mean, what sister stands unabashedly stark naked in front of her brother? Is Shame an issue film about a sex addict or about incest? Enigmatic obfuscation is one thing; manipulative red herrings are another entirely.

Also, she’s wearing a hospital bracelet, but this is never addressed – in fact, most audience members probably missed it, seeing as there was no close-up or dialogue about it. Again, here’s a missed opportunity to give Sissy more of a voice, instead of marginalizing her as just a projection of Brandon’s. Did she have an operation? Attempt suicide? So did Brandon never visit her at the hospital meaning she had to come to him?

We next hear her on the phone, desperately professing her love to someone leaving her, though by this (still early) point of the film the damage to her character’s been done. That scene’s not quite enough for us to accept that she’s the inverse of Brandon and have equal sympathy for her. Even her big moment – a bar blues rendition of ‘New York, New York’ – is ultimately upstaged by Brandon and his maudlin release of a single tear. Sissy, like her brother, is love-starved but emotional and expressive rather than cold and silent; however, the way she’s presented in the film, we are pushed to favour Brandon’s control and detachment over her messiness and vulnerability.

In the end, despite Carey Mulligan’s committed performance, Sissy, like Marianne, is more catalyst than character. She mainly serves to expose and challenge Brandon while acting as a foil – she’s addicted to attention/affection rather than carnal pleasure. Thus her self-destruction isn’t in itself important, because it simply sparks Brandon’s self-destruction (if indeed we are to view Shame as a message film about sex addiction). It’s a bit of a pity, really. Remember Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd in another New York film about emotional and psychological dislocation? They could have been mere dressing on the window of Travis Bickle’s mind, yet Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader made it clear that these three-dimensional women existed outside their warped protagonist’s jaundiced perspective. In my humble opinion, Shame’s idolatry of Brandon keeps it just short of being a fully accessible and truly brilliant film.

I really like Jeanne Moreau. What’s not to really like? The heavy-lidded insouciance of her gaze. The husky purr of her voice, undoubtedly nurtured by a several-packs-of-Gitanes-a-day habit. The attitude that challenges you to find her irresistible while simultaneously not giving a Gallic toss whether you do or not. I present Jacques Demy’s La Baie des Anges as case for the defence. Just see if I’m not right.

Louis Malle didn’t exactly discover Moreau but he certainly gave her an almighty shove up the career ladder. In his first two fiction features, the Malle-Moreau chemistry worked wonders for both parties, on-screen and off. In Ascenseur pour l’échafaud Moreau wanders the Parisian boulevards throughout the night while her lover is trapped in a lift. In Les Amants she wanders in the wee small hours through the woods in her nightgown before taking a bath with the lover she’s just picked up. Nobody takes a nocturnal stroll quite like Jeanne Moreau.

Jeanne Moreau shades it

After making the downbeat Le feu follet (also featuring Moreau in a minor role, and recently re-invented in Norway as Oslo, August 31st), Malle decided it would be welcome change of tone to make a comedy. This might have been a fine plan, except Louis Malle had no talent for comedy. His previous attempt, Zazie dans le Métro, though formally clever and inventive, seems to last twice as long as its 90 minutes in its desperate quest for wackiness. Viva Maria! also proves to be something of a challenge for an audience in search of a laugh.

The set-up is promising: Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau as a pair of travelling performers discovering striptease by fluke, in what’s probably the first female buddy movie. Their musical numbers together are the most enjoyable aspect of the film. The scene where Bardot accidentally bursts out of her costume during a song, then continues to strip to the inevitable excitement of the audience, has a certain charm, although Barbara Windsor will forever remain the Queen of Accidentally Bursting Out Of Her Costume. And a few years later Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac occupied the stage with much more pizazz in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.

It’s an uncertainty of tone that holes the film beneath the waterline. It veers across genre and style like some mishmash of Carry On, Monty Python, Luis Bunuel, The Wild Bunch, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Jesus Christ Superstar and Calamity Jane. The plot (if we can be bothered with it – certainly the screenwriters didn’t appear overly concerned) involves two performers both called Maria travelling around Central America with a circus at the start of the 20th century. They witness the sufferings of the peasants under the sadistic dictator Rodriguez, and after Maria I (Moreau) falls in love with the doomed revolutionary leader Flores (George Hamilton), the girls lead a popular revolt to victory over the dictatorship and the corrupt Catholic Church.

One minute we have the two Marias performing a fluffy song-and-dance routine, the next we have a brutal massacre and enslavement of peasants. Then there’s George Hamilton making his entrance like Christ on the road to Calvary, forced by his captors to carry a beam of wood across his shoulders, while giving Bardot a run for her money in the unfeasibly well-coiffed hair stakes. The Hamilton role is completely absurd but presented earnestly and without a whiff of humour. He speaks po-facedly of the degradation of the peasants and the necessity of revolution as if he had just read ‘Marxism for Dummies’, and with all the conviction of someone who knows he is being out-acted by his French voiceover artist. The scene in which he makes sweet love to Moreau in his jail cell, all the while chained to that inconvenient cross, is beyond parody, yet the plaintive guitar and lush string accompaniment indicate that we are meant to take it at its romantic face value.

George, putting the "ham" in Hamiltion

When Hamilton flutters his pretty lashes for the last time, Moreau, fired by her promise to continue the revolution, makes a speech based on Mark Antony in Julius Caesar that rouses the assembled peasants to rise against their oppressors. The speech is designed to awake indignation in the audience too, but since it is sandwiched between scenes of unfunny farce, all it awakens is an awareness that this film has been going for an hour and a quarter (only half an hour to go).

And so it continues. Relatively straight shoot-out action sequences and scenes of would-be dramatic impact are undermined by bizarre moments of surrealism (as they cross a barren desert, they encounter the upright skeletal remains of a horse and its rider) and weak humour (the cross on a church spire being used as a semaphore signal). The final sequences unexpectedly rope in a Spanish Inquisition that is straight out of Monty Python, and unveil the military genius of Brigitte Bardot. Ah yes, Bardot plays the innocent, virginal daughter of an Irish revolutionary, easily mistaken for a boy despite her proficiency with false eyelashes, who, after a night with the lads that would make a Premier League footballer blush, becomes the type of revolutionary strategist that chalks her conquests on the wall of her caravan. And who goes into a bit of a sulk when Moreau nabs Hamilton first.

Of course it’s all nonsense and not to be taken too seriously. The problem is that Malle does take it seriously for curiously long periods, resulting in a film with a tone as uneven as Bardot’s impersonation of an Irish boy. It looks good and the large budget is reflected in the crowds of peasants swarming across Mexican hills, but it’s an incoherent mess and rebelliously unfunny. So, a film that you probably haven’t seen and definitely shouldn’t? Well, yes. But, you know, it does have Jeanne Moreau in it…

Contributor Fintan McDonagh can be followed on Twitter @Fintalloneword.