Grey kingfisher.

This time the film that I saw on the weekend was Black Swan. I knew virtually nothing about it, but the damned thing kept popping up in my Facebook feed so often that I couldn’t help but arrive at the deduction that my own personal film critic homunculus was trying to tell me something. So I took the hint, rang up a friend and barrelled off to see aforementioned stretch of celluloid. And let me start by saying that Darren Aro-I can’t-possibly-pronounce-the-remaining-few-syllables’ psychological ballet thriller Black Swan is an arty, arty film. In fact, it couldn’t possibly be artier if it sellotaped itself to the back of a Rembrandt and had itself smuggled into the Louvre by a disaffected professor of 19^th century humanist literature dressed in a beret and a coat made entirely of paintbrushes.

This isn’t to say it isn’t watchable. It’s just that it wears its artiness so self-consciously on its sleeve that it may as well be shouting, “Look at us, we know how to make a movie cleverly! Critics of the world, cough up the stars”, with every ominous crystalline chime of the soundtrack that accompanies Barbara Hershey’s tyrannical mother bursting in on Natalie Portman’s darling daughter in the middle of doing something embarrassing. Which, incidentally, happens more often than you’d think. But that’s enough about that.

It’s shot in grainy desaturated colours that turn highlights to brilliant ivory white and cast shadows around the unknown edge of the screen, playing light off dark in a somewhat too-neat visual parallel of the struggles in its heroine’s inner psyche. Only when Portman’s Nina ventures outside the world of the theatre and into the New York nightlife do more vivid colours begin to dominate, and then only for a very brief period. Then there’s the at-turns alternately grandiose and minimalist soundtrack. And, of course, the surrealist nightmare episodes that offer insights into the mind of Nina as it cracks under the pressure of her own psychological metamorphosis.

If you told me beforehand that Black Swan was going to include freaky Japanese horror-movie F.E.A.R.-esque sequences, I’d reply that I’d be interested to see how they’d fit in without seeming artificially grafted on, and probably also mention something about how it would be kind of hard to achieve that. Yes, I just compared this self-consciously super-arty film to a first person shooter game series, go and have a cry about it and try and drown me in the tears if you require a topically relevant means of exacting revenge. But they do work and it’s because they segue effortlessly into a cinematic sea of relentless tension, where you’re never quite at ease. The predictable main arc of the storyline is the only comfort the audience is allowed in a film where anything could happen next, one which – like the ballet itself - is so heavily stylized that everything or nothing that occurs might be real or just a figment of the heroine’s imagination.

Sure, there are a couple of cheap shocks. The moments where Nina spins round and the camera lurches across to reveal – surprise, someone standing right behind her, usually Mila Kunis’ deadly rival in the main role stakes, or her mother – didn’t sit too well with me. They’re squatting there self-impudently on the border fence between being overdone and staying just under the quota. But the actors are so good in their respective roles that we’re sufficiently immersed to let this kind of potentially awkward stylistic transition pass without noticing. And there are even a few instances of subversive humour, so low-key as to be non-existent, like when one of Nina’s fellow stars clad in full monster costume shambles past her and mumbles an affable “Hey.”

So what else can I say about it? Hmmm. In a sense, Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan mirrors the journey of an adolescent into full maturity through the discovery of art. When we first encounter her at the beginning of the film, she’s still a child; naïve, sheltered, innocent, repressed. The sexuality, self-expression of adulthood: both have been swallowed wholesale in the yawning singularity of discipline enforced by her mother. Nina’s allowing the Black Swan to flourish within herself is akin to reaching a belated maturity – or perhaps just unlocking a part of herself that has remained latent. She knows the choreography, the technique perfectly, with mathematical precision; but true feeling is unknown to her. Learning to exert control over one’s emotions is a skill that is generally associated with growing up – but recast in this light, the film seems to suggest that learning when it is appropriate to relinquish control over emotion can be just as much a part of reaching true maturity.

So on one hand, maybe it’s essentially a tale of growth. But the Swan Lake subtext seems to suggest that both the child and the adult can coexist within one person, and be adopted at a moment according to whatever the situation calls for. Like actors on the stage, we too can switch wholesale back and forth between innocence and maturity as we wish. This is a film full of chameleons.

Little less action and a little more conversation please.

Five weeks later… I’m back. Somewhat better travelled hopefully. On the flight home I watched a lot of movies. Three good ones and one not so good. Thankfully though, one in the former category was Clint Eastwood’s understated World War II epic Letters from Iwo Jima. Certainly, lurking in the back of my mind like a pride of starving lions (no, of course I haven’t been anywhere in particular recently…) the whole time were a whole bunch of peripheral concerns about topics such as the presentation of history through film and, more specifically, the presentation of war in film and other mediums. All of which are pet concerns of mine.

What really struck me and I what I walked away with from Letters, though, was the emphasis that Eastwood places on people. He understands a fundamental requirement which so many other directors, authors and artists frequently under-prioritize in their tales: the need for an audience to identify emotionally with characters. I got a vague sense of this in watching Gran Torino and Letters has that similar field of human scope. It’s such a basic, foundational ingredient of good film-making, but it’s so often undervalued or overlooked. I’m fairly strongly of the opinion that having good actors who can play their parts convincingly is among the most critical elements in a film, but until recently, I didn’t fully understand why I thought that way.

The reason is simply this. I judge whether a film is good or not based firstly upon whether it moved me emotionally, and secondly whether or not I was aware I was being manipulated in this respect. Either way, a story cannot have dramatic impact unless you actually care about the characters involved. If the audience is disconnected from the emotional plight of the story’s protagonists, then the story loses that immersive quality that defines pure fictional escapism. The screen displays a series of fragmented images of pretty places and people, but the audience is still sitting there in the darkened cinema, aware of their own powerless embodiment and probably, in all likelihood, getting restless and waiting for the damn thing to end so they can trudge off home to bed. For films about war, this is perhaps all the more important, given that the stakes in the fictional scenario being presented are so much higher (i.e. unlike a romantic comedy, characters can die; unlike a James Bond film, no character is immune from death, etc)

Was I aware I was being emotionally manipulated in Letters From Iwo Jima? At times, yes; at others, no. But the film’s most valuable trump card is that it creates recognizably human, empathetic characters from the fabric of an enemy which historically has been demonized as barbaric, faceless and inhuman. Most notably, Eastwood uses music minimally, which gives dialogue scenes a realistic quality, as if of everyday conversation, perhaps engaging with an old friend. Realism in this respect goes hand-in-hand with historical immersiveness. As the audience, we become fully enmeshed in the plight of Saigo and Nishi, Shimizu and General Kuribayashi because we come to know them as others do, through conversation; through that simple human quality of speaking and listening.

That not so good movie I was talking about? It actually wasn’t that bad. It was this wacky little Ukrainian thing called We Are From The Future 2. The thing was that technically it was far superior to what I was expecting. It must have had a decent-sized budget for a foreign film. I’m inclined to rate it down because the scenes of battle carnage that are shoved relentlessly up the audience’s nose for the film’s second half are so grossly mired in their own tacky gorefest, often accompanied by a driving metal soundtrack, that they overshoot the ballpark of realism and land squarely in the neighbour’s backyard of kitsch (I’ve always wanted a chance to use that word, and there it is! I’m happy now, for at least the next four minutes). Moreover, some of the earlier scenes taking place in a modern WW2 re-enactment of the battle are equally cheap. Partying youths wearing SS uniforms dance to the same bloody annoying Eastern European heavy-metal, as slow camera movements pan over the stage and the crowd and luxuriate in the violence, the noise and the visual palette of militaristic symbolism.

But I’ll say this for WAFTF2: it was economical. It only had an hour and a half or so to do its thing, and as an action film, it succeeds admirably. By the end of it I was mildly interested/morbidly fascinated to go out and look for We Are From The Future 1, so I’m prepared to count that a success. I suppose it’s just that straight after watching Eastwood’s far superior (although to be fair, marketed at a somewhat slightly different recipient base) WW2 film, this was a starkly noticeable change of pace.  

The fact that WAFTF2 chooses as its focus a less historically Hollywood-trodden theatre of war (i.e. the Eastern Front and Ukrainian involvement), however, gives me an immediate instinct to scrutinize it as a work of filmic history, rather than as the sheer escapist entertainment it is. I mean, it’s about time-travelling college students, for Pete’s sake. In this respect, WAFTF2 suffers rather than profits from having a relatively high-budget technical arsenal at its disposal: as the audience, I didn’t know whether the filmmakers’ intent was to create a realistic portrayal of what it would have been like to fight in the Battle of Brody in 1944, or whether I should be taking the action at face value. So I posit the question: is it possible to depict historical violence and warfare at a high technical level (Saving Private Ryan being the oft-quoted textbook example/high water mark) without the element of cheap, escapist thrills that inevitably seems to go hand-in-hand? Something, hopefully, to think about.