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Comedy is a funny business. It can be as light as candyfloss or as sinister as an oil slick, which is probably why some people find clowns so very disturbing – on the one hand a thing of ridicule on the other, a disturbingly ‘masked’ embodiment of uncertainty. Ben Wheatley and Robin Hill’s debut feature is as serious as the tears of a clown, pulling the plug on the usual gangland cliches and taking their killers back to the kitchen sink. The result is a black comedy reminiscent of the likes of Alan Bleasdale and early Ken Loach, but which is also distinctly unnerving.

And yet, what can be more ordinary than a terraced house? Sitting innocently in suburban Brighton, the family it contains are at once utterly banal and worryingly psychotic. Karl and his Dad Big Bill (played by Hill and his real-life father Robert) are fresh from escaping a prison term after four months’ remand and, back home, they and their extended family consider who may have grassed them up over tea and a biccie.

Big Bill has a mostly zen approach to the art of criminality, seemingly preferring to play folk tunes on his guitar, although it is clear he is not to be crossed, while Karl, despite the outward appearance of normality, soon comes to display a high level of arrested development and very short fuse. Watching over both is long-suffering matriarch Maggie (the fabulous Julia Deakin), who quickly shapes up to be Lady Macbeth in Marigolds. And if a snitch in their midst is not enough, Karl’s ex (played by Robin’s real-life wife Kerry Peacock) arrives on the doorstep with a bun in the oven she claims he put there.

By mixing the situations of a crime drama with dysfunctional family dynamics, the everyday becomes accentuated, meaning that outbreaks of violence are absurdly comic but still retain a nasty edge. Additional characters push this absurdity even further, such as hitman Pringle (Michael Smiley), who in a flourish of modern parenting problems, brings his three-year-old son (played by Robin’s real-life daughter Kitty Blue) along on a job.

There is no denying the film is low-budget. In addition to Robin Hill casting just about everyone in his family (his sister-in-law and mum also turn up in a very brief cameos), with the exception of a handful of scenes, the entire film is set in his parent’s home, facts which only add to the documentary feel.

Director of Photography Laurie Rose deserves praise for his excellent handheld camerawork that makes a virtue of the claustrophobic nature of the house. His intuitive use of the camera is all the more impressive when you consider that most scenes were done in one or two takes, one of which would be semi-improvised and, when they are in the confines of the house, he keeps his framing in the face of the central characters. The acting is uniformly excellent, with a resolute downplaying of each scene which gives the humour an organic, natural feel.

As the body count begins to stack up, the tension begins to haemorrhage out somewhat but the climax of the film is a fitting one even if it does stray into predictable territory. With wins at Raindance and the British Independent Film Awards and plenty of festival play in the US, Wheatley, Hill and Rose are all on the rise and it will be interesting to see what they do with a bigger budget and less familiar setting in the future.

Recently I interviewed Noah Buschel, the director of The Missing Person, for a podcast on the various ways the independent film world works and how it has changed over the past ten years. Noah would know better than most about this subject, because he made three films in three different eras of independent films, always having to change his approach to selling the film to potential financiers and eventually getting distribution (or not). One of his films was Neal Cassady, a fractured biopic about the titular figure who was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty character in On the Road. Not knowing much about that era of writing, or beatniks, or Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), I was going into Neal Cassady practically blind on the subject matter. And to Noah’s credit he did not dumb his movie down for the mass audience. As a result, I had no idea what was going on for most of the 80 minute film, as there’s no really no in for an outside party, and I complimented him on sticking to his guns and making a movie I had no way of understanding.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl about Allen Ginsberg’s controversial poem that became the subject of an obscenity trial, threatened to leave me in a similarly excluded lurch. Ginsberg was both inspired by and was a lover of Cassady, and as with Kerouac, Ginsberg employed a rambling, self-indulgent style of writing. Whether you identify with his themes of anger, confusion, and bottled up sexuality is helpful to your potential enjoyment of Howl, but the movie is made in such a way as to alienate both fans of Ginsberg and those who are novices of beat poetry.

Friedman and Epstein (who made The Times of Harvey Milk on his own and The Celluloid Closet and Common Threads with Friedman) had intended to make a documentary on the trial but couldn’t find enough footage to justify a feature. So, instead of making a short subject, they were forced to cobble together an 85 minute mix of staged court footage and Ginsberg, played by James Franco, explaining the origins of Howl¸ accompanied by computer generated animation (a typewriter morphs into a jazz musician) to further break down the sexual imagery (“alcohol, cock, and endless balls”). The scenes in court are stiff and have no power, not helped by the overqualified actors playing lawyers (David Straithairn as the DA, Jon Hamm as the defense attorney, Bob Balaban as the judge) and witnesses with literary pedigrees (Jeff Daniels, Treat Williams, Mary Louise-Parker) in glorified walk-ons, and especially because the public context of the obscenity trial isn’t explored. We never know how this trial affected any writer or politician outside of those in the courtroom or how obscenity laws and trials changed because of it. It’s funny that one of the interpretations that are harped on is, “literary value sometimes is a book which will survive any test of time,” and yet the movie doesn’t evaluate its own subject in that manner.

And since these scenes in the courtroom are limited to the lawyers asking a question and the witnesses simply reciting their personal analysis of Howl, the movie turns into a cliff notes version of the poem. Franco’s performance, which considering the photos of Ginsberg shown throughout the film, isn’t nebbishy enough, except for his attempt to play the part as if he were doing a half-hearted impression of Jeff Goldblum (Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement would be best suited for the role, since Goldblum is now a bit too old for the part). It’s not that Franco has much to do anyway; he’s either on stage reading his poem, or explaining it to an unseen reporter. There’s no deliberate irony in this choice either, despite the fact that the entire trial appears to be based on the objection to individual words and profanities, intending to remove them from their context. Did Friedman and Epstein not notice that by having Franco reveal the meaning of each word and phrase, they’re just as bad as the district attorney who filed the case?

There are issues that could have been explored other than the time-honored “what is obscenity?”, such as Straithairn’s specious argument that if you don’t understand the meaning of something, it must be obscene or how the entire notion of determining public decency is based on protecting a theoretical person. It’s a condescending notion that still goes on today (“I don’t find it racist/homophobic/xenophobic, but the public might”), but in Howl, it turns out it’s just a legal device, not intended as anything other than a transparent attempt to sway the judge in absence of real evidence. And since the judge ignores it, why exactly should I care?

Viewed as part of the 2010 Philadelphia QFest.

If you want to read more of Adam’s reviews, you can find them at his site, A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity.

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-By Ethan Alter

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Gasper Noé’s heady and unintentionally hilarious exploration of
life after death, Enter the Void, is an example of
exceptional technique used in service of a half-baked idea that’s
been dragged out to interminable length. But oh, that technique! If
Noé were any less skilled a showman, it would be easy to dismiss
Enter the Void as a grand filmmaking folly that the general
moviegoing public would be better off avoiding. And as it is, this
isn’t the sort of movie you’d casually recommend to a co-worker or
acquaintance unless you’re deliberately planning on burning that
bridge for good. But serious film buffs and fans of cult movies in
general owe it to themselves to check out what Noé hath wrought
here, if only to witness the rare sight of a director going
completely off the deep end in service of his vision.

That vision includes, among other things, onscreen drug trips that
strive to outdo the famous Stargate sequence from Kubrick’s
2001, graphic and prolonged sexual encounters, a suicide
attempt followed by a queasy depiction of an abortion and, last but
certainly not least, what may very well be the first cum shot ever
filmed from the perspective of a woman’s vaginal canal. Lest you
think that Enter the Void is nothing but a
two-and-a-half-hour parade of depravity, there are also moments of
startling grace and beauty courtesy of Noé’s visual conceit (or, if
you prefer, gimmick) for the movie. See, Enter the Void is
shot entirely from a first-person perspective…even after the death
of its main character.

Confused? Here’s how it works: The film’s first half-hour
chronicles the final night in the life of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown),
an American living abroad in Toyko who earns a modest living by
dealing drugs. So far, it’s shaping up to be an average evening for
the twenty-something dealer and recreational user: He snorts some
cocaine, experiences a far-out vision, welcomes over a buddy and
shoots the shit about this crazy book he’s reading, The Tibetan
Book of the Dead. Then he goes out to a nearby nightclub to
meet a connection, where he’s promptly set upon by undercover cops
and shot to death in a toilet stall. All of this plays out entirely
through Oscar’s eyes, with Noé even regularly fluttering the camera
shutter to mimic the effect of blinking.

Once Oscar is killed, the camera follows his spirit out of his body
and hovers above the action, looking down on the world and people
he’s left behind, specifically his emotionally fragile sister,
Linda (Paz de la Huerta). As foretold in The Tibetan Book of the
Dead, Oscar’s spirit also travels back in time, reviewing the
highlights of his sad little life—the violent death of his parents
when he was a child and his subsequent separation from his sister,
moving to Tokyo and falling into drugs, bringing his sister across
the Pacific only to watch her embark on a career as a stripper—as
he prepares to move onto the next stage of existence where he’ll
have the chance to be reincarnated.

This brings us to the movie’s sure-to-be-legendary final act, where
Noé reveals that the next stage of existence is, in fact, a
neon-red lit carnal palace where men and women writhe in passion as
glowing light emanates from their nether regions. After observing
and rejecting countless pairings, Oscar’s spirit finally follows
the light into a thrusting couple and rides a wave of sperm to his
host’s uterus, from which he emerges nine months later as a
bouncing baby.

Descriptions of Enter the Void don’t really do the movie
justice—it’s even more overwrought and hysterical than this
synopsis indicates. Noé’s self-seriousness just makes the damn
thing funnier, especially in the reincarnation sequence, which is
difficult to watch with a straight face. At the same time, though,
the filmmaking is so absorbing, it’s possible to be enthralled by
what’s happening onscreen even while you’re rolling your eyes and
laughing. Coming off a diet of rigidly programmed summer
blockbusters, there’s something liberating about seeing a director
unshackle himself from convention in such an outlandish way. No
doubt aware of the ridicule and scorn his movie will invite, Noé
nevertheless fully commits himself to this depiction of the
afterlife, never holding back even when restraint would be the
wiser course of action.

But his admirable artistry behind the camera doesn’t excuse some of
the movie’s more glaring flaws, beginning with the fact that Oscar
and Linda are generally irritating and unlikeable people for whom
the audience has little sympathy. And at two-and-a-half hours, the
film is punishingly long; the middle section in particular drags on
and on, rubbing the audience’s face in the characters’ misery and
needlessly repeating scenes we already witnessed in the first act.
One thing’s for sure—if you make it to the other side of Noé’s
demented trip through the void, it won’t be a journey you forget
anytime soon.