MikePadgett.com

• Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
• Italy, 2000
• 

It’s tempting to think of Malèna as a shrink-wrapped, ultra-compact, bitesize companion piece to Tornatore’s meandering, elegiac ode to movies Cinema Paradiso. But while both pictures feature protagonists still in the grip of childhood, what drives young Renato here is something less innocent and more erotic. For what’s barely hinted at in the snipped reels of Salvatore’s silver screen is the very epicentre of this great quaking story of an iconic siren.

The siren in question is Malèna Scordia, admirably filled with equal parts mystic and sympathetic by Monica Bellucci, for whom this role seems especially fitting. Yet the contrast between the leading lady of hormonal Renato’s nocturnal wanderings and the reality of a troubled, vulnerable woman struggling with widowhood and wartime couldn’t be greater. It’s through this counterbalance that the movie’s tone turns bittersweet and mines a rich seam of dramatic gold.

For those of us who hold fond memories of Paradiso, Malèna comes off a bit rushed. It’s almost as if Tornatore seems worried about getting away with his usual languid pacing. Nevertheless, everything’s memorably and confidently photographed and even the camera’s love affair with Bellucci doesn’t stop the film from hitting the right emotional notes.

• Directors: José Padilha, Felipe Lacerda
• Brazil, 2002
• 

José Padilha’s enthralling documentary seems much shorter than its two and a half hours’ length. This is the direct result of presenting the material with artful care, without judgement, bias or resort to the artificial dramatisation of events.

Those events need little spin anyway, consisting of the tragic life and death of Sandro do Nascimento, a Rio de Janeiro street youth whose attempt to rob the passengers of a bus in June 2000 escalated into a high-profile hostage situation.

Interspersed with the electric allure of live television footage is the story of Sandro’s life, from witnessing his mother’s brutal murder at five years old to surviving from day to day as a forgotten child on the streets of Rio. The pace of the documentary never slackens, ensuring that we form our own opinions only when we reach the conclusion.

• Director: Walter Salles
• Brazil, 2001
• 

Sandwiched between the superb Central Station and the even better Motorcycle Diaries, Salles’ period adaptation of an Albanian novel makes memorable cinema out of the simplest of storylines.

Walter Carvalho’s cinematography expresses aridity, drudgery and wilderness in a style reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s westerns, as Tonho (played sensitively by Rodrigo Santoro) struggles to break out of the suffocating existence imposed on his family by a long-running blood feud.

In common with his great films to date, Behind the Sun is another lyrical example of the director’s attempts to breathe humanity into the most inhuman of environments and it succeeds with surprising economy.

• Director: Cédric Klapisch
• France/UK, 2005
• 

Russian Dolls begins a new episode in Xavier’s (Romain Duris) life as he turns thirty: it’s a sequel whose events unfold five years after those twelve eventful months in Barcelona as covered by L’Auberge Espanole (UK: Pot Luck).

After a period of more orthodox work, Director Klapisch wanted to return to the ad hoc filmmaking techniques of L’Auberge and it follows that Xavier’s life since Barcelona would be ideal material. In doing so, Klapisch also managed to gather together many of the same faces.

Russian Dolls is by no means as successful as its predecessor, probably because this time there’s more plot to cover between Paris, London and St Petersburg and no ensemble performance. The overall effect is rather fractured and most of the original cast is horribly underused, but the spirited optimism of L’Auberge does continue into Dolls, even if the latter no longer has the zeitgeist.

• Director: Akira Kurosawa
• Japan/France, 1985
• 

It took a long time for Ran to get made, since veteran director Kurosawa had been all but written off by the Japanese film industry and was forced to search for foreign backing.

This film is one of the last in a filmmaking career spanning fifty years and Kurosawa suggested that the troubled protagonist resembled himself. That protagonist is Hidetora, an old warlord who makes the disastrous decision to divide his dominions between two of his sons. As such, Hidetora also resembles Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Ran (roughly translated as “Chaos”) is an epic of classic scale with strong themes. It is visually stunning, particularly in its use of colours and beautiful locations. However, much of the acting - in the style of Japanese Noh theatre - tends to subtract from the film for a Western audience used to more subtly emotive performances.

• Director: Lukas Moodysson
• Denmark, 2000
• 

Lukas Moodysson has been in touch with his coal-black dark side of late, starting with 2002’s impressively bleak Lilya-4-Ever. But before all that, there was Together: as earnest, sensitive and innocent as a young lover, yet warm, fuzzy and familiar like a woolly jumper.

It’s 1975 and as her marriage breaks down, Elisabeth and her two kids seek refuge with her brother in his commune called Tillsammans (”Together”). But Elisabeth soon finds that the commune’s got troubles of its own when the young idealists within try to reconcile their way of life with that of the modern society outside.

Moodysson makes no judgements, draws no parallels and offers not a whisper of political comment, however ripe the material. Instead he sticks to the far more interesting business of developing characters and relationships and on such fertile ground the film is happily successful.

• Director: Federico Fellini
• Italy, 1960
• 

Something about Fellini’s films always leaves me cold. They’re literate, exquisitely shot and intensely artistic. But ultimately I never seem to get on with them.

La Dolce Vita is an iconic classic, one of Fellini’s brightest pearls in a whole string of them. It charts the path of Marcello Rubini, a journalist who aspires to greater things but cannot escape his fascination for the lifestyles of Rome’s playboys and girls. And on the way, the images are indelible: a statue of Christ airlifted over the city by helicopter, Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Fontana Di Trevi, the strangely sad cabaret.

I ought to love this movie. The satire’s so powerful that one character’s name has become part of our language. But as with 8½ it just feels empty. A spectacle for the sake of a spectacle. A beautiful tableau minus a fitting caption.

• Director: Andrés Wood
• Chile, 2004
• 

The Machuca of the title is a young boy from a poor family who ends up in a public school that’s riding the high crest of a socialist wave sweeping over Chile. Pedro Machuca’s friendship with middle-class classmate Gustavo Infante is the main subject matter, with historical events looming large over the boys like the rainclouds that characterise the film’s outdoor scenes.

The events in question took place in the early 1970s, the era of Salvador Allende’s struggle for a socialist redistribution of wealth ending in Pinochet’s coup and accession. Wood lived this era at a similar age to that of Pedro and Gustavo and many scenes are appropriately hazy, shot from low angles to reflect the children’s point of view.

Whilst the photography is first-rate, the acting (non-professional in some cases) tends to be somewhat unemotive. As such, the human relationships feel underplayed, leaving the dramatic potential of the film unrealised at key moments.

• Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
• US/Mexico, 2006
• 

I always look forward to a new instalment of the González / Arriaga filmmaking partnership. Babel is undoubtedly their grandest effort to date and it’s probably their weakest, but a flawed González movie is still extraordinary.

Babel has been described as the first film about globalisation: four stories from around the world interconnect to form a parable about love and consequences.

Whilst the narrative is uneven and binds together only with some difficulty, the whole product is visually thrilling and there are some stand-out performances, particularly in the Mexican sequences.