Chris Gude’s Mambo Cool, is a very personal, poetic and chromatic display of the faces (literally), postures, ramblings, dreams and dancing of the lowest level of the drug industry in Medellín, Columbia, “the black market of the black market”. While mambo and drugs seem to constitute life itself, folding one over the other like the beats of the same song with no end in sight, for Mauro, the protagonist of Hernán Rosselli’s film, drugs and music are a way of life, as natural as hanging out with friends and family and counterfeiting money. The drama here is very subdued, the film’s appeal stems from the mundanity, the technicality and the routine of the character’s illegal activities that are just a party of everyday life, from Rosselli’s (!) take on neorealism. At the opposite side, the homeless heroin addicts of Heaven Knows What (Ben & Joshua Safdie) inhabit an emotional world of extreme drama brought on by a way of life that is now living them, their social and physical survival and integrity – amidst suicide attempts, OD’s, infected wounds, psychiatric wards etc. – not even a result of endurance as in Mambo Cool, but of pure happenstance. The film makes a very interesting use of music, an abrasive blend o electronica and black metal that is entirely non-diegetic but somehow permeates the story both ways: as a resonance of the character’s emotional landscape and also as an enhancer of the audience own receptiveness to what happens in the story. While it is the most fiction like of the three, Heavens Knows What into reality in the flesh of lead character Arielle Holmes who is in fact playing herself based on her own (both lived and written) story.

Another interesting aspect is how these three movies relate to space and to the bigger community inside which the specific subculture develops and the way these specific spaces echo the intensity and drama of their life choices. Mambo Cool is a world in itself closed of from the reality of the bigger city, the background is almost always a small room, a dimly lit bar, the ruins of some forgotten building, and every character we see on screen is connected to that group. The larger community seems to have vanished and the feeling is that the space we see exists in a parallel reality. As a consequence there is no reference for what an alternative, normal, lifestyle could look like. The characters – while they are all non professional actors who are in fact living the mambo cool life – bring no emotional charge to the table, only their own surreal performances. As long as we can’t determine if these performances are scripted real life stories (if not drug induced delusions caught on camera) we are left to read their faces for sorrow, regrets, insanity or any other tragedies our mainstream, not mambo cool mindsets prompt us to look for.

Heaven Knows What presents a very fluid community – homeless people with an addiction to alcohol or drugs or both – that fills up a space organically: the streets of New York, and the occasional burger joint or public library, are claimed as territory through the sonic projection of an otherwise not so threatening visual presence. Their shouting, cursing and arguing create a homogenous and impregnable bubble inside the metropolis: they are autistic to the environment and, strangely enough, the environment seems little troubled by their presence (just to be clear, I’m not talking about the times in which the characters choose to step outside the immediate reality but when they are sober). Spaces are thus unknowingly conquered and abandoned without any meaningful contact between these people and the larger group.

photo filmlinc.com

In Mauro it is the exact opposite: while the protagonist is engaging in a life of crime, there are no real borders between him and the larger community. It is a sign of his social representativity, the tolerance of petty criminal activities inside the community as a means to improve one’s life, and a necessity of the nature of his activity, money laundering. While the owners of the shop and bars where Mauro changes his fake bills will no doubt resort to violence if they found out they had been cheated, those who catch on just say that it’s a fake bill and they can’t excepted (it’s not a coincidence that you never see a policeman or a police car in the film). Because of these strong community ties, Mauro’s rise and downfall are just ordinary life events, and him just another working guy who has lost (t)his opportunity to make it big: he still has his regular job, and his former partners (a young couple expecting a child) eventually forgive him and invite him for family dinners once more.

Andrei Sendrea

The post Mauro, Heaven Knows What and Mambo Cool: Three Films about Addiction Seen at the Viennale 2014 appeared first on INHALE MAG.

It all started quite climactic, with one of the strongest opening shots I’ve seen this year: a catholic priest in a confessional, the little window is drawn open to let in the light and the words of an unknown sinner “I first tasted seamen when I was seven years old”. The priest is given a week to live, his death sentence a punishment for all the bad things other of his kind have done. As with most amazing opening shots, Calvary is bound to disappoint, but only by comparison.

Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy is a rather shy and funny account of the irksomeness of S&M relationships. Leather bodices and high heels come along with lower back problems and cramped feet, and being tied and locked in a closed space is not so stimulating when your dominatrix lover is a deep sleeper and her snoring is louder than you can whisper the safe word. What is really fascinating is the exquisite rendition of textures and colors that hint to the other side of this love story, the one you don’t see (the recurring scene with the silk pairs of underwear hanging out to dry against the backdrop of the soft blue tiles of the bathroom is a reference point). On some conceptual level, this may well be Strickland’s own pleasure denying game with the audience, not necessarily the absence of any explicit sexuality but the permanent allusions to a more darker side of the game.

52 Tuesdays directed by Sophie Hyde is another film dealing with confusing sexuality, not only for the mainstream audience but also for the characters of the story: a lesbian mother that just started hormonal treatment to become a man, a teenage daughter experimenting with her own sexuality inside a love-friendship triangle with an older couple and their gay brother/ uncle with a small kid of his own. The film is a coming of age drama – for both female leading characters, while the man is obviously trying to never reach that age – but what really sticks with the viewer is the warmth and depth of their relationships and the feeling that this is what a family should be like (no, I’m not being ironic): teenagers being treated like adults and adults that are allowed to behave like teenagers.

Mambo Cool, Heaven Knows What and Mauro are three films built on a combination of drugs, music and deliberate blurring of the fiction/ documentary line, both on screen but also in the filmmaking process. Chris Gude’s stylized depiction of the “black market of the black market” of drug trade in Medellín, uses real life members of that community and surreal, highly staged décors and monologues to render the feeling of the mambo cool life. Arielle Holmes is in fact starring in her own heroin-and-love-on-the-streets-of-NYC biopic in Heaven Knows What, a story she wrote after a chance meeting with directors Ben & Joshua Safdie. For the neorealist slice of life story of Argentinian money counterfeiter Mauro, director Hernán Rosselli first major production investment was a real forger’s printing press (the film’s detailed depiction of the forging process will bring to mind William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.).

Tommy Lee Jones pulls a premature friedkin in The Homesman and hangs his leading lady half way through the film, which still stands for courageous Hollywood storytelling even if he kills Hillary Swank’s character only to have his own take the lead.
As with every edition, the Austrian Film Museum had it’s own programme within the larger frame of the Viennale, a retrospective of John Ford comprising fifty of his films. I saw The Whole Town Laughed, the funniest film of the festival (Birdman running a distant second), and have this piece of drunken nonsensical wisdom to impart, from the mouth of the main character brilliantly played by Edward G. Robinson: “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” With Sergeant Rutledge I was struck by Ford’s surgical use of humor and the ability to keep the comedic elements from diluting the drama and the higher social and political statement.

Striving for political commentary is something The Terror Live (Byeong-woo Kim) shouldn’t have done. The film starts off with a bang (literally, a bridge blows up) and a news anchor who is contacted by a terrorist and held hostage on live television until his demands are met. For the first half an hour the film lives up to it’s name: a one-man show real time newsroom thriller, brilliantly shot, edited and performed, that has the stakes rising higher and higher with not a moment of respite. As the plot unfolds, the increasing number of dots are getting harder and harder to connect and The Terror Live turns into an action blockbuster with one ridiculous conspiracy running under another, where all the rich people, politicians and television bosses have bribe written on their unsympathetic faces or/and are cynical bastards who don’t mind killing a few people for money, reelection, promotion or rating. To top it all, the finale ties all the loose ends together in a big flashy red bow screaming political ideas wrapped in poorly crafted artistic vehicle.

Loose ends are not a problem for courtroom drama The Blue Room, where Mathieu Amalric delivers a cryptic performance (both as film director and as lead man) that will keep the viewer puzzling over what exactly is he being charged with and who is it that he supposedly killed. Skilfully scripted and edited, the story builds up like a maze through temporally disjointed POV flashbacks and the ongoing investigation. Old pathways are abandoned and new ones emerge, connecting characters, locations, circumstantial evidence, motive, means and opportunity. But when the sentence is delivered, stating that the accused entered the labyrinth at this point, took this route and emerged on this side, the audience is faced with a procedural truth that doesn’t match the map. It is not a matter of right or wrong, but rather that the scales of justice are perfectly balanced. This is no cheap storytelling trick, some important piece of information withheld; the scales are full, the only thing that could tip them would be the accused’s flashback of his crime. But Amalric is not cheating here: either there is no such memory or his protagonist is refusing to remember, both variants equally possible and consistent the storytelling rules that the film has enforced throughout. This wouldn’t have been possible without Amalric’s finely tuned, zero-sum acting. He is in fact, delivering a performance of Schrödinger’s Cat paradox: he’s done it and he hasn’t done it at the same time, we’ll never know, because when the end credits start flowing, he’s still inside the maze.

And so am I, so I’ll just end here, with this image from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour: a sailor shirt, black pants and chador twisting in the wind Iranian vampire girl, is rolling on a skateboard through the middle of a dimly lit neo-noir empty street.

Andrei Sendrea

The post Why Viennale is the best film festival appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Fish & Cat won the Special Orizzonti Award for Innovative Content, an award that wasn’t even on the menu. The fact that the Venice jury felt they should somehow reward this film has two implications. The film is indeed something you don’t come across every day. At the same time, the award sort of labels the film and, labels are misleading. This is not that Iranian movie all in one take.

First of all, there is nothing Iranian about this movie, except for the talent of the cast and crew. The story could as well be set in any other part of the world. There is nothing wrong with cinema that has a local flavor, but credit should also be given to a director that eludes exoticism (always big with festival juries) for a more universally human approach.

photo hollywoodreporter.com

Secondly, being a one-take film it’s the least of its merits. Even if we reduce the film to this one technical aspect, Fish & Cat still stands apart from other such films. It is shot entirely outdoors,  using natural light, in rough mountainous forest terrain, in winter, and the story has the characters (which are not few) moving in all directions. The film looks and sounds impeccable except for a few quivers of the camera. Put into context these quivers should be regarded more like the signs (scars) of a great cinematic achievement rather than mistakes.

The greatest thing about this technical aspect however, is that is not gratuitous, it’s not showing off, it’s not just pretentious form filled with whatever story was available. The form is intricately intertwined with the theme of the film: time. The film flows in one single take because time flows in one single take. Unlike other films and other directors who profess their preference for long takes or even one take films as a way of framing reality, in Fish & Cat, real time does not equal diegetic time. In both cases time flows, just not in the same direction. Analyzing the film from the perspective of different time structures (that is, a structure defined by a set of characters that perform a set of actions in a certain order, and a location), the film looks like an illustration of the Gordian Knot. Just like a piece of string (or Rope, if we are to mention the first film that tried to do something similar to the one take film), the string of time in this film has a linear unidirectional flow in the beginning and in the end, but there’s no telling what that direction is. As with a piece of string, you can’t really say which end is the beginning.

photo asset1.sourehcinema.ir

When watching a film we never question the beginning and the end, we never switch their places to see if it makes sense the other way around. There are films that choose to tell the story backwards, but there is always a clear time frame (past-present-future), cause and effect.

The confusion wouldn’t be at all obvious if it weren’t for the knot in the string, the body of the film that makes you question the beginning and the end. As with every knot in every string, a time knot means a time string that twists and flows back on itself – actions that cause other actions and so on, until some action causes the same action that started the whole chain of events. Only this time the camera has moved to another place, it’s somebody else`s point of view. Each point of view advances the plot, gives you a more clear understanding of the situation. Still, these puzzle pieces are so well designed that they fit perfectly with every other piece, and no single direction of causality (time flow) emerges, but a multitude.

photo asset1.sourehcinema.ir

I mentioned the fact that the film was shot outdoors, using natural light. Sunlight can be a good indicator of the passing of time. The light in Fish & Cat is always the same, no indication of the the time of day, no indication of time. This small detail fits perfectly with the whole concept put forward by the movie and brings us to the most important merit of this film.

Shahram Mokri had a great concept, but he didn’t stop there. He found the perfect form for his concept, the one take film, but he didn’t stop there either. He chose the most difficult setting imaginable and he managed to keep the camera flowing while following characters up mountains, and even squeeze in a bird’s eye view in the ending.

photo asset1.sourehcinema.ir

At any point in the making of this film, the director could have stopped pushing the limits, and it would have been enough to make this film memorable. To top it all, he chose to stay true to narrative cinema. There is an articulated, well written story in Cat and Fish, the film is not just an interesting cinematic exercise about time. What is that story? Seems appropriate to end this review with the words with which the director decided to open his film, based on a true story about a restaurant that served minced human flesh for food.

Fish & Cat (Mahi va Gorbeh), r. Shahram Mokri, 2013

by Andrei Șendrea

http://www.liternet.ro/autor/3761/Andrei-Sendrea.html

The post FISH & CAT – ORIZZONTI OFFICIAL SELECTION, 70th VENICE FILM FESTIVAL appeared first on INHALE MAG.

A gay related murder in an age when homosexuality is still incriminated, that’s enough to fill any director’s plate, but this case has a very particular posthumous attraction to it. Lucien Carr is the man who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac and both of them to William S. Burroughs and was an important figure in what would later became known as the Beat Generation.

photo geektyrant.com

A very dense subject indeed and the film has received criticism for it’s holistic approach, trying to tell too many stories  and ultimately failing to tell a single one. While the premise can not be denied (the capillary expansion into all aspects of the story: the murder, the Beat origins, Ginsberg`s coming of age sexually and creatively, Lucien Carr’s relationship with Kamerer), the outcome is a matter of how much is the viewer willing to let director John Krokidas get away with.

photo collider.com

While at some moments very well documented, the film seems to operate and twist real facts and characters into deliberate fiction, a romanticized view over the whole affair that becomes a sort of ritual sacrifice, a founding murder of the Beat movement. Every film based on “a true story” has to rely on some kind of creative license in order to fill in the gaps. This movie is special because the process seems to be flowing backwards: the gaps are not filled with fiction derived from the historical context but rather from what the Beat culture and it’s prophets came to be years after the incident. From this point of view, Kill Your Darlings, is in fact, a crash course in Beat ethos condensed in the time frame of a few months, when Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac were not the Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac that have made it through to the English literature manuals.

photo collider.com

photo collider.com

In the end, it comes down to the viewer and his ability to experience the Beat movement through the duality of this film. Had it been completely accurate from a historical point of view, the film wouldn’t have been entertaining, so upbeat. Had it been utter fiction, just some young guys having fun, planning a literary revolution, maybe even succeeding, the film would have lacked the incredible appeal of the actual Beat counterculture and it’s very recognizable darlings.

by Andrei Șendrea.

http://www.liternet.ro/autor/3761/Andrei-Sendrea.html

The post KILL YOUR DARLINGS – VENICE DAYS, 70th VENICE FILM FESTIVAL appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Little by little we begin to see the cracks in the wall: the daughter is sneaking off to see her boyfriend, the father is an authoritarian figure and he clashes with his older son, his business is going bad and his beautiful wife is cheating on him. These invisible signs of decay of the home are mimicked by very material, almost imperceptible signs of decay in the house: real cracks in the wall and bits of paint peeling of the woodwork, details that fit so perfectly with the clean, austere, simple and luminous house.

photo medeasthefilm.com

At the same time they tell the age old story of “nothing lasts”, they remind the viewer that good things come in frames: always limited. The house was once new, freshly painted; their happiness was once real (the bathing scene is filmed, also captured in a frame). There are also the more ominous cracks in the ground, coming from the lack of rain. Everybody is waiting for the rain, the children even do a rain dance, and somehow you know that the rain is going to come and is going to come down hard, because there is a storm brewing inside this family.

photo medeasthefilm.com

Now, the real magic that should be noted here is this: the film manages to show these changes, both material and within the soul of the characters, in a very slow manner, with as little violence as possible. Violence in the broadest sense, violence as movement, as opposed to the stillness of a single moment in time, the stillness of something that is contained within a frame. Why is this magic? For two reasons. First reason is the very good cinematography, MEDEAS works perfectly as a visual poem (credit goes to cinematographer Chayse Irvin). Second, because you know something is happening, you can sense the members of the family growing apart, you can sense the static electricity building and you brace yourself for the storm; but at the same time, nothing really happens, that is to say, nothing in the classic narrative frame of cause and effect. And this is a great feat of cinematic artistry, coming from a debutant director, no less.

photo medeasthefilm.com

That is why the word poem seems to fit so well, because the understanding of the situation is more somatic than cerebral. At the same time, everything makes sense. You don’t see the actual storm (you do feel it), but the outcome matches the premise, the director just made a choice not to show the road between them. The rain falls softly on the windows of the family truck and once again, the camera lingers over the peaceful, happy faces of the members of this family. It might as well be put in a frame, like any other happy memory.

photo medeasthefilm.com

MEDEAS, r. Andrea Pallaoro, 2013

by Andrei Șendrea

http://www.liternet.ro/autor/3761/Andrei-Sendrea.html

The post MEDEAS – ORIZZONTI OFFICIAL SELECTION, 70th VENICE FILM FESTIVAL appeared first on INHALE MAG.

photo maastricht.gezien.nl

The Act of Killing is one of those good movies you wished you hadn’t seen. Not because of the obvious horrors they unravel but because of the special way they make you connect with the people involved and the reality of what happened to them. The way in which they magnify your perspective (directorial vision is crucial for this part) and show you that what you perceived to be black and white is actually a suffocating murky gray. I remember only one other movie that managed to stir inside me the same kind of uneasy feeling, the feeling that, while the movie was no doubt a masterpiece, I would have been better off not seeing it, that in the end, as tribal people used to fear, the camera (by what it showed me) had managed to steal away some piece of my soul. That other movie was called Grizzly Man and, while researching for this review, I wasn’t too surprised to find out that Werner Herzog, the director of Grizzly Man, was one of the producers of The Act of Killing.

photo filmcomment.com

            In both movies, the reason for this uneasiness is the special nature of the rapport between documentary and reality, and the powerful way in which cinema, as these two examples prove, can transform fiction into something very real. In the case of The Act of Killing, this kind of disturbing transformation is best understood by drawing a parallel to method acting. A method actor aims at creating in himself (the actor not the character) the feelings and inner life of the character he is about to play. Imagine now, that an executioner is asked to play the part of an executioner, and not just any executioner, but of himself! Let your imagination go even further, as director Joshua Oppenheimer has, and set-up this acting exercise in a twisted moral universe, in which the executioner has not been punished but declared a national hero and thus, has no reason (neither guilt nor shame, nor any social pressure from his peers) to adapt his acting to what he genuinely perceives, or at least formally accepts, as right and wrong. From this point on, what you see is not only acting and re-enactment, but also, the reality of killing.

photo theverge.com

Take the scene of the burning of the village for instance. As they are getting ready to film, a veteran of the 1965-1966 massacres chats with his friends, talking about how he used to rape “communist” women back in the days when they were the law. As a spectator, naturally you are outraged. But the real chills come later on, when after the re-enactment of the burning of the village and the murder of its inhabitants, Oppenheimer masterfully sets the camera on the same old executioner. We see him from a distance,  through a curtain of fire, smoke and hot air. He is now resting in a chaise longue, smoking a cigarette and laying back after a tiring day of filming. And then it sinks in. That image is a double folded reality: that is a man smoking a cigarette after a tiring day of rape and murder. Of course you know that it didn’t happen, not now, but forty years ago, that is exactly what that man would have done. Because he is an executioner and not an actor, because his feelings and inner life are not of an actor playing an executioner, but of an executioner playing himself.

            Plato comes to mind with his determination to banish imitative poetry (theater and cinema would qualify as such poetry in modern times) from his perfect city. The Greek philosopher argues that bad people tend to imitate bad actions and bad people and that, on viewing such an imitation, the spectator will he himself become bad. Therefore, imitative poetry should only limit itself to the imitation of good people performing good actions. By switching perspectives, what it comes to is this: bad people who have themselves done the bad actions they are imitating, are not imitating, but are doing. Take away those two seconds, the murderer resting, gazing through the fire he had started, and edit them on real live footage of an actual Indonesian massacre. The result is not real in the common sense of time-space continuity but, on a metaphysical level, one could argue that the two reels edited together are as closely connected as cause and effect can be.

photo vimeo.com

Another example of this kind of chilling reality coming to life through fiction, is the scene in which we see Anwar Congo under a table, strangling an imaginary communist lying on top of the table. We don’t see the man, he is obviously not there, the wire is not tied around somebody’s neck. But forty years ago there was somebody on that table. And the skill and effort Anwar puts in this imaginary murder is the exact image of what would have happened during the massacres. Anwar himself realizes that when predicting the success of the movie: “there has never been a movie where people get strangled, except in fiction, but that’s different, because I did it in real life.”

photo australianfilmreview.files.wordpress.com

But the high standard for this kind of disturbing cinema, that comes at you with the same intensity as reality does, is not set by the murderers. Early on in the movie, during a script meeting between the old gangsters, a middle aged man reveals himself as the stepson of one of the communist murdered in the massacres (though not by the hand of anyone shown in the film). How he got there is unclear, he is never credited, but Oppenheimer admits that he found out about the massacres when interviewing the relatives of the victims for his Globalization Tapes project. The man tells them his story in gruesome detail but assuring them that he is not judging in any way, he just wants to be sincere about it. Bearing this in mind, we see the same man delivering an amazing performance as one of the victims, being interrogated by the executioners. We also see the man playing one of the victims in the burning village scene, and then happily shaking the hands of the paramilitary after the shooting. In another scene, we see him yelling furiously “Cut his throat!” to the demon of Anwar`s nightmares. A victim playing a victim and the murderers playing the murderers. It doesn’t get any more real than this, and to top it all, the man gives such a powerful performance that he would qualify for an Oscar nomination and a psychiatric evaluation at the same time. Or maybe this is exactly that: therapy through art, the victim and the murderer, accepting what happened to them by going through the rituals of murder, through the act of killing.

photo slantmagazine.com

On the surface, this film could best be described as a making-off documenting Anwar`s attempt at re-enacting his murders in various film genres: gangster, western and musical, all with a distinct Indonesian flavor and a (good) taste for grotesque (his sidekick, Hernan, plays the fatty love interest in many of these featurettes), black humor, that sometimes spills outside the frame of the movie within the movie, and all out surrealism. The scope of the film however is much more profound, and beneath all the surreal elements that the imagination of the old executioner conjures, what truly matters in this movie, are the real elements. At the same level of depth with that uneasy feeling I have talked about (that comes from knowing, that on some level, this is all very real), the camera seems to work in an opposite direction for Anwar Congo, not taking away a piece of his soul, but on the contrary, making his soul visible, for his mind and reason to deal with.

photo whatculture.com/

An important part of the movie is made up of screening sessions and in the last one of these screening sessions, director Joshua Oppenheimer pushes Anwar on what seems to be, a tearful acceptance of his past. To the spectator, Anwar`s repentance seems more a fear of bad karma coming his way. From a cinematic point of view, you’d want more, you’d expect his coming to terms to be more emotional, more powerful, not a result of the fact the the director confronts him. You want him to convince you that he has found his moral compass, that he truly repents so you don’t have to feel guilty. Guilty about getting to like this guy, this gentle grandpa who teaches his nephews not to harm little ducks, this funny old man who dresses like a pimp with a fashion degree, this Nelson Mandela look-alike and Sidney Poitier wannabe, this cinema gangster, this murderer. You want to be sure, you want the murky gray to turn black and white again. In fact, you crave for fiction (there is no such thing as a pure documentary, it is always someone’s point of view), for an auctorial intervention that would edit some sort of moral meaning in this ending. But then you realize that this is exactly what this kind of cinema is aiming at: an emotional vertigo of reality that doesn’t let you have the easy way out, once seen you just have to check it as something that happened, something real, not something that makes sense.

by Andrei Șendrea.

http://www.liternet.ro/autor/3761/Andrei-Sendrea.html

The post THE ACT OF KILLING – ACTION IS DOING appeared first on INHALE MAG.

photo londoncitynights.com

First of all, let’s define the terms. It’s gay, not homosexual. Gay comes with the double meaning: sexual orientation but also a mindset. And, from this semantic mixture, come the visible, mainstream manifestations of gay culture, for this is a gay film made for a straight public. In this sense, everything is gay in Behind the Candelabra, starting with the sets, costumes, glasses, wigs, jewelry, champagne and, of course, candelabra, down to the animated things – dogs, men and boys (waxed toyboys and houseboys dressed in ridiculously tight clothes, swimming in diamond laced trunks or showing off their white g-string marks). Palatial kitsch is the concept, as defined by Liberace himself (played by Michael Douglas), a concept best embodied by the golden slippers he wears. Palatial kitsch is opulence so opulent that it goes beyond judgments of good or bad taste and simply demands to be admired. The film must be seen as a classic Vegas show, a show that Soderbergh with his antecedents (the setting and the opulence of the cast in the Ocean’s series) controls very well.

photo guardian.co.uk

Palatial kitsch is, at the same time, the core concept around which Soderbergh builds his film and the high standard set for the level of gay in the movie: but for the visual description of sex, where the film doesn`t go too far, everything else is taken to the extreme. The way the charcters act, dress and talk,  their inner life and their outward appearance, are meant to illustrate, again and again, an universe so gay that it becomes irrelevant whether what happens is real or not. Therefore, it’s irrelevant whether Liberace really was a „fruity Dracula” as described in one American review (the film is not to be seen as a biopic) or whether the film is accurate concerning the socio-cultural representations of gay people, if Matt Damon’s character is a convincing gay or if he is simply a straight actor trying to be gay by using more or less known stereotypes, and by relying heavily on feminine posture and gestures. Also, those that expect a film supporting the gay community or a film that is serious and well-documented concerning the problems of sexual orientation will be disappointed.

photo justjared.com

This thematic-visual-stylistic concept is referenced in every aspect of the film, delivering on occasion some very remarkable feats of cinematic mastery. From the first shot, as the logo of the producer, HBO, is formed out of stroboscopic colored lines dancing to a disco beat, right up to the end credits, with the successive pictures of the toy pianos that accompany the hand-written names of the cast and crew. From the diegetic beginning of the film, a young man so obviously gay (Scott) being picked up by an equally gay man in a gay bar and later introduced to a third man which is the definition of gay, until Liberace’s tragic death from AIDS related complications, a disease initially connected with the sexual promiscuity within the gay community. Soderbergh even succeeds in using frame composition and camera angle to underline his concept as seen in one close-up of Scott, shot between the legs of the houseboy, who is just explaining to Scott his sexual toy status. In another scene Soderbergh really shows his skill when it comes to cinema, that is, telling a story with the help of images, framing and editing. Scott is talking to a friend about how Liberace wants him to undergo plastic surgery . „Won`t it be weird looking in the mirror and not recognizing myself?” we hear him say as the camera pans out showing Scott in his back yard along with his three expensive cars, telling us that Scott is no longer himself anyway, he is whatever his old rich lover wants him to be.

photo loveisspeed.blogspot.com

One must also take note of the great acting performances of the entire cast, and particulary those of the two leading men. Michael Douglas as Liberace, is such a successful combination of decrepitude, sexuality and devilishness that he manages to cause the audience a panick attack and mad laughter at the same time, as in the scene where we see him staring lewdly at his naked young lover,  a wrinkled satyr, with false hair and false teeth next to an Adonis. Also, Rob Lowe delivers a brilliant performance as Jack Startz, the plastic surgeon, a merit he shares with Soderbergh who had the vision to model the character as if he were the result of a bad LSD trip.

photo celebuzz.com

Getting back to the point made at the beginning of this review, Behind the Candelabra must be seen as a classic Vegas show, a larger than life show where the fireworks and lights are more important than the artistic part, a show that looks as if directed by Mr. Showmanship himself if he would have had the courage to come out of the closet or, better said, from behind the candelabra.

Behind the Candelabra (2013, r. Steven Soderbergh)

by Andrei Șendrea.

http://www.liternet.ro/autor/3761/Andrei-Sendrea.html

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