through in the countryside. and girls wear sundresses and flowers in their hair while saying vaguely rude things like ‘Bugger off. Geoffrey.“ Adapted from Elizabeth Young's novel, anCient )Okes and a fog of transatlantic blandness means this painfully thin chick-flick barely passes muster as a Bridget Jones clone. (Eddie Harrison) I General release from Fri 22 Apr.
EPIC UNTOLD SCANDAL (18) 124mm coo vi
The famous French epistolary novel, Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses. proved pertinent enough a couple of centuries later for two films based on it to come out Within a year of each other: Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Valmont (1989). Does it have enough first principles to work in an ASian context, South Korean director EJ Yong (An Affair) wondered? The simple answer is yes. but perhaps too readin so. As Yong sets his film during the ChOSun dynasty where Confucianism rules and social
expectations are conformed to. there is
the suggestion that freedom lies only in intimate forms of self-expansion. usually in the manner of marital affairs and numerous sexual flings. It is here. though, that two characters hatch a plan that will respect the notion of rules. but play them as a game and still allow for sexual pleasure to be pursued. Lady Cho (Mik-suk Lee) offers her relative and master seducer Cho-Won (Yong-jun Bae) an easily seduceable ingenue. but Cho-Won wants a bigger challenge. and determines to seduce the now celibate Lady Chung, still in mourning years after her husband's death.
Certainly the film allows us to see clearly the lay rituals we can allow ourselves in a culture that is full of stultifying ritual itself, but one might wonder whether there haven‘t been fresher. more genuinely amplifying
uses of the themes of the novel, where
deviating from the text itself has lead to a fresh perspective on creating freedom through a casual bet. It's there in Eric Rohmer's 1970 romantic drama Claire 's Knee for example. where the central character's quest to do no more than touch a girl's knee leads the viewer to ask all sons of questions about the nature of seduction itself. whether it lies in trust. lust or affection. or each or all depending on the circumstances. EJ Yong's transposition is beautiful. well crafted and lovingly respectful but Offers few surprises. (Tony McKibbin) I Selected release from Fri 22 Apr.
COMEDY DRAMA CHICKEN 'I’IKKA MASALA (15) 95min .0
Trainee doctor Jimi (Chris Bisson) is a man in his 30s who is clearly gay. That is. to everyone but his respectable Preston-based GUJarati family. Behind his back his father (Saeed Jaffrey) and grandmother (Zohra Sehgal) have arranged for him to marry the beautiful Simran (Jinder Mahal). Jimi is caught in a quandary, finding that he is unable to break either his family's or his boyfriend Jack's (Peter Ash) heart, but fate strikes a bizarre and strange blow. Actor and first time director Harmage Singh Kalirai's (Brothers in Trouble) attempt to fuse carefully scripted cross-cultural farces like East is East with the more shambolic improvised feel of something like Paul Abbott's television series Shameless is admirable but very badly thought through. The rule of thumb here seems to be that anything goes and that the chaos will somehow look after itself. The tone and feel of this is way off from the start. Kalirai clearly has little idea about structure and his control over some of the less experienced actors in the cast is almost zero. Which is something of a shame, for the basic premise here is pretty strong. And in Coronation Street's Bisson and veteran character actor Jaffrey, Kalirai has at least two stars of considerable comic and dramatic range. (Paul Dale) I Selected release from Fri 22 Apr.
REAL LIFE HORROR THE AMITWILLE HORROR (15) 89min ,0
This is a pointless reworking of Stuart Rosenberg's dull 1979 “haunted house' movie. which claims as its ‘inspiration' unused bits of Jay Anson's discredited source book. It's an updated reprise. then. of the allegedly true stOry of George and Kathy Lutz and their three children, who - after moving into the house in which Ronald DeFeo Jr had murdered six members of his family — claimed they were terrorised by poltergeist activity. spooky s0unds. oozing green slime and swarms of flies.
Reviewing the 1979 original, film critic Roger Ebert astutely said: ‘The problem With The Amityvi/le Horror is that. in a very real sense. there's nothing there.‘ That's the trouble With “unseen forces’ - you can't see them. which is a particular problem when working in a visual medium. 80.
DRAMA WILD SIDE (15) 95min 0..
Director Sebastien Lifshitz (Presque Rien) didn‘t want to make a film about gay men or transsexuals. ‘Although we need to see these people represented on film,‘ he says, ‘it shouldn‘t be them telling their stories, as if they’re animals in a zoo.‘ So this low-key story of transsexual Stephanie (Stephanie Michelini), her mother (Josiane Stoleru) and the men in Stephanie's life is told almost entirely without emotion. There‘s no gushing sentimentality, no heart-pouring soliloquies or grand scale emoting.
Everything about the film, from its dialogue to its look and feel, is played down. Speech is kept to a bare minimum; for these people, it is purely functional. Even the French countryside is uncharacteristically bleak and unprepossessing. Whole scenes happen where no one talks and the only action is the stroking of a hand or the blinking of an eye. But this downbeat atmosphere can only help heighten the feelings up to a point, and then you become aware of the overriding bleakness of the whole thing.
There is nothing uplifting about the film, so although Lifshitz avoids the happily-ever-after, chat-show zoo effect, he almost goes the other way in suggesting that there is no prospect at all of happiness for these characters, isolated within society and trapped within the worlds they‘ve built for themselves. There is no tenderness, even in the central threesome relationship between Stephanie and her two lovers. All there is, it seems. is abuse, cruelty and despair. One clenching of hands between Stephanie (Stephanie Michelini) and her Russian boyfriend Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine) after an exploitative coupling for a paying punter is the sole moment of genuine affection; tears on the death of her mother are Stephanie's only outward expression of deep, lasting love.
Bland in both its sense of what is provocative and thought-provoking, Wild Side offers the viewer neither glamour nor any hope of long-term acceptance or social progression. Taking his lead from Robert Bresson (particularly his remarkable yet overlooked 1977 film Le Diable probablement) Lifshitz uses the absence of emotion to create a palpable and utterly convincing world, but that does not stop this being an unsettling and, ultimately, unsatisfying experience. (Gareth Davies)
I Fi/mhouse. Edinburgh from Fri 7 5 Apr.
movmg away from the Lutz family's ExorCist-fed fibs about the demonic posseSSion of the house itself. scriptwriter Scott Kosar iThe Machinist) hedges his supernatural bets and opts for a more psychological approach. The murderous DeFeo claimed he heard voices telling him to slaughter his family. ls there something
nasty lurking in the baserrient which is now driving GeOrge Lutz's incre’ Slrlqu unhinged paterfamilias towards violent insanny?
On the plus Side Ryan Reynolds l‘t/ari Wilder. Blade: Trinity). COH'JlHCITlQl/ ponrays a young father sliding towards madness. By contrast. first-time director Andrew DOuglas only comes into his own during the flash-frame montage sequences. His handling of the ghostly apparitions. f/thll no N take human form. is derivatiye and simply not frightening. The Lutz's ill- fated deCiSion to buy the Long Island house led to a classic case of Nl‘lal estate agents no.7 call ‘buyer's remorse. If you pay to see this ramshackle horror, you may well experience the same. (Nigel Floydi I General release from Fri 75 Apr. See think piece. page 46.
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