Review of Tom At The Farm (2013)

Tom At The Farm, the latest film from the prolific and prodigious Quebecois auteur Xavier Dolan and adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard's play, announces itself with a stillness and tranquillity bordering on the unsettling. This is unlike what we have seen from him before. It is also very effective; we see Tom (Dolan) driving towards the eponymous farm, in an overhead shot that recalls Haneke's "Funny Games". He destroys his sat-nav system in a rage. Then he arrives at his destination, and walks around. The camera follows him with a Kubrickian feel to it; think a rural "The Shining". His phone is out of signal. Nobody is at home. He walks around the farm, getting his bearings. 

In short, Tom is utterly alone, and Dolan's new found restraint has exacerbated this feeling into an almost nightmarish vision of isolation. These are new notes from someone who was teetering on the edge of repeating himself. Gone are the histrionics (mostly), gone is the slow-motion (mostly), and gone are the doe-eyed relationships obfuscated by the characters blinkered self-centredness (definitely). This is Dolan on horror mode, thriller mode, mystery mode, and the result is a confounding, taut and often beautiful tale full of small erotic pulls, subversive whims, and a certain dissonant quality. This is Dolan's artistic maturity.

Tom is at the farm for his recently deceased lover Guillaume's funeral. First he meets Guillaume's mother Agathe (Lise Roy), a widow. Something in her words, and Tom senses that she didn't know about Guillaime and Tom's relationship. That was some intuition; later, Guillaume's brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) wakes Tom up in the middle of the night, holds him down by the mouth and tells him that he isn't going to tell Agathe the truth, he's going to say something nice at the funeral, and then quietly leave Francis and Agathe alone forever. 

Quite why Francis is so desperate to conceal the truth from Agathe is never made clear; Agathe gives off no indication of being homophobic or backwards, and seems like the accepting type. She was expecting a girlfriend to turn up, but that's only because Francis lied to her in the first place. The film toys with incestuous overtones, but not too seriously. This is simply the first of many unanswered questions.

After a funny/painful/sad funeral scene, the film consists of the ever-shifting relationship between Tom and Francis, veering from the amorous (such as in a sequence where the pair rapturously dance the tango in a barn) to what feels like Stockholm Syndrome (in a scene where Tom refuses to leave the farm). It remains maddeningly enigmatic. For example, why does Tom feel such an affinity with Francis when he is so cruel to him? Why is Tom so willing to stay in such utterly hellish surroundings? What is Francis even doing? Is he a sociopath, or worse? Is a revelation regarding Tom and Guillaume towards the end to be believed?  

There is a scene, near the end, in a bar, which I suppose could be taken as an explanation for a fair amount of the above, but to me that seems like the easy way out. This is a film that doesn't want to answer any questions in particular, and that languishes in the murkiest depths of human nature. It's never willing to stick with one genre at any given time; the film can go from resembling "Calvaire" in one scene to some kind of hellish Mike Leigh picture in the next. Everything about it seems geared to keep the viewer on their toes. 

Thematically, it does match up with Dolan's previous work in the near-Oedipal overtones and the consistent obsession with the relationship between mothers and sons. But those are just Dolan's backgrounds; such as Fellini made films about women, Bergman about God, Kieslowski about human relationships, so to does Dolan stick with that one core idea. 

But here, we see him start to spin out a new web from this core, and seeing it is as exciting and bold as the films from the masters I have listed above; company in which I have long thought Dolan belongs, sure, but here is a film which would surely prove it to the sceptic. It's a fearsome, bold move and a fearsome, bold movie. 

Review of The Purge (2013)

I must make a confession, because it will underpin this entire review; the core concept of James DeMonaco's "The Purge" intrigued me from the moment I heard about it. I do not mean that as a comment on the credibility of the idea, nor is that my way of saying that I think it should be enforced, but I found the idea that a Government would make crime legal for one night a year interesting. I doubt it's the kind of thing that would ever really get pushed through in America, but if you take it for what I took it to be, a hidden statement on human nature, then it takes on an interesting element.

Human nature, too, is something inherently interesting to me, and hence I was pleasantly surprised when this film revealed itself to actually be about that. Sure, it markets itself as and has the trappings of a home-invasion horror film, but there is a kernel of human truth here. Take the scene where a man, having been let into the home of a well-to-do suburban family by their pacifist, idealist son, is wanted by a group of sinister killers waiting outside. The family flip-flop between options; let the man go, let him be killed, but be safe themselves? Or keep him safe, but put themselves in danger?

Sure, it's hardly the Stanford Prison Experiment, but the film nevertheless is actually about something. The worth of a human life.

It's about other things, too. It's about a whole mass of things, and there's enough material here for a good four movies, which is astonishing when you consider the 80-odd minute runtime. The film begins on an unexpected satirical note with the mentality that the purge is a new American tradition, for which people should be thankful.

Again, it's hardly Orwell, but I did appreciate it.

The film even, in the final five minutes, does a u-turn that you can kinda see coming, but certainly not the way it arrives, and arrives at that most tricky of subject matters; an (again satirical) expose of small-town thinking and mentality.

Once more, we're hardly dealing with Bunúel or Lynch here, but y'know, sometimes you just have to go with it.

I went with it. And I came away with a certain admiration for this film, which spreads itself so thin that at times it resembles a wafer. But it's a damn tasty wafer, perhaps with a crude representation of John Locke's "Two Treatises of Government" engraved on it, or something.

The technical stuff; acting wise, it's as good as it needs to be, and then a bit better. Ethan Hawke, as the salesman of security equipment for the purge, and the patriarch of a solid family unit, proves once more that Ethan Hawke can elevate any film into at the very least watchability. Lena Heady, as his wife, initially appears to be saddled with the role of unquestioning spouse, but comes into her own and develops a conscience as the film goes on. Rhys Wakefield as the well-educated, well-spoken "Polite Leader" of the gang breaking into Hawke's house, whilst essentially stealing Michael Pitt's turn as a similarly mannered psychopath in Michael Haneke's "Funny Games", nevertheless delivers the sinister chills.

It's also made with a slick, clean Hollywood professionalism, which makes for a visually uninspired but nevertheless better than functional look. Cinematographer Jacques Jouffret has given us a grey colour pallete, perhaps reflecting the overall morality of the movie (or maybe a stylistic choice) but he also has fun with the little flourishes, such as using a first person perspective from a creepy baby doll on wheels made by Max Burkholder's aforementioned pacifistic son. It's not going to kickstart a new cinematic movement, but it doesn't disgrace itself, sticks to what it knows, and plays to its strengths.

It tries, goddammit, and it's never less than an engaging, interesting, fun, weird, original, occasionally brutal, consistently inconsistent ride that's relatively unlike anything you've probably seen. If you can get over the trappings of the home-invasion thriller lying at the films centre, then this is an oddball piece of work which could have been annoying, but ends up being not quite fascinating, but certainly intriguing.

I'm going to call it a bits and pieces movie. It doesn't stick to one creed, and flits about like a child with ADHD. But, y'know, sometimes all you want is some bits and pieces, especially if they're some damn tasty bits and some really flavoursome, ephemeral pieces.