London Film Festival review - Beti and Amare

An Ethiopian micro-budget fantasy set during the war with Italy in the 1930s? When I saw the description in the LFF guide, I thought I had to go. It's the sort of thing you'll only see at a festival, and the whole thing sounded so intriguing: a young girl called Beti travels to her grandfather's house to flee the fighting. There she happens upon a visitor from another world, who she calls Amare. Together they try to survive alone in a world of dangers.

I mean, who on earth would come up with that idea?

Well, the answer became slightly clearer once the writer/director took to the stage as the credits rolled. Andy Siege is the son of German aid workers and grew up moving around Africa listening to local stories. He wanted to make a film inspired by African legends of shape shifting monsters, but blended with Western sci-fi traditions.

Unfortunately, this genre-bending didn't really work, and if I hadn't stayed for the Q&A afterwards, I would have just been incredibly confused. Not much happens over the course of the film - mostly Beti walks back and forth to a watering hole through the stunning grasslands of Ethiopia. When things do happen, they are very strange, sudden and never explained. Amare's origin and intentions are kept deliberately very mysterious. Is he real or a figment of Beti's imagination?

This is a film where it is best to just relax, take in the general mood of the piece, and then marvel at how it could have been made for €14,000. The landscape is beautiful and well shot. Siege has chosen to mix colour with black-and-white footage, sometimes flitting between the two within a few seconds, and sometimes picking out just one colour in a sea of grey. Although intermittently effective, I personally found this technique distracting and over-used. The special effects were understandably ropey, but to the film's credit there was no attempt to make them seem realistic.

The main positive in the whole film is the central performance from Hiwot Asres. With very little dialogue she manages to convey a lot of different emotions and you do really care about what happens to her.

For the budget, this is a very impressive debut from Siege. But dialogue and plot cost nothing, and I would have preferred a little bit more of that to help keep me engaged rather than a sort of meditative tone poem. When it comes to micro-budget films, I might be more of a Clerks person than a Beti and Amare person.

Still, I can tell people that I've seen an Ethiopian sci-fi film.

London Film Festival review - Citizenfour

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London Film Festival review - Welp (Cub)

Maurice Luijten as Sam

This nasty but enjoyable Flemish horror film tells the tale of a cub scout camping trip that goes horribly wrong. As the group venture further into the forest, the scout leaders' stories of a young werewolf called Kai grab the attention of Sam (Maurice Luijten), a quiet boy who doesn't quite fit in with the others. Sam discovers that there is indeed something lurking in the woods. Something that likes to kill.

First-time director Jonas Govaerts is not afraid to hurt women, children or animals (cinematically, that is - not in real life I'm sure). So although this isn't the most violent slasher film you will see, it has an unpleasant edge to it. It's also not that out-and-out frightening in what I call a "jumpy" way (I don't do that well with jumpy horrors). But it is definitely creepy.

For its modest budget, the sets and locations are marvellous. Luijten is an excellent child actor (why do all the best ones look exactly like River Phoenix in Stand By Me? See also Mud), and the two scout leaders (Titus De Voogdt and Stef Aerts) are a lot of fun. I would have preferred the story to have been slightly better sign-posted, as sometimes it wasn't wholly clear what was happening or why. But this is a sterling first effort from someone who obviously loves his genre.

London Film Festival review - Une Nouvelle Amie (The New Girlfriend)

Romain Duris as David, avec baby Lucie.

Every year, the thud of the London Film Festival guide landing on my doormat heralds an intense week of study. Which of the hundreds of films should I choose? A few years ago I just decided to go with "all the documentaries about murder", which helpfully narrowed down the selection. This year I had no theme in particular, just films that intrigued me.

I was drawn to French film The New Girlfriend because the guide told me very little of the premise. "We can't tell you what it's about because it would spoil it", it said. My review will be similarly infuriatingly vague about the details so as to keep you spoiler free.  

But I can outline the main set-up. Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) has idolised her luminous best friend Laura (Isild Le Besco) since they were little girls. When Laura dies shortly after having her first child, Claire promises her that she will watch over her husband David (Romain Duris) and her baby daughter. This watching over leads Claire to discover a secret about David, that will ultimately change both their lives. 

Perhaps surprisingly, The New Girlfriend is based on a Ruth Rendell short story. In the hands of director Francois Ozon this has become much more of a human story than a mystery or suspense one. The performances from the two leads are what really recommend the film - Demoustier is absolutely riveting, her wide, expressive eyes telling so much. Duris is by turns hilarious, creepy and absolutely heartbreaking. 

Although slightly melodramatic and silly in places, this is an intriguing tale of tolerance and self-discovery that avoid sensationalising the topic. 

Are Shropshire’s floods caused by climate change?

The very high River Severn at Shrewsbury.

Shropshire has been battered by heavy rain and strong winds over the last week, as two storms passed over the county within a few days of each other. Hundreds of trees fell (Shropshire Star, 2014a), including one in my garden. With the ground already saturated thanks to months of wet weather, the already swollen River Severn burst its banks at Shrewsbury and Ironbridge, damaging houses (Shropshire Star, 2014b).  

A fallen tree on Haughmond Hill.

This has been the wettest January on record for Britain (Carrington, 2014), so the recent weather is out of the ordinary. But is it part of the normal variation from year to year that we would expect, or has it been caused by climate change? And if so, are we likely to experience this kind of wet and windy weather more often in the future?

What is climate change?

The climate change we are experiencing now is caused by an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases absorb heat from the sun, warming up the air, and therefore the land or water below. Burning fossil fuels to heat our homes or generate electricity causes more carbon dioxide – a key greenhouse gas – to be produced, and destroying forests or other vegetation means that less carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. With more carbon dioxide entering the system than is being removed, the concentration has risen from 278 parts per million (ppm) in the pre-industrial period to 400 ppm today. In turn, the global mean temperature has increased around 0.8°C over the same period (World Bank, 2012).

Climate change and rain

Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere affects rainfall patterns across the world, both in the amount and location of rain. This is because the warmer it is, the more water evaporates from the surface of the earth, and also the more water vapour the air can hold – the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases by 7% for every 1 °C increase in temperature (Trenberth, 2011).  It is thought that the net effect of this “speeding up” of the water cycle will be that dry areas of the world will get drier, and wet areas of the world will get wetter (World Bank, 2012). With Britain already famous for its drizzly weather, it seems likely that Shropshire will receive more rain rather than less.

Scientists use climate models to simulate the effect of increasing carbon dioxide levels on precipitation. A study by NASA (2013) using 14 models showed that not only will there be more rain in wet areas across the course of a year, the pattern of rainfall will change so that there are more days with heavy rain and fewer with moderate rain. The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) states that by the late 21^st century, it is very likely that heavy precipitation events will occur more often and more strongly in areas of the world like Europe.

So, in the future our wet weather will come in shorter bursts, making it more difficult for natural drainage systems to cope and river flooding more likely. A study by Ciscar et al (2011) showed that if global average temperatures increased by 2.9 °C above industrial levels, 12,000 people would be affected by river flooding in northern Britain. If temperatures rise by 3.9 °C, this figure rises to 48,000.

Were these storms caused by climate change?

Shrewsbury's Theatre Severn's flood defences held out. 

Climate change is a long process that has many different and overlapping effects. It is therefore very difficult to blame any specific weather event on it, and instead scientists talk about particular aspects of weather being more or less likely in a warmer world. However, this has not stopped politicians and some public figures making statements in the last few weeks either attributing this unusual British weather to climate change, or actively denying it (Shuckman, 2014).

Interestingly, while there is evidence that specific instances of very heavy rain in the last few years are due to climate change, evidence surrounding storms specifically is less clear (Coumou and Rahmstorf, 2012).

Conclusion

Scientific evidence suggests that the unusually high rainfall levels we have experienced in the last few months may become less unusual in the future, as increasing global temperatures make Britain an even rainier place. While we cannot lay definitive blame for the storms of the last week on climate change, as we move forward we may see clearer patterns emerging. After all, the climate is really a collection of all our weather, so we must expect the weather to change unless we reduce carbon emissions drastically.

References

Carrington D (2014) ‘January was England’s wettest winter month in almost 250 years’, The Observer, 01/02/14. Available at www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/01/january-uk-wettest-winter-month-250-years

Ciscar J, Iglesias A, Feyen L, Szabó L, Regemorter D V and Amelung B (2011) ‘Physical and economic consequences of climate change in Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Available at: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/7/2678.full

Coumou D and Rahmstorf S (2012) ‘A decade of weather extremes’, Nature Climate Change, 2, 491-496. Available at: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n7/full/nclimate1452.html

IPCC (2013) Climate change 2013 – the physical science basis: Summary for policymakers. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/docs/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf

NASA (2013) NASA study projects warming-driven changes in global rainfall. Available at: www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/may/HQ_13-119_Rainfall_Response.html

Shropshire Star (2014a) ‘Hundreds of trees felled by the storms’, Shropshire Star, 14/02/14. Available at: www.shropshirestar.com/news/2014/02/14/hundreds-of-trees-felled-by-shropshire-storm/

Shropshire Star (2014b) ‘Ironbridge residents urged to move out over flooding’, Shropshire Star, 11/02/14. Available at: www.shropshirestar.com/news/2014/02/11/waters-rising-as-floods-swamp-shropshire/

Shukman D (2014) Barrage over climage change link to floods. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26242253

Trenberth K (2011) Changes in precipitation with climate change, Climate Research vol 47: 123-138. Available at: www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf

World Bank (2012) Turn Down the Heat – Why a 4 °C warmer world must be avoided. Available at: www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century

Film review - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Walter Mitty – writer James Thurber's dull everyman, who in his fantasies is a hero famed for his derring-do – is one of those rare characters who has had a psychological complex named after him. Ben Stiller's new version takes this basic idea as a starting point, but moves very far away from the original tale. The result is not wholly successful.

Walter (played by Stiller himself) works at Life magazine, locked in the negatives department but dreaming of a more exciting life with one of his co-workers (Kristen Wiig). When the new owners of Time Life decide to close the title, Walter receives a package from a mysterious photojournalist (Sean Penn) supposedly containing the perfect photo for the last issue's cover. Unfortunately, the photo is missing. In an effort to find it, Walter embarks on a journey that will change his life.

This is essentially a very sweet film about finding yourself and those you love, and you can tell that it is a very personal project for Stiller. It is also very beautiful to look at, with gorgeous shots taken in parts of the world that Hollywood very rarely explores. Stiller is in his best straight man mode, Wiig is adorable as always, and all the performances are solid. There are some problems, though.

Firstly, I would question the need for this to be called a Walter Mitty film at all. Mitty's fantasies occur mostly early on, and are not necessary for the plot at all. They are also some of the least enjoyable parts of the film. Since the original story was written, dream sequences have become such a cliché, and I suppose it doesn’t help that I personally had my fill around 2001 when TV was full of them. They ruined the otherwise perfect Sopranos, and I’m sorry, but if Ally McBeal was really seeing a dancing baby, she is suffering from serious psychosis and needs to be hospitalised.  It does not mean that she is "ditzy".

Although I didn’t like the fantasies, if they have to stay you almost need more of them to properly set up Walter’s world. While watching this, I had a feeling that a lot had been cut out to shorten the running time, and perhaps some fantasy bits had to go; more worryingly, there were a few times when characters referred to things that hadn’t happened earlier in the film, or the plot seemed fuzzy.

And what a plot it is! I must say, it is the most specific plot I have seen for a while, with Walter working for a specific magazine (another problem with the film – too much product placement) in a very specific job, looking for a very specific McGuffin in some very specific places. It is also extremely surreal and basically completely ridiculous, requiring a liberal amount of belief suspension from the audience. It must be remembered, though, that while on the surface this is a big studio comedy, it really is an indie at heart, and most reminded me in tone of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

All in all, Stiller's take on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is moving, and it is funny at times. There was just something stopping me completely going along with Walter's journey of discovery. Perhaps I'm just not enough of a dreamer to understand.

London Film Festival review - The Spectacular Now

This indie coming of age tale provides an interesting counterpoint to Superbad. Both films are about a confident, mouthy, academically unremarkable high school senior who concentrates on drinking and partying to avoid contemplating the future. The Spectacular Now takes a much more serious look at this condition, and at times is truly heart breaking.

Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) thought he had it all – a great girlfriend, a job, a car. But when his girlfriend leaves him, his latent alcoholism and lack of direction become harder to hide. He meets Amy (Shailene Woodley), a good girl who really should know better than to go out with him, and love begins to blossom. But will Sutter allow himself to be happy?

Both leads are excellent, and look young and normal enough to make you feel they are real. The script (from the writers of 500 Days of Summer) is a lovely mix of funny and poignant. Amazingly, the film lasts only 95 minutes but feels much longer (in a good way), with ample time to breathe.

A quick look at director James Ponsoldt’s CV shows that all three of his films so far have been about alcoholics. This is obviously a subject close to his heart, and it shows in the sensitivity with which he treats the characters. The Spectacular Now is a sweet film, which while it doesn't particularly break new ground, takes you on an engrossing journey.