'I'm sorry LOVE'

What does it mean to be in a certain space at a specific moment, and how does this tie in with not only your, but life in general? Is there such a thing as common existence or a concept of life which is not only universal, but can it be expressed at all and if so, how? These conceptual inquiries are as old as mankind, nevertheless, film-makers generally tend to shy away from them in our post-modern age, which more often than not prefers to feign disillusionment at life's mysteries. After all, if God is dead and any attempt at political action seems futile from the start, what point is there in making sense of the world and our existence in it?

Fortunately, Julien Pearly's I'm sorry LOVE bravely aspires to come to terms with this universal concept of subjectivity within the space of existence.

First of all, to fully appreciate the merits of this short film, one has to be aware of the fact that each space, in this case the city of Edinburgh, has its own sensuality rendering it distinct from any other space in the world. Every city has its own essence made up of associative images, smells and colours. Berlin has its evocative grandeur, its high buildings always emerged in half shadow, or half light, its self-ironic treatment of old and new in which the sausage with sauerkraut is treated with the same kind of gleeful integration into the day to day as the latest electronic gypsy swing musical concussion which is blasted from the rooftops in Kreutzberg. London is a celebration of the grey and brown tones of its buildings with its numerous makeshift cafés in which the light baby blue paint is fashionably cracked, while the paper lampshades appear to be the latest instalment of the local artist/writer/musician/waiter. At the same time, the smell of different foods dominate the Brick Lanes of London with an underlying hint of the old, the musty, in short, the river.

What then is Edinburgh? Edinburgh, for me, is sitting in a kitchen in which every item, from the cupboards to the toaster seems to stem from the seventies, where a discarded Elvis figurine with only one arm sits comfortably on the spice rack next to half empty jars of middle eastern spices. Where people do not offer you a nice piece of cake with a cup of tea, but a shot glass of Polish cherry vodka with some oatcakes and hummus. Edinburgh is orange and brown, the Gothic of its streets coincides perfectly with the warm tones of the trees on Greyfriar's cemetery. Edinburgh is the eternal autumnal city.

Pearly perfectly captures this sense of Edinburgh as a city, as his protagonists lounge on a couch which seems to have been adopted from the Bethany shop, they sit on a radiator in front of those quintessential windows which let in the draft and whose slightly tilted angle within the glass makes the world outside seem like a mysterious place or they cycle through the hustle and bustle of the Haymarket area or the greens of the meadows. Pearly understands that space is not in itself self-contained, but made up of an infinite amount of components, ever-changing, ever-shifting, refusing to validate time and space as being fixed. The stop-motion graphics of the film perfectly encapsulate this sense of time as a subjective construct, in disrupting the continuity of a fixed time illusion. The overlapping of sound and image and the discrepancy between the two comes to mirror the notion of subjective time or moments being real, but not necessarily in sync with what we would like to think of as the general truth of the world. To put it differently: you're in your room, hanging up laundry (must be Sunday night), when maybe without even be conscious of it, you hear the sound of a coffee grinder coming from the kitchen in the flat upstairs, this sound is as much part of your reality as it is of your upstairs neighbours', even though you come to think of it as disparate from you as it originates in a different 'scene' from the one happening in your life.

As such, the sound of someone making tea will overlap images of the characters sitting on the bed with a guitar or looking out of the window. At the same time, the dialogue runs over a series of disparate images, as such mirroring the subjective thought process and the latter's omni-presence in all subjective existence. There is a sense of eeriness to the images and sound which stems from the subtle dismantlement of a fixed time-space continuity.

The concept of Imagination as treated in the film comes to bear resemblance to the romantic concept of Imagination as an imprint of reality in the 'mind's eye', most tellingly revealed over the image of the characters in the park as the Romantics themselves explained Imagination with the image of a tree. They wondered if the tree is reality or whether the image of the tree as presented in the onlookers mind came to represent reality. The male protagonist struggles with the concept of separate realities, whereas the female protagonist seems to accept an imaginary world as her own subjective world. Imagination comes to stand as the process of 'going into that imaginary world and knowing that its yours'. The male protagonist, seems to conflict with his own subjective existence in trying to 'eradicate the illusion of choice'. Theses modern characters are very aware of the main pitfalls of Romanticism, as whereas the latter receded to Nature and almost shied away from society, this couple realises the impossibility of living outside the societal norm and as such comes to feel disconnected from their own truth.

This impossibility of living outside the societal construct furthermore manifests itself in the emotional reality of the characters and the discrepancies in subjective perception of the same relationship, ultimately resulting in alienation. The male character suggests that being in love must be lived from one moment to the next, without the, what he sees as, socially imposed concept of finding that 'one' person. The female character counters that this concept is not so much socially constructed as emotionally perceived as, for her, the feeling of jealousy has nothing to do with society, but comes from within. She realizes that he is shying away from a notion of collective responsibility. In our times of extreme individualism, subjective thinking comes to suggest an entitlement to 'have it all' as he puts it. At the same time, she argues that all action has a consequence, a fact which can, and indeed should not be negated. As our reality is as subjective as it is social, individual responsibility must include the subjects which make up your reality as they are in your immediate vicinity.

A sense of melancholia pervades the film as the characters come to realise the impossibility to fully connect to an Other. Modern existence is in essence alienated and even though a certain closeness can be achieved, all in all the discrepancies in subjective perception render a coming together of individuals impossible. While I'm sorry LOVE affirms the truthful nature of all subjective imagining, it equally depicts the consequence of these disparate realities which cannot but result in a gap, a separation of subjective beings.

The film's overall construct is tightly assembled and the cinematography is of a haunting beauty as the camera lingers lovingly on the characters through rain drops on the window. The blurred lens used to depict some images comes to reinforce this almost fairy-tale, but definitely mysterious quality of the world we live in, all the while hinting at that unknown place from which all creation, expression or, indeed, thoughts stem. The characters often linger on the edge of the frame, while the camera emphasises a seemingly unimportant element in the setting, as such granting an equal importance to our surroundings. In this it comes to embrace life in all its complexity without presumptuously trying to render it 'understandable' or 'knowable'.

All in all, I'm sorry LOVE represents an impressive piece of film-making which captures this sense of what it means to live in the world, in a space made up of disparate subjective perceptions perfectly. The melancholic beauty of the images introduce this special kind of sadness which is as comforting as disquieting, as the film quietly whispers: 'I'm sorry LOVE'!

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'POM Wonderful presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold'

The genre of documentaries is generally associated with dusty classrooms, the mating rituals of the South African bumblebee or the relief of a tedious day being interrupted by an hour's worth of merciful darkness. Never very exciting, but always, you know, 'kinda interesting', the documentary was bound to suffer a slow and painful death at the hands of all those Miss Schroeders (my fourth grade teacher) and Mr Forsters (maths teacher first and second grade) who seemed to be just as glad to get a break from the pretend enthusiasm about the microcosm of life as illustrated by a beehive as we were.

Along came Morgan Spurlock, or was it Michael More?, here's to that the chicken or egg question, and introduced us to a new genre of documentaries which celebrated the documenter as much as it denounced the ethically suspect interviewees. It wasn't exactly witch-hunt material, but surely was more exciting than boring observation, coupled with a healthy sense of objectivity.

Spurlocks' latest pop-doc looks into the world of product placement or 'co-promotion' as it is referred to nowadays. This is a film within a film, as Spurlock is depicted trying to get brands to fund his film all the while placing products and adverts within it. In the meantime he is making a film about these companies and how modern marketing is taking over creative production. Get it? Remember that scene from The Lady from Shanghai, with the mirrors? Well, this is similar on a conceptual basis.

The audience then follows Spurlock through what seems like endless board meetings and pitching of ideas, up to the point he finally manages to get his first sponsor on board, which eventually leads him to land the juice manufacturer POM wonderful for one million dollars. In exchange, Spurlock not only has to appear in an advert for POM within the space of his feature, he also agrees to include the sponsor's name in the title.

All of this is done with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, which one cannot help but feel is a certain reassurance on Spurlock's part to the audience that even though he might be 'selling out', he is doing so ironically for the sake of exposure, in an attempt to affirm his own sense of integrity. Spurlock claims that his film is all about transparency, and this might be considered valid in his attempt not to influence the audience. At the same time, however, this 'transparency' is never challenged and introduces a notion of shallowness, as the film fails to convincingly engage in the most obvious of questions raised by 'co-promotion', namely the corruption of artistic integrity. Granted, Spurlock conducts a series of interviews with the likes of Quentin Tarantiono, J.J Abrams and Brett Ratner, getting a neat, tightly edited point of view from each one of them, conveniently covering all bases of the argument, from the director who embraces product placement as part of popular culture (guess which one of these...), to the one that takes it as necessary evil, to one who sees it as the death of artistic integrity. Tick the box!

Spurlock's film is not bad as such, rather, it remains aimless and ambivalent throughout, never really committing to any one stance. The structure of the documentary is poor in its slightly odd juxtaposition of themes and its mixing of tones. First it relies heavily on Spurlock himself as a brand, selling him as a commodity, not only to the companies, but, moreover, to the audience itself. Sperlock possesses the charm of a used-car salesman, rendering the overall tone one of gimmicky entertainment, rather than serious investigation.

All of a sudden, however, as if realizing that he wants to be taken seriously as a documentary film-maker, Spulock attempts to induce some intellectual weight into the equation, including what can only be called snippets of discussion with, for example, Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader. In a painfully obvious, if slightly charming in its boyish enthusiasm, pun on modern marketing and subjective branding, Spurlock, with blatant glee, meets Donald Trump, who comes to represent a symbol rather than interviewee, important in his presence rather than his vague answers. All throughout the interviews, Spurlock can be seen drinking POM juice and even entangling Chomsky in a lively discussion about the merits of the brand of the shoes funding the very scene Chomsky is in. Self-referential nods like this, provide the film with genuinely funny moments in which the audience chuckles at Spurlock's obvious enjoyment in this admittedly quite simplistic form of irony.

There are glimpses of what seems to be almost the film Spurlock attempted to make within this accumulation of semi-witty comments on the nature of the marketing machinery. These moments sit odd within the structure and tone of the documentary. Spurlock visits a school affected by governmental cuts and reacts by taking matters into its own hands by selling space for advertisement purposes. One of the most critical and shocking scenes reveals the introduction of free TVs in classrooms, in exchange for twelve minutes of corporate broadcasts, in which the adolescent students are targeted with specific adverts of, for example, skin products and blockbuster trailers marketed to their specific age group. It is here, that the audience truly glimpses the ugly nature of marketing as it clearly reveals how an individual is brainwashed without personal choice. For a brief moment, corporate marketing raises its ugly head, as the film treats it, not with tongue-in-cheek mockery, but illustrates how in our age of so-called individualism, we are in the end, nothing but specific targets in a machinery which classifies members of society by their buying power in terms of age, gender or lifestyle.

By the same token, Spurlock shows us an alternative reality in visiting Sao Paulo, a city which has bravely put a ban on all public advertisement. In seeing the pure, almost naked, space of this city, the audience comes to truly realize the degree of its desensitisation in regard to the appropriation of space by marketing. Sao Paulo's people re-appropriate their living space, commenting on the fact that they are finally able to focus on the space they inhabit, without being targeted at all times. At the same time they literally inscribe their city in the form of artworks on the walls of their buildings. All of a sudden, the audience is confronted with an awareness which is as simple as it is shocking, namely the fact that a city or any space for that matter should be a construct of its people, rather than a corporate reality in which its inhabitants are walking marks of their individual economic capital.

Even though these moments sit quite awkwardly within the general construct of the film, they are, nevertheless, the only 'real' moments of reflection and come to present the film most of us would have liked to see. The rest of the film comes to appear as a mere means of appeasement for the sponsors. Interesting as the procedure of getting funding for a film might be, in itself the depiction of this process reveals nothing original and leaves the film somewhat without depth and a curiously hollow framework.

As such, Spurlock's work presents an entertaining account of the marriage of modern marketing and cinema, it does, however ultimately fail to resolve the real issues at stake, such as the corruption of a sense of artistic integrity, the marketability of the modern notion of individualism and the all-pervading presence of advertisement in modern life. The film awkwardly lingers on the surface and even while providing some moments of genuine entertainment, the rare moments of authenticated interest fail to merge homogeneously within the text. Spurlock becomes the master of the obvious, meanwhile, however, this might be a reflection on the desensitization of its audience's viewing habits as a result of the constant surrounding of adverts or product placements, invisible by its visual omni-presence.

This reviewer is going to leave you with two warnings: first of all, you are going to want a POM juice by the time you leave the cinema: do not give in, if you want to look in the mirror while brushing your teeth by the time you get home! Secondly, you are going to notice all product placement for weeks to come, which on the one side, might spoil your favourite programmes, on the other, what is the primal purpose of a documentary if not the raising of awareness and who knows, maybe you'll reinvent your life and can be found in Brazil in a year's time, drinking Mojitos in a street café, blissfully aware of the naked purity of the space surrounding you.

'Drive'

Make way for the Vikings, because here comes the latest installment from the mythic North, with Nicholas Winding Refn's ultra-sleek Drive, easily the most anticipated release this autumn.

This time Refn finds himself in unfamiliar territory, namely in Southern California where the heavily clouded LA skies convey a sense of despondent foreboding. Drive deals with an protagonist who seems to be only marginally more skilled in verbal expression than Refn's last protagonist 'One-Eye' and again, remains a character with no name.

The Driver, then, is an extremely skilled mechanic who not only drives for movies, but also the getaway car in heists. He has only one rule: He will only wait for five minutes before leaving the criminals to their fate, why, is not quite clear. His personal failure of a boss Shannon plans on building a stock-car business with a little financial help from two crooked mafiosi. When the beautiful Irene moves in next door, the driver falls quietly in love with her and finds a sort of surrogate family in her and her son Benicio. Unfortunately, her husband is released from prison and owes the wrong people some money. They want him to do one last job and the driver agrees to help on the condition that they leave Irene and her son alone. Of course, things go horribly wrong and chaos and violence ensue.

So much in terms of plot, and there really is nothing more to it. It is a skeleton plot, simplistically classic in its treatment: Decent guy falls in love with innocent girl who glances longingly at the hero and needs saving. The one last job that goes wrong and a protagonist who gets entangled in a very noir serious of events which can only end in betrayal and death. Throw in some mafiosi and a lot of violence which makes Joe Pesci seem like a choir boy and you have a Hollywood classic. At least, this is what Brian de Palma would think. Refn, however, goes about things differently...

The driver clearly taps into the long ancestry of brooding, silent types, from Clint Eastwood (most notable reference being The Man with No Name and the toothpick) to McQueen in Bullit and last but not least Gary Cooper. He is the Western hero, the lonesome wolf, unbeatable at what he does and with a set of moral principles which are old-fashioned in their allusion to the Southern gentleman. Gosling seems to be attracted to exactly this type of role and, to be fair, it suits him. He communicates with the outside in half smirks and quiet glances. Only that sometimes, his muteness appears to be not so much enigmatic as socially reclusive and slightly dumb. The man does know, however, how to carry a pair of wranglers.

Gosling delivers a solid performance, foremost emphasized by the cinematography which clearly focuses on his physicality, in, for example, introducing a shot of his back when he carries Benicio down the hall and clearly accentuates his broad physical frame. In fact, throughout the film, Refn seems to be reversing the cinematic tradition of sexualising the woman, in this case played beautifully understated by Carey Mulligan, instead the camera lingers on Gosling almost lovingly, finding new angles to show the masculine lines of his jaw or the triangular shape of his body. The scorpion on the back of the silver jacket is not only a reference to the Welles' movie Confidential Report, it also introduces a phallic symbolism to the character which cannot be coincidental.

What makes Drive a different film from what it should be, is its beautiful cinematography and contemplative pace. Newton Thomas Sigel, mostly known for his work The Usual Suspects, knows how to transform each image into a still life. The camera grants space to the compositions, never rushing which allows for the opening of introspective space. Images, like the driver in a mask gazing through the deli-window which is composed of white and red squares, are treated with a notion of aesthetic respect, giving Refn's text a cinematic quality which goes beyond mere story-telling.

Drive's cinematography is not so much original as referential. Refn displays the typical enthusiasm of the European director who is given the toys of American cinematic tradition. As such, it plays on the chiaroscuro visuals of the noir era, with its stretched shadows, its rainy street and, evidently, its blinking neon signs of an LA which is anything but the city of angels, as the glitzy surface only partly veils the underlying tone of corruption and betrayal. At the same time, Refn and Sigel tap into the New Hollywood movement of the seventies, as they take evident pleasure in framing the driver from a low angle in his car, while the raindrops on the windows turn the street lights into a glooming halo. These aesthetics are a clear tribute to Scorcese's Taxi Driver, while the mean streets of LA appear to be influenced as much by Scorcese as by Chandler's fiction.

The musical score, often criticized for its electronic sleaziness and over-bearing presence, becomes reminiscent of a Michael Mann film, as the brazen superficiality of the eighties come to tie in perfectly with the frivolity of a city which by definition proves artificial. The credits in pink come to represent another homage to eighties/nineties texts such as Heat or Miami Vice.

Drive as such comes to stand for the art of superficiality, as it clearly favors aesthetics over plot and paints a portrait of LA as being a series of appearances which prove ever-shifting, as it negates any foundation in truth or reality for that matter. As such the driver with no name remains the perfect protagonist as he proves a presence rather than a character, he is obsessed, but without purpose. He is the drive behind the action, even though never deliberately. Here, again, the noir protagonist comes to mind as the driver he is double-crossed and lured into a series of traps. This is a universe of existential loneliness, where trust is a luxury only granted to the female protagonist.

Even though Refn's Drive might come across as too self-consciously retrospective in its aesthetics,at the same time, it proves truly post-modern in its treatment of the concept of artificiality. Its main asset lies in its visual pleasure rather than in its merit as a textured drama, as the glossy cinematography conveys an intensity which draws no distinction between its treatment of beauty and violence. This is no gritty, realist drama, it is a highly-aesthesized piece which proves enthralling in its appreciation of American cinematic culture, its intense cinematography and its sordid depiction of a city which, here, proves as beautiful as dangerous and unnatural.