By Kit Ramsey.

Shot in a loose, improvisational style that makes use of current consumer-grade digital equipment, Fabienne Berthaud’s Sky (2016) is a cheap and cheerful wanderlust and love letter to new beginnings and identities that one can find in new cultures.

Chronicling the tumultuous but never overwhelmingly depressing life of French tourist turned traveller Romy (Diane Kruger), the story consists of one woman’s journey of self-discovery following the dissolution of her holiday (and marriage) with her husband (Gilles Lellouche) along the Mexican/Californian border region.

As previously stated, this film has a distinctly loose quality to it, especially in the narrative. There’s no particular direction or structure that Romy’s life takes following her decision to head out on her own, instead a series of characters and settings play in the background as Romy wanders through.

Her character feels like a ghost, drifting in and out of various lives unseen for the most part. Along the way she finds herself meeting and staying with a handful of supporting cast members, each having some impact on her life and burgeoning new identity, no matter how big or small. On the larger side of impact we meet park ranger Diego (Norman Reedus) whose rough exterior is slowly eroded by Romy. If you think that sounds cliché, it’s because it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFZqLV8Oxbw

Sky’s biggest issue is that for all its soul searching and moody ennui, there’s not much originality that can be wrung from it. The locales we see are fairly part and parcel of the genre: I lost count of the amount of red neon-lit roadside bars and flimsy cafe-diners we see in the film. Then Las Vegas shows up in all its glory complete with show girls and Elvis impersonators. There’s even an interlude with Native American culture, where the classic scene unfolds of a clueless outsider  shown some sort of hitherto unknown deep insight into life around a camp fire, complete with ceremonial psychoactive drink.

When the film isn’t taking detours into American Road Movie scenes (perhaps it’s meant to resemble the sight seeing holiday of which the film begins?) it’s marvellously supported by a series of excellent performances from the leads. Kruger pulls it out of the bag, having to convey everything from trauma to delirious excitement during her travels. Shout out as well to Lena Dunham who pops up in a small but sweet role as the wife of Diego’s brother. She manages to put on an excellent show of naive innocence despite most of her most famous roles being primarily self aware and neurotic.

The thing that most sticks out about Sky is that it does tell the story that it wants to tell, and does it in a way that feels very attainable from a filmmaking stand point. If nothing else, Sky’s deceptively well crafted construction feels inspiring, almost urging the watcher to get out there and make their own road film with nothing more than a DSLR. The fact that it creates a sense of wanderlust in the viewer is a great success in its own right.

3.5/5

By Patrick King.

Der müde Tod or Destiny as it’s commonly called in English, is a silent film written by Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, and directed by Lang. Released in 1921, a year before Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, it is a pretty neat example of folk storytelling at the margins of German Expressionism.

Like everything Lang, it’s a beautifully shot movie. I mean, there’s always been a certain magic about silent films in general because of the primacy of the image and because every other element is subverted by vision. It’s where the modern screenwriter’s tale of woe begins. Silent films could exist, and even flourish, without scripts, or with just a small thread of plot tying them together. And that’s certainly what we have here. The cinematography, the makeup, the set design, the expression in the actors’ eyes, all of these things are far more important than the bare-bones plot that holds them together.

Der müde Tod is basically a collection of short films with a frame story. The frame concerns a young woman who’s trying to bargain for her young lover’s life after Death has taken him to the underworld. Death (Bernhard Goetzke), comes to a small German village. He builds an enormous wall through which no mortal can pass. Plenty of dead souls pass through it, though. Lang seems to absolutely delight in shooting Death in wide shots as he stands against the wall he’s built, dwarfed by the thing. Interesting, then, that Lang sees death as something so small. When the woman (Lil Dagover) attempts to bargain for her lover, we realize that she has more power because, although she cannot defy Death, she can at least make the attempt, which means she possesses free will, and therefore more freedom, than this sad creature who is chained to his fate. And, as it turns out, Death is surprisingly human in this tale. He’s not happy with his lot, but it’s all he has. It’s who he is. And so he moves through eternity having accepted his lot. This is a Death that we feel for, sympathize with.

The three stories between the frame are all about doomed lovers throughout time. One story takes place somewhere in the Muslim world in the middle ages, another in medieval Italy, and the final in Middle Kingdom China. The places and people are mostly mythological. They’re caricatures, sometimes evenly overtly racist. Yes, of course, these things have to be viewed in context, but it can all be a little uncomfortable for a modern audience. Still, there’s a lot of heart and romanticism here. The three stories share the common thread of love cut short just as it’s starting to bloom.

Of course we all know that death can’t be cheated, but von Harbou and Lang find a neat workaround, giving us a happy ending that doesn’t feel like anyone’s been tricked. Still, Der müde Tod probably barely rises above the level of a curiosity unless you’re very into silent film, Fritz Lang, or both.

By Marti Dols Roca.

David Lynch: The Art Life is the Lynch narrated account of the life of the filmmaker before he became that, a filmmaker. From his bucolic upbringing in small town America (Montana, Idaho, Virginia and Idaho again) to his first steps as an artist in “New York for poor people” Philadelphia, until the scholarship from AFI that led him to make Eraserhead; after that everything changed for the young painter in the funny hat.

The whole movie is told by David Lynch sitting in a chair in front of a mike and smoking cigarettes one after the other. While he speaks, we see domestic footage of the Lynch family combined with the slow and hypnotizing process of one of the filmmaker’s artistic creations. The movie is 90 minutes long and right when you think you will start to get bored, it finishes; leaving you with quite a satisfactory feeling: it almost went wrong but it didn’t.

There is also a very rewarding feeling that comes from the question raised early on in the movie: if he wanted to be a painter so much (film isn’t mentioned at any point until quite late) how come did he ended up being the Twin Peaks, Mulholand Drive, Lost Highway and so on David Lynch we know? Well, the disturbing, creepy part shows up pretty soon: as a “sweet” anecdote, when Lynch’s father went to visit his son in Philly, and David proudly showed him his studio full of dead birds, random garbage and strange constructions, Mr. L told him: I think you should never have kids. Turns out his wife Peggy just found out she was pregnant.

Leaving the accuracy of Lynch’s father statement aside (we see a fair amount of quite tender scenes where David and his toddler daughter paint together), shortly after this, Lynch applied for an AFI grant due to his recent interest for moving images. When the scholarship was conceded, Lynch put all his money, time and effort in the creation of his first movie. And while he was discovering that the seventh art is a combination of painting, music, sculpture, architecture, poetry and performing he just found himself enjoying more than ever with his work.

Eraserhead came along and the rest is history.

Now, the truth is that the experience of watching David Lynch: The Art Life is surprisingly satisfactory. The surprisingly adverb comes after Lynch’s well-known eccentricity. Even to his most devoted fans, the genius filmmaker work is always a riddle, so it is fair to sit in the cinema chair wondering what’s this “David Lynch: The Art Life” going to be like.

Well, the truth is that is as interesting (as it explains how did one of the most prolific and creative artists get to the Olympus of filmmaking) as hypnotizing (his voice and his paintings carry us along the 90 minutes in a very smooth, pleasant and light manner).