Film Shapes

This is a neat little 'Is he or isn't he?' comedy-drama about an elderly Jewish man living in the Colombian countryside who comes to believe that Adolf Hitler has moved in next door. Director (and co-writer) Leon Prudovsky opens this Israeli/Polish co-production in Germany in 1934, then swiftly time-jumps to 1960, just after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.  The premise is faintly ridiculous but mixing potential farce with holocaust themes is brave, to say the least. Mr. Plonsky lives a fairly ascetic lifestyle, and crucially, alone (the flashback opening shows him with a large family), when he is made aware of a buyer, a Mr. Herzog, for the rundown house next to his rundown house. He's a proper misery-guts, the only thing he seems to care about are the black roses in his patchy garden - a nice visual link to the past. Imagine then, the shit that hits the fan (well, hand) when he finds that his new neighbour's dog (German Shepherd, obviously) has been mes...

Memoria starts with a locked off, very mundane shot of a curtain with a dark, triangular shape in the foreground. This holds for around a minute until an incredibly loud bang provokes the shape to move. This is the shoulder of Tilda Swinton's Jessica, and she slowly rises and wanders through her apartment, settling at a table next to some caged mice. Cut to a car park at night, where alarms start sounding and continue for what feels like ages. They eventually die out one by one, all held in a slow zooming shot. I admit to never having seen any of the director's (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) previous films, but if this is anything to go by, he's certainly a brazen chap. The source of the loud bang is the nominal thrust of the film, as Jessica, almost half-heartedly, investigates the cause. But the noise is just a pretext for Weerasethakul (who also wrote the film) to explore ideas of displacement, disconnection, memory and the weight of history. Jessica is an English botanist...