Loading ...GreenCine Daily - Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect. Received rapturously at its screening in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand, the film will be an audience-pleaser at festival s and, though not specifically targeted at children, should play well at events with a kids’ angle. Theatrical exposure is likely to be modest, but robust ancillary life seems likely.
The setting is a windblown, dusty plain - Betpak Dala, or ‘Hunger Steppe’ - in southern Kazakhstan, where young Russian-speaking sailor Asa (Kuchinchirekov) has travelled from Sakhalin to join his sister Samal (Yeslyamova) and her family. Samal’s husband Ondas (Besikbasov) is a herdsman tending a large flock of sheep. Asa’s dream - which he has illustrated, as per tradition, on his sailor’s collar - is to have his own herd one day. But to do that he needs to find a bride. The film starts with his nervous courtship of the coy Tulpan, daughter of a neighbouring couple, whom Asa tries to impress with his tales of the sea. But the couple are apparently deterred by Asa’s wildly embellished description of encounters with marine life, while the bashful Tulpan, who stays stubbornly out of sight throughout the film, is turned off by the size of Asa’s ears. The courtship scenes are a hoot, with photographic evidence produced to show that Asa’s ears are smaller than those of England’s Prince Charles.
Getting nowhere with Tulpan, Asa is also falling foul of his brother-in-law, who’s not convinced the lad has the makings of a herder. Meanwhile, Asa’s breast-obsessed, tractor-driving buddy Boni (an exuberantly entertaining performance by Baisakalov) tries to persuade the landlocked mariner to try better times in the city. But Asa sticks to his guns, and eventually wins his spurs as a shepherd by delivering a lamb - and giving it the kiss of life - in an extraordinary extended take that’s shot for real, and that combines the ‘yuk’ and ‘aah’ factors to showstopping effect… [Full Story]
Cinematical - Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan’s 1997 Palme d’Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person — or even ourselves?
GreenCine Daily - Philippe Garrel’s Competition entry, Frontier of Dawn, is “a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge,” writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.
GreenCine Daily - ”Fifteen years after the career-killing debacle of Boxing Helena, Jennifer Lynch dares to raise her head above the parapet once more,” writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily.
GreenCine Daily - ”The brutal French-Belgian-Liberian movie Johnny Mad Dog, an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country’s recent war, left me wrung out - furious, confused, deep in thought,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.
GreenCine Daily - ”‘A typical festival art film.’ That was the judgment of a friend of mine after the Tuesday press screening of Delta, a competition entry from the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo,” writes AO Scott in the New York Times.
GreenCine Daily - ”Nothing I’ve seen in Cannes has possessed and disturbed me quite as much as the Directors’ Fortnight entry Tony Manero, from young Chilean director Pablo Larraín,” writes Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir.
GreenCine Daily - ”The searing intensity of To Take a Wife turns into overly diffused heat in Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s follow-up family drama The Seven Days,” writes Variety’s Jay Weissberg.
GreenCine Daily - ”Boldly grabbing hold of the central issue at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict - namely, whose land it is that is being contended by both sides - Salt of This Sea will certainly make people talk, even while it fails to fully involve them in its artificial drama,” writes Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter.
GreenCine Daily - ”Better Things unfolds in photographic compositions rather than dramatic scenes,” writes the Observer’s Jason Solomons.
