Intermission: brilliantlove (coda)

You may not remember a film called Madagascar Skin. It came out in 1995 and is the sort of film contemporary British cinema does very well; quirky and well-constructed, it stars John Hannah as a young gay man marked with a birth mark the shape of said Indian Ocean island.

Director Ashley Horner's feature brilliantlove shares with Madagascar Skin many positives, including Sean Conway's tidy script, which investigates sexual love against a provocative backdrop. brilliantlove also has a nice sense of humour and never tries to outstrip itself: ambition is great only if you succeed.

Nancy Trotter Landry stands out as the focus of photographer Manchester's obsession; their sex scenes are uninhibited and enjoyable. (Manchester has a penchant for having his lover record her fantasies on a second-hand Dictaphone.) Though the couple's innocence grates, brilliantlove offers one way forward for the British film industry since the demise of the UK Film Council. It's out on DVD on 10 January.

PS I love this poster image for the film by illustrator Hattie Stewart, a really unusual and eyecatching take!

PPS When I started this blog, I aimed to complete 20 entries by Christmas 2010. I've done that so I'm going to take a break, though I may post intermittently. (I didn't get to Last Tango in Paris!) In the meantime, you may enjoy my other blog, which tackles film, as well as books, music and photography. Have a very good 2011!

Intermission: Leap Year

Director Michael Rowe was inspired to write Leap Year, which is out this Friday, by a story he was told 'about a conservative woman who'd accepted a sadomasochistic relationship in order to keep her lover from leaving.' Laura (Monica Del Carmen) is a freelance business journalist: her day is made up of ringing editors for work ('30 tips to take advantage of the economic crisis'), carrying the can when things go wrong, eating, cleaning (the fridge), reading (Erich Fromm), wanking. She's also alone: a ring on her hand and picture by her bedside may hint at a man in her life but she pretends to family and one-night stands she has a full time seeing friends, going out and eating well, when she's mooching around in her pyjamas scoffing something from a tin.

Set in Mexico, Leap Year portrays a very different life to that of Y tu mamá también's spoiled brats, rather Laura could be a grown-up daughter of the indigenous couple at the centre of Battle in Heaven. Australian Rowe has lived in Mexico for 16 years and says he has an outsider's perspective on Mexican society, though the Spanish-language film is very much an inside job: other than views from the window, his camera never leaves Laura's flat. This is Rear Window without the repressed sexuality; Laura masturbates watching the next-door couple performing mundane tasks.

Laura misses their intimacy, which she finds in Arturo, a man who takes sly interest in her while dealing out beatings. Their sex progresses in the manner of the couple in Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, through throttling and pissing to knives. Initially submissive, Laura strips ready for sex every time Arturo appears, like Cécilia in L'ennui. Throughout the film Laura crosses off the days of her February calendar; she takes control of the relationship towards the end of this leap-year month - it could be called 29 Days Later.

Intermission: Enter the Void

For French director Gaspar Noé every ending is a beginning: his last film, Irreversible, begins at the end and is told backwards while this latest starts with the death of its lead character, from whose point of view we see the rest of the film. Oscar has invited to Tokyo Linda, the sister from whom he was split in childhood when their parents died in a car crash. Linda finds work as a stripper to supplement Oscar's income from drugs - and, it seems, as a gigolo to a friend's mum - but he's killed when a deal goes wrong.

Like Irreversible, Enter the Void is filled with strobe effects - Noé has no interest in courting an epileptic fanbase - a club with a bad name (The Void) and even a self-referential gag, where the director's name serves as a contact for a dealer. There's plenty of neon and fractals, a predominant breast fixation, as well as some guff about the Tibetan Book of the Dead that purports to serve as the film's philosophical frame. (I don't know what it is about Tokyo that sends Occidental directors bonkers: Sofia Coppola, Hal Hartley, Wim Wenders...)

I once described an author's role in one book as more like directing traffic, and there's something of that in Noé. He is undoubtedly technically very accomplished but much of his recent work is about the camera hitting its marks and orchestrating the cast to meet theirs; he's not someone to provoke great performances from his stars. All directors should be in control of their material, but the great ones have something to say, too. In Enter the Void, death is described as the 'ultimate trip' but highs are like dreams: you shouldn't share them with other people.

Intermezzo: Room in Rome

Julio Medem's most recent film, Room in Rome, is being released in the UK on DVD by Optimum on 18 October. It stars Elena Anaya (from the same director's Sex and Lucía) and Natasha Yarovenko as two women who meet in the Italian capital and spend the night together.

There's something here about the tales we tell each other and how we also use the internet to either support or check our truths and fabrications. (Apart from WiFi, the couple's only contact with the outside world is singing night porter Max, who's keen to join in their bedroom antics if he can.)

This is a small piece for Medem, but there are again hints of his favourite - coincidence - some Basque influence, and a lot on art and mythology (myth-making). The leads are very beautiful and, though the English-language dialogue is somewhat clunky, the final effect oddly likeable. It would be good to see Medem back on a bigger canvas soon.