oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx
Joined Aug 2002
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Bogancloch is Ben Rivers' follow-up to his 2012 feature Two Years at Sea, as well as the shorts This Is My Land (2007) and I Know Where I'm Going (2009). All these films follow the life of the now-elderly hermit Jake Williams, who lives in remote Bogancloch, Aberdeenshire, quietly going about his day-to-day life. The film is mostly shot in black and white, with occasional bursts of vivid colour-particularly when Rivers films Jake's old travel photos, likely from the 1970s. Weathered and distorted by time and the elements, these images appear joyously 'smooshed', like psychedelic artefacts from a vanished past.
Jake is often seen communing with nature - listening to birdsong, observing the landscape, or simply sitting in stillness. From the expressions on his face, it feels fair to say that nature has become his lover. Ben Rivers, as usual, finds beauty in disarray and decrepitude, and occasional magic, helped along by the presence of a cat who comes across as Jake's familiar.
Bogancloch is an unobtrusive and charming ethnographic document of one of the last eccentrics.
Jake is often seen communing with nature - listening to birdsong, observing the landscape, or simply sitting in stillness. From the expressions on his face, it feels fair to say that nature has become his lover. Ben Rivers, as usual, finds beauty in disarray and decrepitude, and occasional magic, helped along by the presence of a cat who comes across as Jake's familiar.
Bogancloch is an unobtrusive and charming ethnographic document of one of the last eccentrics.
Human Traffic is a film I can identify with because I grew up in the same vibe, close to where the movie is set, and around the same age as Danny Dyer's character, Moff. It's about a drug- and love-fuelled long weekend in Cardiff, shared by five friends. I absolutely wasn't involved in that lifestyle, but the zeitgeist is acutely familiar. I was growing on the same agar plate as these guys.
From 1979 to 1997, the UK was ruled by a Conservative government, one deeply unpopular with young people. The characters in this film had never known another political order. That fostered a persistent, ambient youth alienation.
I remember, in the mid-'90s, being confronted by unprovoked boys the same age as me, wearing shellsuits, walking up to ask if I wanted a fight. Heavy industry was shutting down. Unions were being crushed. Prospects for young working-class people were grim. A bravura moment in the film captures this mood: an entire pub of young people sings the national anthem to the tune of rebellion-"Our generation / Alienation / Have we a soul?"
There wasn't yet internet access for most of us. Wikipedia didn't exist. There were no discursive outlets, no easy entry points to alternative perspectives. You couldn't just go down a rabbit hole and emerge somewhere better informed. So we sat with our confusion.
This is reflected in the film's characters. They know, with deep certainty, that their parents' generation is wrong about everything. But they don't know why. And they don't know what to do about it. The result is a kind of howling absurdity-a culture of oblivion drinking. Other generations drank too, but our generation drank to forget we existed and gurned on MDMA. And for the first time, women-the so-called ladettes-drank with the same abandon and for the same reasons.
Mimicry was another response to the absurdity. The characters spend much of the film mimicking the cultural voices around them, blurting out fragments of gibbering elderspeak. This is how people respond to authority they don't understand and can't escape-by parroting it, distorting it, making it ridiculous.
Take the lyric "Who is the Queen?" from the film's replacement national anthem. Critics mocked it at the time for its clunky delivery-but it's a question that carries weight. For Gen X, a profound connection that older generations felt to the monarchy was severed. My father, like many of his generation, had a portrait of Elizabeth II in his study. When he became a police officer, he swore an oath to her, and he meant it. That personal bond was real for him. For us, the monarchy was an absurd relic. The lyric exposes a cultural rift.
Human Traffic is stylistically bold. It blends documentary-style narration, stylised sequences, fantasy cutaways, and surreal internal monologues. It's a collage of raw energy and fractured identities.
At its core, Human Traffic is a joyous film about young people looking for love and escape. They find refuge in the weekend, in chemicals, in the giddy chaos of being "space kittens," to borrow a phrase from the movie. The exuberance is the point. It's something we've since lost. It's something the generations to come never really had.
We didn't have a reason to be exuberant-but we were anyway. Follow any of the conversations in the film and they're mostly nonsense. They don't have much to say-but they inject energy into the saying. Socially, the worst thing you could be at the time was a "buzzkill." Today, buzzkilling is practically a social obligation. Sobriety and self-righteousness have seen a renewal.
Human Traffic is funny, energetic, and makes brave stylistic choices-for which it's rewarded. This is a definitional film of a time and place. It may not be perfect, but it's real.
From 1979 to 1997, the UK was ruled by a Conservative government, one deeply unpopular with young people. The characters in this film had never known another political order. That fostered a persistent, ambient youth alienation.
I remember, in the mid-'90s, being confronted by unprovoked boys the same age as me, wearing shellsuits, walking up to ask if I wanted a fight. Heavy industry was shutting down. Unions were being crushed. Prospects for young working-class people were grim. A bravura moment in the film captures this mood: an entire pub of young people sings the national anthem to the tune of rebellion-"Our generation / Alienation / Have we a soul?"
There wasn't yet internet access for most of us. Wikipedia didn't exist. There were no discursive outlets, no easy entry points to alternative perspectives. You couldn't just go down a rabbit hole and emerge somewhere better informed. So we sat with our confusion.
This is reflected in the film's characters. They know, with deep certainty, that their parents' generation is wrong about everything. But they don't know why. And they don't know what to do about it. The result is a kind of howling absurdity-a culture of oblivion drinking. Other generations drank too, but our generation drank to forget we existed and gurned on MDMA. And for the first time, women-the so-called ladettes-drank with the same abandon and for the same reasons.
Mimicry was another response to the absurdity. The characters spend much of the film mimicking the cultural voices around them, blurting out fragments of gibbering elderspeak. This is how people respond to authority they don't understand and can't escape-by parroting it, distorting it, making it ridiculous.
Take the lyric "Who is the Queen?" from the film's replacement national anthem. Critics mocked it at the time for its clunky delivery-but it's a question that carries weight. For Gen X, a profound connection that older generations felt to the monarchy was severed. My father, like many of his generation, had a portrait of Elizabeth II in his study. When he became a police officer, he swore an oath to her, and he meant it. That personal bond was real for him. For us, the monarchy was an absurd relic. The lyric exposes a cultural rift.
Human Traffic is stylistically bold. It blends documentary-style narration, stylised sequences, fantasy cutaways, and surreal internal monologues. It's a collage of raw energy and fractured identities.
At its core, Human Traffic is a joyous film about young people looking for love and escape. They find refuge in the weekend, in chemicals, in the giddy chaos of being "space kittens," to borrow a phrase from the movie. The exuberance is the point. It's something we've since lost. It's something the generations to come never really had.
We didn't have a reason to be exuberant-but we were anyway. Follow any of the conversations in the film and they're mostly nonsense. They don't have much to say-but they inject energy into the saying. Socially, the worst thing you could be at the time was a "buzzkill." Today, buzzkilling is practically a social obligation. Sobriety and self-righteousness have seen a renewal.
Human Traffic is funny, energetic, and makes brave stylistic choices-for which it's rewarded. This is a definitional film of a time and place. It may not be perfect, but it's real.
Masks is a gothic mystery of antique origin, successfully updated for a world a century later. To breathe new life into a well-worn story takes style, inventiveness, and brio - all of which Chabrol, co-writer Odile Barski, and a well-chosen cast bring in spades. The traditional shadows and spandrels of the genre are discarded in favour of a uniquely saccharine creepiness.
Philippe Noiret fits his role as smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (literally "the winner") like a glove. His program - in which elderly romantics compete in dancing and singing - feels eerily plausible. We spend most of the film at his country estate, populated with familiars, where he has invited a young biographer to hear his story. This biographer, however, has a secret mission that only reveals itself gradually. The setup sounds implausible, but Legagneur is just egotistical enough to be seduced by the flattery of a biographer's attention, and just manipulative enough to welcome an extra puppet into his theatre, even if he suspects the ruse.
Robin Renucci, as the fake writer Roland Wolf, brings youthful brashness and self-assurance to the role, making him a worthy opponent in this quiet battle of wits. Other notables include Bernadette Lafont, gleefully hamming it up as the voluptuous tarotist-in-residence Patricia, and Anne Brochet as Catherine, Legagneur's ailing god-daughter.
It's tempting to think of Chabrol as a New Wave pioneer who drifted into less promising genre territory. But dig deeper, and you find a filmmaker with a remarkably acute grasp of the upper middle classes - particularly the collusive, self-perpetuating nature of class power. Legagneur is no rogue individualist. He gregariously surrounds himself with like-minded confederates who share in the spoils. To put it more simply: the rich don't rock the boat - they eat veal cutlets on the boat and sip fine wine.
Legagneur laughs easily, with his inner circle and at society. He is a law unto himself, creating a hermetically sealed, ideologically baroque world of his own. This is captured in a memorable image: he sleeps beneath an Arcadian tableau, recessed into ornate panelling - the physical manifestation of his dreams. We glimpse the structure he inhabits whether awake or asleep: a world entirely of his own invention and control. He is a dreamer wide awake. Or, to put it plainly: a powerful fantasist. Years before the world came to understand the true nature of TV host Jimmy Savile, Chabrol had already drawn the silhouette.
The 1980s were a relatively fallow period for Chabrol, but Masks - this opiated flower from an unmapped canyon of dreams - stands out.
Philippe Noiret fits his role as smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (literally "the winner") like a glove. His program - in which elderly romantics compete in dancing and singing - feels eerily plausible. We spend most of the film at his country estate, populated with familiars, where he has invited a young biographer to hear his story. This biographer, however, has a secret mission that only reveals itself gradually. The setup sounds implausible, but Legagneur is just egotistical enough to be seduced by the flattery of a biographer's attention, and just manipulative enough to welcome an extra puppet into his theatre, even if he suspects the ruse.
Robin Renucci, as the fake writer Roland Wolf, brings youthful brashness and self-assurance to the role, making him a worthy opponent in this quiet battle of wits. Other notables include Bernadette Lafont, gleefully hamming it up as the voluptuous tarotist-in-residence Patricia, and Anne Brochet as Catherine, Legagneur's ailing god-daughter.
It's tempting to think of Chabrol as a New Wave pioneer who drifted into less promising genre territory. But dig deeper, and you find a filmmaker with a remarkably acute grasp of the upper middle classes - particularly the collusive, self-perpetuating nature of class power. Legagneur is no rogue individualist. He gregariously surrounds himself with like-minded confederates who share in the spoils. To put it more simply: the rich don't rock the boat - they eat veal cutlets on the boat and sip fine wine.
Legagneur laughs easily, with his inner circle and at society. He is a law unto himself, creating a hermetically sealed, ideologically baroque world of his own. This is captured in a memorable image: he sleeps beneath an Arcadian tableau, recessed into ornate panelling - the physical manifestation of his dreams. We glimpse the structure he inhabits whether awake or asleep: a world entirely of his own invention and control. He is a dreamer wide awake. Or, to put it plainly: a powerful fantasist. Years before the world came to understand the true nature of TV host Jimmy Savile, Chabrol had already drawn the silhouette.
The 1980s were a relatively fallow period for Chabrol, but Masks - this opiated flower from an unmapped canyon of dreams - stands out.
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