Month: September 2014

Finding Vivian Maier

Seven years ago, a young Chicago historian named John Maloof made an extraordinary discovery. He picked up a box of undeveloped photo negatives at an auction belonging to a mysterious woman named Vivian Maier; later, Maloof tracked down a storage unit rented in her name, filled to the brim with negatives, prints and miscellaneous effects.

For a modest payment, he found himself the owner of a staggering, huge archive of street photography by a brilliant, undiscovered talent, clearly to be compared with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. These were thousands of stunning images taken on the streets of New York and Chicago from the 1950s to the present, but never shown to anyone in the photographer’s lifetime. This documentary shows Maloof’s mission to develop, catalogue and publish this sensational trove, and to find out more about the unknown artist herself. Maier, who died in 2009, had earned a crust as a nanny to the well-heeled, dragging her charges out on long walks while she took candid shots on the streets, and also dabbled in Zapruder-ish cine film. Her humble job allowed her to roam, and perhaps her low status gave her a sharp sense of dispossession and even resentment. Interestingly, the pictures she took in rural France, her mother’s birthplace, are calmer and gentler than the fierce images of Chicago. These are, in a sense, symptoms of her own mental turmoil. This is a fascinating study.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

Jonas Jonasson: The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

As unlikely and funny as Jonas Jonasson’s 2012 debut bestseller, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, his second novel follows a self-taught Soweto shanty-town girl called Nombeko who has the opportunity not just to save the king of Sweden, but also the world when she finds herself confined in a potato truck with the king and the Swedish prime minister in 2007. Unlikely? The probability, calculated by Nombeko, is 1 in 45,766,212,810. With an eccentric cast of characters that includes three Chinese sisters practised in the arts of poisoning dogs, an alcoholic South African nuclear bomb engineer and a borderline psychotic who brings his twin sons up as one child so that the “spare” can eradicate the Swedish royal family, there is no shortage of fast-paced action. The faux-naive style makes light and frothy work of weighty events: take nothing seriously is the refreshing subtext. At the heart of this very likable book is the notion that even someone from the humblest of origins can have a gigantic impact on life.

Sophia Martelli in The Guardian

Only Lovers Left Alive

Jim Jarmusch’s smacked-out vampire movie ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ starts with a close-up of a seven-inch single spinning on a turntable. Which is apt, as this slim, dreamy film demands that you kick back and slip into its slow, deadpan groove if it’s not going to drive you completely mad. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are Adam and Eve, a married vampire couple of many centuries standing. He’s depressed and surrounded by records and guitars in a Gothic house in Detroit; she’s living in a flat in Tangier. They’ve seen it all and met everyone – the English civil war, Franz Schubert – and life’s taken on a fin-de-siècle, morose air.

Jarmusch’s film looks beautiful and has a groovy nighttime air to it, especially when Adam and Eve drive about the ruins of Detroit at night in Adam’s white Jaguar XJS. These scenes could be the hippest travelogue moments ever committed to screen. But ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ drags its feet and shows serious signs of anaemia as a story. Really, though, Jarmusch doesn’t seem too concerned with story at all, and he rarely has been, with some of his films like ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, ‘Mystery Train’ and ‘Night on Earth’ dispensing altogether with the pretence that the feature-length work is his strength.

At times it feels like a great idea, atmospherically realised, worryingly diluted. Too many times we hear references to getting up at dusk and going to bed at dawn; the talk of humans as zombies is repetitive (even if tagging Los Angeles as ‘zombie central’ is brilliant); and the century-hopping namedropping becomes a little tiresome, even if it’s a good gag at first. Brief appearances from Mia Wasikowska as Eve’s less mature sister Ava (she still drinks blood at the source), Anton Yelchin as Adam’s rocker pal Ian and John Hurt as Christopher Marlowe lift the film out of its stylish torpor, and maybe one or two more appearances like this would have given it a boost.

But there’s still something magical and magnetic about this world of mature, know-it-all, ultra-cool vampires that Jarmusch creates and somehow it never seems at all silly. On the contrary, we come to see them as something like cultured heroin addicts – extremely well-read and fine company, but always looking over your shoulder for the next fix. They are a refined sort. They procure their blood on the black market (Adam is in cahoots with a hospital doctor, played by Jeffrey Wright), they recall their friendships with Byron and Shelley, they muse over colourful wild mushrooms (‘Just goes to show: we don’t know shit about fungi,’ says Adam deadly seriously) and they discuss science and planets. If this is partly a compendium of Jarmusch’s arcane knowledge, then Hiddleston and Swinton, dressed to impress and both totally suited to the other-wordly but tender nature of their characters, are surely the guys to share it with us.

Time Out London

The Keeper of Lost Causes

Regulation maverick Danish cop Carl Mørck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) begins this meat-and-potatoes policier by jumping the gun – a colleague is in hospital, and before he knows it, Mørck’s sent down to basement level to flip through cold cases. He’s assigned a new partner, who by rights ought to be called Mindy, but is instead Assad (Fares Fares).
One case pricks their interest, involving the disappearance of a young politician (Sonja Richter) on a passenger ferry five years earlier. Suicide was suspected, but they smell a rat – in the long tradition of rat-smelling, cold-case-meddling Scandi ‘tecs, they poke around to the point where badges get revoked, careers jeopardised, and wintry flashbacks with grainy film stock are summoned ad nauseam.
All the while, we know that Richter’s character is still alive, imprisoned in Silence of The Lambs-style captivity by an unknown psychopath, and it’s a case of joining the dots in time. Slickly adapted by A Royal Affair’s Nikolaj Arcel, this first screen version of one of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s popular Department Q books has been so successful in Denmark that the sequel is already in post-production. A less blatantly mechanical plot seems the order of the day, since the no-nonsense double act of Kaas and Fares has grit and promise.

Tim Robey in the Telegraph