The Hot'N'Tots toy - a monkey, mind you - for kids

I spotted this incredibly inappropriately-named children’s product last night in the chain store Butler’s in Islington, London.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with just how wrong this is. It’s got to go down as maybe one of the worst clusterfucks in marketing/product naming history.

Wikipedia goes dark in protest at SOPA and PIPA

A few years back, before all this internet/smartphone/ubiquitous stuff, I worked for a media development NGO, helping to strengthen public-interest media in the developing world, as a critical part of public debate and social change. One of the ways we used to articulate why it was important to support these independent, public and community media was “imagine a world without media”… Unthinkable.

Now, with the space for individual communication and agency expanding and affecting so many facets of our lives, a flotilla of sites “going dark” is a critical action that demonstrates where we might all end up if this kind of legislation, which seeks to protect archaic modes of production and value creation, at the behest of entrenched lobbies and interests, is not stopped in its tracks. SOPA and PIPA must be stopped.

[And, if laws such as these pass in the US, then these flawed and failed legal standards will then be exported to other nations, with drastic results for free speech, and the creation of value (cultural, economic, and network) worldwide.]

1. Redefining quality:

We are seeing a huge increase in the quantity of content, but old markers of quality need to be redefined in this new era. Journalists are having to deploy traditional skills in new configurations and at different speeds, as well as sharing parts of their role to their networks on Twitter and elsewhere. Curation, facilitation and amplification are becoming core skills, alongside new forensic techniques for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of information. This could mesh powerfully with long-standing approaches within media development, such as foregrounding the perspectives and demands of those on the front lines of poverty and marginalisation, or increasing the diversity of sources. It’s incumbent on the media development community to engage with these new modes of doing journalism, and to help to shape the new markers of quality and value.

2. A new ethics of information and communication

When billions can communicate in real-time through text, audio and images, and images formerly seen only within a country’s borders or by a select few are now available instantly around the world, media literacy and information ethics become ever more important. Ethical practices in journalism are part of the picture, but it’s bigger than that – it’s more fundamentally about how we communicate, how we film, photograph, document our and others’ lives, and how we share this information, for example on social media networks. [Update: A journalist wonders, for example, about the ethics of using material posted to social networks, and whether there might be a signal of intention missing between "public' and "private".] Services like Facebook are trying to make it as easy and “frictionless” to share content as possible, but might “friction” – for example, considering whether I really should post that picture – be a good thing? And as more and more citizens acquire the ability to stream live video, for example, how will technology providers, regulators, NGOs, media, and citizens respond? How will “local cultural sensitivities” change and adapt in a truly globalised communication environment? Several of our interviewees suggested that looking at these issues through the lens of human rights provides a robust new basis for a new information ethics. Alongside these ethics, we will need to rethink how and when we might extend, for example, some of the statutory protections afforded to journalists to others engaging in similar work, but not affiliated with publications, and not working in traditional media forms. How might this benefit governance, for example? [Update: Here's a case from December 2011 where a blogger invoked, but was judged not to have followed professional practices necessary to, statutory legal protections journalists might have access to.]

3. Privacy, identity and technology are inextricable

Our privacy, our identities and our technology are increasingly linked and bound up with each other. Participating in new networked technology – using a mobile phone, having a Facebook profile, using a free email service – and taking advantage of its social aspects means trading aspects of your privacy, and linking formerly separate parts of your identity. Doing this unwittingly, whether you are an activist, official or journalist, presents new types of risks. It is clear that neither policy-makers nor civil society organisations understand these technologies well enough, if at all, or how they work – and therefore their understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks inherent in them is cloudy at best. We all need to understand these technologies, the people that build them, and the impacts they have better – whether by learning the basics of computer code, or about how mobile phones work, or how data is collected on web users – rather than seeing them as somehow “magical” or dismissing them as insubstantial. [Here's one excellent analysis, from October 2011, of how journalists could do better, by OSI Fellow Christopher Soghoian.]

3. All our eggs in one privately-owned basket

Technology, and video increasingly, is a critical part of civil society’s infrastructure. We need to invest continually in making sure civil society has the capacity to use it effectively, as it can magnify the impact of resources, mitigate isolation, act as a protection and so on. But as I have noted, it’s also a risk generator… Much civil society content is stored on private commercial web services, some of whom have less than stellar records on protecting freedom of expression. This content is also vulnerable when commercial web services are shut down – in these circumstances these services rarely consider donating their content to a public domain site like Archive.org [non-profits also fail to do this, but they host far less of other people's content]. Content is also vulnerable to takedown on the grounds of copyright – parodies, an honourable tradition in internet video, for example, are especially vulnerable to poltically-motivated copyright takedown. But copyright policy debates are dominated by the film, music and publishing industries and by polarised rhetoric, and policy-makers rarely have access to a balanced set of research and resources to help guide digital-era policy. We’re in the early days of addressing this public/private conundrum – and media development practitioners and donors might have helpful lessons to share from their experiences of more inclusive definitions of the public interest, bridging public and private media.

4. Agility

Programming cycles in civil society are too long and inflexible, and unsuited to the nature of more fluid and iterative project development (some might say, to the nature of reality.) Whether this is a result of donor requests for deeper and more robust evidence of impact, or some other root-cause, it is leading in some cases to risk aversion, and to a fear and masking of failure. Venture capitalists and technologists thrive on acknowledging and understanding failure – civil society and donors need to own up to, understand and use failures much more clearly, especially in the iterative ICT domain, which rarely responds well to rigid long-term logframes… Similarly, legislative cycles are too long and unwieldy to be able to cope adequately with new developments in technology and new uses for technologies. It means that policy coherence is fractured across and between different domains of government and intergovernmental policy, and that legal and regulatory mechanisms are increasingly out of step with the reality of practice. And legal communities and judiciaries around the world (here in the UK too) need to understand these developments better too, not least in helping to develop evidentiary standards for social media.

5. Civil Society

I’ve already said a lot about civil society, but here’s something specific that came out of a lot of the interviews: civil society needs to collaborate more and to compete less when it comes to the internet and the media. Civil society’s collective knowledge, understanding, networks and influence are enormous – CSOs are among the most trusted organisations and institutions in the world. But lack of coordination, lack of collectiveness, and lack of forward-planning are hampering this potential influence. We need to infuse spaces (and the companies that own them) such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook with the human rights ethics and values we espouse, but at the same time, we need to learn from other sectors in becoming more fluid, more porous and more collaborative – and if we are to exercise more credible influence, we need to understand the technologies and spaces we are talking about better, in the same way we understand trade negotiations, or HIV/AIDS, or the environment – or indeed, governance.

6. Donors

Finally, a word about donors. Donors – whether governments, foundations, individual philanthropists or crowd-funding sites – need to be more mindful and less risk averse in how they approach and evaluate funding for human rights and ICTs. They need to help rethink the programmatic model for a more complex, instant age, bring together groups of grantees more systematically, and function more clearly as brokers of ideas and as field-builders and -strengtheners. They also need to use their long and evolving understanding of M&E to help build less burdensome, more shared systems for documenting and measuring the effects of what they fund. Interviewees also called on donors to fund the development of a more systematic evidence base in this field. Finally, they need to use their long experience to help peers and grantees to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, particularly in instrumentalising, or “harnessing” the internet. [Here's a presentation I gave a few months later with recommendations from the final report on what donors can do specifically.]

Perhaps the most succinctly insightful critical response to the work of Nicolas Roeg might be Michael Clark’s portrait of the British director in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Entitled “al-jebr”, this Arabic word means “the bringing together of broken parts”. There are certain keywords that recur in critical appraisals of Roeg’s work: fractured, shattered, collapsed, labyrinthine. This is no less true of his now thankfully re-released 1973 masterpiece, Don’t Look Now, which forms part of an early body of work, including 1970′s astonishing Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), the deeply pessimisticWalkabout (also 1970), and the glacially prescient The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). These films inspire similar “what ifs” to the contemporaneous career of Francis Ford Coppola. After his under-appreciated 1980 film, Bad Timing, Roeg seemed unable to reach the intense complexity his earlier work had shown, and has since managed to succeed where even Coppola has failed, by earning the epithet “largely forgotten”.

Don’t Look Now begins with the tragic drowning of Christine, daughter of John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), and in a sequence famed for its elliptical yet instinctively communicative editing, introduces the key symbols and themes of the film. The motifs of water, of the colour red, of breaking glass, of criss-crossing (noted, in the left-right alternation of shot angles, by Manny Farber in his 1975 essay on Roeg), of spirals, of aural/visual disjunction, of deception/perception, of restoration (forgery/authenticity), are all introduced and established. An early, Hitchcockian, jumpcut from Laura’s scream of horror to the screech of a drill in Venice brings us forward in time, and establishes also Hitch’s presence as an influence. John and Laura have travelled to Venice, where John is working on the restoration of a Byzantine church (which, in a Gothic film, provides a pleasing counterpoint of styles). There they encounter two eccentric sisters, one of whom, apparently psychic, claims to be able to see their dead daughter standing between John and Laura, but also warns them that their lives are in danger while in Venice. John is sceptical, while Laura is willing to believe, and finds a degree of calm in the sisters’ words. The sisters even suggest that John himself possesses second sight, a possibility he denies to himself, in spite of otherwise inexplicable sensations.

This denial cuts to the heart of Roeg, his treatment of time in particular; that we preserve our illusions of control over time, that we structure and order them to give our lives structure and order, and that when encountering alien conceptions of life and time, some of us can make the leap and others won’t. John, professionally engaged in making the present look like the past, will not admit the possibility that he can see the future in the present, despite all signs to the contrary. Roeg’s camerawork increasingly jars sightlines and angles, giving the impression that John is being watched. Venice’s legendary ability for confusion – between east and west, sea and land, decay and splendour – begin to make their presence felt, as John, separated from Laura, is led through the city’s labyrinth by a false Ariadne, to his death.

There is something insistently ecstatic – rapturous, yet distanced – about the rapid montage of John’s demise, a change, and his acceptance of that change, in his consciousness. There is a sense in which only by the “bloody silly way to die” (as the ending of Du Maurier’s original short story has it) can John’s sense of guilt be reconciled. Even at the last, his reconciliation with his apparent “gift” is fudged and distancing. In contrast, Laura’s acceptance of the supernatural leads to growth and survival.

Sacrifice, experience by example, collective progress, all of these, along with his professed belief in a collective unconscious, place Roeg firmly within a Jungian framework. This positioning is emphasised in the fascination with reflective surfaces, and in the sound design, especially in the sequence where John is chasing Roeg’s fairy-tale ogre, accompanied not by Hermann-esque music, but by deep Jungian churnings. Within the canals of Venice, Roeg’s mise-en-abyme of the auditory canals also manages to suggest a mosaic or even fractal structure – of structures within structures. Chris Marker’s observations, in Sans Soleil (1983), on Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), about the spiral nature of time, elicit another strand of Hitchcockian imagery in Don’t Look Now - the spiral. First seen on a slide in the opening sequence, then in the flight of pigeons, in a stairwell, in a bishop’s crook, in the misty wake of the dwarf and John – all contributing to, Farber’s words, Roeg’s “cubistically spiralling style”.

At a time when visual, narrative and emotional complexity seem inaccessible and inconceivable to British film financiers and distributors, film makers, and perhaps even the audiences, an opportunity to revisit one of this country’s most glittering, underrated and serious talents is welcome and necessary. It remains to be seen whether it will influence any of the above constituencies one iota.

Fucking Åmål, retitled Show Me Love for more sensitive markets such as the USA and the UK, is Swedish poet and novelist Lukas Moodysson’s debut feature, and already the biggest Swedish film of all time. The film follows Agnes (Rebecca Liljeberg) who, even after 18 months in the provincial town of Åmål with her family, still has no friends, and Elin (Alexandra Dahlström) who is sick of the fact that by the time something is ‘in’ in ‘fucking’ Åmål, it is ‘out’ everywhere else, and is also keen to rid herself of her virginity.

Agnes is having a 16th birthday party and, for want of anything better to do, Elin and her sister Jessica (Erica Carlson) turn up having made a bet that Elin wouldn’t dare to kiss Agnes who, it is rumoured, is a lesbian. Elin manages to kiss Agnes and then disappears without realising that Agnes has a crush on her.

The rest of the film centres less on Agnes’ growing confidence in public knowledge of her sexuality, than on the confusion within Elin on her unexpected and reciprocal feelings for Agnes and whether to act on them or not.

For a film that has enjoyed such critical and commercial success, Show Me Love has been criticised in some quarters for a perceived shallowness – not an unusual accusation for films that purport to deal with or portray youth. What is so striking about the film however, is its realistic observation of youths and their provincial boredom; Moodysson seems at times to be filming the youths’ parties and interactions with the skill of a wildlife documentarist. He captures the chaos and thoughtlessness of teenage parties, the cruelty and capriciousness of popularity contests, the gaps that rise up between parents and their children and the fact that not all teenagers develop and ‘grow’ and the intense despair of provincial boredom.

Moodysson also indicates that teenagers are not often that sophisticated in their tastes, provincial teenagers less so, nor are they usually that dextrous when trying to make a point. As a result, the choice of ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ as the song to which the two girls kiss manages to ring true. Moodysson also shows a delicately sure touch when portraying homophobia, in one scene letting Oskar (Axel Widegren), Agnes’ little brother, bring it to his mother’s initially liberal attention that his elder sister is apparently a lesbian. The only scene that falls flat comes at the end where the girls come out of the (water) closet, a scene conceived purely to allow weak puns in reviews.

The director is helped throughout by a largely first-time cast, with Liljeberg and Dahlström both excellent and, among the supporting cast, Carlson and Mathias Rust (as the meathead with whom Elin tries to cement her heterosexuality after she dreams of Agnes), give notably good performances. Show Me Love, despite its bum note resolution (which it manages to recover from in the very last scene), is an enjoyable 90 minutes, at times excruciatingly so, and comes strongly recommended.

Showing in its original version rather than the longer “director’s” cut (widely held to be a more balanced and complex film), the tenth anniversary re-release of this 1989 winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes, and the Best Foreign Language Film at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes, offers an opportunity to reassess a film that was panned by critics on its release, but proved something of a hit with the public.

The storyline aspires to myth, but finds itself hovering between romance and melodrama, as we follow a middle-aged Salvatore into his memories of childhood, when he was known as Toto. He has received a message from his mother telling him that someone called Alfredo has died, and that the funeral is tomorrow. Salvatore thinks back to his childhood in the Sicilian village of Giancaldo, where he is an altarboy to the priest, also the local film censor. Toto, whose father died on the Russian front, finds a surrogate father in Alfredo, the curmudgeonly projectionist at the local Cinema Paradiso. Toto, obsessed by films, persuades Alfredo to teach him to be a projectionist. One evening, a reel of film catches fire in the projector, and Alfredo is blinded. Toto becomes chief projectionist in the rebuilt cinema, a post he occupies until he goes to the mainland to do his military service. In the months before he goes away, he has an abortive love affair with Elena, the beautiful daughter of the local banker. Upon his return, he cannot find her, and returns to Rome to begin his career in film, not returning to Giancaldo until Alfredo’s funeral.

In many ways, it is easy to see why Cinema Paradiso received such a critical savaging: it is unashamedly romantic and emotionally manipulative; the characters, while largely amusing and engaging, are hardly complex; the setting, a lovingly-drawn Sicilian village, is replete with every cliché imaginable; and the plot often lumberingly symbolic. These flaws were given a thorough airing at the time of release, but why is it still, even in this version, a viable piece of cinema?

The film operates in three periods: Toto’s childhood, adolescence and middle age. Each is marked by a different quality to the memories, and the nostalgia they invoke. Toto’s childhood is conjured with a small arena of familiar haunts and faces. Much is made of Toto’s emotional wisdom, and though this makes him seem cutely precocious at times, it allows the delight to be tempered by hints of melancholy. Once we pass into Toto’s adolescence and passage into manhood, the tenor of the scenes, while not losing playfulness and warmth, becomes a little less open, the public scenes more anonymous, the projection booth, a surrogate womb for so many years, no longer a world in itself. The scenes from which his memories are launched are marked by the disillusionment of middle age, and the safety of nostalgia.

The redemptive role played by the movies (and it is the experience of the “movies” that the film is largely concerned with) is emphasised again and again. From the outset, the similarity between church and cinema is shown by following a shot of motes of dust dancing in a shaft of light in church with a shot of the shaft of light emerging from the projection booth in the Cinema Paradiso. Both serve as a focus for, and serve the spiritual needs of the community. Yet it is the cinema that seems a more loving and complete microcosm of the world – all life is here, and so on. During the course of the film, the cinema plays host to both the hoi polloi and the self-proclaimed local bigwigs, to a nursing mother and a couple having sex, pubescent youths masturbating along to Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, and a prostitute. Finally, when Salvatore returns to the predictably derelict cinema after Alfredo’s funeral, posters for porno films litter the ramshackle interior. The point that Tornatore is making is obvious, but no less passionate for that.

Not overly sophisticated (thank God), indeed somewhat crude at points (excellent), and rather like a mixture between The Sure Thing, Beavis and Butthead and Shadowlands (just kidding), Y tu mamá también is extremely good-natured, thoughtful and enjoyable – far more so than the witless trailer (which makes it out to be a teen gross-out comedy) suggests.

It follows two seventeen-year-old Mexico City friends – Tenoch (Diego Luna), a corrupt politician’s son, and middle-class Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal, of Amores Perros) – and Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the beautiful young Spanish woman they meet at a party. To impress her they invite her on a road trip they are planning to go on, to what they say is the best beach around, La Boca del Cielo, or Heaven’s Mouth – which they’ve invented. She declines, but when her husband (Tenoch’s writer cousin) calls her in tears to tell her of an infidelity, changes her mind, and calls the boys – who are forced to rustle up a car, and a plan. The ensuing road trip tests their friendship and their sexuality.

It’s crisply shot, consistently funny, and still manages to feel like it’s got more going on than in an average teen road movie. As the Charolastras or Space Cowboys, as they dub themselves, Tenoch, Julio and their friends get stoned, masturbate furiously and jam around to a teenage coda. Luisa’s own crisis, and its resolution, finds its release in helping the two teens begin their graduation out of that teenworld to adulthood, some apparently complicated sex (not at all, as everyone who sees the film is at pains to stress, gratuitous), and encounters with rural folk, into whose lives we are given a brief insight by the omniscient narrator.

The film wears its politics lightly, but manages to give a clear impression of a Mexico that is changing, even growing up. From the heavily-guarded appearance of the President at the party at the start of the film, to the horde of pigs trampling the campsite, and the invasion of tourist hotels at the end, Alfonso Cuaron handles the two levels of the film skillfully and enjoyably, never overburdening the spectator with too much weight or too much fluff. Along with the excellent performances, from Garcia Bernal in particular, this makes for a lighter, but equally praiseworthy, Mexican follow-up to Amores Perros. In short, just go and see the bloody thing.

Asif Kapadia’s accomplished debut feature (following on from his acclaimed short “The Sheep Thief”) offers a variation on a classic story – feared bad guy tries to go straight, and his former employers put a price on his head. 29-year-old Kapadia himself has described it as a samurai film set in India (in, erm, “Hindu”, as the BBC review has it), and has said that it took its inspiration from a Japanese folk tale. The film was awarded the Sutherland Trophy at the 2001 London Film Festival, and lives up to the brief: an original and imaginative first feature. (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)

While the story is pretty well-worn, Kapadia’s variations and visual brio work well with the journey from Rajasthan’s deserts to the Himalayas. The Warrior, Lafcadia (Irfan Khan) is the ruthless head of a warlord’s private band of warriors, who, in the process of meting out punishment to a village late with its dues, has a mystical encounter with a young girl he is about to kill. The girl is wearing his son Katiba’s amulet, which Katiba (Puru Chibber) gave to her when she saved him from a group of bullies. Returning to himself, he immediately runs home and flees with his son. On hearing this, the warlord (Anupam Shyam, full of detached, bored menace) demands his head. While his father prays at a shrine for safe passage, Katiba returns home to get his knife, is captured by the warriors loyal to the warlord, and taken, along with the head of a lookalike, by Lafcadia’s former deputy, Biswas. Pressured to identify the severed head as his father’s by the deputy, whose own neck is on the line, Katiba does so, and his throat is slit – witnessed by Lafcadia, who has slipped unnoticed into the watching crowd. Lafcadia flees, and on his subsequent journey of redemption and retribution encounters a young orphan thief (Noor Mani), and an elderly blind woman on a pilgrimage.

Although The Warrior calls to mind the unswerving trajectory of a Western, the preoccupation with landscape, a real urge to situate, it recalls the early Chen Kaige, Yellow Earth (1984) in particular, with its curious mix of anthropology and epic, even heroic framing. Set in a barren desert region, where spilt water leaves no trace, Lafcadia’s band display a barrenness too – disrupting sacred and communal moments, raping and pillaging. The contrast between their behaviour in that landscape, and the cool contemplative atmosphere of the mountain towards which Lafcadia instinctively heads gives the film much of its momentum. Casting for faces, as Kapadia has admitted, has its merits too, especially in such a silent film. The textural qualities of the film are enhanced both by the extremely distinct cast members (some non-actors) and their controlled performances, and by the sound design, which privileges the background to an unusual degree. Asif Kapadia’s boldness – in design and execution – is to be commended, and though it’s rather slow, and rather simplistic, its many merits far outweigh the gripes. And he’s from Hackney, so this is one gangster-heavy Britflick you don’t need a frontal lobotomy to enjoy.

Miguel Albaladejo’s fourth film, winner of the Best Film prize at the LA Latino Film Festival, is another light romantic comedy, competently acted, competently scripted, competently shot. Spun round what is essentially a telenovela plot, with telenovela characters – the cardboard psychiatrist protagonist, Miguel, played by the Catalan Sergi Lopez (whose beige, shrinking performance could be in protest at being forced to spend months shooting in Madrid), the predictably sparky beautician, Jasmina, played with sub-Almodovar charm by Mariola Fuentes, and the tumour-surviving (what do you mean I’m spoiling the plot? It’s a telenovela… You weren’t expecting tumours?), mother-in-law (Maria Jose Alfonso) – Albaladejo intends us, I am sure, to draw some Significance from the Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary People, but no Hegelian Aufhebung out of the numerous colliding banalities is forthcoming. If, however, you are looking for a mildly diverting, flossy, typical bit of Iberiana, then this could be a good bet.

Pitched, to be honest, midway between a film and a TV film, Ten Days Without Love (a telenovela title if ever there was one) opens true to its Spanish title El Cielo Abierto - The Open Sky - with a torrential downpour, people putting up umbrellas, pulling down blinds, shutters and screens. Miguel is on the phone to his wife, Sara, who left him 3 days previously for another man. She has rung from Tokyo to ask a favour – her mother is flying down to Madrid for a check-up, and is expecting to stay at their flat. Could he put her up for the night? At that moment, the mother-in-law, Elvira, arrives and Miguel is extremely accommodating, but she takes Sara’s side against Miguel. It emerges that Sara has run off with Miguel’s… wait for it… father (su padre! Joder, tio!), a famous painter and womaniser, which, obviously, changes everything.

The same day, a patient of Miguel’s steals his wallet (ummm, it never rains but it pours), and when Miguel goes to track it down, he meets the patient’s down-to-earth beautician sister, Jasmina – she evidently likes him, he is slow to respond, but eventually (you’d never guess it if I didn’t tell you) their love, or at least hers, (it all gets a little bit Jersey Girl – she’s ultra-enthusiastic, and why shouldn’t she be? She dumped her last boyfriend for knocking off ATMs… Miguel’s obviously on the rebound, looking for a bit of validation), blossoms, and is confirmed at the end when Sara returns from Tokyo, and is left standing in the rain. Maybe I’m clutching at straws, but at the last, judging from his face, Miguel seems just to be going with the flow, and you do at least wonder quite how long this inevitably unlikely liaison will last, whereas Jasmina looks like she’s hit the jackpot.

Fleeting charm is provided by scenes of Miguel’s patients (the usual collection of “the voices, the voices” and surly kids), and of Jasmina’s domestic life – rough kids (hearts of gold, of course, made to grow up too quickly, motherless children, tragedy, etc.), and semi-senile grandparents (who, desde luego, talk sense when it’s most needed). Damn it, she even strikes up a rapport with some gypsies. Albaladejo manages to put together what is a more or less solid, extremely conventional, clumsily feelgood film, but with little depth of characterisation, motivation or structure. Perhaps your money would be better spent on a couple of steaming plates of albondigas.

After her delicate and very Canadian debut, Kissed, focusing on a picnoleptic female necrophiliac, Lynne Stopkewich has turned to another literary adaptation for her new film, inhabiting another sexually transgressive woman, this time one diving into the depths of her self and of sexual expiation. Using the same creative team and lead actress, Molly Parker, Stopkewich has forged another striking feature, simmering down Laura Kasischke’s novel to a strong central trajectory, but while only occasionally reaching the tightness and drive of the first film, she manages to invest the unravelling knot of the story with a determined and understated feeling of imminent threat. (Spoilers ahead…)

(Plot spoiler warning:)
Molly Parker plays Leila, a receptionist at a small-town motel, who sells herself to pudgy, bloated men for the price of their room. She seems to do this, in forensic close-ups of shoes, hands and empty spaces, without any real end in mind, hiding the money in her jewellery box, in the uncommunicative home she shares with her apparently anorexic husband. We are introduced, in what appears initially to be a rather lame analogy of Leila’s life, to a young girl who befriends Leila while feeding swans on the river. Like Leila, the girl has a complicated family situation (her mother cheating on her salesman father with his brother, and also with her lawyer). Cue the inevitable flying-away of swans.

Gary Jensen (Callum Keith Rennie), seemingly a drifter, arrives at the motel and has Leila come up to his room, where he hits and rapes her. Something (indicated by a trademark Stopkewich burn-to-white) shifts in her, and although she initially rejects his apologetic overtures, the offer of $200 and Gary’s now gentle and attentive manner convince her to resume their liaison. The rapture she seems to feel at someone taking time and care over her physical pleasure cements her relationship with Gary, and before long, she plans to leave with him for an unknown destination. Gary suggests that they spend the night at his house, where one of his friends is waiting, and leaves her to rest while he goes into town. Gary has told his friend to sleep with Leila, to which she assents almost automatically. When they have finished, she gets up to find a stream of cars arriving at the house, and she is told that Gary is in fact a pimp of sorts, and she is expected to get back in the bedroom. She lapses into almost catatonic unresponsiveness, and is beaten by one of the men, but when he gets out a knife, she jerks into it, and cuts her neck. The men panic, but one of them bandages her neck, and helps her escape to the river. As we move towards the climax of the film, we realise that, in the little girl, Leila is in fact meeting her childhood self. She escapes back to the other side of Suspicious River, and lives to see the swans come back.

Suspicious River is at least as intense as, and more emotionally excoriating than Kissed, and shows Stopkewich expanding her vocabulary and her range (although the burn-to-white seems to have become a key indicative device in her vocabulary). Her films thus far have had a very definite feel, but seem at times too similar to other work, distinguished partly by the perceived extremity of the subject matter. While Kissed showed an engaging and keen Campionesque eye for how solitary, coherent yet odd childhood can be, the dreamy feel of Suspicious River and the neat device of looping past with present contribute to a film that leaves the viewer feeling as passive and detached as Leila is through her own compulsive encounters in darkened rooms, yet compelled to dwell on her descent into hell long afterwards.