Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung has a distinct curiosity about the significance of music, both in everyday life and in cinema. A recurring scene from his gorgeous 2000 film ‘At the Height of Summer’ saw a young couple waking each morning to the strains of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and engaging in a ritualised early-morning ballet of stretches and ablutions. At a pivotal moment in his wistful and agonisingly poignant new work – a thoughtfully abridged adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s lilting 1987 chronicle of late-teen neurosis in 1960s Tokyo – a young woman, Naoko, who’s still traumatised by the suicide of a schoolyard sweetheart, breaks down when a friend casually strums through a rendition of The Beatles’ torch song ‘Norwegian Wood’. The idea that something as ephemeral as a pop song could release a storm cloud of sorrows encapsulates the objectives of this film. It asks: how can we ever really be sure of love without understanding the hidden impulses of others? And what’s the point of love if death’s cruel hand can swipe at any moment?
My Dog Tulip
This gently episodic film by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger manages to say more about man’s relationship with dogs in a single, lush frame than ‘Marley and Me’ would if it were to run on a loop until the end of time.
It’s attentively adapted from a memoir by the late British wit JR Ackerley, which offers – in infinitesimal detail – the mucus-slathered trials of life with his fusty Alsatian bitch, Tulip, in 1950s Putney. Ackerley’s bone-dry prose is the epitome of self-flagellating, post-war Englishness, recalling at once the instructional irony of George Orwell’s essays and the arch, self-effacing out-loud-thoughts of Alan Bennett.
It’s attentively adapted from a memoir by the late British wit JR Ackerley, which offers – in infinitesimal detail – the mucus-slathered trials of life with his fusty Alsatian bitch, Tulip, in 1950s Putney. Ackerley’s bone-dry prose is the epitome of self-flagellating, post-war Englishness, recalling at once the instructional irony of George Orwell’s essays and the arch, self-effacing out-loud-thoughts of Alan Bennett.
Other New Stuff
Limitless
Way Back, The
Made In Romania
The Trip
Archipelago
L'Amour Fou
Company Men
Macbeth (2010)