Dans la forêt du charme et de l'enchantement

I went to see my first Shane Meadows film, This Is England. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was starting to write the film off, since it seemed rough and ready in terms of editing or the way the scenes were staged. But despite this amateurishness, the story grabbed me.

You would think that this film would stand or fall on its realism, but it doesn’t. In some ways it is a mis-remembered 80s. It remembers every single teenager as dressing in perfect 80s fashion, whether New Romantic or Mod. It also hits the wrong note in places. It can seem far too 2007. But it captures how it felt to be a teenaged boy in the 80s.

This is England is a strange, awkward and nostalgic film, but it expresses the distance between then and now, and is worth seeing.

One of the Guardian’s critics, for some reason, watched every single Ingmar Bergman film. I felt like I had too before I’d finished reading his conclusions. Once you start thinking of a film-maker like Bergman as formulaic, then it seems pointless to watch more than a handful of his films and since I already have, he’s not on my rental list at the moment.

I watched Robert Bresson’s take on the Joan of Arc story. It was such a disappointment that I wondered why I’d liked his other films. Googling it, I see comparisons between his film and Carl Dreyer’s on the same subject. It seems a bit unfair to lump them in together just because they’re old foreign films in black and white, but there you go.

Anyway, Dreyer’s film moved me, Bresson’s film didn’t. I prefer A Man Escaped and L’Argent followed by Balthazar and Mouchette. Those would make you think that Bresson is one of the greatest directors. But Procès de Jeanne d’Arc is a dud to throw in with Lancelot du Lac.