News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Some thoughts on Left Bank

10:57 PM / Cinema / 3 Comments

The blurb on the front cover of the US DVD release of Belgian shocker Left Bank (original title Linkeroever) calls it "as important as Let the Right One In." I'm still not sure I quite follow how the reviewer is quantifying importance, and I do feel that invoking the name of Tomas Alfredson's excellent fim is slightly misleading, given that they have little in common, beyond both being European horror films with a rather melancholic atmosphere. You have to sell your product to the masses somehow, however, and I'm not sure how else I would have marketed Left Bank to an audience that had never heard of it. Then again, the film does wear its influences on its sleeve, combining the sort of apartment block dread that Roman Polanski used to excellent effect in Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant with the otherworldliness of pagan rituals from the likes of The Wicker Man. All of this is nothing new, of course, but Left Bank is well enough executed to be worth a watch in spite of its somewhat derivative nature.

Runner Marie (Eline Kuppens) is forced to drop out of a prestigious pan-European competition when she collapses shortly after coming second in the qualifiers (she was desperate to come first). Diagnosed with a serious iron deficiency, she is ordered by her doctor to take things easy for the next few weeks. Sick of having nothing to do except lounge around the house butting antlers with her mother (Sien Eggers), she decides to move in with her new boyfriend Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts) who lives in an apartment on Antwerp's Left Bank. At first, all is well. She and Bobby introduce one another to their respective mothers, enjoy each other's company, and have lots and lots of sex. Gradually, however, things begin to gow awry for Marie as she meets some of the apartment block's more unsettling tenants, and becomes prone to bouts of nausea and deeply unsettling dreams. Her mother, an ageing hippie type, senses bad vibes in the apartment block and urges her to get out, but it's not until it's too late that Marie realises just what sort of unsavoury goings-on she has walked into.

Left Bank takes its time to get going, but this unquestionably works in its favour as it builds up an atmosphere of impending dread that simply could not have been achieved had director Pieter Van Hees gone down the cheaper route and opted for quick gratification. Last week, in his Radio 5 review of Michael Haneke's latest offering, The White Ribbon, Mark Kermode talked about how the film's great strength was that it preyed on the threat of something bad happening rather than actually showing something bad happening, and the same technique is at play here. A few hyperkinetic, frenetically-shot moments in the final act notwithstanding, the film's style is clinical and understated, utilising the Scope frame and naturally dour locales to impressive effect. The score, while minimalist in the extreme and completely absent for lengthy stretches, kicks in where appropriate and adds to the air of unease.

Acting-wise, Van Hees succeeds in getting a great deal out of Eline Kuppens who, in her debut film, delivers and incredibly assured and naturalistic performance. In terms of the script, there's not a great deal to Marie short of a handful of broadly defined traits, but Kuppens takes the character and runs with her, and somehow makes her seem real. She appears in more or less every scene and, while this is largely a mood piece, the bulk of the film still rests on her shoulders. It's a good thing her performance is so strong, because she is to some extent able to distract you from the problems with the script, namely a tendency to throw a variety of ideas on to the screen that aren't fully realised. Many of these are to do with character: for instance, around halfway through the film Marie tells Bobby that sometimes she wishes she could just start her life over with a clean slate. It doesn't make a great deal of sense because we aren't given any indications prior to suggest that she is overly unhappy with her life. Instead, this aside is introduced merely to set up the film's climax, which ultimately feels a little tacked on and results in a lack of cohesion. Similarly, while Van Hees attempts to keep the specifics of what's going on shrouded in uncertainty, horror veterans should have no trouble working out what Marie has stumbled into when the word "Samhain" appears.

But despite these concerns, and a nagging sensation that it was ten minutes longer than it needed to be, Left Bank made for interesting viewing. So many people have written about the dire state of the majority of current American horror output that it hardly seems worth referring to it here, but films such as this, flawed though they may be, simply serve to remind us how little US horror currently has to offer in comparison with its counterparts from more exotic locales. The closest counterpart Hollywood has put out to Left Bank this year is probably David S. Goyer's The Unborn, and the comparison should leave no doubt as to which side of the Atlantic is currently producing the cream of the crop.

3 Comments

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at whiggles[at]ntlworld[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.