FORUM Francine REVIEWED BY DAVID D’ARCY


Take a Sundance-style no-frills movie about a woman starting life over after prison, and cut its budget by 90% and that pretty much covers the look of Francine, starring Melissa Leo. This portrait of a struggling soul by Brian M


Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky has a garage-film purity and a dark view of American marginalia that could strike a chord in Europe. Leo in the lead will drive Francine more deeply into the mar-


Spain REVIEWEDBY LEE MARSHALL


A cast of kooky loners led by Grégoire Colin disap- pear into a big multilinear black hole in Austrian director Anja Salomonowitz’s debut, which cen- tres, in an unfocused sort of way, on immigration issues. Visually stylised, larded with Biblical imagery and ultimately rather cold, the film holds our attention at first as we struggle to work out in what way the four oddball characters it focuses on are connected and where the story is going with them. But as the unlikely twists and gnomic lines of


dialogue pile up, it is difficult not to let the irrita- tion creep in — something not helped by the fact two of the four characters are losers with few redeeming qualities. The film’s heightened autumnal palette, obtru-


sively quirky production design and superficially hip multistrand storyline could conceivably talk some audiences round, but without the backbone of satisfying dramatic structure or characters that feel real, these are meagre compensations. Colin has a certain cachet, especially among female viewers, but this is unlikely to be enough to steer Spain towards much theatrical action outside of Austria and Germany. In the great tradition of arthouse films that have


little to do with the place they are named after, Spain opens with a crash between a car and van on


n 8 Screen International at the Berlinale February 15, 2012


ketplace, and after festivals and an eventual art- house release it could also be used by film schools as a manual for low-budget film-making. Francine (Leo) is released from prison for a


crime that is never disclosed. To the accompani- ment of annoying music, she stumbles through several jobs involving animals — from a pet store to a vet’s office. It seems that we are back to the template of numbing loser angst in drab settings. Yet Francine proves that less can be more.


US-Can. 2012. 74mins Directors/screenplay Brian M Cassidy, Melanie Shatzky Production companies, Pigeon Projects, Washington Square Films International sales Washington Square Films, kstern@wsfilms.com Producers Joshua Blum, Katie Stern Executive producer Anna Gerb Cinematography Brian M Cassidy Editors Brian M Cassidy, Benjamin Gray, Melanie Shatzky Main cast Melissa Leo, Victoria Charkut, Keith Leonard


Writer-directors Cassidy and Shatzky have found a bare-boned realism here, beginning with a full- frontal nude shot of Leo in prison that her publi- cist would probably order burned. Cassidy and Shatzky do not take the path into


magic realism, cloying quirkiness or mumblecore mannerisms that many indies might. Instead, we see a character take shape and come unhinged in utterly believable circumstances — from the eve- ryday frustrations of working in a pet store to the burning of animal bodies kept in a veterinarian’s deep freeze until cremation. The key to that tone is Leo, who plays with an


absolute deadpan until she is in contact with the animals she loves. The performance does not call for the horror of Charlize Theron’s self-transfor- mation in Monster, but without make-up or much of a wardrobe or many spoken lines, the Oscar- winning Leo (best supporting actress for The Fighter) probably will not turn this role into a Vogue spread. Leo’s Francine lives at the edge of society where


the glass is always half empty, except when she feeds the animals who transform her humble house into an unruly hamster cage on growth hormones. The interiors make those in The Fighter look like Beverly Hills. Things do become odd — when Francine


washes a kitten’s paws with her tongue or shaves an anaesthetised cat, which looks like a stuffed animal, before an operation in the vet’s office — but the film’s charm is that it does not labour to interest its audience. Production values are austerely solid for the


low-budget project. Cassidy — also the cinema- tographer — beats the logistical odds with close handheld observations that capture Francine in her world, whether she is lying on the floor with dogs or in a rowing boat in the middle of a lake.


FORUM


Aust. 2012. 101mins Director Anja Salomonowitz Production company Dor Film International sales Doc & Film International, www. docandfilm.com Producers Danny Krausz, Kurt Stocker Screenplay Dimitre Dinev, Anja Salomonowitz Cinematography Sebastian Pfaffenbichler Editor Frederic Fichefet Production designer Maria Gruber Music Max Richter Main cast Tatjana Alexander, Grégoire Colin, Lukas Miko, Cornelius Obonya


a country road in what turns out to be lower Austria. Though both drivers die, Sava (Colin) emerges


unscathed from a crate in the back of the van. Ini- tially assuming he is in Spain — it later emerges he had paid the van driver to take him to Barcelona — the taciturn Moldovan is given board and lodg- ing by a priest whose moped he fixes. He turns out to be a dab hand too at evaluating antiques and restoring wooden statues — a dilapidated group of


which are soon keeping him busy in the priest’s country church. The plotlines of the characters are interleaved in


a way that apes the structure of a film such as Babel or Crash to little real purpose, as few side- lights are shed between one story and the next. And the film’s religious imagery — which ranges from the characters’ names to heavy-handed sym- bols of feet-washing, crucifixes, loaves and fishes — is of the ‘put it in and see what sticks’ variety.


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