The Unknown Girl

The Dardennes brothers (The Kid With a Bike, L'Enfant) are back with their new film The Unknown Girl out on DVD from Curzon Artificial Eye on Monday 6th February.

The film tells the story about a young female doctor, Jenny Davin (Adele Haenel) in small town Liege, Belgium; who after a long day refuses to open the door to her clinic when already an hour after closing. The next morning policemen tell her that the young woman - a black African immigrant working as a prostitute.

This starts a moral guilt in our young female protagonist, a conflicting individual who is almost bullying to her young trainee doctor. The trainee is a male and she admits she did not open the door to the girl to instill a means of superiority.

She begins an investigation to find out the identity of the young girl who has been buried without a name so here family can be informed.

The Dardennes are famous for small town stories with universal themes, here are tropes of privacy, guilt and belonging. Jenny is unusual in the sense that we do not know her history, where has she come from; we are aware of her future more with the impending clinic she may well take control of. The story makes her reassess her decisions and she does alter from lacking bedside manner to becoming a better local GP by using her local knowledge to her advantage.

Shot with gripping hand held flourish in the same vein as classic neo-realism and the better Ken Loach films, bringing a sense of documentary realism to a fictional story.

It also has a political message on immigration within EU borders in today's current political climate providing a compelling platform for this intelligent film with a brave central performance from Haenel.

The Unknown Girl is out on DVD from Monday 6th February from Curzon Artificial Eye

ANOMALISA

This sterling work of stop-motion animation (a la Fantastic Mr. Fox) comes from the creative genius of Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the script and co-directs with Duke Johnson.

From the mind that brought surreal offerings as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ... Anomalisa is a film about a male trying to find an understanding of his place in the world. Kaufman is a romantic writer, who wants the characters he starts with to end the film happy; this does not necessarily mean staying with the same partner they started the film with.

Michael (voiced by David Thewlis) is attending a conference in Cincinnati, Ohio where he is giving a speech on customer service. From the flight to the taxi ride to the hotel ride to the ex he calls, every person be it male or female is voiced by the same person, in this case Tom Noonan, a voice of soft banality and lacking emotion. This tells us Michael is suffering with disillusionment in his life, he wants to be alive and after he has a shower, he hears a new different voice.

The voice he hears is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a young telesales operator attending the conference who has read Paul's book and is a fan. The sweetness of her voice is music to Michael's ears and he wants to hear everything about Lisa, which she finds surprising as she considers herself fat and ugly in comparison to her flirtatious friend Emily, who men Lisa says prefer generally.

This anamoly of their courting happening out of the blue coupled with her name gives the film its name. Perhaps Kaufman is critiquing a fear in society about how settling for your life can lead to mundanity and everything sounding the same, Lisa is a new sensation bringing a sense of solace to his ears and eyes.

Michael and Lisa share a night cap in his room and this leads to a sexual coupling between the two, which is done with a bit more sincerity than the marionette puppets in Team America. However, Michael wakes up from a mad dream where everyone has the same voice and they all love him. He wants to convince Lisa to runaway with him and he will leave his wife back in Los Angeles. 

Following a breakdown at his convention speech, Michael travels home to his mundane household. Again everyone has the same face and voice, even his young child Henry has the voice and his demands for a present shows how ungrateful a child he is and in effect symptomatic of the life Michael endures.

The animation couples well with Kaufman's witty script with good observational dialogue such as the taxi driver describing the Cincinnati Zoo, 'You should visit it. It's zoo sized'. The voice cast do excellent work across the board, and this is another worthy film into Kauffman's pantheon full of intellect undoubtedly and now with this film, one of unique charm.

This is a beautiful little anomaly of a film, insightful of the human condition stating how we deal with loneliness and project our insecurities towards the world. Both haunting and beguiling, Anomalisa is a cinematic treat that will stay with you long after you leave its dream like quality

Anomalisa is released from Curzon World cinema in DVD and Blu-ray from Monday 11th July. The discs feature a Q&A with Kaufman and Johnson, a total of 13 featurettes, photo gallery and theatrical trailer

Victoria

Directed by Sebastian Schipper, Victoria is a gripping look at a night in the life of a young Spanish girl who lives in Berlin, and gets sucked into doing something she would not ordinarily do.

Shot in real time, the film is supposedly shot in one take as the camera follows Victoria (Laia Costa) as she leaves a nightclub at 4am in the morning to go home before work. There she encounters four guys and there is an initial flirtation with Sonne (Sebastian Lau).  He and his friends are German, and Victoria cannot talk German fluently, so in broken English they communicate about life, drink and having fun.

Halfway through the film though, there is a shift in tone as the narrative takes an abrupt turn involving a favour ex-convict Boxer (Franz Rogowski) owes someone from when he served jail time.

The hand-held camera that follows Victoria and the real-time situation creates a fear of impending doom as we follow this vulnerable girl making hasty decisions revealing her naivety because she is alone in a big city abroad.  Until the abrupt turn in the narrative, this viewer feared that Victoria was going to be a victim of sexual assault, but the shift shows how immediate a world we live in.

This is a film for the millenial era - a generation of knee-jerks and instant reaction to feel like you belong to this world.  It is a film of the here and now, and how every decision can change the rest of your life, but also how fleeting moments and meetings with people can have a further longer lasting influence.

Shot with real panache by Director of Photography Sturla Brandth Grovlen (his is the first name credited at the end of the film - and rightly so), whose camera goes where the characters go into lifts and cars; there is never a let down in the tension as the narrative unfolds.

It is a credit that while the film could be marketed as a one-take gimmick film, the cast elevate the film to something more than its selling point and a film that stays with you due to the intense performances and conviction of a director to follow through on the potential of an idea to reach the ceiling and burst through it.

Victoria is out on DVD (£13.99rrp) and Blu-ray (£15.99rrp) from Curzon/Artificial Eye on 23rd May
www.curzon.com