Film: Inception/Leaving

I've seen a few films recently, but don't really have the time or space to fit them all in. Here's a few I enjoyed (in no order of preference...):

INCEPTION (dir. Christopher Nolan)
In his previous works, from Memento to Insomnia, to the Prestige and to Batman Begins and The Dark Night, Christopher Nolan has never been a director who likes to dumb down. With his films come an authority of intelligence that other film-makers can lack, especially when dealing with studio finance or outside material such as remakes or comic books, and he has always been concerned with the mind and with the concept of reality and truth. So with Inception comes Nolan's turn, after the financial successes of the Batman prequels, to bring some serious studio money and intellectual weight together. And he does so with quite staggering effect.


Inception is less a film than a piece of cinematic engineering, constructed like a bridge so that if just one minute detail, one block of stone is removed then the whole thing may fall apart. The plot is multi-layered to the point of exhaustion, and sees Leo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb bring together a crack team of "extractors", thieves who infiltrate targets' minds through their dreams in order to steal information, to pull off one last job that will allow Cobb to finally return home to America and his children after years of exile. The job is to crack the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to the world's most powerful energy corporation, and perform "inception" by planting in his mind (as opposed to removing it) an idea, the idea to break up his father's company. Inception is, we are told, impossible, but Cobb has no other option, and so the mind-madness begins.

I have neither the time nor the energy to try and concisely explain what follows, but the story dives into the various layers of Fischer's sub-conscious as Cobb's team try to bury deeper and deeper into the depths of his mind. Each level is designed by a talented young "architect" called Ariadne (Ellen Page), and stretches time further and further, until finally we come close to Limbo, a level of subconscious where time is so slow that one second in the real world can last fifty years. Cobb is the only one to have been there before and boy does he not want to go there again.

With a great cast of reliable youngsters in support (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy in particular work hard to steal the show), Leo does a good job of bringing some heart to his character in an attempt to emotionalise the otherwise quite superficial story, but it is not the character development that we have come for in this epic, it is the concept, the construction, the scope and size of it all and I left the cinema feeling positively drained, mentally exhausted, but ultimately and entirely enthralled. The effects, the score and the production design are all faultless, building an over-whelming world (or several worlds, rather) in which we are fully invested. It is tense, twisty and most importantly it is risky to the extreme, but it shows just what can be done with cinema should those with money seek out those with brains and ambition, instead of two-a-penny infantile gamers, to build their summer hits.

As Mark Kermode has said in a recent review, this film is exactly what the movie industry needs; a hugely expensive, effects laden, star-studded summer blockbuster, funded by the studios, that makes people work, that makes an audience think and that is ambitious to the extreme. There is no excuse, he rightly says, for studios to dumb down their movies and treat the viewing public like mindless popcorn-gobbling children when this film has showed audiences' capacity to work hard and still enjoy themselves. They have come in their droves in the knowing that Inception is not going to be easy, and they will keep coming, and come again, so I say well done to Inception, and well done to Christopher Nolan and his team, for showing us the light...

LEAVING (dir. Catherine Corsini)
In this uncomfortable and unsettling drama about a bored wife in southern France who abandons her husband and children to embrace her passionate and lustful relationship with a Spanish ex-con, Kristin Scott Thomas pushes again to be recognised as one of our country's best and most over-looked actresses. Two fine accompanying performances from Sergi Lopez and Yvan Attal as sympathetic lover and scorned husband respectively make this a film for actors to relish, but there is more here for audiences to enjoy, even if they may struggle to sympathise at times with the story's heroine.


That Kristin Scott Thomas was ignored even for nomination in 2009's Academy Awards for her heart-wrenchingly frank and unflinching performance in 2008's brilliant 'I've Loved You So Long' is unforgiveable, and I for one was astounded. Over the years she has shown great talent and versatility in her performances in such English language films as Four Weddings, Gosford Park, The English Patient and, recently, Nowhere Boy, before embracing her bilingual heritage in seamlessly moving into the French cinematic arena and delivering yet more performances of real nuance and bravado.

Few people do honest emotional distress and internal struggle like Thomas, and this film provides her with the opportunity to shine as she plays Suzanne, an ex-pat who has found herself married and with children and living in rich comfort in the south of France. When she accidentally runs over a rugged builder though, things take a turn for the more deceitful, and a passionate, highly sexual love affair between them threatens to consume her. When she can't hide it anymore she confesses to her husband and walks out. Furious, he makes it his mission to sabotage their relationship in any way he can, and her desire to stay with her lover is tested more and more.

It's a very solid story - told well, emotionally engaging, brilliantly performed - and yet strangely difficult. As an audience member, it is unclear at times to what extent the director wants us to sympathise with Suzanne, a woman who has abandoned her children and a perfectly decent husband (or at least he was when they were together) in favour of a relationship seemingly built more on lust and sexual desire than emotional connection. As the film moves on, and it becomes harder and harder for Suzanne and her lover's relationship to survive, the logic in her actions is stretched. We begin to want her just to give it up, and she resembles more and more a young girl obsessed with a boy, determined to ignore her parents' sensible advice. We begin to watch with a shaking head, urging her to return home and not risk ruining everything for a relationship that is ultimately doomed (as we know, being intelligent, when we find out about her lover's criminal history).

Nevertheless, this sort of questionable motive is still intriguing and engaging and worth the rental of a DVD when it is released, if not just to see a woman engage in an onscreen affair with a man who is in his forties and normal looking, rather than some olive-skinned toyboy who paints or rescues cormorants something (see Unfaithful and other such balls).