The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 27

THE GUARDIAN Thursday November 21 1991 REVIEWSCREEN 27 A sky-diving, surfing, male-bonding movie directed by a woman? Why not, Kathryn Bigelow asks Mark Salisbury Hollywood's macho woman TTr ATHRYN Bigelow has mal, very tribal. I tried to use the surfing as a landscape that could offer a subversive mentality." Californian-born Bigelow readily connects the subversive surfer thieves of her latest work with the anarchists of her first film, the art-house biker pic The Loveless, and the nomadic vampires of her second, the inspired Near Dark. "Movies can be cathartic," she says. "I think that they can transform you, they're kind of windows on to another universe that you can't experience in any other context. I think the most important thing is to work in an accessible format but with a conscience that's the overriding motivator for me." Given her position as queen of the action picture does Bigelow believe her work will encourage women to follow her lead and make tougher, grittier films? "I think they should just be encouraged to work in an as uncompromised a form as possible, be that tougher or softer," she responds.

"It's really a question of being true to their vision." Bigelow's own, she says, is reflective of her surroundings. "There's an element of reality certainly Blue Steel was inspired by having lived in New York and being aware of a number of women on the police force and imagining what their life and ex Fall guys FBI agent Keanu Reeves, left, has a mid-air encounter with bank robber Patrick Swayze in Point Break Valmont, Milos Forman's soft-edged tale of sexual corruption, heads the new films reviewed by The sweet seduction of Cecile Derek Malcolm Firstly, it is extremely well played by Doug E. Doug, Mario Joyner, John Leguizamo and Nester Serrano. And secondly, Vasquez orchestrates his comedy with a telling sense of the limited but almost heroically hopeful lifestyle it is depicting. Encouraged at first to contemplate another street-gang melodrama, you end up actually liking the bums who, though seeming decidedly dangerous to know, are in fact as human as the rest of us as they strut the town.

For this alone, the film is worth seeing. The British Ama (Renoir, 15) is a film for which there can be no expectations whatsoever, since it deals for the first time with Africans in London who are not cast as down-trodden But this is a long and hardly crisp account of the story, sometimes fatally lacking in pace and narrative drive, sauntering through its plot as if loath to leave any of its detail aside. You do wonder sometimes whether it is not a little too sweetly fetching for its own good. No one could have accused the Frears film of that. Joseph B.

Vasquez's Hangin' With The Homeboys (Cannons, Haymarket etc, 15) hardly takes itself seriously enough to be considered a black movie of great consequence. But this story of four young city bumpkins from the South Bronx (two black and two Puerto Rican) on a night out in Manhattan has enough home truths to qualify for an honourable mention anyway. immigrants and tells its story with due attention to African as well as European narrative traditions and sensibilities. Ama is a young girl who believes she is an ancestral messenger for both her elderly father and her boxer brother. The former must return home to Ghana to avoid death and the latter must cancel a fight to avoid certain injury in the ring.

No one believes her and the contemporary setting of London militates against what turn out to be prophetic warnings. The film is thus part fantasy and part realist, an exploration of the African psyche, cast sometimes badly adrift in the modern world. Directed by Kwate Nee-Owoo and Kwesi Owuso, both born in Ghana, Ama is often hesitant, unclear as to what it really believes and not blessed with much narrative fluency. But it remains an intriguing and very honourable breakthrough which, despite its failings, is both perceptive about its characters and encouragingly determined to persuade us to look at things through different eyes. British director Franc Rod-dam's K2 (Cannon, Shaftesbury Avenue etc, 15) was shot in the Canadian Rockies at heights of up to 16,000 feet.

There was 24 feet of snow during the filming and temperatures fell as low as minus 40. It was not a comfortable film to make and the result is a mountaineering movie that at least looks spectacularly authentic. The Rockies doubled for K2, the second highest and most Uvt been asked this par-JBL sL ticular question a lot. No matter how delicately you phrase it, how much you skirt around the issue, it comes down to the same thing; Why does she make the kind of movies she makes? As the sole woman director regularly working in the traditionally male-dominated action movie arena, Bigelow has had to contend with critics ill-at-ease with her proficiency with the medium. Moreover, she does it better than most of her male counterparts.

"I don't think of film-making as a gender-related occupation or skill," Bigelow recites in response. It's an answer she must have given many times before. "I think a film-maker is a film-maker. That's not to say you don't bring your own, either masculine or feminine tendencies to any particular body of work. Men can handle, for instance, emotional material beautifully, just as a woman might.

It's a question of perception, of how a woman might handle something that might be perceived as masculine; but then you have to ask yourself, why is it perceived as masculine? Action is action." By her own admission Bigelow makes "high-impact films that get in your face:" gut-wrenchingly kinetic, explosively visceral, poetically violent; like a female Walter Hill crossed with Sam Peck- inpah. While fellow directors Penny Marshall and Martha Coolidge are content to scour the emotional battlefields, Bigelow goes for a rush res ponse: all fast edits, upfront camerawork and an almost fetish-like respect for weaponry. Oliver Stone, producer of her last film, Blue Steel, says she possesses a relentless-ness he describes as masculine. Bigelow laughs at the suggestion, again questioning the need to ascribe gender. Though she does her best to disguise it, there's a twinge of irritation in her voice.

POINT Break, out this week, is Bigelow's hiehly enjoyable fourth feature. A Visually stunning, if intellectually shallow, surfingsky diving romp, it stars the talented Keanu Reeves as a fresh-faced FBI agent on the trail of a gang of bankrobbers wno disguise themselves as former US presidents Reagan, Nixon, and Carter. Tracking them to the beach he falls under the beguiling influence of surfing guru Patrick Swayze. So far, so spectacular. Yet having formerly suc ceeded in wringing invigorating new twists from well- worn mythologies bikers, vampires and cops with her first three efforts you'd expect more than wipeouts and macho-bonding from Bigelow.

"It's not about good guys versus bad guys," she contends. "It's a little more complicated when your good guy your 'hero' is seduced by the darkness inside him and your 'villain' is no villain whatsoever, he's more of an anti-hero." I Nor, she insists, is it a film simply about surfing. "The ocean in this particular context serves as a crucible for the main characters through which they define, test and challenge themselves. It's a film about self-realisation; they could have been doing anything. The unique thing about surfing is that it kind of exists outside the system, the people that embody it are of their own mind set, they have their own language, dress code, conduct, behaviour and it's very pri IS extremely doubtful that those who liked Stephen Frears' adapta-i tion of Christopher Hampton's Dangerous Liaisons will find Milos Forman and Jean-Claude Carriere's version of the same Choderlos de Laclos novel as satisfactory.

But Valmont (Lumiere, 15) is certainly a beautiful film if nothing like as hard-edged. It embraces its 18th century erotica more as a game played out by characters reacting against the morality of the day. If Dangerous Liaisons spoke of corruption, Valmont links its tale more to the spirit of our own sixties and substitutes a bittersweet ending for the black finale of the previous film. Forman constructs a much less abrasive entertainment and, accordingly, Colin Firth's boyish Valmont and Annette Bening's pretty Marquise seem totally different characters, cocking a snook at the world by engineering Cecile's seduction. The girl, as played (very well) by Fairuza Balk, is simply an innocent plaything as much tormented by Meg Tilly's virtuous Madame de Tourvel as by those who would remove her virginity.

If you believe nothing is totally serious in the game of life, it is possible to find Valmont a charmingly apt expression of that idea. Its cinematography, by Miroslav On-dricek, is almost painterly, its decor and costumes are magnificent, and its music lends an air of period enchantment to the ear as well as the eye. Red Lantern gives a warm glow Derek Malcolm and Tim Pulteine on the highlights and flat spots of the took place before and during production and the scheduled Christmas 1989 release was missed. Eventually the $25 million film opened in the US last summer, a bad time for a "non-popcorn" picture, to some quite respectful reviews but hardly any business. When the Japanese and Australian returns were no more encouraging, Paramount and their distributors, UIP, decided European release should be passed to independent companies.

The British distributors Blue Dolphin are giving it an art Guardian Lecture was packed, in marked contrast to composer Michel Legrand's. Modestly he explained to his rapt audience that his entry into Indian politics as a Congress Party stalwart had been a mistake and that to clear his name from implication with the Bofors scandal which rocked Rajiv's Congress government, he took resort to the British rather than the Indian courts. Asked why, he said: "That's what the judge asked too but it's very simple. I won my libel action in three weeks. It would have taken 15 years for the case to be heard in India, and I hadn't got the time." Now 50, this son of a famous Hindi poet was so severely injured in a fight scene a few years ago that the whole nation almost came to a halt until he was out of danger.

He said the devotion of his millions of fans touched him greatly but they wanted him to go on play dangerous peak in the Himalayas (which has claimed the lives of a considerable number of climbers) and the story concerns an attorney from Seattle (Michael Biehn) and a physicist (Matt Craven) who attempt to conquer their own fears of the mountain itself. Basically a little similar to Werner Herzog's Scream Of Stone, unveiled at Venice, K2's intrepid cinematography is not matched by a very convincing script. But you can't have everything and at least the film delivers on the mountain if not in the mind. If it is action sequences you want, however, Kathryn Bige-low's Point Break (Odeon West End, 15) would be hard to beat. Surf and sky-diving sequences alternate with chases in this almost sublimely silly thriller about rookie and veteran FBI agents (Keanu Reeves and Gary Busey) chasing a gang of bank robbers, led by Patrick Swayze, round California.

The robbers are called the Ex-Presidents since they wear Nixon, Reagan, and Carter masks while on the job and Swayze is a quasi-mystical surfer whose Zen philosophy and more down-to-earth greed fight uneven battles with each other. A great deal of male bonding goes on in between the stunts and one occasionally wonders what a woman is doing shooting it so lovingly. Bigelow, though, proves it doesn't take a man to make a macho movie in Hollywood these days. demi-travelogue was finished, he had gone out of business. But his influence can perhaps be detected in the movie's most singular line of dialogue American tourist to female counterpart: "Looking at scen ery really gives you an orgasm, doesn it? LONG TIME NO SEE: The fortnight's strangest exhumation was the Brazilian silent, Limite, made in 1930 by the then 19-year-old Mario Peixoto, who never succeeded in completing another feature, and was, in fact, believed to have died.

Research proved, though, that he was alive and evidently well in Copacabana. He was invited to London, but eventually declined. The picture is something like an abstract symbolist version of Three Men In A Boat, except that one of the trio is a woman. Did it prove a revelation? Er well, no, not really. PARTING SHOT: The mannerist trailer by Mike Leigh which prefaced all Festival screenings had a cumulative tendency to get on some spectators' nerves.

Overheard remark by one departing customer: "Who on earth did they get to do that some first-year film student?" crlfp road, mmonmlHi, 0B1-741 30a OBl-363 0331 (fl periences might be like and how they might differ from their male colleagues." While Blue Steel, with its gun-toting female protagonist (Jamie Lee Curtis), can lay claim to initiating the whole women-with-guns trend that peaked this summer with Thelma And Louise and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Bigelow shies away from acknowledging the connection. "It's just a reality. As the violence in our society escalates I think it's a symptom more of a kind of social disease than a film-making trend." She will, however, concede that accepted female dominance on screen hasn't necessarily translated to any great transference of power to women off it "It's difficult for any emerging filmmaker, be they male or female, because it's such a competitive arena and only a few films are made each BUt I think it's changing. It's a process that can only get better." Iff I ST MARTINS LANE WC2 PHONE 071.3793014 (MM III ill NOVEMBER 22 the Mall, London, SW1. 071-930 3647 2.00 Sat Sun.

Seats Bookable SBSS ttQffiita mm sensibility underpinning it is distinctively modern, and the quality of regret, so much a part of the private eye genre.is Intensified by the retrospective viewpoint Nicholson's own performance evinces an almost Oriental inscrutability, at times oddly reminiscent of Marlon Brando in his middle years, while his delivery of the Chandleresque first-person commentary is worth the price of admission by itself. In short, The Two Jakes, combining the best of the old and the best of the new, is one helluva good movie. Screen to help the group finance another, this time with a professional producer and crew and a rather more expansive budget. No use asking Scottish Television, of course. 3D OR NOT 3D: The Festival's most engagingly offbeat sidebar event was the tribute to the late Arch Oboler, pioneer of 3D movies, and maker of the first feature produced in this process, the 1952 Bwana Devil (advertising slogan: "A lion in your lap A lover in your It cannot be said that this picture, or the two later ones which Oboler made in a somewhat refined variant of the technique, managed to suggest that 3D, quite apart from the inconvenience of having to wear special viewing glasses for the privilege, could have amounted to more than a gimmick.

But the theatre was packed for Oboler's hardly-seen last film, Domo Arigato, made in Japan in 1972. The director's long-time assistant, Jerry Kay, cut a flamboyant figure in introducing the screenings, and later disclosed that Domo had been financed by the proprietor of a US chain of porno cinemas who was eager for something "artistic" to improve his image. Unfortunately, by the time this "An astounding experience house launch but intend subsequently to release it more widely. And, happily, the film proves worth the wait The further adventures of Los Angeles private dick Jake Gittes take us forward from the 1930s to the late 1940s, heyday of the noir thrillers. Their pedigree is, however, fully honoured by both the convoluted plot, cross-referencing public and private chicanery, and the jagged thrust of the movie's style.

But The Two Jakes is not, as Chinatown was, limited to an exercise in pastiche: the London Film Festival ing the same parts in the same way. "I owe them a lot," he said, "but not that." He also said he'd never kiss a woman on screen even if his producers begged him. "I'm happily married, you see. And I just wouldn't be comfortable with it" Eat your hearts out, Hollywood wives. BETTY'S BARGAIN: Nobody knows which was the most expensive movie at the Festival this year, but the cheapest (and one of the most popular) was certainly Betty's Brood, made by the Gorbals Unemployed Workers Drama Group.

It cost just about 2,000. Channel 4 is keen to show it, which ought to make Scottish Television, which has shown no interest whatsoever, look a little foolish. Director Mick McConnel (an unemployed teacher) was down in London hoping to persuade Channel 4 andor British superbly acted throughout" HIM vi mi THE 35th London Festival ends today with Mark Peploe's Afraid Of The Dark. But if the 250 people who hung about trying in vain to get into the Chinese film Raise The Red Lantern was any indication of what was the most popular film, it would certainly have got the vote rather than anything British. Alas, director Zhang Yimou was not present since the Chinese government refused him a visa to travel to the LFF, and have already banned the film.

It was not unexpected, since Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, his previous successes, were also not shown in China. Those who missed the film at the Festival, however, will soon be able to see it. Artificial Eye have bought it for this country and will screen it at the Lumiere early next year. GOLDEN OLDIE: Bv some way the oldest and wittiest Fes- I dlflTTTTTT THE sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes, (ICA, 15) has had a chequered history, writes TimfuUeine. Robert Downe's screenplay was written in 1984 and went into production two years later with Downe directing.

But soon, amid sundry vicissitudes, not least the casting of producer Robert Evans in a key role, the project collapsed and was not revived until 1989. The star, Jack Nicholson, became also the director and Harvey Keitel took Evans' role. Considerable rewriting tival guest this year was 99-year-old Hal Roach, producer for Laurel and Hardy and many other film greats. Accompanied by Stan Laurel's daughter, he was here to publicise the rather doubnul and not actually very good colourisation of and H's Way Out West, now on video. He got to his feet at the reception for him to thank Kevin Brownlow and others for their praise in the following terms: "Ladies and gentlemen, I shall soon be 100-years-old, so if you don't like what I say and want to throw me out, please throw me on something soft!" HINDI HERO: The guest who provoked the most girlish squeals, however, was undoubtedly Amitabh Bachchan, the Hindi cinema's biggest superstar in reputation as well as height (6ft 3ins).

Three of his most successful films were shown at the Festival and his BRUNSWICK SQ.WC1 PROGS RUSSELL SQUARE TUBE 2.05 PHONE 071.8378402 4.15 1 A.3Q JACK niCHOLSOn 3 you may never see Its like again" -TIME OUT "An event to fall In love with" CITY LIMITS "One of the moat exhilarating and enchanting productions of the year should on no account be missed" EVENING STANDARD "A genuine spellbinder" THE GUARDIAN "Mesmerizing a magical, beautifully orchestrated production" -THE INDEPENDENT 111 11 Ui "A MAGNIFICENT WPARWEITS performance is HYPNOTICALLY enjoyabfe' Akxemttr WaNur STANDARD "ja tough, thoughtful film, An Artificial By b)m. Bony Norman CP Z5 nUAMOUNrPICIUHESprnm a flOBERI EVAKS HAROID SCHNEIDER ft. JACK NICHOiSON THE TWO JAKES HARVEY Kflftl MEGIIUY-MADflfWf StOWE kSEU WAllAEM RUBEN BUOES FREDERIC I0HRESI DAVID KEITH. RICHARD EARNSWORTH -SSIVIIMOS 2SIGM0NO. A.S.C 1 ROBERT TDWNE ROBERT EVANS-HABOtO SCHNEIDER -CJAH NICHOLSON mioayaTBiar INMIIMnCTltEr pweraittestudios FROM FRIDAY tali Oai-r4S 33B4 ICACINEMA uwhd sens an mum wsi a ww.

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