Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 11/4/2013)

Written by Allan Scott (who had been responsible for the majority of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers scenarios) and directed by Gregory La Cava, Fifth Avenue Girl, was regarded as a bit racy when it was first released, even though it bore a passing similarity to the same director's caustic Depression satire, My Man Godfrey (1936). Focusing on the platonic, but unconventional friendship between a jobless girl and a businessman frustrated by his factory and his family, this Capra-esque slice of feel-good escapism chronicled the transformational impact that the outsider has upon the household. Although it is more graphic in its depiction. Pasolini's Theorem (1968) tells much the same tale. However, while Scott and La Cava were content to crack wise and push a little folksy New Deal ideology, Pasolini questioned whether the bourgeoisie could handle liberty and self-awareness and concluded that depravity, suicide and insanity were all better options than accepting reality.

Following a series of interviews with workers who have taken control of the means of production, postman Ninetto Davoli announces the coming of a stranger to the Milanese neighbourhood where wealthy Massimo Girotti lives with his wife Silvana Mangano, artist son Andrés José Cruz Soublette, taciturn daughter Anne Wiazemsky and southern maid Laura Betti. On first seeing the beautiful Terence Stamp, Betti lifts her skirt in an uncontrollable act of subservience and supplication. However, Stamp has to rescue her from an attempt to gas herself before his consolation can lead to seduction.

Over the next few days, Stamp also befriends Soublette and instils a new vigour into his art and confidence into his personality. Similarly, he lures Wiazemsky out of her shell and into his bed, which he also shares with the unfulfilled Mangano, who disrobes as though in a trance and waits for him with a passivity that contrasts strongly with the sense of exhilaration and renewed purpose she derives from their encounter. Even Girotti sheds the despondency that had made him ill after he slips behind a bush with the silent drifter.

But, just as the family is getting used to having Stamp around and is responding positively to his nurturing, Davoli proclaims his departure and his good work quickly unravels. Wiazemsky falls into a catatonic state, while Soublette starts covering the house with sloganising graffiti. Mangano goes in search of youths resembling Stamp as much to fill the void he has left behind as to satisfy her revived sexual appetite. Betti quits her post and returns to her native region, where she lives on nettles, levitates above a barn and cures a boy with sores on his face before allowing herself to be buried alive by Susanna Pasolini. As water miraculously pours from her grave, Girotti decides to hand over control of his business to his workforce and, having divested himself of his clothing on a railway station platform, rushes naked into the countryside and starts scaling a volcano.

`It's not important to understand Theorem,' Pasolini told one interviewer. However, when pressed about the identity of the stranger, he denied he was Christ or Satan by saying, `the important thing is that he is sacred, a supernatural being. He is something from beyond.' It is tempting to see him in relation to the parable of Dives and Lazarus, in which a damned rich man asks Abraham to send a resurrected beggar to his father's house to urge his kinsmen to mend their ways. But Pasolini seemed intent here on lamenting the `false revolution' of the spring of 1968, which he felt had been sabotaged by middle-class students playing at being radicals. Indeed, he went so far as to decry their violence towards the policemen who came from the lower orders. Yet, while he also condemns bogus art, hysterical belief and selfish consumerism in this swingeing assault on contemporary society, there is no lack of sympathy for the characters who have been confronted with their shortcomings and then abandoned to act upon their new self-knowledge.

While applauding the performances and the excellence of Luciano Puccini's production design, Giuseppe Ruzzolini's cinematography and Ennio Morricone's score, the critics of the period were divided as to whether the family was blessed or cursed by Stamp's intervention. Some saw the film as a typical `60s demand for liberation from the constraints of capitalist tyranny, while others thought it a blasphemous parody of the Messianic myth. The Church didn't know what to make of it, with the International Catholic Film Office giving Pasolini an award at the Venice Film Festival, while the Vatican denounced him. The Italian authorities were no less conflicted, as they sanctioned the film's release after Pasolini was acquitted of obscenity charges. Even the Marxists complained that Pasolini had exhibited `a certain compassion' for the detested middle-classes, despite his contention that `the point of the film is roughly this: a member of the bourgeoisie, whatever he does, is always wrong'.

Pasolini had envisaged Theorem as a verse tragedy for the stage and had initially conceived the stranger as a kind of fertility god. But he eventually proclaimed him to be `a generically ultra-terrestrial and metaphysical apparition', who could equally be the Devil or a mixture of God and Devil. However, his identity mattered less than the fact that he was `authentic and unstoppable'. The picture clearly seems to adhere to Buñuel's contention that spiritual growth and political consciousness are dependent on sexual freedom. But it's also faithful to its title in that it posits an answer to the question `would a bourgeois household implode if it encountered a force from outside its experience?' Thus, this is a revision of the Edenic fable, with the family realising its shame as a serpentine tempter exposes the reality of its consumerist paradise and forces it to accept its true nature.

Another interloper proves just as disruptive in Katarzyna Klimkiewicz's feature debut, Flying Blind, as the ordered existence of a Bristol-based aerospace engineer comes under threat when she falls for a handsome Algerian with a mysterious past. Affording Helen McCrory the opportunity to prove there is screen life after Narcissa Malfoy, this is a rarity in so far as it allows a middle-aged British actress to play the kind of intellectually and sexually confident protagonist her continental counterparts (particularly in France) are offered on a much more regular basis. It's only a shame, therefore, that the story should be so formulaic and allow itself to become distracted by a xenophobic Muslim terror subplot instead of sticking to the key theme of how our society expects women of a certain age and background to behave.

Although she disapproves of its intended deployment, fortysomething Helen McCrory is excited to be working on Remotely Piloted Air Vehicle (or drone) for the armed forces. She more than holds her own in discussions with superiors Tristan Gemmill and Lorcan Cranitch and brasshats Tim Wallers and Jonathan Pembroke and relishes the challenge of making refinements to her design to a tight deadline. Father Kenneth Cranham (who worked on Concorde) is hugely proud of her and she is pretty pleased with herself as she wittily dismisses the protestations of a mouthy student after she gives a lecture at the local university.

As she leaves, however, she realises she has locked herself out of her car and laughs when Najib Oudghiri offers to break in for her. She notices that his textbook is out of date, but thinks nothing more of it as he sidles away. However, when he bumps into her at a cashpoint in the city some time later, she insists on getting him an updated edition from her elegant Georgian townhouse and they end up spending the rest of the evening wandering around the Bristol waterfront. McCrory invites Oudghiri home, but he slips away when she nips into the bathroom to compose her thoughts. However, he leaves a note containing a couple of lines of Arabic poetry and she goes to a nearby kebab shop to have them translated and is sufficiently intrigued by their teasing message to track him down.

He shares a house with Sherif Eltayeb, who asks McCrory some loaded questions as they watch Oudghiri play football on a patch of wasteland. She is also put out when they go for a meal and he has a furtive conversation with waitress Razane Jammal, who turns out to be an ex-girlfriend. But, even though she is conscious of the age difference and is aware that a liaison with a Muslim could be considered a risk given her profession, McCrory refuses to see why she should deny herself some fun and embarks upon a passionate affair. She even allows Oudghiri to move in with her after he is beaten up and hires him to redecorate after she discovers that he is not a registered student, but a taxi driver with an expired visa.

A concerned Cranham sees them together and worries that his daughter's reckless decisions will come back to haunt her. But she assures him that everything is fine and confides in Gemmill that she is enjoying her fling. Shortly afterwards, however, factory guard Glyn Grinstead stops McCrory at the security barrier and she is interrogated by Philippa Howard, who warns her that Oudghiri and his friends are under surveillance. Suddenly anxious that she has been duped, McCrory takes a peek at her lover's laptop and throws him out when she discovers that he has been looking at fundamentalist websites.

Unable to get him out of her mind, however, McCrory asks Jammal for details of his background and she reveals that he had been jailed for activities against the repressive Algerian regime and McCrory feels so guilty that she rushes to see Oudghiri and beg his forgiveness for her folly. But, having made up, she stumbles upon a cache of weapons hidden in a secret compartment under the bath and carelessly leaves a mobile phone on the floor as she beats a hasty retreat. Howard and cop Sam Ellis pay her another visit and Cranham tries to convince her she is doing the right thing by following her head rather than her heart. But McCrory can't help feeling she has betrayed Oudghiri and sets out to find him before the security forces do.

Working from an idea by Caroline Harrington, screenwriters Naomi Wallace and Bruce McLeod set out to establish McCrory's credential as a self-assured and fiercely independent woman. She spouts technical jargon with ease and enjoys her banter with Gemmill and Cranham, who had raised her alone after her mother had died when she was child. But, as is so often the case in even the best intentioned movies, McCrory succumbs to the charms of a hunk and starts letting her libido make the most irrational choices on her behalf. In order to excuse her idiocy, however, the script makes her beau a freedom fighter who is only branded a terrorist by paranoid spies incapable of seeing what a fine and noble creature he is. But few will be persuaded by a heroine whose supposed brilliance and professionalism prove no match for her susceptibility to every piece of conflicting information she receives about the 24 year-old stud who makes her feel like a real woman. 

Despite these enervating character flaws, McCrory gives a compelling performance that is complemented by cinematographer Andrzej Wojciechowski's sensitivity to her subtly shifting expressions. However, the spark with Oudghiri never quite ignites, while Cranham struggles to do much with yet another aversive role. Having made her name with the 2007 documentary Wasserschlacht: The Great Border Battle (which she co-directed with Andrew Friedman) and such shorts as Nothing to Lose and Hanoi-Warsaw (both 2009), Klimkiewicz directs steadily enough and generates a decent amount of climactic suspense. But the social and political themes get lost in the increasingly melodramatic narrative which allows the audience off the hook by enabling it to judge McCrory rather than confront its own possible prejudices.

It's much tougher to condone the actions of American in Paris Bradley Corbet in Antonio Campos's Simon Killer. Allegedly inspired by the writings of Georges Simenon, but owing plenty to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, this appears to follow Campos's feature bow, Afterschool (2008), in indicting the malevolent influence of the Internet on modern male impressions of the opposite sex. However, as with Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), which Campos produced, this is more a story about the difficulties people face in overcoming emotional trauma and the ruinous decisions that they sometimes make when not in complete control.

Having just broken up with his five-year girlfriend, twentysomething Brady Corbet arrives in France to stay with his cousin, Nicolas Ronchi. Left to his own devices for a few days, Corbet wanders around the capital's landmarks and galleries by day and its bars by night. However, he has no luck in picking up girls, although he does chat briefly to Constance Rousseau and Lila Salet on the Métro after he is harangued by Cambodian Etienne Rotha Moeng for bumping into him in the street. Following an unsatisfying sex line encounter and an even less enjoyable conversation with mother Alexandra Neil, Corbet allows himself to be shepherded into a Pigalle bar by doorman Yannis Calonnec. He pays for sex with African hostess Mati Diop, who breaks the rules by giving him her number in case he wants a private session.

Upset at receiving an email from his ex saying she wants nothing more to do with him because he has changed beyond all recognition, Corbet calls Diop for a paid date in her apartment. However, when he gets beaten up while trying to stop a mugging at the Gare du Nord, Diop reluctantly allows him to stay with her while he makes alternative arrangements. As they lie in bed together, she tells him about the violent husband who abused her while she was having a miscarriage and Corbet (who only has schoolboy French) misunderstands and thinks she works as a prostitute to raise her son.

Lying to Neil that he has gone to Prague and is focused on finding something worthwhile to do with his neuroscience degree, Corbet enjoys lots of sex, drugs and rock`n'roll with Diop, who is taken by the awkward charm he exudes while dancing inexpertly in a nightclub. After a couple of days, he suggests that she should film her clients and blackmail them so she wouldn't have to work so hard. However, when they try fleecing Michaël Abiteboul, he turns out to be a cop and Corbet only just evades his clutches having followed him home to make a doorstep proposition.

They have more luck with guilty husband Souleymane Dicko, who watches laptop footage of his infidelity with deep shame, as Corbet and Diop celebrate their imminent payday with energetic sex. Soon afterwards, however, Corbet runs into Rouseau who remembers him from the train and tells him about her literature course over coffee. But, on getting home, he finds Diop has been badly beaten by Abiteboul and gives her the fox lapel pin he has had since childhood to cheer her up.

His concern doesn't stop him from meeting Rousseau, however, and they kiss in a club, where again his ungainly dancing style proves irresistible. He keeps trying to contact Solo to arrange a cash collection, but he receives no reply until the following day, when the victim's wife calls to ask Corbet why has been pestering her husband and if he can explain why he has suddenly disappeared. Realising he could be in big trouble, Corbet runs out on Rousseau and hurries home to Diop to urge her to move out as quickly as possible. She smells another woman on him, however, and brands him a coward. In a fit of pique, Corbet attacks her and leaves her in a dreadful state, as he drops the incriminating phone into a street gutter.

Needing somewhere to crash, he badgers Rousseau. But she refuses to let him stay and he drops in on Ronchi in the middle of a birthday party. He asks if he can take a shower and, suddenly remembering that he left his fox pin with Diop, he begins whimpering pathetically in fear of being apprehended. In desperation, Corbet sends his ex a message begging her to take him back and insisting that he has changed. He has a nervous moment at the airport, as his visa has expired. But he is allowed to depart and seems to escape becoming the killer of the film title, as Diop joltingly regains consciousness.

Playing on the image created in such pictures as Michael Haneke's Funny Games US (2007), Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Martha Marcy May Marlene (both 2011), 23 year-old Brady Corbet delivers another chilling display of seething sociopathy in this gripping, if not entirely convincing thriller. But, for all the confused amorality and exploitative opportunism, it isn't entirely clear what Campos is trying to say about his protagonist or the society that spawned him. Much of this has to do with the opacity of the narrative, which denies the viewer any tangible backstory to explain Corbet's mindset. But the plotting often feels haphazardly extemporised and too many of the secondary characters, including Rousseau, Abiteboul and Dicko (who is better known in France as the rapper, Solo), seem to exist solely to complicate the sleepwalking Corbet's nightmarish progress.

Conspiring with cinematographer Joe Anderson to disconcert the audience with some chicly eccentric framing choices and lengthy Dardenne-like takes, Campos uses the percussive score by Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and the driving techno-rock songtrack to give the action plenty of audiovisual punch. He also concocts a supremely disorientating transition style that eschews plain cuts, fades or dissolves to fill the screen with scrawls of colour that almost convey the blurring of Corbet's sense of right and wrong. But the moral ambivalence ultimately proves as problematic as the sexual explicitness and the bleak wit, which too often feel self-consciously contrived rather than intrinsic to either the sordid drama or the disturbed individual at its black heart.

Dutch newcomer Muriel d'Ansembourg similarly seems to have set out to shock in Good Night, the pick of the BAFTA Shorts programme that includes all of the 2013 nominations for the Live-Action and Animation categories, with the curious exception of Mark Gill and Baldwin Li's The Voorman Problem. As each title was up for an award, one might expect the quality to be better than that in the average portmanteau picture. But this is an inconsistent package, with each picture suffering from moments of maladroitness or self-indulgence alongside the occasional flash of inspiration.

Made as a graduation assignment for the London Film School, this dark insight into the precocity of modern teenage girls centres on 14 year-olds Anna Hogarth and Rosie Day as they doll themselves up for a night on the tiles. Dancing provocatively to music that dares them to be dangerously sexy, Day suggests they insert vodka tampons to give them a boost without exposing them to booze breath. However, Hogarth quickly feels uncomfortable and slips into a back alley to relieve herself, where she is accosted by drunken Scot Dave MacRae. He ignores pal Michael Stevenson and starts making lewd suggestions that prompt the girls to jump into stranger Jay Taylor's car. With Day suddenly feeling unwell, Taylor offers to drive them home. But he is more than a little tempted when Hogarth begins to flirt with him.

Admirably photographed by Arturo Vasquez to convey the sordid reality of nightlife in any town centre across the country, this is a film that will alarm every parent of teenage girls. Wisely, d'Ansembourg refrains from pushing the story too far, as the line between innocent teasing and felonious seduction begins to blur. But she coaxes a superb performance out of Hogarth (with whom she had previously worked on Play in 2009), who just about keeps her wits about her as the equally hesitant Taylor flatters her into her first kiss.

The theme of staying strong in the face of emotional strain recurs in Kris Kelly's digital animation, Here to Fall, and Fyzall Boulifa's mini-drama, The Curse. The first opens with a signal fizzing across telephone wires that seems to carry a message from her father to a girl in a hooded top. It clearly makes a deep impression on her, as she sees a human-like shadow forming on the wall of a building in a rapidly fragmenting metropolis and hops across some streetlights to keep up with it. But the skyline appears to fold in on itself and Amy plunges into a darkness that is eventually illuminated by a dayglo pink jellyfish that she is keen to avoid. Back on the roof, she cowers against a wall. But she is soon negotiating wires high above the streets as the shadow seems to beckon her on.

It has to be said that this is not an easy film to interpret. The vision, the ambition and the computer-generated draughtsmanship are admirable, but no concession is made to the viewer, who is left to search for meaning in images that never quite enchant or entice as they are intended. By contrast, Moroccan Fyzal Boulifa goes for stark simplicity in The Curse, which builds on the good impression made with Whore (2008) and Burn My Body (2010). Photographed by Taina Galis to emphasise the brightness of the sun scorching the arid Chichaouan desert, the action centres on Ibtissam Zabara, a young woman who has been caught in flagrante with her older lover by a bunch of kids from her village. Already considering her an outsider, they accuse her of being a slut and threaten to expose her indiscretion to the elders unless she buys them sweets.

Chanting about Twix, Kit-Kat, Mars and Coca-Cola, the urchins follow Zabara to a remote outpost, where she performs a sexual favour for its occupant in return for cash. She plonks the toddler sent by the others to keep an eye on her in front of the television and plugs her ears to distract her. But the child turns to watch with uncomprehending fascination. Outside, she guzzles candy with relish, while the ringleader reassures Zabara that she is now their friend, as he tucks into a cake. However, as she hears the call to prayer from the village on the horizon, she realises she is trapped by both her guilt and the dread that one of the children will eventually let something slip or make further demands for their silence.

This sense of alienation is also felt by the cartoon anti-hero of Eamonn O'Neill's I'm Fine Thanks, which adopts a bold graphic style and garish colour palette to chronicle the moments that presaged a tragedy. The first involved a round-faced youth being knocked off his bicycle by a female playmate, who snaps the horn off his handlebars and leaves him prone to be covered in clippings from a passing lawnmower. Three years on, the kid is mocked by a cynical teacher and, four years after that, he suffers the humiliation of the girl he has never stopped loving backing away from him when he tries to hold her hand. Now, a decade later, he is almost invisible to his fellow passengers as he straphangs on the Tube and even lacks the confidence to accept a friend request from the old flame who never was.

The memory of the broken bike horn returns to haunt to him and he reaches breaking point after witnessing a girl being attacked in the rain and being bored senseless by a droning workmate. Suddenly, his head starts to distort in a jerky riot of colour and he is still in this funk when a man on the station platform asks if he is okay. In his mind, he bellows at the passengers who hit him with their backpacks or carelessly flicked hair and he even takes on a couple of skinheads who pull knives on him. But reality proves more fatally prosaic.

Produced while O'Neill was studying at the Royal College of Art, this is a visually arresting and surprisingly moving series of vignettes that may not have anything particularly new to say, yet recognises the merits of brevity. The same cannot be said for Edinburgh College of Art graduate Will Anderson's hybrid offering, The Making of Longbird, which may have won the award, but rather rambles through its 15 minutes and fails to exploit a splendid premise. Harking back to the golden age of Russian cinema, the action opens with a clip from a monochrome cut-out animation by Vladislav Aleksandravich Feltov, a weaver of worlds who was a close friend and collaborator of the stop-motion maestro Vladislav Starevich (sic). But this is no mere tribute, as Anderson intends reviving Feltov's most famous creation, Longbird, as a fire prevented him from finishing his masterpiece.

On Day 1, Anderson explains how new techniques will enable him to breathe new life into Longbird, who was once so iconic that he featured in an American advertising campaign for cigarettes. However, Feltov began to feel intimidated by his creation and he hopes to avoid similar pitfalls in making him relevant once more. But it soon becomes apparent on Day 2 that Longbird has a mind of his own. He may only be a long, thin strip of black cardboard, but he refuses to change his accent to suit Anderson and dubs him a silly boy for never having seen the Bolshoi Ballet and for attempting such an ambitious project without a script. A caption reading '37 minutes later' pops up and we cross-cut between close-ups of the bird's face and the animator's mouth and fingers until Anderson loses his temper and cuts Longbird's neck with his scissors.

By Day 4, a montage of discarded drawings reveals that Anderson has failed in his attempt to redesign his hero and Longbird is far from impressed with his efforts. In order to try and shut him up, Anderson starts typing up the scenario on Day 14 and then tries to intimidate him by placing him in a busy street with lots of paper cut-out vehicles whizzing past him. He is run over by a bus and Anderson takes pleasure in ticking him off for not being able to cope with such an everyday situation. He storms off to smoke, leaving the bird to sing a Russian lament as it sits alone on the animation table.

Eight days later, Anderson concedes he may have over-reacted and re-watches Feltov's original in a bid to gain a clearer understanding of the character. He admits the project is proving tougher than he had imagined and runs a sequence of new looks for Longbird on Day 30, which meet with no approval whatsoever from the increasingly frustrated subject. In the hope of drumming up some outside enthusiasm, Anderson puts his footage on the Chitter website. But it only gets four views and all the feedback is negative. Longbird falls out of the frame trying to look at the other material on the margin menu and the final shot shows the rubbish left lying around the empty studio and Longbird dissolves from the page as he calls out to Anderson not to quit.

Vaguely recalling The Bug Trainer (2008), Rasa Miskinyte's homage to Wladyslaw Starewicz, this is a fine idea that simply never gets off the drawing board. The banter between Anderson and Longbird (voiced by Vitalij Sicinava) is devoid of wit, while the struggle with writer's block lacks acuity. Technically, the picture couldn't be better, with Tobias Feltus and Sophie Gackowski assisting Anderson on achieving the required look and Atzi Muramatsu contributing a neat score. But the makers seem to have become a touch enamoured of their own ingenuity and, thus, despite its proficiency, this is never as funny or anarchic as it should be.

Unfortunately, the same applies to the second of the three Scottish offerings, Johnny Barrington's Tumult, which borrows heavily from Jean-Marie Poiré's hit comedy Les Visiteurs (1993) for its droll, but laboured study of clashing civilisations. As another of their number (Jean-Marc Chautems) collapses from exhaustion and the agony of his wounds, Norse warrior Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson urges sons Ívar Örn Sverrisson and Gísli Örn Garðarsson not to apportion blame for the defeat that cast them adrift in the Highlands. The sun beats down on them and Sigurðsson longs for Valhalla, as they notice a metal ship on wheels approaching through the heather.

The tourists aboard the bus from Aberdeen are no less surprised to see the Viking trio at the side of the road and guide Dolly Wells descends to greet them. On realising they are hurt, she tries to call for help. But Sigurðsson has decided she is a valkyrie to escort him to the afterlife and he is keen to follow her. However, when cagoule-clad passenger Howard Lee asks them to smile for his camera, he is beheaded when the sons are frightened by the flash bulb and wife Eileen Dunwoodie meets a similar fate when she protests. Driver Raymond Mearns is keen to make a quick getaway and he closes the doors on Sigurðsson's head as he pleads with Wells to let him board her chariot. As Sverrisson howls in anguish at seeing his father die, Garðarsson sets about him with an axe and stands by their graves with the camera around his neck, as Wells tries to pretend nothing untoward has happened in informing her surviving charges that sheep were introduced to this region during the reign of Thor and Xena the Warrior Princess. 

Hard though the cast works and splendid though Manuel Alberto Claro's imagery might be, this is nothing more than a shaggy dog story that can trace its lineage back to Monty Python's `Spam Song' (if not further). Indeed, it's disappointing that nothing comic passes through the mind of Tom Litten as he glides through the waterways lustrously photographed by Adam Biskupski in Lynne Ramsay's BAFTA-winning, Swimmer. Commissioned by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, this is an elegant, but otiose offering that almost makes Andrew Kötting's Swandown look accessible. From its opening of reeds waving in the breeze beneath a road bridge to its final shot of the ripples spreading out from Litten's arms, this couldn't look more beautiful. But it pales in comparison to something like Jean Vigo's Taris (1931) and not even the audio extracts from Linday Anderson's If... (1968), John Schlesinger's Billy Liar, Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies (both 1963), Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1970) and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) or snippets from Ralph Vaughan Williams's `Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' or Al Bowly's rendition of `The Very Thought of You' can elevate it.

When not focusing on Litten, the camera alights on a small boy in goggles (Jasper Martin) wandering down to the water's edge, lovers Sophie McKeeman and Oscar McVeigh strolling along the bank, a boy in a bunny suit watching others firing arrows underwater, and a woman (Caroline Main) and a tramp (Adam Holden) looking down from a bridge. At one point, Litten seems to rise from the water and walk through the woods towards a fairground. But the significance is fleeting and soon lost, as he dips beneath the surface of a placid lake whose meticulous framing epitomises the artistry of the exercise. But, while it evokes the poetic actualities of Humphrey Jennings with its adroit, tapestried counterpointing of sound and vision, this paean to the British landscape, people and culture lacks genuine resonance and says much more about its maker than her homeland.

What's most striking these seven shorts is the conscious effort made by each film-maker to be stylistically innovative. By contrast, the two documentaries on release this week couldn't be more traditional and, while each does its job adequately, neither provides any shattering revelations about their potentially fascinating subjects. Indeed, in the case of Bess Kargman's First Position, it's impossible not to detect similarities with situations already presented in three other studies of aspiring dancers: Marilyn Agrelo's Mad Hot Ballroom (2004); Beadie Finzi's Only When I Dance (2009); and Sue Bourne's Jig (2010). Nevertheless, Kargman ably captures the personalities of her hopefuls, as well as the pressures they face in order both to please their parents and coaches and fulfil their own ambitions.

Each year, 5000 dancers worldwide between the ages of 9 and 19 enter the Youth America Grand Prix in the hope of being among the 300 candidates competing in the New York final for the prizes, scholarships and contracts that could change their lives. Kargman alights on seven dancers of varying ages and backgrounds and charts their progress over the months leading up to the competition. Some receive more attention than others, but each one is treated with respect and affection, as Kargman cannily manages to find a circumstance or trait that will have us rooting for each kid every step of the way. 

Adopted with her sister Mia from war-torn Sierra Leone, 14 year-old Michaela DePrince from Philadelphia is easily the most empathetic candidate. Undaunted by the fact that few black dancers succeed in the world of classical ballet and no longer fazed by the skin pigmentation around her neck that used to bother her as a child, Michaela combines poise with power and coaches Stephanie and Bo Spassoff are convinced she has the makings of a great ballerina. Jewish parents Charles and Elaine are aware of the prejudice she faces from her rivals, but their main concern coming into the New York showdown is an Achilles problem that limits the amount of training she can do and, even in the warm-up room backstage, Michaela is uncertain whether she can go on, let alone perform to the standards that have previously delighted such important figures as the Venezuelan-born Rock School ballet mistress, Mariaelana Ruiz.

Dancing since the age of four, 11 year-old Aran Bell has always responded positively to  mother Michelle's contention that achievement is impossible without sacrifice. However, neither has risked more than doctor father Ryan, who accepted a US Navy posting to Kuwait so that his son could stay on the Rome base nearest to teacher Denys Ganio. Aran is friends with Israeli girl Gaya Bommer Yemini, whose choreographer mother Nadine Bommer serves as her tutor, and they meet up for the heats in the southern city of Catania, where his classical and her modern routines secure them berths in New York.

Having moved his entire business from Palo Alto to Walnut Creek in California, Brit Mat Fogarty has also gone to extremes to boost the chances of his children, Miko (12) and Jules (10). Japanese mother Satoko is the driving force, however, and she doesn't always see eye to eye with Russian coach Viktor Kabaniaev, who recognises that Jules merely has energy while Miko has talent. When not browbeating Kabaniaev (who is a renowned dancer and choreographer), Satoko is fussing over diet, costumes and schooling and leisure regimens and seems oblivious to the fact that her husband considers dance the most stressful aspect of his life .Yet she supports Jules with a touching loyalty and is genuinely crushed when he decides to quit because he lacks the passion that saw Miko overcome a fall during her first routine to win her place in the Grand Prix.

Failure is similarly not an option for 16 year-old Joan Sebastian Zamora, whose Colombian parents have invested heavily in his training with Flavio Salazar in New York. He lives roommate Jonathan Mendez and girlfriend Jeanetts Kakareka in Queens and knows that he has to fulfil his goal of joining the Royal Ballet in London if he is ever to repay his family's faith. Having impressed in his semi-final, Joan Sebastian returns to Cali for the first time in a year and revels in a traditional cook-out on the verandah. But the reunion only confirms the expectations piled upon him in the big finale.

At 17, Rebecca Houseknecht from Odenton, Maryland is aware that this is her last chance to make an impression. Parents Wendy and David have always been supportive, but they sometimes wonder whether the money lavished on lessons and costumes might have been better spent on a college fund and a wedding trousseau, and even Rebecca has her doubts, as she explains how she has continued with her studies and even been a cheerleader at school in an attempt to have as normal a youth as possible. However, coach Michelle Lees continues to believe and urges her not to waste her gifts and she demonstrates admirable tenacity in the semi by bouncing back from a disastrous first dance to make the cut.

Having concentrated, thus far, on background and temperament, Kargman devotes more time to dance in the final third. She introduces Larissa Saveliev, the founder and artistic director of the Young America Grand Prix, as well as competition organiser Shelley King, judges Deborah Hess, Franco De Vita and Gailene Stock, and Elisabeth Platel from the Paris Opéra Ballet School and Tadeusz Matacz from the Stuttgart Ballet's John Cranko School, who explain what they are looking for in the competitors. Kargman also provides plenty of behind-the-scenes atmosphere and includes a brief montage containing some of the standout performances by the other aspirants. But the focus eventually falls on our sextet.

Despite her misgivings and the pain in her leg, Michaela comes alive on stage and lands a scholarship that involves her family relocating to New York. Aran and Gaya also show well, with her bronze medal being topped by his prize for best overall performance in his age category. However, they are left to keep practicing and Gaya is shown in inset doing her  Cartoon Girl routine during the closing credits.

Miko manages to ignore the backstage bickering between Satako and Viktor to land a bronze medal and she is later seen doing extra stretching classes to improve her suppleness. The same sequence shows Joan Sebastian enjoying life in London after his piece from Don Quixote brought the house down in New York. Rebecca also gets her big break, despite missing out during the Grand Prix, where she had complained how unfair it was that years of effort came down to a few seconds in the spotlight. But, having gone away to finish her studies, she was hired by the Washington Ballet and seemed to be on her way. However, she has since hung up her shoes to read speech pathology at university. 

This decision confirms the maturity that Rebecca demonstrates throughout the film, along with the tenacity and dedication that she shares with her fellow hopefuls. But Kargman seems less intrigued by the peppy blonde princess and her resolution to remain normal and dwells, instead, on more dramatic incidents like the murder of Michaela's mother and teacher by rebel soldiers and the more amusing stage mother antics of the tigerish Satoko. She is certainly fortunate in her chosen subjects, who combine skill with articulacy and considerable composure before Nick Higgins's camera. Moreover, Kargman and co-editors Kate Amend and Jennilyn Merten knit the stories together well and ably sustains the suspense during the climactic awards ceremony. But, as she is so much in thrall to Larissa Saveliev for her unprecedented access, Kargman also glosses over the many difficulties the dancers face both now and in the future and, in retaining a remorseless positivity, she ignores harsh realities that might have proved more instructive.

Deference is also the watchword in Ben Harding and Phl Grabsky's Exhibition Manet: Portraying Life at The Royal Academy of Arts, as presenter Tim Marlow explores the exhibition with co-curators MaryAnne Stevens from the Royal Academy and Lawrence Nichols from the Toledo Museum of Art. Yet, in spite of its conservative presentation style, this proves a fascinating introduction to Édouard Manet (1832-83), even though it sometimes comes across as a feature-length commercial for a show that is due to end on 14 April.

In truth, this seems better suited to the small rather than the cinema screen. But it forms part of a laudable initiative to allow audiences around the world to see marquee exhibitions that they would ordinarily have to miss. Hoping to emulate the successful screenings of live stage plays and operas, the Exhibition strand has already lined up pictures on Munch in June and Vermeer in October, while the British Museum is also set to enter the fray in June with Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. As Marlow has already made a documentary about Modern Art Oxford, perhaps somebody at the Ashmolean should pop along to a screening and take notes.

The Royal Academy exhibition has two aims: to celebrate Manet's genius as a portraitist and to show how he transformed the art of the portrait by allowing it to reflect the growing modernity of the world around him. Marlow and his guests agree that Manet is a misunderstood painter, who befriended and influenced the Impressionists, while remaining outside their coterie. Nichols wants the show to capture the compulsion to create that gave Manet's canvases such immediacy and power, while Stevens is keen to emphasise his status as a radical thinker and reinforce his claim to be the founder of modern art. She reveals how he approached each subject free from preconception and blurred the distinction between portraiture and genre painting by making his sitters actors in scenes of contemporary life. Nobody mentions this here, but this is exactly what Robert Bresson would later seek to achieve by casting non-professional `acteurs-modèles' in his films.

Following a section on how a gallery goes about planning, assembling and staging an exhibition of this magnitude, the focus falls on Manet's early years, as the scion of an upper middle-class family who struggled at school and relied on uncle Edmond Fournier to pay for his first drawing lessons. His father was a judge who hoped he would follow him into the law. But biographer Kathleen Adler explains how Auguste agreed to let Édouard study under academic painter Thomas Couture after he twice failed the naval entrance exam and endured a trying voyage to Rio de Janeiro aboard a training vessel.

While only 17, Édouard fell in love with his Dutch piano teacher, Suzanne Leenhoff, whose son Léon featured in 17 paintings over the next few years. However, he could just as easily have been fathered by Auguste as Édouard and the couple had to wait until Auguste had died before marrying in 1863. The most famous of the Léon pictures is The Luncheon (1868) and Marlow discusses its significance with artist Tom Phillips, who highlights the disengaged poses that make its narrative all the more enigmatic. He also points out the teasing departures from classical composition and how the juxtaposition of traditional still life components with the boy's youth signify a moment in which innocence passes into maturity and intimates the possibilities of great things to come.

According to art historian Stéphane Guégan, Manet learned a good deal about spontaneity during his six years with Couture, whose Romans in the Decadence of the Empire (1847) also helped shape the notions of moral decline that would come to dominate his own work. However, Gustave Courbet and the realist style that so scandalised the Salon also left their mark on Manet, along with such Old Masters as Franz Hals and Diego Velázquez, who was the subject of a Prado pilgrimage that was reflected in both The Street Singer (1862) and The Tragic Actor (1865), which depicted Philippe Rouvière in the role of Hamlet. Dulwich Picture Gallery curator Xavier Bray notes the latter's similarity to Velázquez's portrait of court jester Sebastián de Morra, which similarly employed a neutral backdrop to draw attention to the simplicity, immediacy and authenticity of the central figure.

King Louis Philippe had done much to popularise Spanish art in France and it was his successor, Napoleon III, who transformed the Paris in which Manet lived and, thus, provided him with plentiful inspiration for his later works. When not thrilling to the trains pulling into the St Lazare station near his home, Manet became fascinated with the regularisation schemes devised by Baron Haussmann during his frequent walks with the poet Charles Baudelaire, who coined the term `flaneur' to describe their penchant for people watching. As writer and film-maker Iain Sinclair explains, Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) encapsulates this flaneuristic approach. Yet, while it screams modernity, it also cannily hedged its bets by depicting the very people whose good opinion Manet valued. Thus, the radical spirit is tempered by the bourgeois pragmatism that also informed the self-promotional decision to include himself just inside the frame.

What is most remarkable about the picture, however, is its synthesis of music, poetry and painting. Manet boldly excluded the source of the music from the scene, but it remains evident in the rhythm of the composition and it is fitting that harmony should play such a key role in the history of a canvas that is jointly owned by the National Gallery in London and the Dublin City Gallery founded in 1908 by Hugh Lane. Director Barbara Dawson proudly proclaims that this was one of the first spaces devoted to modern art in Europe and reveals how Lane was among Manet's earliest collectors, with the Tuileries Gardens and a portrait of the artist Eva Gonzales among his key acquisitions. However, following his death on the Lusitania in 1915, the 39 year-old's will was accompanied by an unsigned codicil that prompted the galleries to share the bequest on a six yearly cycle.

Back in Paris in 1863, the Salon remained the best way for artists to exhibit their latest work. In this year, however, Manet was among many who had submissions rejected and, thus, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe formed part of the famous Salon des Refusés, which proved a sensation with the critics, even though they tore into what was presumed to be a depiction of two students picnicking in the woods with a naked prostitute. Manet was undeterred by the denunciation of this affront to taste and decency and returned, two years later, with Olympia, a nude inspired by Titian's Venus of Urbino that was accepted by the Salon, but denounced for both the supposed uncleanliness of the reclining prostitute and Manet's temerity in placing the viewer in the position of a prospective client. At a stroke, he became the leading avant-garde artist in Paris and actor-director Fiona Shaw delights in the subversive nature of a second version included in the RA show, as she explains how he craved acceptance in presenting the staid formality of Second Empire life, yet couldn't resist tweaking convention and refusing to justify his audacity.

Following a short digression on photography, Manet's fondness for cartes de visite and the naturalism of his portrait of Georges Clemenceaus, Jonathan Yeo assesses the 1868 portrait of Manet's friend and fellow realist Émile Zola. He discloses that the 27 year-old novelist disliked the picture and kept it in his hallway, as he felt it said more about the painter than himself. Yet, while it's impossible to miss the copy of Olympia on the wall and Zola's essay on Manet on the desk, what is most revealing here is the fact that the author avoids eye contact with the viewer and Yeo (himself a portraitist) suggests that this was because Manet was unable to escape prejudgement and perhaps recognised that Zola resented being treated as a prop rather than a person. 

Another discursion follows, in which Andrea Mall shows how an 1873 pastel portrait of Suzanne had to be specially packaged for transit, while Larry Nichols testifies to the radical application of paint in the 1880 portrait of Manet's politician friend, Antonin Proust. But, while his technique was innovative, he was anxious not to be too closely associated with friends like Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who had come to be known as the Impressionists after critic Louis Leroy's mocking review of Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1873). As Stevens explains, Manet may have painted The Monet Family in Their Garden in Argenteuil (1874), but he tended to be a studio rather than an outdoor artist. Moreover, he never copied their example of breaking form with fractured light and sought to revolutionise art by storming the Salon rather than operating outside it.

Yet, as Marlow and Shaw concur while looking at The Railway (1873), Manet did challenge convention by painting pictures that were about things rather than mere representations of them. Consequently, this image of a woman with her daughter beside some railings and a railway line succeed in being both sentimental and modernist in its reflection of the dawning of the Third Republic and growing urbanisation of French society. However, he didn't live to see the momentous changes come about, as he succumbed to syphilis at the age of 51. However, as Guégan states, he bade a dramatic farewell to Paris in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which contrasts the gaiety of the patrons reflected in the mirror with the impassivity of the barmaid, as she serves a customer (ie the viewer) who is also seen in the glass behind her.

As Marlow concludes, Manet died while recovering from an operation to amputate his gangrenous left leg. Antonin Proust, Zola and Monet were among his pallbearers and Degas lamented that it took his passing for them to realise his importance to art history. The curators close by stating that Matisse, Cezanne and Picasso all revered him and wish that he was not quite so underrated, as they would rank him alongside Monet and Van Gogh in popularity and perhaps above them in terms of significance. By combining analysis with meticulous cinematography, this earnest and informative documentary allows audiences to reach their own conclusions. But one is left hoping that the surfeit of asides and slight fustiness of style can be addressed before the next outing.