Rent or Buy

Having lived a long and fruitful life, Nikolai Nademsky dies peacefully in an orchard. His passing convinces grandson Semyon Svashenko that the time has come to sweep away the old order and he argues with father Stepan Shkurat about the benefits of buying a village tractor to speed the ploughing. The vehicle arrives and there is rejoicing among the workers, who kick start the engine when it breaks down by urinating in the radiator. Amidst scenes of joyous labour, Svashenko crushes the fences erected by the kulaks to protect their property. But he pays the ultimate price when he is shot as he dances along a dusty path by landowner's son, Pyotr Masokha.

Orthodox priest Vladimir Mikhajlov meets with Shkurat to discuss the funeral arrangements. But he refuses the Christian rite and asks his neighbours to join him in a song-filled procession that will commemorate Svashenko's life and symbolise the undying link between the seasons and mankind's relationship with the soil. Masokha attempts to disrupt the ceremony by proclaiming his guilt, but the celebration continues and the birth of a child and the coming of the rains to nourish the crops seems to suggest that Nature has replaced God in this new Eden.

Juxtaposing Daniil Demutsky's lyrical rural vistas with close-ups of the happy peasants, this is as much a hymn to humanity as a political tract. The images are composed to reinforce the unity between the people and the land and the produce it yields. Thus, the shots of apples, seeds, sunflowers and waving fields of wheat have both a romantic power and a propagandist positivity that are much more evocative than the cemetery oration about the Communist aeroplane and Svashenko's spirit providing the impetus that will ensure victory over the class enemy.

Audacious in its denunciation of social tradition and religion, this rhapsodic silent paean to the natural cycle was made three years after the advent of sound. Much is always made of the awkward transition to talkies. But the sophistication of French cinema in this period is clear from Jacques Feyder's Le Grand Jeu (1934), whose release prompts one to hope that many more contemporary masterpieces will be released in its wake.

Having established himself as one of the most inventive French directors with L'Atlantide (1921) and Crainquebille (1922), Feyder had spent several years in Hollywood and he returned home with the germ of an idea from an unrealised project with Greta Garbo. He had proposed to dispense with the Swede's famous accent in an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's play, As You Desire Me. But MGM had replaced him with George Fitzmaurice. So, Feyder and Charles Spaak concocted a scenario that would turn on a woman's voice being the key to a case of mistaken identity.

Parisian Pierre Richard-Willm is ruined by his reckless pursuit of Marie Bell and commits a crime to maintain the illusion of affluence. Facing disgrace, he flees to North Africa and joins the Foreign Legion alongside Russian émigré Georges Pitoëff. They spend much of their time at a shabby hotel run by the lecherous Charles Vanel and his fortune-telling wife, Françoise Rosay. However, Richard-Willm soon finds himself obsessed with a chanteuse at a seedy bar, who is identical to his old flame in every regard except her voice and hair colour.

Refusing to discuss her past, Bell (who plays both Florence and Irma) exploits Richard-Willm's emotions, as she realises he could be her ticket back to France. But Vanel has also set his sights on her and only Rosay's willingness to help the pair prevents the authorities from discovering that his death was not accidental. However, just as Richard-Willm is about to sail from Casablanca, he bumps into his lost love (who is now the paramour of a wealthy Arab) and resigns himself to a further tour of duty, which Rosay's tarot cards suggest will end in an heroic demise.

Frustrated in his bid to shoot on location in Morocco, Feyder returned to film the action on atmospheric sets designed by Lazare Meerson, which reinforced the mood of poetic realism that had begun to inflect French cinema. Assistant director Marcel Carné was clearly influenced by the style and many of his finest features echoed its pessimistic sense of doomed romance. Spaak would also be inspired to return to similar territory in La Bandera (1935), another legionnaire tale that was directed by Julien Duvivier, who would also set his baleful drama Pépé le Moko (1937) in the Maghreb.

But Le Grand Jeu does much more than merely anticipate future classics. Vanel and Rosay are superb and, despite the hesitant performances of Bell and stage actor Richard-Willm (who was a last-minute replacement for Charles Boyer), this is an engrossing study of lovesick folly. Moreover, it also made innovative use of sound by having Claude Marcy dub Bell's dialogue as Irma. Robert Siodmak would remake the picture with Gina Lollobrigida, Jea-Claude Pascal and Arletty in 1954, but it made much less impact.

A decade later, Sergei Paradjanov directed one of the great works of Soviet cinema, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964). Adapted from the Carpathian writer M. Kotsubinsky's novella, `Wild Horses of Fire', it won a raft of awards at international film festivals. Yet it was scarcely seen in the USSR, as much through studio hostility as official disapproval. However, the accusations of formalism and Ukrainian nationalism stuck and, having had numerous projects blocked, Paradjanov was arrested on bogus charges of gay rape, the spread of venereal disease and the trafficking of icons, and, although he was released in 1977, he never completed another film.

Despite the feud between their fathers, Ivan Mikolajchuk and Larisa Kadochnikova become lovers. However, she drowns during a temporary separation and, after a period of grief, he marries Tatyana Bestayeva, whose treacherous carnality contrasts with the purity of the much-lamented Kadochnikova, with whom Mikolajchuk is eventually reunited in death.

Perceptive critics have identified the indomitable spiritual dimension of this astonishing feature as the reason for its hostile reception. But the audacious technique, which was intended to convey both the ethereality of the tale and its allegorical discussion of the stages of existence, so confused the Soviet cinematic establishment that it presumed that the shadow cast by the past shrouded a seditious political message.

However, Paradjanov's sole purpose was to challenge conventional methods of screen storytelling and redefine the audience's relationship to the moving image. Thus, he deconstructed the very processes of narration and representation, so that every frame confounded the viewer's expectation and forced them to reappraise both the action itself and their approach to spectatorship. In order to achieve this, he made flamboyant use of Yuri Ilyenko's camera, which seemed to plunge from the top of a tree, peer without distortion through a pool of water and elongate vistas through the use of 180° fish-eye lenses, whose wide angles disorientated as much as the minute-long 360° spin that blurred shapes and images into an abstraction that approximated the troubled world of the mythical storyline.

Sound and colour were similarly exploited. Lush orchestrations, discordant sounds, folk music, natural noises and religious chanting were all employed to reinforce the psychological significance of scenes that were designed according to a `dramaturgy of colour' that passed from the white innocence of childhood and the green optimism of youth through moments of monochrome and sepia despair to the blazing shades of transient contentment, the autumnal hues of resignation and the reds and blues of oblivion.

Four decade on, few film-makers have attempted anything as cinematically and sensually audacious. However, Glauber Rocha certainly couldn't be accused of lacking ambition, as he drew on politics, folklore, religion, literature, music and dance for Antonio das Mortes (1969), a follow-up to Black God, White Devil (1964) that reimagines the true story of a Brazilian bounty hunter as an updating of the myth of St George and the dragon.

Maurício do Valle is a gun for hire, who arrives in a village in the north-eastern sertão to protect landowner Joffre Soares. His chief target is activist Lorival Pariz. But no sooner has he mortally wounded him than Do Valle realises the error of his ways and throws in his lot with the peasants. Eventually, he spears Soares while on horseback. But, rather than remain to fight alongside his new comrades, Do Valle heads into the wilderness to combat the more potent threat of foreign exploitation.

Earning Rocha the Best Director prize at Cannes, this is one of the major works of the Brazilian new wave known as Cinema Novo. With Affonso Beato's camera scouring the bleak landscape that emphasises the insignificance of its residents, the action is suffused with a social and cultural symbolism that urges a rebellion against faith-based fealty. Making dazzling use of colour and boldly staging in long takes and intricate sequences that succeed in being both cinematic and operatic, Rocha mythologises the struggle by equating revolutionary heroes like Che Guevara with warrior saints like George and Anthony.

Incorporating the customs, music and dance of the backland region of Bahia, Rocha achieves a stylised realism whose potency is made all the more tangible by the unflinching attitude to violence, with the assassinations of both Pariz and police chief Hugo Carvana being bloody in the extreme. Some may bridle at the depiction of female character like Odete Lara as self-serving and treacherous. But this was still a call to arms for all Brazilians (particularly the oppressed black population) and its rejection of militarism would precipitate Rocha being forced into exile in 1971, as he was no longer able to express himself freely under President Emilio Médici's authoritarian regime.

The clash between primitivism and modernity is also examined in Shohei Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), a simmering epic set on a southern Japanese island that laments the creep of Westernised progress, while also warning of the perils of clinging to outmoded traditions and beliefs. The iconoclastic director's first colour feature, this frequently recalls the oppressive mood of Hiroshi Teshigahara's Pitfall (1962) and Woman of the Dunes (1964). But this uniquely delineates Imamura's interest in `the relationship between the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of everyday life in Japan is built'.

Engineer Kazuo Kitamura is dispatched from Tokyo to the sub-tropical island of Kurage to excavate a well to provide fresh water for a proposed sugar mill. He arrives to discover the inhabitants struggling to cope with drought and the superstitions that have paralysed their existence. The island's oldest family is particularly blighted, despite the fact it is supposed to be descended from the deities that created the place. Near senile Kanjuro Arashi married his sister and their son, Rentarô Mikuni, has been condemned for his immorality and his habit of fishing with dynamite and must remain chained in a pit until he appeases the gods by removing a boulder deposited by a tidal wave.

Mikuni is besotted with his sister, Yasuko Matsui, who is a priestess at the local shrine and the mistress of businessman, Yoshi Katô. He is also the father of Choichiro Kawarazaki (who is made Kitamura's assistant, but despairs of his incestuous kin and seeks to leave for the mainland) and Hideko Okiyama, a simple-minded, but sexually voracious daughter, who exerts a fatal fascination over Kitamura. Indeed, he briefly reverts to nature and even considers marrying Okiyama before he is summoned back to headquarters, leaving her to take up vigil on the beach for his return, as the landscape around her undergoes a transformation that eventually attracts trainloads of tourists.

With Masao Tochizawa's camera capturing the sweltering heat exciting the passions of the ostracised Futori clan, this is a gruelling and disconcerting study of human frailty. Such is the relentlessness of Imamura's gaze that there is almost an entomological feel to his pitiless detachment. The performances are excruciating, as the cast explores the basest instincts with a courage that compels the audience to assess its own animalistic attitudes and cravings.

The shoot dragged on for many months, as Imamura became distracted by the sights and temptations of his Okinawan location. Then, much to the frustration of the Nikkatsu studio, it proved a commercial failure and Imamura didn't make another feature for seven years. However, it is clear that this is every bit as significant as such reputation-making nuberu-bagu titles as Pigs and Battleships (1961), The Insect Woman (1963) and The Pornographers (1966) and his Palme d'or winners, The Battle of Narayama (1983) and The Eel (1997).

The sins of the flesh also dominate Federico Fellini's Casanova (1976), which has the infamous lothario reminiscing in seclusion at the Castle of Dux about his sexual encounters with, amongst others, an ageing Marquise, a beautiful countess, a hunchback and an automaton. Never one to make a definitive statement, Fellini declared this fantastical portrait of Giacomo Casanova to be both `my most complete, expressive, courageous film' and `the worst film I ever made'. Although it's studded with trademark moments, this isn't one of Fellini's finest hours. But, considering the chaotic conditions under which it was made, it's far better than it had any right to be.

Depressed by the state of his marriage to Giulietta Masina and pressing tax problems, Fellini had little enthusiasm for the project when it was mooted by Dino Di Laurentiis. He was even less taken with the producer's suggestion of Robert Redford for the title role. Similarly dismissing Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine, Fellini insisted on Marcello Mastroianni, as he was not only an easy collaborator, but also something of a lothario himself. But, even after De Laurentiis withdrew, Fellini had to abandon Marcello and accept the casting of Donald Sutherland to appease his new Hollywood backers.

Fellini treated the Canadian with disdain from the off and the more he struggled to come to terms with his character, the more the director left him to his confusion. Yet, Fellini's problem lay less with the actor than with his loathing of Casanova himself. Disregarding his achievements as an author and entrepreneur and his exploits as a gambler and spy, Fellini chose to focus on Casanova's reputation as a great lover and took sadistic delight in depicting him as a washed-out shell looking back on his past, without any appreciation of either the disdain of those who once feted him or the fact that his pursuit of pleasure had dulled his ability to feel.

Some saw Fellini's own despair in this depiction. But Sutherland's detachment from the `braggart Fascist' of the director's jaundiced design makes this technically impressive exercise seem even more morally and intellectually barren.

Fellini was already an established screenwriter by the time that Alain Resnais made his first short films in the late 1940s. Still active in his 89th year, Resnais rivals Jean-Luc Godard as the most challenging film-maker of the New Wave era. Complex, uncompromising and mischievously controlled, his work is both cinematic and literary, acerbic and compassionate, and no one else could have produced the four films in the mid-80s selection released by Artificial Eye.

A treatise on individuality, imposition and imagination, Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983) is a tripartite fantasy that slips between the 1910s and the present to explore the attainment of happiness. With characters occasionally bursting into song, this offers a very different insight into life-changing experiences to Love Unto Death (1984), an exacting exercise in dualism that sees Lutheran clerics André Dussollier and Fanny Ardant attempt to revise atheists Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma's attitudes to existence and the afterlife.

Using compositions by Hans Werner Henze as contemplative entr'actes, Resnais refuses to provide easy answers to the anguished questions raised in the sombre meditations. But he succeeds in making philosophical speculation seem visually dynamic by employing a form of filmic theatricality that is more pronounced in Mélo (1986), as Resnais utilises enclosed sets, stage lighting and interval curtains to distance the viewer from action that chronicles Sabine Azéma's intensifying feelings for womanising violinist André Dussollier, after husband Pierre Arditi invites him to dinner. Once again exploring the links between love and death, this is a superbly played boulevard drama whose emotionality is reinforced by the long takes and the meticulously designed mise-en-scène.

By contrast, I Want to Go Home (1989) is something of a curio, as Resnais ventures into territory more usually associated with Robert Altman and Woody Allen. However, cartoonist Adolph Green's Parisian sojourn with embarrassed daughter Laura Benson is not without its moments, most notably the animated interventions of Hep Cat and his companion Sally and a costume ball sequence that includes Sorbonne academic Gérard Depardieu dressed as Popeye. Confirming that the only thing to expect from a Resnais picture is the unexpected, this is a teasing sketch on artistic value and middlebrow pretension that just about surmounts its transatlantic tribulations.

Depardieu's son, Guillaume (who, like co-star Marie Trintignant, died tragically young), headlined Pierre Salvadori's Wild Target (1993), which has been rather opportunistically released on disc to coincide with the arrival in cinemas of Jonathan Lynn's remake, starring Bill Nighy, Rupert Grint and Emily Blunt. Nevertheless, this is a hugely entertaining crime romp that is dominated by a wonderfully lugubrious turn by the peerless Jean Rochefort.

Rochefort's meticulous hitman is about to retire when Depardieu's gangling delivery boy unexpectedly interrupts a job. Somehow unable to dispatch him, Rochefort decides to take him on as an apprentice. But, while he is occasionally hot-headed, Depardieu is anything but a natural born killer and the pair soon have another assassin on their tail after they fail to bump off Trintignant's con artist, who has just fobbed an expensive art forgery on to a vengeful Corsican mobster.

Never one to spurn a running gag, Salvadori stuffs the action with visual and verbal gems, like Trintignant's kleptomania and the fate of Rochefort's parrot. He even manages to slip a few surprises into the fairly predictable plotline. However, he is less successful in either reining in Depardieu's erratic comic timing or coaxing him to spark with the assured Trintignant. Nevertheless, she jousts feistily with the dapper and deliciously deadpan Rochefort, who reproduces his Patrice Leconte form as the stickler unable to wrest back the control he has so impulsively surrendered. However, even Rochefort is powerless to prevent Patachou from stealing every scene as the trigger-happy mother, who taught him everything he knows, but now can't stop herself from slaughtering her home helps.

Rochefort typically excelled in Leconte's The Man on the Train (2002) and his co-star, Johnny Hallyday, finds himself in Hong Kong for Johnnie To's Vengeance. A hint of improbability threatens to undermine this customarily steely crime drama. But such is the confidence with which To and screenwriter Wai Ka-fai introduce Hallyday's sudden drift into amnesia that it becomes one of the picture's offbeat pleasures.

When daughter Sylvie Testud is hospitalised in the attack that accounts for her husband and two children, Hallyday abandons his Parisian restaurant and arrives in Macau determined to dish out some vigilante justice. Reasoning that the Triads must somehow be involved, Hallyday hires assassins Anthony Wong, Lam Suet and Lam Ka-tung, who are keen to do something more interesting than babysit boss Simon Yam's unpredictable mistress. As they reconstruct the crime and begin following clues, Hallyday and his new buddies forge a quirky camaraderie that is eventually explained when the Frenchman is wounded and reveals both his hitman past and the fact that a bullet lodged in his brain is sapping his memory.

Clearly owing much to Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000), the scenes in which Hallyday is forced to write on photographs and even his gun to keep tabs on everyone feel a little strained. But they do have a sly payoff amidst the stylised carnage, as expertly staged shootouts at a picnic area and a vast rubbish tip are topped by a beautifully choreographed murder by moonlight sequence.

Cheng Siu Keung's moody views of Macau and Hong Kong and David Richardson's slick editing reinforce the contrasting moods of melancholy and malevolence. But it's the interplay between the leads that makes this so compelling, with Hallyday (stepping into a role intended for Alain Delon) conveying a cool taciturnity that perfectly complements the hard-boiled charisma of his Chinese counterparts.

The sound of clashing cultures rings more hollow in She, A Chinese, the fictional debut of novelist-cum-director Xiaolu Guo, who made such a decent impression with her documentaries Far and Near (2003) and How Is Your Fish Today (2006). Despite a calculated stylistic shift to reflect the change in the anti-heroine's circumstances, this chapter-rigid picaresque feels less like a motion picture than a collection of audiovisual jottings for a book.

Tired of her mother's nagging, teenager Huang Lu quits her country village after she is raped by a truck driver and heads for the central Chinese town of Chongqing. She loses jobs in a shirt factory and a hairdressing salon, but hooks up with hitman Wei Yi Bo and discovers a stash of banknotes after he is killed. Recognising Big Ben from a calendar in Wei's room, she books a trip to London and slips away from the party so she can remain illegally.

Without papers, however, Huang is only able to find menial work and gratefully accepts the marriage proposal of retired maths teacher Geoffrey Hutchings, whom she meets in a massage parlour. But it's not long before she tires of their platonic arrangement and begins an affair with Chris Ryman, an Indian Muslim from a nearby fast-food joint.

If the outline sounds somewhat perfunctory, it disappointingly reflects the sketchiness of Xiaolu's scenario. Huang sleepwalks through her experiences, with her sullen demeanour preventing any clues to her emotions, whether she is exploiting or being exploited by the various men she encounters. Zillah Bowes's cinematography is equally mundane, despite the switch to a more restless style for the UK sequences. Yet Xiaolu steadily exposes the disadvantages Chinese women have to overcome, while the contrast between hardships in East and West is assuredly made.

Finally, a very different juvenile predicament arises in Kakera - A Piece of Our Life. Based on Erika Sakurazawa's shojo manga Love Vibes, this chaste lesbian romance earned Momoko Andô (who is the daughter of actor-director Eiji Okuda) the soubriquet `the Japanese Sofia Coppola'. It's certainly an assured debut, with the sedate pacing being enlivened by the odd flash of visual flamboyance.

Student Hikari Mitsushima is becoming increasingly disillusioned with her relationship with slacker boyfriend Tasuku Nagaoka. So, when prosthetic sculptress Eriko Nakamura vamps her in a cafe, she is willing to be led into a kooky new world, even if their friendship gets off to an embarrassing start with a tampon shortage in a park toilet. Nakamura still lives with her parents above their backstreet dry cleaning shop, along with her transvestite grandfather. But while she seems innocent, as she leads Mitsushima on a journey of self-realisation filled with eccentric adventures, Nakamura prove to be not quite as in control of her emotions as she believes and she has a crisis of sapphic confidence with one of her ageing breast replacement patients that jeopardises her new romance.

Despite the wondrously offbeat performances, particularly by the mesmeric Nakamura, this is a rather stifled saga that seems to place great emphasis on remaining resolutely coy. Indeed, the picture's precision reinforces its superficiality, with Andô failing to develop themes of identity, privacy, gender and physical beauty. Scored by Smashing Pumpkin James Iha, this is technically slick, but as calculating as it's charming, with Andô exploiting Mitsushima's pop star celebrity to reinforce a sense of daring that the script can't quite capture.