A Grand Tour

The premise is simple. Some recycling workers discover 19 cans of film and a notebook while demolishing a derelict caravan and hand them over to an Oxford institute, where they are examined by an old acquaintance of their author (voiced by Vanessa Redgrave), whose deceased partner had been his companion on some earlier peregrinations. She reveals that Robinson had arrived in this country from Germany in the mid-1960s and had recently been spending time at Her Majesty's pleasure. However, he had not ceased to be a keen student of the passing scene and the start of the economic crisis in the spring of 2008 had prompted him to explore Oxford and its environs for items of scientific and historical interest that could shed light on the decline of liberal capitalism.

Robinson's initial aim was to visit the Pelican Inn in Berkshire, where the Speenhamland System of outdoor relief was devised in 1795 to aid the rural poor. However, he is easily distracted by the Boyle-Hooke plaque outside University College, the post box on the corner of Catte Street, St Margaret's Well at Binsey, the lichen on the road sign at Kennington roundabout and the Lidl store on the Cowley by-pass. Once out of the city, however, he passes Harrowdown Hill, where Dr David Kelly committed suicide in 2003, and RAF Brize Norton, which was the original point of repatriation for corpses from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also detours through fields of oilseed rape to view the Harwell complex that played a key role in the development of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. However, by following The Ridgeway, Robinson reaches Donnington Castle and Speenhamland, just as the sub-prime bubble bursts and the banking crisis erupts following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

During the course of his journey, Robinson has identified the industrial, economic and military links between Britain and the United States since the Second World War and these are brought into sharper focus when he arrives at Greenham Common, where a Women's Peace Camp was pitched in protest at the decision to house 96 American cruise missiles on the base in the early 1980s. The land has since been restored to public use and this reclamation leads to a discussion of the enclosures attempted in Otmoor in 1830 - which provoked revellers at St Giles' Fair into attempting to rescue those arrested for smashing fences - and Hampton Gay in the 1590s. The latter pursuit of Cockaigne resulted in the hanging, drawing and quartering on Enslow Hill of Edward Bompass and Richard Bradshaw, whose father owned a mill that continued to produce paper until the Elizabethan manor house burned down in 1887 and whose employees had tried to rescue the victims of the Shipton-on-Cherwell rail disaster of Christmas Eve 1874.

These recollections of Oxfordshire and Berkshire's rich and often tempestuous histories would be fascinating in themselves. But Keiller also pauses to watch the harvest being gathered, to consider how rare flowers continue to flourish in the hedgerows of pollution-choked highways and how a spider can construct a web with intricate care and infinite patience, while the rest of the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart. Indeed, these close-ups of the varied and resilient flora and fauna serve to emphasise the transience of the derelict domestic and industrial edifices that testify so damningly to the persistence of human folly in ignoring the lessons of the past.

Ultimately, Robinson's unexplained disappearance prevents us from learning his proposals to heal society. But one can only hope that this is not the last we hear from this eloquent émigré, whose itinerancy is only matched by his curiosity and acuity.

If Robinson in Ruins requires full intellectual attention, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is more content to allow viewers to bask in its languid aura of sensual spirituality and take whatever message they can from its droll, but deceptively demanding blend of realism and reverie. Inspired by Buddhist monk Phra Sripariyattiwetti's 1983 book, A Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, and expanding upon the short A Letter to Uncle Boonmee that formed part of the 2009 gallery installation, Primitive, this was the surprise winner of the Palme d'or at Cannes. However, its musings on myth, memory and image mesmerise and innervate in equal measure in leaving a warm glow of gentle solicitude and compassionate humanism.

Somewhere in the remote Nabua region of Thailand, beekeeper Thanapat Saisaymar is dying of a kidney-related ailment. He is tended by his Laotian servant Samud Kugasang, but sister-in-law Jenjira Pongpas insists on paying him a visit with nephew Sakda Kaewbuadee. Over supper, they find themselves in the presence of Saisaymar's long-departed wife, Natthakarn Aphaiwonk, and their son Geerasak Kulhong, who disappeared 13 years earlier and has been transformed into a simian creature with burning red eyes after mating with a Monkey Ghost. Nobody is disconcerted by their arrival. Indeed, Saisaymar draws solace from Aphaiwonk's sanguine mien and willingly follows when she leads him, Pongpas and Kaewbuadee through the jungle to a network of caves, where Saisaymar claims he was originally born in a form that was neither human nor animal.

This revelation should be surprising, but Weerasethakul has already taught us to expect the unexpected by drifting off into digressions that are, in all probability, Saisaymar's reminiscences of his past lives. He may well have been a water buffalo that broke its tether and wandered into the forest, only to allow itself to be meekly recaptured by the farmer having realised that it can't cope in the wider world. More bizarrely, he also seems to have been a catfish with the power to change reflections in the surface of a waterfall pool so that ageing princess Wallapa Mongkolprasert could recapture her lost youth and beauty.

Culminating in a curiously erotic aquatic encounter, this enigmatic episode (which pays parodic homage to Thai cinema history) is balanced by more the shocking supposition that karma is making Saisaymar suffer for killing so many insects with pesticide and Communists during the conflicts of the 1970s. These references to the country's turbulent past and troubled present are reinforced by a photomontage of soldiers rounding up Monkey Ghosts for torture and Saisaymar's vision of a future society in which subversives could simply be made to disappear. But Weerasethakul doesn't limit himself to subtextual political commentary, as he also questions Kaewbuadee's devotion to his monkish vocation by showing him discard his robes after showering in Pongpas and niece Kanokporn Thongaram's hotel room after Saisaymar's funeral.

Despite its asides on the taste and texture of honey, the tensions between Thailand and Laos, the over-rated nature of the heavenly afterlife and the attachment of ghosts to beloved humans, this may not be as thematically complex or stylistically audacious as Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006). Nevertheless, there is plenty to engage the mind and soul in the teasing screenplay, Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's glorious 16mm cinematography and Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr's evocative natural sound design. But, above everything, this is a picture that needs to be experienced rather than explained or extolled.

By contrast, Feng Xiaogang adopts a more emotive approach for Aftershock, an imposing melodrama set against the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 240,000 Chinese. Earnestly played by a fine ensemble and considerably enhanced by some terrifyingly authentic special effects, this is a sprawling saga that ably examines the impact on daily life of the seismic ideological changes that occurred in Beijing following the death of Mao Zedong.

Truck driver Zhang Guoqiang lives in a quiet north-eastern town with his wife Xu Fan and their seven year-old twins, Zhang Jiajun and Zhang Zifeng. The latter is more spirited and intelligent than her brother. But, when the quake strikes and Guoqiang is killed while saving Xu's life, she opts to have Jiajun rescued (even though it will mean the loss of an arm) when forced to decide which child to pull from the wreckage. However, as Xu staggers towards a survivor's camp run by the People's Liberation Army, Zifeng miraculously revives and is taken to an orphanage, where she is selected by soldier couple Daoming Chen and Jin Chen.

The story shifts forward to 1986 to reveal Xu fighting a losing battle to keep the now teenage Li Chen in school and she despairs when he relocates to Hangzhou to work for a cycle rickshaw company. He is unaware, however, that sister Zhang Jingchu has enrolled at the city's medical school against the wishes of her adopted mother and Daoming has to cross the country to persuade her to return to Jin's deathbed. Zhang is so ashamed of hurting Daoming that she disappears when she gets pregnant and boyfriend Yi Lu refuses to stand by her and another decade passes before they are reunited.

Xu, meanwhile, has found work as a seamstress in the rebuilt Tangshen. But, such is her devotion to the memory of her husband and daughter that she spurns the attentions of electrical shop owner Lixin Yang and refuses to move into the plush apartment that Li buys for her when he becomes a successful travel agent. He is now married to Ziwen Wang and has given his son the same name that Zhang gave the daughter she is now raising in Canada with older husband, David F. Morris. But, when the 2008 earthquake hits Sichuan, she feels the need to volunteer as an aid worker and finds herself returning to Tangshen after overhearing Li tell his story to a stranger amidst the rubble.

No narrative stretching over 30 years and involving separated siblings can be entirely free of contrivance. But, ably assisted by production designer Hou Tingxiao and cinematographer Lu Yue, Feng tells his tale with considerable care and restraint, with the consequence that this is both engrossing and affecting throughout. The quake sequence is shocking, but avoids making gratuitously spectacular use of CGI, while set-pieces such as Xu's Sophie's Choice-like decision over which twin to spare and Zhang's reunions with Daoming and Xu laudably eschew sentimentality. On the distaff side, Feng somewhat sanitises the political aspects of his history. But he balances the chronicle of China's growing prosperity with the warning that economic and technical advance will always be powerless to prevent natural disaster and that family and community will invariably play a bigger role in overcoming adversity and healing wounds than the state.

There's a bleaker vision of the Economic Miracle in Pang Ho-cheung's supposedly fact-based Dream Home, a darkly droll slashing satire on the Hong Kong property boom that doesn't always know when to stop. More problematic than the revolting excess, however, is the needlessly complex structure, which flashes back over 16 years to explain why tele-marketeer Josie Ho goes on a pitiless slaying spree on 30 October 2007.

Opening with the strangulation of a security guard in a luxury apartment block overlooking Victoria Harbour, the action cuts away to show Ho struggling to convince bank customers to take out loans at special rates. She needs money herself, however, as she has set her heart on buying a flat in the complex that caused the childhood friend with whom she used to have string telephone conversations across the courtyard to move away and deprived her sailor grandfather of his sea view. As the night of 30 October wears on, Pang flashes back to such key moments in Ho's frustrated dream as the death of her mother, her father's failure to disclose his illness on a health insurance form and the price hiking of the elderly couple selling the flat Ho has agreed to purchase in order to profit from the volatility of the stock market.

However, it will be the bloodletting that will provoke discussion. The casual dispatch of a Filipino maid and an adulterous husband will scarcely raise an eyebrow. But the brutality meted out to a pregnant woman before she is suffocated in a vacuum seal bag smacks of a chauvinism that recurs in the deaths of two naked party girls in the second apartment that Ho infiltrates in her savage bid to induce a property slump. The first has her head dashed against a toilet bowl as she throws up, while the second has a bed slat rammed into her throat after her lover is castrated following coitus. The lingering demise of a flatmate whose guts have spilled out after a stabbing similarly fails to raise the grotesque guffaws Pang seeks and the climactic slaughter of a couple of cops feels like overkill in every sense of the word.

Yet, for all the lack of restraint, this is a slickly produced picture. Wenders Li edits Yu Lik-wai's evocative cinematography with grim efficiency and Ho turns in a splendid performance as the dutiful daughter and hard-working salarywoman, who simply snaps having been abandoned in a seedy hotel by her married lover and cheated by the avaricious sellers who care nothing for Ho's struggle to fulfil a vow to her dead mother. However, the capitalist critique and social commentary rather get lost amidst the carnage.

First-time director Brad Haynes and screenwriter Dacre Timbs leave the viewer in no doubt about their message in Broken Sun, an intense study of military honour that makes ambitious use of flashbacks and apparitions to recount a Great War ANZAC's encounter in August 1944 with an escaped Japanese prisoner of war in the New South Wales bush. Evocatively photographed by Anthony Jennings and played with combative dignity, this occasionally recalls John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968). But it also combines the restraint and authenticity that characterised the period pictures that launched the Australian New Wave in the early 1970s.

Despite returning home a hero in 1919, Jai Koutrae has struggled to make a living as a farmer in the remote town of Cowra. Living alone in a rickety shack, he is tormented by the ghost of a fallen comrade and the cough caused by a mustard gas attack on his trench. However, he does his bit for the community by patrolling the woods and captures Shingo Usami after he escapes from a nearby camp.

Reluctant to obey commanding officer Kuni Hashimoto's `death before dishonour' dictum, Usami surrenders without much resistance and the pair return to Koutrae's compound to await the arrival of the MPs. However, the two foes come to realise that they have much in common, as Usami thinks back on his harrowing jungle experiences with buddy Kentaro Hara, while Koutrae dwells on the dreadful moment when he allowed his emotions to get the better of him while guarding a German prisoner back in 1916.

The dialogue isn't particularly polished, while Usami's grasp of English shifts conveniently to suit the scene. But Haynes ably integrates the flashbacks and reveries and draws sincere performances from the gauntly regretful Koutrae and the timidly decent Usami, who is driven less by the Bushido Code than his parents' insistence that staying alive is more important than the empty glory of a warrior's death. Ian Sparke's stark production design is exemplary, while Jennings's imagery often has a painterly feel and Haynes deserves much credit for producing such a handsome and quietly affecting picture on a self-financed shoestring.