Do cry for this Argentina

Emma Thompson in the limply keen Imagining Argentina

10 April 2012

IMAGINING ARGENTINA X Cert 15, 107 mins

Christopher Hampton's political drama received such a slamming when it was first screened at Venice last year that it arrives here later than intended - and limping.

It is not a good film; it is, moreover, a very earnest one, and our popular culture despises earnestness above almost anything else.

Emma Thompson and Antonio Banderas play a husband and wife suffering under Argentina's 1970's military dictatorship. Thompson, a journalist and critic of General Guzman (Anton Lesser) is one of the Disappeared. Banderas - a children's

theatre director with psychic powers - struggles to keep the home fires burning.

The film swerves about incoherently, part Death and the Maiden (horrible scenes of rape and electrocution), part Stir of Echoes (spirits lure Banderas to various parts of the country in his search for his wife).

It talks a lot about the imagination, but rarely uses it, although I've never seen a flamingo used as an omen before (unless you count the movie Cocktail). The sad area of Latin American tyranny is one that no Englishlanguage film has yet nailed, and it is a shame that a project involving the great Claire Bloom (as a death-camp survivor living out in the Pampas) should be so minor.

THE HONEYMOONERS

Cert 15 96 mins

There is an ecstatic feel to The Honeymooners - a road movie shot in rural Ireland on digital video - that comes from a proper enjoyment of the form.

You get the impression that after an age spent trying to raise more money, this cast and crew cut their losses, jumped in a hire car and sped off yelling, "Let's make the movie anyway!"

We have seen this kind of thing before, of course (most recently with David Mackenzie's The Last Great Wilderness), but rarely with the obvious thought that has gone into this film's pace and tone.

Jilted groom (Jonathan Byrne) asks just-sacked waitress Claire (Alex Reid) for a lift from Dublin to Donegal. She is angry with her married lover and happy to travel anywhere just for the hell of it.

Holed up in a coastal cottage, they struggle to connect; both have faintly detached personalities but are giving off vibrations that make the other want to stick around.

Anyone who has spent time in a holiday-let will recognise these curtains, these cupboards, these nights spent drinking Sparbought cava. Everything is so merrily and frankly presented in this tight little economy-packaged flick.

The Honeymooners has a sharp-as-a-tack vitality and when the couple (and cameraman Darren Tiernan) go for a swim in Donegal's water, littered as it is with confetti-like seaweed, you grin at their abandon.

BUKOWSKI: BORN INTO THIS

No cert, 90 mins

You might find it hard to imagine the furious, LA bum-poet Charles Bukowski describing the process of writing as a "nice, easy thing to do", but so he does in this documentary.

Through interviews with friends and footage of the man himself, the film follows his life from abused son of a German èmigrè to adult heavy drinker. Bukowski, like Francis Bacon, would still put in a day's work on his art no matter how late or messy the previous night had been.

Although the writer was "devoted to the de-Disneyfication of all of us" and his mantra was "I will not let them kill me!" he comes across as a lover rather than a fighter.

BUS 174
Cert 15, 118 mins

An award-winning documentary about homeless Brazilian Sandro do Nascimento hijacking a bus in Rio in 2000. The situation soon escalated into a full-scale SWAT episode, broadcast live on television, and had the nation baying for Sandro's blood.

Director Josè Padhila interviews surviving hostages, witnesses and friends of the tragic Do Nascimento - the background to the drama is a gnawing story of miscalculation.

THE CALCIUM KID X
Cert 15, 90 mins

Orlando Bloom plays an innocent London milkman-turned-champion boxer in this clumsy mockumentary. We'll have to wait for the forthcoming Troy to see what this actor is really about.

MAIN HOON NA (I am There For You)
No cert, 179 mins

Bouncy, intriguing Bollywood at its best, drawing on films from The Matrix to Ten Things I Hate About You to Broken Arrow. A deserved hit in India, and an action-packed spectacle.

OUR HOUSE X
Cert 12a, 90 mins

Drew Barrymore and Ben Stiller are newlyweds moving in to a Brownstone house in Brooklyn and dealing (badly) with their demanding, elderly neighbour. A kind of Barefoot in the Park meets Mousehunt, it's a comedy too safe to take off.

PAS SUR LA BOUCHE! X
Cert PG, 117 mins

This slight French operetta about bourgeois infidelity actually premiered on stage in Antibes in 1925 (perhaps Dick Diver himself went to see it). Years later, director Alain Resnais found the libretto in a library in Paris and was "struck by its madness". The film is entirely silly.

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