'Treacle Jr.' (2010) - Jamie Thraves.

I am a great admirer of Jamie Thraves's rather unique approach to drama, and his delightfully quirky, but far from syrupy character study 'Treacle Jr.' proved to be yet another earnest, vividly realised, socially conscious, idiosyncratic celluloid wonder from this talented auteur of homespun, left-of-centre drama. Sad-faced six-footer Tom (Tom Fisher) for reasons obscure suddenly leaves his wife and young child, exchanging his cosy, middle-class suburban life for the altogether more precarious milieu of South London where a violent altercation with a tree swiftly sends an increasingly dazed Tom into a busy A&E, and he is fractiously drawn into the histrionic jibber-jabbering vortex of the appealingly unfiltered, effusively enigmatic Aiden (Aiden Gillen), whose singular personality traits and consistently chaotic personal life is further complicated by the purchase of the adorable kitten Treacle Jr. Dynamic film-maker Jamie Thraves's heart-swellingly edifying 'Treacle Jr.' is an exhilarating tonic that deftly blends gritty, melancholic drama, and lustrous comedy to truly magical effect! And if the scrumptious, honey-centred ending doesn't hit you right in the Gulliver, then it's pretty much all over, mayte!

 

 

 

'Real Fiction' (2000) – Kim Ki-duk.

The 2^nd striking feature I have seen by maverick Korean auteur, Kim Ki-duk certainly proved no less abrasively intriguing than 'Bad Guy'. 'Real Fiction' is a fascinatingly twisted downward spiralling drama about a beleaguered street artist Na (Ju Jin-mo). A docile, morose, interior dwelling individual whose bruising altercations with violent street thugs, and mocking, abusive customers have become distressingly frequent events. After a skewed encounter with a strange, near-silent camcorder woman, the once docile artist snaps, his long-simmering humiliations fatefully boiling into incandescent rage! 

Na relentlessly tracks down his oppressors, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the catalyst for his brutal catharsis has been secretly filming Na's increasingly grisly acts of bloody retribution! While gifted writer/director, Kim Ki-duk's 'Real Fiction' plays out in real-time, nervily captured with a jerky, pseudo-documentary style realism, it also maintains a surreal, deliciously off-key atmosphere. There are unsettling interludes when his desperately dismal world seems positively unreal! 'Real Fiction' exudes a palpably malign energy, not quite a fully fledged fever dream, but one observes life through a wickedly warped lens. Not the easiest of viewings, but I don't believe that's what the director intended Real Fiction to be, and I rewardingly pondered upon this singularly warped narrative long after the credits rolled. The performances were truly exemplary across the board, and I really enjoyed the intense score by, Jeon Sang-yun which, for me at least, disturbingly recalled the similarly strident soundtrack to, Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik!

 

 

 'The Iron Rose' aka 'La Rose De Fer' (1973) – Jean Rollin.

With a remarkably elegiac text by writer Maurice Lemaitre, maestro Jean Rollin's darkly surrealistic romance is doomily set against the macabre, baroque beauty of an ostensibly deserted graveyard. An initially coy, newly courting couple, energetically caught up in the heady rush of mutual attraction spontaneously seek shelter in a sinisterly sprawling, shadow-steeped cemetery, as their ardour increases, Rollin's scintillatingly strange, whimsically wyrd, ethereally eerie phantasmagoria about tomb young lovers and their morbidly sensual graveyard fling belies its simple premise with the director's sublime command of eldritch atmosphere, and forbidden eroticism is put to strikingly poetical use in one of Jean Rollin's most visually striking, exotically stimulating, profoundly engrossing nocturnal fantasies!

'The Iron Rose' is held in high regard by a great many film fans for good reason, arguably, its most enduring appeal lies in the bountifully bosomy presence of exquisitely earthy Euro-starlet Françoise Pascal whose playful, physically uninhibited performance creates an indelibly erotic impression upon the viewers imagination; the luxuriously lissome Pascal gracefully pirouetting dance among the desolated tombstones is the mesmerizing highlight of maestro Rollin's most cohesive, and beautifully constructed Gothic fantasies; the beguilingly blackened bloom of Iron Rose's eternally fascinating, far from rose-tinted allure remains wholly untarnished!