Author: Lisa Roberts

There is nothing Lisa loves more than delving beneath the surface to catch a glimpse of the hidden mechanisms that bring the magic to the screen. She first studied film in a pioneering course, Rough Beasts are Slouching, directing with St Martins Youth Theatre and she has completed a postgraduate certificate in writing with Swinburne University.

Wonder Woman 1984

Rated: MWonder Woman 1984

Directed by: Patty Jenkins

Written by: Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns, David Callaham

Produced by: Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, Patty Jenkins, Gal Gadot, Stephen Jones

​Starring: Gal Gadot, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Chris Pine.

For the first time in, it seems like in forever, I settle into my seat as the lights go down and the big, booming bass comes up. All at once, I’m gathered up and soaring over wild and rocky island where a tournament that barely conforms to the laws of physics is taking place between a cohort of Amazons. Their aerial feats heap peril upon danger and I’m immediately swept into a world of strength and precision where it is possible to move over land, air and sea in unimagined and gravity-defying ways.

Unlike other super heroes, Diana of Themyscira (Gal Gadot) is not a fully-formed super being; she makes mistakes and must earn her powers. Amid the pyrotechnics of the genre it’s a subtle distinction, but it underwrites and in some ways allows this movie to nudge the genre’s boundaries.

After a rigorous preparation in physical combat and a painful introduction to ethics, Wonder Woman’s training continues, even while she is out in the world and on the job. When an out of control car careens out of nowhere, Diana instinctively kicks it to the kerb and is at once assailed by doubt. Has her action been seen by the bystanders around her? A momentary impulse may well have blown her cover as a mild mannered specialist in antiquities at the Smithsonian museum.

Not only does Diana buck the genre as a hero who is still learning her craft, the villain (Pedro Pascal) is a man who more than anything wants to live up to an heroic ideal of himself. Instead of a frustratingly invincible villain, this one, grinning snake oil salesman though he may be, is merely a man with a seriously misguided sense of what it is to be a good parent. Together with a highly unusual premise that to embrace the truth you must be prepared to let go of even your dearest wishes and dreams, this combination allows the story to delve into some of the existential dilemmas we must all reconcile. And, despite being set in 1984, in that decade of power dressing, big shoulders and extremely unfortunate leisure wear, the storyline and the question it asks are very much at one with the times in this era of fake news.

But this is a comic come to life and Wonder Woman 1984 is very much a high flying adventure. The towering atrium of a multi-story shopping centre almost doubles as a private gymnasium for Diana when a feckless trio of crooks attempt to rob a jewellery store and grab a child hostage on their way out. But, this time, Diana does remember to take out the security cameras before sheleaps over the handrail.

While some viewers might wish for a deeper emotional frisson between Diana and her long lost love (Chris Pine), for those of us who’ve let their inner child loose this is an unmissable opportunity to upend armoured vehicles travelling in convoy on a lonely stretch of desert highway, lasso bullets and hitch a ride on a commercial flight at the end of a golden rope.

Lassie Come Home

Rated: PGLassie Come Home

Directed by: Hanno Olderdissen

Screenplay: Jane Ainscough

Produced by: Henning Ferber

Starring: Niko Marischka, Bella Bading, Sebastian Bezzel, Anna Maria Mühe, Matthias Habich.

When I think of Lassie, I think of a dog who knew too much. Way too much. Previous Lassies would bail up the villains, almost before they’d managed to commit the crime. Whereas Florian Maurer’s Lassie, possibly due to her intensely close bond with the boy, shares many of the personality traits of her 12 year old partner in crime.

Lassie is both a mischievous bundle of fur and an exceptional athlete with her go button stuck on high. She never walks when she can run but, mostly, Lassie careens around as if powered by a secret jet pack. So, it is not surprising when the landlady’s bag of groceries is knocked flying as Lassie tears down a narrow staircase or she leaves an elegant trail of paw prints when she bounds across some freshly painted road markings. It is this overflowing exuberance that sees her banished from the apartment where her human family have recently taken up residence.

With the landlady waving the lease and refusing to budge, her family must find Lassie a new home. At least temporarily. Fortunately they are friendly with Graf von Sprengel, the dog-loving owner of a grand country manor. Flo and Lassie are desolate at their separation, even though they will be living within in walking distance of each other. That is, until Graf needs to travel to an island in the North Sea to sell his summer home.

It’s from here that Lassie races off. When one of the hired hands attempts to mistreat her, Lassie sees her chance to bolt. It is the beginning of a series of adventures for both dog and boy as they vainly try to reunite. And, since she’s the only one with a phone so they can follow Lassie’s progress as it is captured and posted on social media, Graf’s 12 year old granddaughter Cilla joins the chase too.

As a dog of many talents, Lassie is well equipped for such an odyssey. It turns out that she is not only an expert at hitching rides and stowing away, but she’s a sausage snavelling fiend and an accomplished circus performer. And in true Lassie style, she can sniff out friend from foe at 20 paces.

As the film has been dubbed from the original German, there is in some places a slight disjunction between the emotion a character is displaying and the shape of their words, but this is a minor consideration. Not only is the cinematography gorgeous and the scenery stunning, the film has been well cast: from Flo and Cilla who are more like real children and not the overly earnest characters of previous generations to Bandit the Scottish Collie who plays his starring role with aplomb.

Rather than a dog who knows too much, Lassie is a headstrong creature with her own methods of solving problems. Since she doesn’t bite, Lassie frequently achieves her ends with some well-timed barking. A lot of barking. Lassie is still very much a super dog, but in a more doggy way.

With the focus of this film on friendship, and no awkward lectures on doing the right thing, I could just sit back and enjoy the pandemonium.

Body Swap

Rated: not rated in AustraliaBody Swap

Directed by: Timothy Morton                

Written by: Jimmy Kustes

Produced by: Jimmy Kustes

Starring: Ella Jordan, Jimmy Kustes, Gunner Willis, Joseph Tino, Kayte Giralt, Erica Manni.

‘Pump the brakes lady. I don’t swap bodies every day.’

When Casey (Jimmy Kustes) an unemployed video gamer and highly-evolved couch potato takes the company motto to ‘be yourself’ to heart during an interview, he not only blows any chance he might have had to get the job, but the interviewer (Ella Jordan) is so incensed at his bare-faced honesty that she tries to feed his résumé to the paper shredder. As the pair jostle, Casey’s drink spills and the device short circuits, knocking them both out.

On regaining consciousness, each discovers that they have swapped into the last body in the world they would choose to live in.

Even worse, it’s a critical time in C.J.s career, she has been tasked with steering a billion dollar merger for her firm and her boss has made it clear that she is to do nothing that might jeopardise the process. Under the circumstances, C.J. feels as if she has no choice but to let the job applicant reject appear in her place while she navigates a body that can keep an M&M hidden under its boobs.

This is a gentle comedy rather than a roll around on the floor romp but, for me, there was great delight in delving into the meta-levels of this thoughtful offering. Throughout the film, interview footage of a more relaxed and socially adept C.J. and Casey, as they sit sprawled across a couch discussing the intimate mechanics of body swapping, is inserted into the flow of the narrative as if the whole thing were actually a documentary.

With this meta-level intrusion serving as an ongoing reminder, I was very conscious that each character was at once themselves inside another’s body, at the same time as they were attempting to take on the identity of the other, while never being able to fully shrug off the traits of the person they had once been.

Such a kaleidoscope of competing agendas kept my mind in a whirl. In a good way.

When C.J. and Casey swap bodies, they step into lives so far apart on the career and social spectrum that they might have been living in separate universes. Ostensibly the film is about what the two can learn about themselves on their paths to becoming less dysfunctional human beings, but this is also where this movie so nicely defies convention. Despite the strangeness of the situation, each finds themselves in an unexpectedly powerful position in their new life. C.J. knows exactly how to shower Casey’s girlfriend with romance, that is until she runs into mechanical problems, while Casey has been longing for an opportunity to unleash his gamer superpowers onto the real world and it doesn’t take him long to see the huge potential in his new corporate role as well as the possibilities of life as a lesbian.

While this indie flic might demand some effort on the part of the audience, much of the humour lies in the subtleties, there are some deliciously absurd moments with two thoroughly amusing and likable leads.

Monos

Rated: MA 15+Monos

Directed by: Alejandro Landes

Written by: Alexis Dos Santos, Alejandro Landes

Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Moises Arias, Sofia Buenaventura, Julian Giraldo, Karen Quintero, Laura Castrillón, Deiby Rueda, Sneider Castro, Paul Cubides.

Monos has been hailed as Lord of the Flies meets Apocalypse Now and with so many obvious parallels I couldn’t help but wonder if this would be a film I had already seen.

As Monos opens, the camera swoops in on a remote outpost atop a mountain, where a band of war orphans shelter in an abandoned bunker. From a distance the terrain is visually arresting and close-up the environment alternates between a muddy and wind-whipped wasteland overhung by great, boiling clouds and a private Shangri-La for the group of underage guerrillas. That is, until the encroaching conflict pushes the squad and their hostage down into the cover of the jungle below.

While Apocalypse Now also tracks an expedition into the tangled depths of the jungle, the primordial setting a mirror to the battle-ravaged psyche of a U.S. colonel gone rogue, Alejandro Landes’s film goes even deeper, beneath the skin to where the blood fizzes and thrums. In the swarming wilderness, birdlike tongue clicks identify the group to itself and a lone giggle rises up into the indifferent skies. With the ever-present helicopter rotors pulsing overhead, echoing both Apocalypse Now and the strains of a thumping heart, Mica Levi’s music score builds into a vast and panoramic soundscape that is at the same time utterly intimate.

Landes’s camera, too, continues this dance between near and far. On one level, telling the story in the traditional way with characters and dialogue and, on another, the soaring camerawork abstracting the experience. Unlike the two earlier films, each viewed through the prism of a single character, Monos is seen through the eyes of its several victims. While this approach does invoke the visceral experience, it also opens up a psychological distance that may not be to everyone’s taste. At the same time, this cinematic distancing also tilts the focus of the film ever so slightly.

Where Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now tell intensely human stories that arise from the social and political context of their times, Monos more directly addresses the context. At the outset, these child soldiers playing blind man’s bluff, indulging in communal pashing sessions and so gleefully spraying the slopes around them with machine gun fire enjoy an almost unfettered degree of freedom, but underlying it all are the unspoken fears that come with the threat of adult punishments and all-to-real consequences.

It is a culture shaped by its paramilitary status, but it is also a society populated by those young enough not to have preconceived notions of what a society should be. While the stories told by the two earlier films have emerged from highly organised social structures that they implicitly critique, there is no sense here that these teenagers have ever known a safe haven beyond their earliest years.

As the war encircles them, their micro-society does not so much fall apart as an already harsh regime mutates, morphing into an entity where those that wield the power will do absolutely anything to preserve their fiefdom and those on the receiving end will, equally, risk everything to get out.

Monos is both lyrical and shocking, an experience felt at the level of tissue and bone, and a story playing out, somewhere. Now.

The Biggest Little Farm

Rated: PGThe Biggest Little Farm

Directed by: John Chester

Produced by: Sandra Keats

Featuring: John Chester, Molly Chester, Todd Chester, Alan York

It all began with a promise to a rescue dog . . . that he has come to live with his forever family.

When John, a wildlife filmmaker, and Molly, a chef with a tiny garden on her porch and a passion for home-grown produce, are served with a notice evicting them from their apartment because Todd, their dog, has a bad case of separation anxiety, the solution seems obvious.

Buy a farm for the dog and spend every day out in the paddocks and the fresh air with Todd. What could go wrong?

Although it could be squarely classified as a documentary, this film is something special. In keeping with the principles of storytelling, there is a powerful sense of being part of a drama unfolding in real time, as well as a sprinkling of philosophy and gorgeous cinematography. I wasn’t expecting to be, but I was entranced.

The film opens with great plumes of smoke rolling across the paddocks toward the house as Molly stands at the kitchen window and stares. With two-way radio chatter and whumping helicopter blades providing the backbeat, John prepares to set the animals loose and Molly belatedly grabs random belongings and flings them into a suitcase.

But all this comes later. First there is the farm. An abandoned orchard encircled by bare hills and large-scale, monoculture holdings. All around, intensive farming methods predominate, and it’s the exact opposite of what Molly and John have in mind.

When the couple start out, their little patch of soil is as unyielding as granite and a cluster of hives they find tucked away among the trees is a ruined monument to its dead bees. So the first thing is to engage a soil expert and the next is to find out what happened to the bees.

In their first six months, Molly and John will spend an entire year’s budget of their investors’ money without producing a thing. But they do find Alan, a board-short clad farm consultant with a passion for compost and a vision. He describes a farm that will function as an eco-system, eventually coming to harness the power of nature, maybe not easily, but as simply as a wave bearing a surfer ahead of its crest.

Alan’s concept is to base the farm upon the greatest bio-diversity possible, from the micro-organisms in the soil to an orchard stocked with 75 different varieties of fruit trees (to begin with), in the belief that such profusion will regulate the farm and inoculate it against the epidemics that bedevil its monoculture neighbours. Well, that’s the theory, and the Apricot Lane Farm is stocked lavishly. Until I saw the trays of chickens and a plethora of piglets arriving, I didn’t really appreciate what it meant to actually stock a farm.

As the soil regenerates, the farm is gradually populated with an array of domestic animals and crops, and the wild species, too, are returning. Among the swarms of bees, flotillas of ducks and gopher gangs moving in, are the hungry-eyed coyotes, running their nightly missions on the henhouse, along with a procession of invaders, such as the squadrons of starlings laying waste the to the fruit crop.

Alan had said that it would all balance out, but he didn’t say how. This time it would be up to Todd to lead the way.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Rated: MPortrait of a Lady on Fire

Directed and Written by: Céline Sciamma

Produced by: Bénédicte Couvreur

Starring: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luana Bajrami, Valeria Golino.

Is it the ‘Lady’s’ portrait that is on fire or does the title allude to a portrait of a ‘Lady’ who is on fire? Inscribed within the very title is a hint of the subtleties and ambiguities that characterise this deeply intimate romance, winner of the ‘Best Screenplay’ at the Cannes Film Festival.

And from this point on, the enigmas only proliferate.

In the opening scene, a hand clasping a stick of willow charcoal hesitantly traces a black line across the page while the model/tutor posing in front of the class instructs her students and, at the same time, indirectly urges the viewer to, ‘Take the time to look at me.’

Much in the way that an artist will strive to render three dimensional form on a two dimensional surface, noticing the minutiae of form and the way the model’s limbs and torso are affected by the quirks of perspective and the play of light, so too the viewer is invited into a more intense and quiet world where gesture and symbol take on a deeper meaning and sounds emerging from the stillness— waves slapping against a wooden hull, keys jangling, the scratch of charcoal on paper—take on their own musicality.

It is 1760 and Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is travelling to an isolated chateau perched atop a cliff on the Brittany coast to fulfil a commission. She is to paint a wedding portrait for Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), but the work must remain a secret. Her subject, freshly graduated from life in a convent, is clinging on to her first and last moments of freedom before she is offered up for marriage to an Italian nobleman she has yet to meet, and the only way for Héloïse to resist is to prevent her portrait from coming into existence.

While Héloïse has already forbidden one artist to continue painting her, she doesn’t suspect that her new companion may have her own agenda. Not only is Marianne compelled to work in the few moments of daylight she can snatch away from her time with Héloïse, she must also reassemble Héloïse in her memory from the fragmented glances she manages to steal as the two roam the grasslands surrounding the estate and the rugged shoreline below.

As she works at her task Marianne reflects, ‘One must study the ear, even if it is covered.’ With this observation, Marianne does not simply refer to the way that memory and imagination must work together to reconstruct that which is hidden, or the way the folds and whorls of the ear set up a visual rhythm that recalls its function, she also draws our attention to the ear as a motif, with its form a labyrinth at the entrance to a lightless tunnel.

Like the layers Marianne builds up on her canvas—from the initial cartoon marked out in charcoal, through the abstract daubs of paint where features roughly blocked in glow whitely against the raw umber imprimatura, to that moment when a likeness appears as if from a veil of smoke—that first guarded friendship between the artist and her subject forms its own layers, eventually building into a connection that will draw them both through an emotional and philosophical labyrinth to that lightless tunnel at its heart.

Finke: There and Back

Rated: MFinke: There and Back

Directed by: Dylan River

Produced by: Rachel Clements, Isaac Elliot, Meredith Garlick, Trisha Morton-Thomas

Narrated by: Eric Bana

Director of Photography: Clair Mathon

Featuring: Isaac Elliot, Scruff Hamill, David Walsh, Daymon Stokie , Luke Hayes, Toby Price.

‘Fast as all hell, rough as hell and dangerous as all hell.’

If that sounds like your idea of fun, you might want to head up to Alice Springs on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend for the Finke Desert Race.

Each year 15,000 spectators and 500+ riders turn up for the Northern Territory’s biggest annual event.

It’s a two hour dash through the scrub to the Finke Hotel, 230 kilometres through the heart of Australia, and for the riders, ‘It’s like holding onto the edge of a cliff for two hours’.

While the car and bike events each crown a King of the Desert, the dirt bikes are the glamour event. Theirs is the raw confrontation with one of the most challenging off-road events in one of the most remote places in the world.

Part of the allure is that a dark horse can come up from behind and steal the crown.

With race favourite Toby Price forced to compete in the four wheel drive section due to injury, the field for this year is wide open. As Finke is raced on corrected time, and each rider sets off individually, the race leader will not necessarily be the winner.

Behind the scenes there are high stakes for these potential dark horses in their ubiquitous trucker caps, with the film honing in to tell the stories of six competitors from a field of nearly 600.

Yamaha hasn’t taken out the race in 9 years and local boy Daymon Stokie, despite a broken hand, hopes to steal the crown from fellow local and KTM rival David Walsh.

Scruff Hamill has driven up from Sydney to race a 1970s’ bike he’s restored himself, while Isaac Elliot will attempt the race on a bike with special modifications. A decade earlier he fell during the race and, while it rendered him paraplegic, it didn’t dilute the Finke fever running through his veins.

Every year there are gut-wrenching stories. Who will take the crown this year? The desert will decide.

Breathtakingly beautiful, ‘The desert is an all-powerful force that looms over every rider,’ and stunning cinematography, using aerial and ground-level views, even bike-cam, captures the inscrutable beauty of this ancient world, while glimpses of the night sky are awe-inspiring.

As Eric Bana’s voiceover intones, ‘It’s God’s country, it’s like nowhere else’.

With its clouds of dust, drifts of red sand, relentless heat, dangerous curves and infamous whoops (like the corrugations on dirt track, only bigger—much bigger) the Finke is intense.  It is very much a confrontation with human fragility. According to emergency services, just about every bone in the human body has been broken somewhere along the track. As one rider very perceptively commented: ‘The hardest part of the course is the four inches between your ears.’

The Finke has changed since it began with a group of larrikins in the 70s. According to one ex-rider, ‘It’s a bit different now; it’s a bit serious.’ But some things haven’t changed. There are still plenty of ways to put yourself on the ground. Hard. Even if you’re not in the race, you can ride the 44 gallon drum hooked up to bungie ropes. It’s the Finke version of a mechanical bull.

Punch & Judy

Rated: MA 15+Punch and Judy

Directed by: Mirrah Foulkes

Written by: Mirrah Foulkes

Produced by: Michele Bennett, Nash Edgerton, Danny Gabai

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman, Tom Budge, Benedict Hardie, Lucy Velik, Gillian Jones, Terry Norris, Brenda Palmer.

This strangely beautiful fairytale, horror story, social commentary is not an easy film to classify.

Behind the scenes, the director has breathed life into the puppets, allowing the drama of the Punch and Judy Show to play out beyond its predetermined conclusion.

Traditionally Punch batters a whole cast of characters. Often starting by mistreating his own baby, Punch’s other victims include Judy, a police constable, a skeleton, the devil and even a crocodile—with many of those hapless characters now populating the village of Seaside.

In the version of the show that has survived in England from the 17th century until the present day, Punch and Judy are glove puppets voiced by a single storyteller.

Dubbed the Professor, the puppeteer uses a device called a swazzle for the voice of Punch. Since the swazzle renders Punch almost unintelligible, he mutters away, his frustration and fury building, until he finally vents, paying out on anything in reach with his slapstick.

Even so, the film harks back to the earlier marionette theatre that made its way to England from Italy’s commedia dell’arte. The word slapstick in our modern language actually has its origins in the literal slap stick that Punchinello carried across from Europe, while the expression pleased as punch macabrely  derives from Punch’s glee when he beats another character senseless and then proudly proclaims, ‘That’s the way to do it’.

As, Punch & Judy opens, it’s a moment where life imitates art imitating life. Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) and Judy (Mia Wasikowska) are taking a bow for their newly revived more punchy and more smashy show when the Professor apropos of nothing, casually flings Judy across the stage and into a wall.

In keeping with the English tradition where the crowd sides with Punch, shouting out warnings to him and revealing the hiding places of the other characters, the living puppets of Seaside have descended into a state of mob rule, with those who are weaker or different are scapegoated as witches.

In this world the voice of the accuser holds sway, while the rabble seizes upon the flimsiest of pretexts to displace their own depravity onto the those unable to defend themselves: ‘This one’s chickens all died on the one night, this one has a rash and that one was out staring at the moon for too long.’

As three women, ‘Fresh filthy examples of the evil sweeping our land,’ cower on the gallows for Stoning Day (a cunning inversion of Mother’s Day), I was struck by a frisson of recognition. The setting was one I’d roamed around in. I’d had picnics there. It wasn’t the English forest that I was seeing, but native Australian bushland.

It was a conundrum. Why set a quintessentially English story on the other side of the world? The film was so beautifully composed, so it didn’t seem accidental. Many of the scenes had been shot with specially-selected lenses from the 1960s and 70s, and some scenes had even been shot by candlelight as way to evoke the rich, dreamlike feel. When I thought about it, I wondered if, maybe, the film had been designed so we could see ourselves more clearly, while we believe that we were looking at them over there.

Camille Claudel

Rated: PGCamille Claudel

Directed by: Bruno Nuytten

Produced by: Isabelle Adjani, Bernard Artigues

Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Cuny, Laurent Grévill, Madeleine Robinson.

Restored version

In French with English subtitles 

It is definitely worth a trip to Winsor for a coffee, a croissant and Camille Claudel.

As a part of their Isabelle Adjani retrospective, the 2019 Alliance Française Classic Film Festival is screening  the 1988 classic, which tells the story of Camille Claudel’s tragic romance with the sculptor Auguste Rodin (Gérard Depardieu).

As the film opens, Camille Claudel is out late at night and all alone. The wind howls, snow is falling, and, despite her full-length skirt and bonnet, Claudel is burrowing into a muddy pit, pawing handfuls of wet clay into a suitcase.

What could possibly inspire such single-minded determination? An audition to work as an assistant to Rodin. Yes. Absolutely. But beyond that, Claudel’s aspirations were so improbable that a film about her life had to be based on a true story. Even at the dawn of modernism, Claudel’s chosen art form was unlikely.

Sculpture has always been hideously expensive and working at scale meant long hours of backbreaking toil in freezing barns and stables. Much to her mother’s (Madeleine Robinson) displeasure, Monsieur Claudel (Alain Cuny) shared his daughter’s ambition and was happy to indulge her. Although, in the end, her father’s indulgence may have turned out to be a poison chalice.

Taken on as one assistant among many, Claudel is working high on a scaffold when her attention is drawn toward a nook on the other side of the studio. From her unseen vantage point she can see Rodin running his lips over his model’s naked flesh. His reputation as a seducer of young women would appear to be well-deserved, until the sculptor later uses the same gesture on a marble torso as he tries to feel the life within.

While kissing the sculptures is generally discouraged in galleries and museums, hewing form from rock is intense and physical, and the film beautifully alludes to the sculptor’s desire to caress the rock, to sensuously experience that moment when the curve of ankle or the bow of a lip first emerges from its casing.

In the role of Claudel’s mentor, Rodin offers keen insights into the nature of sculpture and subtly evokes its poetry, ‘The accident of what is left is a complete emotion,’ but Rodin was years behind in fulfilling his commissions and struggling for inspiration when the affair began. As his muse, his model, his lover and his artistic collaborator, Claudel was the focus of Rodin’s admiration and her name was becoming established at the epicentre of Parisian art, so it must have seemed inconceivable that it would all come apart.

When the unthinkable did happen, Claudel denounced Rodin as the arch-villain who destroyed her. She blamed him for everything from stealing her commissions to undermining her reputation and blighting her exhibitions. She even claimed that Rodin was somehow responsible for the river Seine when her studio flooded.

But there was another less obvious figure involved in Claudel’s downfall. While Claudel was conducting her affairs in the limelight, her younger brother (Laurent Grévill) had been pursuing a successful diplomatic career and quietly gaining recognition as a poet. Ever available and obliging, Paul Claudel was Camille’s closest ally; that is, until he came into his inheritance.

A singular woman in a world conducted by men with agendas, the story of Camille Claudel might not be quite as it appears.

Pavarotti

Rated: MPavarotti

Directed by: Ron Howard

Produced by: Ron Howard

Written by: Marc Monroe

Featuring: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, José Carreras, Bono.

Before even the first images appear, the cinema is filled with the chittering and warbling of birdsong, and I can only suppose that some kind parallel with Pavarotti’s voice is being drawn. In fact, when the vision comes up, I find myself swooping over the Amazon jungle looking down at the serpentine loops of the river.

As Pavarotti’s story unfolds, director and producer, Ron Howard, not only ushers us behind the scenes, but invites us onstage and even takes us on the road with the maestro. While Luciano Pavarotti may have been born with, ‘One of the most clearest and passionate voices, heaven on earth,’ it took a very earthly degree of physical exertion to fill an entire concert hall with a single voice. Without a microphone. Without an amplifier. And certainly, without speakers.

Despite a long induction emulating his father’s singing, Pavarotti initially qualified as an elementary school teacher. The decision to take on the long training to become a tenor was an enormous leap of faith, ‘You don’t become well-known in a day. You don’t know your destiny’.

According to his wife Adua Veroni, Pavarotti was not a person who ever planned things and that was certainly the case for his international debut. He took the stage as a stand-in playing opposite Joan Sutherland, but was more than a lucky break. Pavarotti was in awe and he believed that Sutherland’s breathing technique allowed him to become a serious professional. During a rehearsal, Sutherland invited him to feel the muscles in her diaphragm. Much to Pavarotti’s amazement, they were responding, even before Sutherland had sung a single note.

For the operatic tenor, the high C is the epitome, but it is not a natural range in the way a bass or baritone is and to achieve the fluency that makes it seem effortless requires more than talent. So, when Pavarotti performed nine high Cs, he created opera history. Likening it to horse jumping, when the Maestro of the High C was asked whether he knew he would be able to reach the note, he replied with a contrary smile: ‘No. That is the beauty of my profession’.

According to Placido Domingo, the art of the opera singer is to share the emotion of each particular word: ‘If you pronounce it well you get the rhythm immediately.’  For Pavarotti, it was a matter of technique: ‘You measure your breath’. The public will not know what you are doing, but they will feel it. But, for all of the art and the artifice, Pavarotti’s wife felt that he was so suited to his operatic repertoire because he was a ‘bumpkin’ at heart.

Then again, his eight-year-old daughter described her father as a thief, because he went to work each night with a suitcase full of fake moustaches and beards. For Pavarotti, ‘the opera is something fake that little by little becomes true’.

On camera Pavarotti seemed so confident and cavalier, but behind the scenes, before every performance, Pavarotti would lament, ‘I go to die.’ According to José Carreras, ‘The voice is a demanding mistress, anything will affect it’.

In his later years, Pavarotti performed with many contemporary musicians. While the focus is on his unlikely friendship with Princess Diana and Bono, he also performed with Elton John and Lou Reed among many others.

Little by little, Howard builds a lifelike portrait of an extraordinary life, but his documentary, overflowing with texture and detail, still cannot cram it all in.