When I started work at the Cheltenham Music Festival on the 2^nd July, I couldn’t have guessed that two days later I would be page turning in a headline concert. The evening was one of the centrepieces of the festival, featuring world-renowned violinist Nicola Benedetti, cellist Leonard Elschenbroich, pianist Alexei Grynyuk, violist Benjamin Gilmore, and violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky.

My role as page turner offered a rare snapshot into the behind the scenes lives of these musicians. While sitting in on the pre-concert rehearsal, it was comforting to realise that international professionals share many of the poor rehearsal habits that we normal folk have: while Grynyuk determinedly practised a tricky passage, Sitkovetsky and Elschenbroich argued over which of them would win in a fight against one another, and the amused Benedetti began to text a friend in the corner.

It is testament to the incredible talent of these performers that, during rehearsal, they were able to maintain a spellbinding level of musicianship while simultaneously sharing jokes and tips on each other’s playing. 

The atmosphere on the stage was electric. I was acutely aware of the intensity of the concert for audience and performers alike, yet felt oddly removed from the music itself. My part in all of it was as a cog: to carry out a function as quietly as possible, while the musical fireworks erupted all around me.

As an audience member, you forget the physical effort that goes into creating such a rousing performance. However, given my proximity to the artists, I was struck by the sheer visceral physicality of their performance, especially in the ‘rondo alla zingarese’, or ‘Gypsy rondo’ of the opening Brahms G minor piano quartet.

To see the tiny communicative glances and smiles between each performer gave me an impression of the power and spontaneity of each moment. All at once, I was acutely aware both of the mechanics of the performance itself and the incredible musicianship on display; the edges of all four musicians began to melt into one another to create one entity.

The most striking feature of the evening was the dynamically unbalanced nature of the programme. The last item, Shostakovich’s deeply introspective G minor piano quintet, could have felt anticlimactic; the explosive Brahms would arguably have suited the role of finale rather better. Yet the performers handled the immense emotional load born by the quintet very sensitively, leaving the crowd in stunned silence.

Cheltenham music festival has long been known as a cultivator of new music: the  concert included ‘Butterflies Remember a Mountain’, a new commission by female composer Arlene Sierra. Sandwiched between the Brahms and the Shostakovich, the piece complemented the programme’s focus on emotional transparency; its delicate scoring and use of fluttering extended techniques created a darkly wistful atmosphere.

The balance of emotion between this contemporary work and more standard repertoire felt entirely genuine. The overall effect of the concert was therefore one of reserved introspection, with the audience left spellbound after the final bars.

The opportunity to meet and work with such talented musicians was a privilege. Viewing the festival from a unique viewpoint was an experience that I will remember for a long time to come.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

“See. You felt everything. Fear, worry, blurred vision, dizziness, shaky legs. That’s the full experience.” These are the words of Lea Seydoux’s Karole to Tahar Rahim’s Gary after their first romantic encounter, making explicit the central conceit of Grand Central, a French romantic drama which explores the toxicity of love through a forbidden affair forged in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. Gary is a migrant worker who joins a team of labourers led by Karole’s fiancé that works in the innermost sections of the reactor. Here, tensions mount as loyalties are tested and lives put in danger, lending the film an unexpected claustrophobia, even whilst the disparate tones of Rebecca Zlotowski’s film never entirely connect. 

Whilst the film’s title ostensibly refers to the name of its nuclear power plant setting, its ironic bent becomes clear within minutes of the film’s opening, as we observe that little about these character’s lives is either grand or centralised, with their time divided between minimum wage work at the plant and a mundane existence in an impoverished trailer park. It is here that the lovers’ secret affair occurs, but it is in the plant where it threatens to unravel tenuous but vital bonds of loyalty. Compounded by the divisions of class and gender inherent in the film’s setting, the film develops an escalating sense of peril which sustains into the film’s credits. Zlotowski’s interest in the peripheral existence of the cast of migrants, gypsies and criminals imbues the film with social realism and capitalist critique, as the disadvantaged characters sell their health, identity and futures to the plant’s toxic operation.

For all these poetic and academic ambitions that distance Zlotowski’s directorial voice from that of the characters, both are deeply preoccupied with the properties of skin, particularly how it is displayed and concealed. An early flirtation which sees our lovers’ bodies trapped behind white work overalls cuts to a later scene of his arm pressed tightly against her naked leg in a secretive and sexually charged exchange in the back of a car. These juxtapositions of concealment and exposure show how these lovers find comfort and sexuality in each others skin, even as they view their own with increasing paranoia.

Zlotowski’s camera lingers over the characters’ bare flesh as they go about their days, capturing glimpses of the eroticism they find in their forbidden liaisons. The recurring shots of manic scrubbing and relentless showering combine the tension of the plant with the tensions of the affair; the lovers struggle to scrub the traces of radiation from their bodies, but also traces of each other. This constant eroticism effectively foregrounds the simmering romance at the story’s core, even whilst the elements of social realist drama occasionally threaten to overwhelm it.

However, the film operates as a strange mix of genres and ideas, with the saturated blues and greens of the excruciatingly tense scenes inside the plant reminiscent of science fiction, whilst around the trailer park the film shifts between gritty drama and romanticised sex scenes which unfold in sun dappled fields. These varying tones capture the conflicting moods of the film, and illuminate the fractured relationships at the core of the narrative, but the shifts between them feel uneasy, and consequently the film never coalesces into an entirely satisfactory whole.

Furthermore, the film’s attempts to balance its lyricism with its realism results in several overwritten scenes that sacrifice consistency of character to the film’s larger points about the destructive power of love. This imbalance is also felt in the predictable ending, where the film’s poetic sensibilities overpower the narrative, leaving the emotional arcs of the characters feeling somewhat incomplete.

With regards to the film’s performances, Tahar Rahim makes for a likeable protagonist, playing his undereducated labourer with a sweet innocence even as he knowingly jeopardises the safety of himself and those around him for his own selfishness. Meanwhile Lea Seydoux brings her usual intensity to the part of Karole, filling the screen with a confidence and barely suppressed rage which is gradually stripped away to reveal some of the actresses’ most delicate and affecting work to date. Seydoux uses her aggressive femininity to challenge the male character’s dichotomous sexual identities and machismo, bringing an added dimension to the film’s social exploration. The ensemble cast also deliver affecting work in supporting roles, particularly Denis Ménochet as Karole’s fiancé, who adds shades of sadness and jealousy beneath his character’s macho facade.

Ultimately, Grand Central‘s themes and performances are interesting enough for the film to remain compelling even as it struggles to decide on its identity.  Rebecca Zlotowski has crafted a poetic examination of forbidden love which is grounded in a fascinating exploration of marginalized workers, and in which the potent setting creates a consistent tension that elevates the film over other contemporary romances.

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

A lot of people were breathless in anticipation of the release of the new Transformers, but perhaps none more so than me, as I panted through the Odeon lobby and sat down ten minutes into the showing. I was late and deathly afraid that I had missed key plot points, character exposition and scene setting.

I had purposefully waited to see Michael Bay’s latest contribution to cinema, in order to let all the hype die down. I didn’t want to be influenced by talk of how it will breeze past a billion dollars at the box office, how it was the biggest ever film to open in China or that it had received dreadful reviews. I tried to go into Transformers: Age of Extinction with an open mind.

To my credit, I’m not a card-carrying member of the ardent ‘Michael Bay is cinema’s Antichrist’ lobbying group. The previous Transformers didn’t rile me; they just melded into an orgiastic montage of bright colours, sparks, and unnerving numbers of up-skirt shots. And to be honest, I didn’t really hate this one either. I wasn’t left angry or annoyed. I was just left dazed and confused and with a mountain of questions.

I’m going to leave out the story synopsis, because it’s exactly the same as the previous three films. In a nutshell, aliens arrive and the robots fight each other. It’s more interesting to notice what’s new about this latest edition to the growing Hasbro canon. For one, gone is charisma-vacuum Shia LaBeouf, replaced by hard man Mark Wahlberg. An interesting switch? No, not even slightly. It would be interesting if Bay paid attention to his human characters. But he doesn’t. So it doesn’t matter who the actors are. There are also now robots than can transform into dinosaurs. They’re called Dinobots. Obviously.

But the most interesting change for the franchise as a whole, in terms of marketing, is that more than half the film is set in China. It’s a change not driven by artistic intent, but one to try and crack the single largest cinema audience in the world. That’s why Bingbing Li, one of China’s most famous actresses, features prominently.

It’s probably also why it seems like the film was paid for entirely by the Chinese Tourism Board, flitting as it does between snazzy urban metropolises to picturesque ruins and idyllic valleys. And why the Chinese government gets some cracking positive publicity, where they valiantly and completely free of any agenda pledge to protect Hong Kong. And why Optimus Prime now has ‘Visit China’ lasered onto his face (that’s not true).

Acting wise, it’s pretty non-existent. Mark Wahlberg frowns occasionally. And to give him credit, it is a good frown. Stanley Tucci shouts and swears. Kelsey Grammar is hideously miscast as the villain. He has a naturally smiley face. That’s not frightening. And he’s the voice of Sideshow Bob, who is far more villainy than the cack-handed bad guy role he’s landed here. Nicola Peltz, playing Walhberg’s daughter, is so wooden she makes a scarecrow look like a rhythmic gymnast. And Titus Welliver, playing another villain, has a great name. Safe to say, the acting is pretty thin on the ground. Thin in the air too. Just generally pretty trim.

If I could level one original aspect of criticism at Michael Bay, it’s that his understanding of head injuries and casualty counts is suspect at best. Near the beginning, Optimus Prime whacks a man in the head with a gun the size of a vending machine, and does the victim’s head explode like a melon being hit with a sledgehammer? No. He gets a bruise.

Let me remind you that Optimus is a 28 feet tall robot, who weighs 4.3 tonnes, and can flip cars with a finger. A few minutes later, there’s a slo-mo sequence where a rally car hits a man in the face. Does his head explode? You don’t seem to be getting the pattern here. I don’t really have a choice but to dock some points for that. Poor show Michael. 

But on the bright side, it’s revealed that in the battle at the end of the last film that levelled the entirety of Chicago, apparently only 1300 people died. In a battle that destroyed an entire city. A city that hadn’t been evacuated or had any shelter system of even the most rudimentary kind installed. So that’s a plus.

One thing that didn’t bother me was the 2 hours and 45 minute running time. That is almost a lethal spell to be in a cinema for. A period of time so extended that there should be adverts beforehand warning of DVT. 2001: A Space Odyssey was just over 2 hours long, and that goes from the origins of man to the birth of a new species. Transformers doesn’t. In 2 hours and 45 minutes you could fly to Malta, or Romania or Iceland. But I was so engrossed in trying to keep a mental list of all the plot holes that I didn’t notice the running time at all.

It’s like they used the first draft of the script that no one had re-read; it was more full of holes than the Titanic, a packet of Hula Hoops and a colander combined.

Why is Optimus in an abandoned cinema at the beginning of the film? You would expect to find a lot of interesting stuff in an old cinema, but not a mortar-shelled HGV lorry. How does Wahlberg’s character, a jumped-up electrician, have the requisite skill and knowledge to repair an alien transforming robot who even says he needs his robot friends to fix him? Why, when Optimus is on the run from the government and needs to be covert, does he repaint himself in the gaudy red and blue that he is globally infamous for looking like? How does Wahlberg, a man wanted by the CIA, walk through the front door into a top security arms-production plant? Why does a ship designed for 28 feet tall robots carry guns that are human-sized? Since when can Optimus fly? Wouldn’t that have been a useful thing to crack out, oh, I don’t know, in any of the three preceding films? Where do all the new Autobots come from? Why are the dinosaur robots left to randomly roam across China at the end of the film? Why do all the characters insist on using lifts when it is manifest that collapsing buildings are regular occurrences? 

But if counting that isn’t entertaining enough, then you could also try and keep track of the number of product placement scenes in the film. What with the contribution by the Chinese Tourism Board and the breathtaking number of crass advert moments, this could well be the first blockbuster film to have no budget at all.

It is nice that the product placement scenes are made to seem almost coincidental. So now, when the robots transform, it just happens that the car logo stays on their chest. Or that Stanley Tucci really did want a carton of Shuhua milk after being chased to the top of a building by government assassins. Or that a bus with Victoria Secret emblazoned on it just happened to be in the middle of an extended panning shot. Or that the alien ship just happened to crash into a Budweiser Light truck. Or that there is now a transformer that turns into a Beats speaker. But then again, what else would you expect from a film franchise that has to have a mandatory trademark insignia in the title?

In the end, the film is exactly what I was expecting. It was like meeting an old acquaintance, whom you were never very fond of to begin with, and asking them to urinate into your eyes. All you’re left with is a warm stream of sterile repetitiveness marinating your retinas. 

★☆☆☆☆
One Star

If there’s one thing to be taken away from Sony’s latest theatrical comedy, Sex Tape, starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, it’s that you probably shouldn’t drink and film—yourself having sex. And if you absolutely must, avoid documenting technically comprehensive acrobatic tutorials with the runtime of Dr. Zhivago. The reason being: someone might see it. Like your boss. Or your parents. Or the mailman. I’m inclined to reserve judgment—since depending on one’s proclivities this may or may not be such a bad thing—but in Jay (Segel) and Annie’s (Diaz) case, it’s a very bad thing.

Annie’s blog about motherhood is in on the verge of being purchased by Hank (Rob Lowe), Chief Executive Officer of Piper Brothers. Hank praises Annie for embodying, in the opinion of his ultra-family-friendly corporation, the ‘ideal mother’—a saintly, chaste creature. Astute readers will here see Annie’s dilemma, opaque and cloudy as it may be, when she and her husband Jay realize their ‘personal time’ was automatically synched via an online cloud to various other devices that Jay so charitably bestowed upon those closest to him: his mother-in-law, his twelve-year-old son, his best friend Rob (Rob Corddry), the mailman and yes, Annie’s boss, Hank. After Jay receives a mysterious text message expressing an unknown sender’s approval of the recording, the couple realizes they have only hours to wipe the devices clean to save their reputations, and, as Sony would have you believe, their very livelihood. 

Married right out of college, Jay and Annie laid their way into the foundation of something vaguely resembling a relationship. The first objection viewers might have to this is the visual implausibility of Jason Segel (thirty-four) and Cameron Diaz (forty-one) playing college-aged adolescents. This conspicuous little logic question sets the tone from the opening sequence onwards; it also seemingly takes forever for Jay and Annie to actually make the tape, considering the couple in the back of the theater were, quite impressively, able to make two and a half tapes themselves before the end of the first half.

Jay and Annie’s quest to locate and destroy all extant coital copies leads them on an evening filled with equally ridiculous moments of intra-relational ‘clarity’, where the couple ruminates on why they made the damn tape in the first place. Yet, since their relationship is constructed almost entirely on physical attraction, the night is more revelatory than anything else. At times it seems that if these two thought about sex as much as they profess to, they wouldn’t have time to hold employment, walk in a straight line or even remember each other’s names.

Is Sex Tape funny? At times, very much so—Rob Lowe steals this film. But beyond intermittent episodes of crude, slapstick humor, the story offers little more than the noisy antics of two people whose situation is hardly as dire as they inflate it to be. Even more detrimental is the uncomfortable inclusion of children into this arena—not just on the periphery, but as active players. The head of a major porn website rattling off the litany of his competitors (Youjizz, etc.) in front of a five-year-old is, to me, morally indefensible.  Call me old-fashioned. 

If you have any preconceptions about what a student film set would be like, I can imagine it’s something like a chaotic melee of handheld cameras, improvised costumes, bewildered actors and enough creative enthusiasm to power a small rocket. Like Passolini trying to co-ordinate the Battle of the Somme. But the set we visited was as far removed from that amateurish stereotype as could be imagined. There was order, clear direction, a sizeable production team and professional equipment. It was a student film set, but one that screamed skill and proficiency. 

We spent an afternoon on the set of two student films being shot in Oxford, called Waterbird and Catkins; a double feature exhibiting the best that the local amateur film scene has to offer. Professionalism seems to be the watchword of the project, from production to acting. Ryan, playing one of the protagonists for Waterbird, went to lengths in explaining how high-calibre this was in comparison to his other experiences; “It’s far more professional. I’ve done a few things before this, but nothing of this sort of calibre with such a strong team. From head to toe of the project, everyone knows their role, everyone’s got a fantastic relationship.” To get a better sense of just where this professionalism comes from, we sat down with producer Ksenia, head of marketing Owen, and Ryan to better understand the project.

Waterbird, the one we saw being filmed,follows two friends, one partying to forget, the other a keen sportsman, who have a falling out that leads to a tragic accident, and how the surviving friend reminisces by a river on the loss. Catkins follows a man arguing with his wife, who is convinced to not divorce her after an ethereal encounter with a young woman on a river bank, caressing a bunch of the eponymous flowers. Ksenia explained how “the one big project is how people use nature to come to terms with their grief, and how nature symbolises the pain they’re going through.” And as Owen pointed out, “it means you get to film in some really beautiful places, like these lovely rivers”, referring to the banks of the Cherwell where the crew was filming that day.

And although being shown together, the films had very separate conceptions. “Waterbird was an amalgamation of things Alex (the director) had come across, the tragic death story is something that’s happened to a friend. Catkins came from a Turgenev short story, where there’s a very similar plot and Alex has decided to put it into a modern context. So very different, and we’re intending on making them very stylistically different”, Ksenia elaborated. Indeed, in terms of style, the films have a very clear aesthetic intent. “The outdoors shoots appear very dreamy, less realistic. Based on what we’ve seen so far from Catkins, the outdoor bits almost seem like a dream and very idealised. The indoor scenes are much more realistic”. Owen also explained how the visual aspect affects the structure of the story telling. “All of the present day stuff is outdoors and dreamy, all the indoor stuff is a year ago, dreary. It’s all very enclosed and suffocating.”

Sound also plays a key role in both shorts, where substantial aspects of the story telling are shifted to the soundtrack. “The sound adds an atmospheric quality. Both films feature folk songs that are being reworked, and we’re improving with the actors to get some folk songs as well. The songs also represent the idea of nature being solace, as they come on when the characters find contact with nature and I think it adds a romantic touch.” Owen went further, “Alex has always seen sound as a purer way of expressing emotion; as soon as a song begins it’s something different, dreamier.”

Such a thoughtful and in-depth attitude to all aspects of the filming is something extremely striking about the production. All aspects of the visuals and the sound represent something and further the story, even down to the importance of individual props in the scenes. There is very little sign of thoughtlessness in any aspect of the films. The actors are all plugged in to what is going on and the artistic intention, as James, playing the other protagonist in Waterbird, explained when we spoke to him. “The rehearsals have been extremely helpful in bringing emotion out in the performances, especially the darker emotions. It’s been really professional in how everything’s been explained to us, and how we’re meant to approach it from an acting point of view.”

So, these were student films that bore, perhaps, little resemblance to the ramshackle stereotype attached to amateur productions. It was slick, well thought-out, well funded, with financial backing of the Vice Chancellor himself, and was consistently directed by clear artistic intent. Even the equipment we saw would not look out of place on a professional film, with top-of-the-range cameras, lenses and sound equipment. No home movie handheld cameras here. But more than just impressively snazzy, the quality of equipment spoke volumes about the care and attention that pervaded the set. Clearly, these were films intended to be pieces of art, not just distracting side-projects. 

Both films are being entered in a host of films festivals, both domestic and international, from Tribeca to Southampton, and whilst we can’t tell what the finished products will be like, based on professionalism alone, Waterbird/Catkins certainly have a fighting chance. And don’t worry, you’ll be able to watch the end result for yourself, as the team intend to put on a showing in Oxford some time at the end of Michaelmas or the beginning of Hilary.