In what must surely be one of the most iconic scenes in Hong Kong cinema ever, Wong Kar-Wai lovingly pans the camera across as Maggie Cheung, wrapped lovingly in a vibrant silk qipao, swings her thermos on the way back from the steam-filled noodle stall she visits every evening, across the grimy alleyways of Hong Kong in the sixties. It is the very essence of arthouse. Then the slow-motion stops, Cheung trudges up the stairs to her lodgings, politely but firmly rejecting her landlady’s kind offer to have dinner with the family, and pulls the shut between the rowdy comfort of the flat and her secluded room within. It’s a lonely life.

This is a movie about loneliness, and human connection lost and found and lost again. In the socially conservative era that constitutes Hong Kong in the 1960s, Mr Chow (played by am impeccably suave Tony Leung, he of the cheap suits and perpetually-furrowed brow) rents a room in an apartment the same day Mrs Su (Maggie Cheung) does. They are each married to absent spouses, never seen onscreen, who work overtime. As a result, Mr Chow and Mrs Su spend much of their time, initially, staying in their respective room, alone, nursing their solitude like fine wine. Eventually, when they discuss the matter, they come to the conclusion that their spouses have been unfaithful, and that they have been seeing each other. In a continuation of the film’s meta-fictional affectations (you did notice that the aforementioned camera panning was too knowing to be entirely in earnest, didn’t you?), they re-enact what they imagine might have happened. Yet the actuality of their relationship remains platonic. “Can a man and a woman ever just be friends?”

As any classicist might tell you, the Platonic (to make a cheap pun), is far from boring. Of course Mr Chow and Mrs Su have feelings for each other that they do not admit. Much of the film is given over to exploring the Foucauldian tension between knowing and confessing; feeling and acknowledging.

In The Mood For Love is not a romantic film. Premised on mutual infidelity, disappointed love, and the jadedness of urban institutions, it is too knowing, too jaded. It questions its own musical effects; it makes metafictional references. Whether that makes its inevitable segue into sincerity jarring or striking, is subject to the personal sensibility of the viewer. I should rather say the latter.

Chris Foster, self-described socialist and porter at Corpus Christi, says his taste is ‘eclectically varied’ and that he likes comedy. We sit down for a coffee, and talk social justice and film. Thanks, Chris!

Q: What was the first film you remember watching as a child?

A: Whistle Down The Wind. I was ten. It’s about three children living in the countryside who find a fugitive on their farm. It’s always stuck with me. I saw it in the cinema. Now that I think about it, it’s particularly striking that it is a film about innocence, since I watched it when I was still young and innocent.

Q: What about when you were a teenager?

A: I must have seen The Graduate when I was 14 — in The Odeon, of course. It was very hard to get into at first, but then I found it very daring. The same year, The Bicycle Thieves was released, which is obviously a very different film in the genre of Italian neo-realism, and about social issues. It made a big impression on me. Social mores were changing then. A big example of that was Woodstock, which I remember seeing also. It was about the festival — one of the best concert movies ever made, really.

Q: What then is your favourite film ever?

A: Oh, I’ve made notes on this [Li: Because I warned him beforehand, Chris has taken extensive notes, which he now refers to. He is the ideal interviewee.] Probably The Third Man, which is classic noir, for its stark cinematography and darkness. It was scored by Anton Karas, as I remember. And my favourite actor of all time, Orson Welles, was in it. It’s a film about disappointment.

Q: Would you say you go in for disappointment in a big way?

A: Haha! Yes, probably. A couple of my other favourite films are about that. All Quiet On The Western Front, for example, is a film about men who slowly lose their idealism and humanity. Heart of the Matter is about a man whose entire life is disappointing. To Kill A Mockingbird isn’t so much about disappointment as it is about injustice. But really, it’s as much about when I saw these things as anything else.

Q: Really? What films do you like that aren’t about disappointment?

A: Oh, Z, which is about a political murder in Greece. That was release in 1969 — I’m showing my age. And Paths of Glory, which was directed by Stanley Kubrick and starred Kirk Douglas. The Winslow Boy. That’s about honour. I’d say I have eclectically varied taste. I like comedy, too.

Q: One last question — what are some recently-released films you enjoyed?

A: The Browning Version has one of the most touching speeches I’ve ever heard on screen. It always makes me cry, and reminds me of the need for more kindness and understanding in all our lives. But that’s not recent. Days of Glory is pretty new. It’s all about films which make a difference.

The Blind Spot is the first play that I wrote.

I began to write it just after I finished school, at the start of my gap year. It was the first time in a while that I’d had enough time to sit down and focus on something that I wanted to write about for a while: three years playing poker, online and in school, often for five to six hours every day. 

It was an addiction, and a very profitable one. My parents didn’t give me an allowance for two years since I supplied the money from poker. In this sense, they approved – I was winning regularly and it gave them one less thing to worry about. My fifteen year old ego skyrocketed as I paid my own way and managed to talk my way into a casino membership and an online poker account.

The comeuppance was quick around the corner. Our game broke up, since the player who effectively funded it lost too much and girls arrived at school. Priorities shifted, power relationships were inverted and poker lost its spark.

A few years on, I wanted to explore the colder sides of my personality, and of my friends, that the long evenings spent locked in boarding school rooms gambling our parents’ money had exposed.

I stuck to poker as the dramatic form for writing about it. It is, as many writers have discovered, inherently theatrical. Conflict springs off the back of every card, character traits are ruthlessly exploited by the winners and money, power and status hang perpetually in the balance.

The result is a play that reveals as much about the nature of the players as it does the cocooned public school world they inhabit. 

The Blind Spot is on in 5^th week in the Moser Theatre, Wadham. Tickets are £5 from www.wegottickets.com

The year 2000 saw the dawn of a new age for television with the launch of the Big Brother franchise – unscripted, ‘real’ people being constantly filmed and put out on air for our viewing pleasure – spurring a spate of new observational ‘reality’ shows: Survivor, Fear Factor, America’s Next Top Model, and, now, entire channels dedicated entirely to them. In 2001, the genre even gained its own Emmy category.

But, last year the sun rose on something new on television, something with the same name but yet tangibly different: something shinier, more tanned and with smooth storylines, narratives which might, almost, maybe, have been written? From The Only Way is Essex to the newest (and punniest) addition, Desperate Scousewives, we are left wondering how much of what we’re seeing is spontaneous dialogue and interaction between characters and how much is managed by ‘story producers’ such as Daran Little (of TOWIE AND MIC), who by some insane and probably totally unrelated coincidence is an award-winning script-writer for Coronation Street.

This new genre goes by many names: reality soap/docu-soap/reality-drama/structured reality with the thin pretence of being a kind of anthropological study of a certain social group (the K-Rahs/the Essex Girls/the Scouse Elite). But, with the obvious content of, in the words of Charlie Brooker, ‘a glossy-looking soap opera performed by non-actors half-improvising a non-script’. Have we actually just been lulled into watching some sort of really painfully budget soap opera? A soap opera with untrained and unskilled actors? And even more predictable plotlines?

Whatever this enigmatic genre is, it’s everywhere and there’s a terrifying number of us glued to our screens screaming inane things like ‘Oh My God – she’s SO stupid!’ in the full knowledge that the fabulously false-eyelashed, fake-tanned and dentally-veneered figure on our screens whom you’ve inexplicably found yourself shouting at, has almost definitely been told to say exactly that spectacularly stupid thing, to elicit the exact reaction you just gave. We’re all following the invisible script, both behind the screen and in front of it.

The end of the last decade witnessed Big Brother’s retreat into the broadcasting purgatory of satellite-only channels. So what happened to TV reality? ‘There’s a new kind of reality, and it’s scripted’ says Sam Wollaston, but why do even our ‘reality’ shows now need to be scripted and airbrushed into a self-consciously perfect reality? Why does nobody on our screen look like the people in the street unless it’s a news item or a mugshot? Can we no longer handle the truth about how people actually look and how they really behave?

In a time when even David Attenborough is ‘structuring’ his footage of polar bears, we’ve got to face the facts (if we can remember what they look like). Reality on screen is over. Our dalliance with reality entertainment was great, it really was, but it’s over. It’s not the genre, it’s us. We just don’t feel the same way any more. We’re out of love with reality.

The underlying morale that pervades Roman Polanski’s latest cinematic endeavour is a cynically Hobbesian take on human morality: civilisation is only a superficial veneer hiding our otherwise barbaric nature. When the Cowans (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) meet up with the Longstreets (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) to discuss a recent skirmish between their young children, it doesn’t take long for Polanski to reveal that the stylish setting of a Brooklyn apartment is as much a milieu for warfare as the school playground. Once Kate Winslet’s vomit chooses Jodie Foster’s precious Kokoschka art books as its primary trajectory, the middle-class farce is set in full motion and it is obvious that the interest of Carnage lies in its observational comedy schtick, in recognising the arrogance and anxieties in all of our comfortable lives.

Originally a play by Yasmina Reza, the film is an acting rumpus for the illustrious cast. Jodie Foster reaches unseen heights of vein-popping outrage as the aggrieved mother of her self-described ‘disfigured’ boy. She really nails the role with devious efficiency, establishing a paradox of unappealing inaccessibility and heart-warming cluelessness. That said, the mystery of how she and her hardware salesman husband ever ended up together is surpassed only by the question of how they could ever afford their bourgeois apartment. Such nitpicking is unavoidable in a contrived chamber-piece film like this, especially when the whole cast accelerate from sober to pissed in what appears to be only a few sips of scotch, rather negating the whole real-time concept. The main criticism, however, should be reserved for the rather unambitious screenplay which targets some fairly low-hanging fruit without bringing anything new to the middle class coffee table. Carnage is only following in the well-trodden footprints of The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

It’s therefore perhaps best to view this film as a simple comedy of ill manners, with Polanski getting in touch with his inner Woody Allen and displaying an outright, farcical sense of humour that’s been long absent from his work. Sadly the real points that the screenplay tries to make about parental hypocrisy and social graces are suffocated under this self-aggrandizing surplus of ‘Arts Picturehouse’ amusement (i.e. where you laugh, turn to see how much the person sitting next to you is laughing, then turn back to laugh even harder). Carnage should have been an intimate exploration of middle-class fears and angst; it’s just a shame that I experienced that sense of claustrophobia mainly in the form of an anxious scan for the cinema’s exit.

TWO STARS

Becoming a fan of Brando and Dean in the formative years of adolescence left me with the indelible impression that the fifties was a rebellious age. The era was electrifying for so many reasons – Hitchcock’s pacy thrillers appealed to Cold War anxieties; Ford’s westerns were glorious and sprawling; Gene Kelly was singing in the rain – but the 14 year-old boy in me will always visit 50s cinema to meet up with just two young stars.

The voice of youth and Stanislavski’s radical ‘method acting’ married in 1950 and found an accommodating home in the body of Marlon Brando. The Men (1950) was Brando’s first feature after a thrilling stage-career which paved the way for stronger, more anguished characterizations that were made all the more exciting by naturalistic acting. In previous decades Clark Gable and Cary Grant gave Hollywood clean looks and enunciating voices but they lacked a pulse. When Brando collapsed in 1951, hands gripping his face, and bellowed ‘Hey Stella!’ it was clear that what was expected of actors would never be the same again. This was real.

  Brando granted the 50s his charming and mesmerising presence which looked effortless but was really the result of dedicated work. In an industry where acting consisted of playing a version of one’s best self, Brando worked hard to become a different person in each role. Viva Zapata! (1952) had him perfect a Mexican accent; The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) had him learn Japanese and Orientalize his face; The Young Lions (1958) had him mastering German playing a Nazi. He furnished each character with a detailed background and distinct psychology: when the object of his affection in On the Waterfront (1954) drops her glove Brando’s Terry Maloy retrieves it, unscripted, cleans it and wears it as if unconsciously communicating his desire for her. His acting was often that of the minute, yet he mastered the grandiose as well – bringing colour and life to Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1953) and showing his musical skill in Guys and Dolls (1955).

Brando set the yard-stick for actors and James Dean swiftly took up the challenge. His tortured personal life came through strongly in his roles and what was clearly a cleansing for him proved cathartic for the audience also. His iconic cry, ‘You’re tearing me apart!’, still resonates today, whilst the father-son scenes in East of Eden (1955) are painfully, and importantly, real and do great example to display the split between traditional acting styles and the new breathtaking one that was emerging.

For me, these two actors are what 50s cinema is all about – in an era dominated by traditional values, Brando and Dean gave voice to a feeling of frustration and desire for change that was bursting to be expressed. When asked what they were rebelling against, they replied ‘What’ve you got?’

A Useful Life

Ultimate Picture Palace, Cowley

This short Paraguayan film is a must-see for cinephiles, telling the story of a life devoted to film and the art of cinema with strong echoes of the classic Cinema Paradiso. 

The Hothouse

Oxford Playhouse, until 4th February

The ambitious, expensive Pinter production finally arrives,  with high expectations to meet. The play follows an excessively bureaucratic mental institution through the machinations and political power plays of its staff. Doors vary, 2.30/7.30/8pm, Tickets £10-£15.

Love Interruption

Released 7th February on Third Man Records

A year after the White Stripes announced their breakup, Jack White releases solo single ahead of his forthcoming album, Blunderbuss.. 

Visions of Mughal India

Ashmolean, until 22 April

From the private collection of artist Howard Hodgkin,  this exhibition of Indian paintings is displayed for the first time in its entirety. See www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/mughalindia/booking for ticket details.

Being Human

Starts 5th February, BBC3

The supernatural comedy-drama returns, sans Vampire  Mitchell, as the gang returns to their house in Barry Island to deal with the aftermath of  the third series, some new friends and some new enemies.  9pm.

Oxford Gargoyles

Copa George St, 7th February

Oxford’s leading jazz a capella ensemble return with a mix of Disney toe-tappers,  grooving funk and, of course, classic jazz. Doors 8.30pm, tickets £4/£2.