As part of Music at Oxford’s 09/10 concert season, Emma Johnson (clarinet) and Pascal Rogé (piano) offered one of the most promising concert programmes I have seen for a while – from Weber and Brahms to Stravinsky and Copland, the range of music was impressive and the artists never sounded out of their depth.

The opening Silvana Variations by Weber were played with brimming enthusiasm, although it was at first difficult to gain a solid impression of Johnson’s character while she was dominating the hall by walking around centre-stage. This was rectified with the pleasant surprise of anecdotal information before each piece – a story about one of Weber’s premières being poorly attended due to one of the first hot-air balloon ascents gave the kind of informal atmosphere you’d hope for when attending a concert to both appreciate and learn something about the music.

The largest piece on the programme was Brahms’s first Clarinet Sonata, which the composer wrote after he was stunned by the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld – an experience which lifted him out of a brief retirement. Johnson infused the piece with great energy and lyricism, although it is a ‘Sonata for Clarinet and Piano’ as much as it is a ‘Clarinet Sonata’, and she was overbearing in places, unfortunately making some of the piano’s greatest passages inaudible.

Rogé was a fine accompanist throughout, and he fully seized the opportunity to display his own virtuosity with a piece for piano solo – La Cathédrale Engloutie from the first book of Préludes by Debussy. This was one of the most moving pieces of the night thanks to Rogé’s ability to evoke the image of the cathedral of Ys rising from the sea with its tolling bells, and he thus demonstrated his acclaimed affinity for French pianism.

This month’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones continues the cinematic tradition of contemplating what comes next, after one has shuffled off this mortal coil. As far as artistic challenges go, depicting the afterlife with any degree of success is undeniably formidable. Yet it is a challenge that has inspired countless gifted and foolhardy filmmakers to attempt the definitive version of life on the other side.

The landscape of the afterlife on display in The Lovely Bones, wandered by the soul of Suzy Salmon, a young girl murdered and forced from afar to watch her family come to terms with their wrenching bereavement, is one of the more elaborate to be created onscreen. The way in which it fluctuates to symbolically reflect her mood, bursting into verdant life one moment and becoming a ravaged wasteland the next, is reminiscent of What Dreams May Come, an almost forgotten fantasy-drama from 1998 starring Robin Williams.
Effectively a pop-culture retelling of Dante’s Inferno, relating the story of a man who decides to travel from Heaven to Hell to rescue his wife, damned for committing suicide, the film is heavy-handed and overwrought, yet endearing for its remarkable visual sensibility: the realms of the saved and the condemned Williams traverses have a painterly feel, lit with a golden haze, and melting into one another like Renaissance masterpieces in an overheated art gallery.

In terms of computer-generated otherworldly vistas, the Hell of Constantine is also worth remarking upon; smartly opting to update traditional imagery of the fire-and-brimstone underworld, the art team built a Hell modelled after the modern urban environment, only one that appears to be caught in a perpetual nuclear blast.

No film has more poignantly shown the audience a literal Heaven, meanwhile, than Powell and Pressburger’s sublime British classic, A Matter of Life and Death. Ingeniously, the team behind it decided to shoot the scenes on Earth in vibrant Technicolour and those in Heaven, including the final set-piece at the Celestial Court, in shimmering monochrome, where it might have seemed more obvious to do the reverse. As it is, the black and white photography evokes a Heaven that is both timeless and distant from our reality, momentous and yet diminished by the Arcadian splendour of the WW2-era England in which the film is largely set.

Nonetheless, the overwhelmingly literal spin on the afterlife that these films adopt causes dramatic problems in that despite being spectacular they also risk losing sight of the human anxieties that define them. Most importantly our fear of death, and the desire to believe in something else beyond it. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is for this reason the film to deal most unforgettably with the question of an afterlife. Concerning a knight of the crusades, tormented by doubts over the existence of God in a time of plague and religious hysteria, it draws upon the tradition of medieval artwork to portray a universe in which Death, personified and with a penchant for deciding mortals’ fates over games of chess, stands between us and any glimpse of a comforting afterlife.

Whilst we can rest assured that the future will bring further colourful and eclectic versions of the afterlife to our cinemas, it is unlikely that any will approach the power of Bergman’s, made all the more present to our minds by its disturbing and agonising invisibility.

Sometimes a film has to underwhelm before it can satisfy. Building on the success of 2005’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, such has been the critical acclaim garnered by Jacque’s Audiard’s latest that at first it appears simply unable to live up to the hype. Lazy comparisons to Jean-Pierre Melville or The Godfather haven’t helped. A Prophet may be long, French, and include Mediterranean gangsters, but its largely uncinematic, observational feel has more in common with recent films such as The Hurt Locker than either of these – in fact, one of its most admirable characteristics is that it constantly avoids giving you the film you’d expect.

One wouldn’t necessarily infer this from the story. A young French Arab, Malik El Djebena (a breakthrough performance by Tahar Rahim), begins a six-year prison sentence. A chance conversation with a fellow inmate brings him to the attention of the prison’s ruling elite, a group of Corsican crime-bosses led by the patriarchal César (Neils Arestrup, admittedly looking something like a grizzled French Don Corleone). After his brutal forced initiation into César’s circle, Malik’s subsequent ascent of the Corsican crime hierarchy allows him to pursue his own criminal agenda, using the people and information he comes into contact with on the inside to play off various sides against each other for his own profit.

Yet even as Malik’s interventions in the outside world become increasingly complicated, the film’s extended running time makes what would traditionally be climactic twists seem like just more episodes, and it is a testament to the scriptwriters and editor that this tactic doesn’t slip into torpidity. Instead, through allowing the story and characters to develop at a relatively lifelike pace, such a flattened, linear progression actually enhances the film’s impact, provoking a constant unease regarding just how it will end up. The unfussy cinematography also helps this, refusing to draw too much attention to any particular moment or scene, and exercises enough self-control to come across as realistic without seeming overly messy or ugly.

Often, it is the careful manipulation of documentary-like aspects which really betrays Audiard’s skill: a particularly memorable example is Malik’s lingering over signing a legal form, his near-illiteracy brought uncomfortably to the fore. The film’s sound design often has the same effect: early scenes present a progression of half-indifferent, half-commanding bureaucratic voices, whilst the prison itself is a constant background of taunts and shouts echoing blurrily along the corridors. Outside, an incoherent tannoy constantly chastises inmates in the exercise yard – conveying well a world of authority present but almost always ignored. The naturalistic performances are generally strong, with Rahim’s strikingly believable performance conveying well his character’s mix of the tense, the vulnerable and the uncomfortably complicit. Meanwhile, Arestrup memorably imparts both his expectant ferocity and ultimately embittered dejection: an unsuccessful public attempt to catch Malik’s attention yields surprising pathos, Arestrup looking like an unwanted fifth-best-friend across the schoolyard.

Yet amidst all this, Audiard periodically introduces elements which seem bent on deliberately undermining the lifelike tone: thus at various points we are presented with a ghost, Tarantino-esque chapter titles, more typical gangster-film montages, two almost Lynchian visual sequences, not to mention Alexandre Desplat’s self-consciously cinematic music. These have mixed results: although they admirably prevent the film from becoming too monotonous, only in a few cases do their contributions seem to really add something beyond this, and the better elements – the various apparitions and hallucinations – feel too spasmodic and underused to fulfil their potential.

It is to Audiard’s credit that he manages to make all this realism, magic realism, and apparent self-reference co-exist quite effortlessly. Overall, the conflicting aspects and subtle shifts in direction seem like part of the general refusal to give you the film you expect; the intention is admirable, but the film’s story and construction simply aren’t original enough to prevent this seeming like a substitute for being truly innovative. This is not to say that A Prophet is not worth seeing: the end-product is well put-together, thought-provoking and becomes increasingly compelling as it progresses. It succeeds well on its own terms; whether it has much lasting impact will remain to be seen.

Three stars 

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Friday: Balliol at Night – Charlie Guo

Thursday: Equus – Ollie Ford

Wednesday: Purple Sky – Jenny Attwater

Tuesday: Behind the scenes in Christ Church kitchens – Ollie Ford

Monday: Polish Representation at the European Affairs Society’s European Food event – Adrian Krajewski

Sunday: Trust – Michelle Tan

Saturday: Oxford Imps at the Wheatsheaf – Sonali Campion