Baz Luhrmann has never been a man to bow to cinematic convention. He is a film-maker who can genuinely be described as a visionary, and thus far he has got it right every time. From ballroom dancing in the award-winning Strictly Ballroom to the Bard’s “star-cross’d lovers” in the acclaimed Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann has yet to put a foot wrong.

Now comes his latest unorthodox move, Australia: an epic ode to his homeland. A vast undertaking, this is not only a romance but also a War film and a Western: it is a collage of cinematic form. At its heart though, as in all great epics, lies the love story: the unlikely pairing of Nicole Kidman’s aristocratic Englishwoman, Lady Sarah Ashley, and Hugh Jackman’s hardy herdsman. The latter is a sort of Clint Eastwood meets Crocodile Dundee figure, named simply ‘Drover’. They are stock characters; Kidman is a truly absurd caricature of English aristocracy and Jackman is a rough diamond with a heart of gold but a body of steel.

This is an epic trying to live up to the example of the sumptuous cinematic feasts of David Lean, in particular Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as well as Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939). Luhrmann uses to full effect the truly awesome natural advantage afforded him by his titular location and so creates some of the greatest shots that we will see this year or the next.

However, behind this cinematic bluff lies a film that never matches its great predecessors. The cinematography may indeed be truly awe-inspiring but the film itself is let down by heavy handed screenwriting, desperate to impart on us the tale’s moral to the point of condescension. We will surely never forget that Clark Gable didn’t “give a damn” or that “it would have been lovely if we’d met before” for Zhivago and Lara, but will we in quite the same way remember that ‘Drover’ enlightened us with his “welcome to Australia”?

Something in me wants to be proved wrong here, because Australia is not a bad film. Overblown, overlong and over-budget, the film is no masterpiece, but it is hugely enjoyable. Luhrmann is a long way from stealing Lean’s crown as the epic director and Kidman and Jackman may not be toppling Clark Gable, Peter O’Toole or Omar Sharif any time soon, but Australia is a visual feast and in spite of its heavy script is eminently watchable. It could lose a good half-hour and gain a little more direction, but it is driven by quite brilliant vision and some very strong performances. Not least is that of our narrator, a debutant plucked from obscurity by Baz himself for the role, thirteen-year-old Brandon Walters, who plays the young aboriginal adoptee of ‘Drover’ and Lady Ashley.

Australia is quite some spectacle and though it may never enter the canon of great romantic epics it is an ode to a nation with a troubled history and identity. There is a sense of catharsis in this film for its Australian cast and direction team as well as the thousands of Australians flocking to see the film already. This is an enjoyable if flawed film, and one that means a lot to a lot of people, not least, lest we forget, the Australian tourist board who will enjoy perhaps even more than us the glorious and inspirational panoramas that dominate Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.

Three Stars.

Before you read on, this is one of the best films of recent years, and a must see. Directed by Uri Edel, and with the same producer as last year’s German success Downfall, The Baader-Meinhof Complex deals with the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group of left-wing revolutionaries and their reign of terror against the West German state in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. However, in its detail and political viewpoint, the film is morally equivocal. Ideologists will be disappointed by the film; at various stages the RAF are described as anarchists, socialists and communists; none of it is terribly clear. Viewers hoping to be enlightened as to their core beliefs should consult the original sources.

Reputed to be the most expensive German film of all time, Baader-Meinhof certainly packed the punches. Arson, murder, kidnappings, bombings, the hijacking of planes, and even a superbly cool 70’s rock soundtrack reminiscent of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers about the same time period (the ’68 Paris riots), Baader-Meinhof seamlessly packs in action, depth and documentary footage into 2 ½ hours of film-making. Too long? No. The opening riot in West Berlin between left-wing demonstrators, the police and the Shah of Persia’s bodyguards, is a terrific scene of cinematography.

The massive budget was apparent, not just in the breath-taking action shots, but in the clever casting of talented German actors, in particular the three central characters. Martina Gedeck’s performance as Ulrike Meinhof, the middle-class mother, intellectual and journalist who joins the RAF and becomes central to the ideology and the propagandist voice of the movement, was subtle and effective. Personally, it was Johanna Wokalek’s portrayal of Gudrun Ensslin, the mother and pastor’s daughter, that stole the show; Gudrun’s blend of revolutionary fervour and ‘terrorist chic’ created a dangerous ambivalence towards the movement’s violent terrorism. Andreas’s rampant sexuality, as the radical homicidal stud, was irresistible. Yet the movie did not shy away from portraying him as the world’s greatest sexist.

The danger of Baader-Meinhof is that terrorism has never looked so sexy. This peculiar phenomenon of attractive, well-educated middle class women and male petty criminals was an aspect of urban terrorism in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. This can also be seen in the film Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst about the terrorist movement The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA); there are also extraordinary shades of it in Charles Manson’s ‘organisation’. The movie built up the attractive, mythological quality of the movement and then shattered it, as the group were slowly whittled down by imprisonment, violent death and suicide, and divided through internal conflict. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a second generation of the RAF, vociferates this towards the end of the movie, when she states: “Stop seeing them the way they weren’t”.

Baader-Meinhof avoids making direct parallels with current terrorist groups, yet one can’t help but notice the similarities. The list of suspects with their faces crossed has an alarming resemblance with the pack of cards used by the Americans in the War in Iraq. The kidnapping of Schleyer (the head of the Employer’s Federation) and his televised ‘confession’, as well as the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner to Mogadishu in 1977, have similar contemporary parallels.

However, if one can fault anything about this film, it is its ambivalence towards the fundamental morality of the Baader-Meinhof group. In as much as the film discussed how the RAF funded itself, it seems to suggest that they were self-funded through bank robberies. But no other sources are mentioned. Without attributing sources, the Stazi or the Russian government could have been involved. To make the film popular in Germany, it appears that the film’s makers have papered over a few inconvenient historical cracks. One can’t help but feel that if Baader-Meinhof had seen the film before the premiere, they might have bombed it. The film has that form of liberal dishonesty which they felt such impulsive hostility towards.

5 stars

There are few better ways to begin a poem than with half a paragraph of untranslated Hegel. Andrew Zurcher’s (sorry: andrew zurcher‘s) ‘Lift’, which follows up this theoretical face-slap with a page or so of delicately spaced opacity, is a pretty perfect exemplar of OP08’s poetic style: neatly fragmented, formally intense – in sum, healthily avant-garde. Big-hitters Szirtes and Motion feel somewhat out of place amid all the ampersands & quick-cut linebreaks, and though the great J.H. Prynne fails to appear, a well-considered review of his latest collection makes up for it.

In fact, it’s the issue’s prose that proves the ultimate highlight. Taking on, amongst others, Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and Geoffrey Hill, the criticism is both insightful and highly polished, while the shorter fictional pieces tend towards an amusing and irreverent absurdity: one considers the London Underground as a parasite on the body of the city (‘The techniques of separating a metro from its host are innovative in their brutality …’); another presents a brilliant parody (or, at least, what I hope is a brilliant parody) of Martin Amis: ‘It was 2001, September 11th. You know, 9/11.’

If OP08 contains some decent work of the sort that is widely and wrongly castigated for pretension, it also contains some genuinely pretentious rubbish. On p. 56, the reader is treated to an ‘Email from Oxford’, presumably sent by one of the editors either to Katherine Duncan-Jones or to H.R. Woudhuysen, whose co-edited edition of Shakespeare’s poems is later reviewed. While their musings on authorship are vaguely interesting (‘Is the idea of poets collaborating unthinkable historically?’), they remain just that – musings in an email – and it is difficult to see their inclusion in an otherwise serious and professionally-produced journal as anything less than intellectual arrogance. The five-page preface with which the issue begins is similarly dull, written in an antiquated high-literary style that feels only partly parodic.

What the editors lack in prefatory restraint they nevertheless make up for with the boldness and harmony of their selection: Oxford Poetry ’08 is, finally, both cogent and exciting, and at the special credit-crunch price of £4 certainly worth an afternoon or two.

Four stars

Immigration is nothing new to Europeans. Both in the  past and present Europe is remarkable for the way in which its peoples have a propensity to migrate.

And yet, over these past few years, questions concerning immigration seem to have acquired a new urgency in European cinema – highlighted most recently by the Dardenne brothers’ latest venture, The Silence of Lorna, and Ulrich Seidl’s grim migrant-epic, Import/Export, both unsurprising successes at Cannes earlier this year. (It is now as good as a tradition that the Dardennes should pick up some prize or other from the jury at Cannes.)

The Silence of Lorna is a film that cannot be summed up with any satisfaction; so, unsatisfactorily, it is the story of a young Albanian woman called Lorna whose recently acquired Belgian passport puts her in line to marry a wealthy Russian willing to pay for EU citizenship. She tries to save the life of her rent-a-husband drug addict, fails to do so, and descends into a madness that seems to offer the only moments of ethical clarity throughout the entire film. In an interview Luc Dardenne described the film as being about Lorna’s having to ‘accept or refuse the death of someone. Nothing can authorise her to do this. The spectator might think, ‘Given her situation, we can understand’. But in this case no.’ Certainly, the importance of Lorna’s choice is the hinge upon which the entire film rests, but this choice is eminently bound up in her social situation – the film is thus a covert attempt to, if not define, circumscribe Lorna’s social situation, the space in which her silence is articulated.

Import/Export is, if anything, an even grimmer and grimier affair, a film even more impossible to watch or understand. Talking about one of Seidl’s earlier movies, Werner Herzog claimed that he had never looked so directly into hell – Import/Export carries on in this tradition. Paul, an Austrian loner, is transporting old slot machines to the Ukraine with his increasingly grotesque stepfather, Michael. Olga, a Ukrainian nurse is making the reverse journey in search of money for her young family. Both find, at the end of their journeys, what can only be described as ‘hearts of darkness’ moments that leave the audience turning away, crying out, unsure how to react. The film seems to carry on until it is real, until the audience is left knowing that its events are really taking place. For Olga this moment occurs during a violent confrontation with a senior nurse, for Paul it is his step-father’s hiring an Ukrainian prostitute and capriciously demeaning her, a moment whose insufferableness is only heightened by the obvious fact that the prostitute is a real prostitute who does not know she is in a film, for whom the events projected onto the screen the events happening in the here-and-now of her life.

It doesn’t take much to see the similarities that unite these two films; the irresistible force of capital in people’s lives, the commoditisation of flesh, and institutionalised sadism are certainly all in the mix, but more importantly so is the overarching concern with how these forces impact upon the lives of individuals, and likewise what escape is possible when you’re an alien worker in an alien land. Because both films do end on what might provisionally be called escapes; Lorna escapes, at least for a time, from her would be executor, Paul leaves his step-father and takes to the road in search of a job, Olga seems to find the possibility of love, even in her own personal hell. But these escapes aren’t even conciliatory, they are structural survivals, offering nothing more than a conclusion. Each immigrant has made a choice, yes, but these choices are worthless, they are every one of them left at the mercy of the forces that have decided their fates at every crossroads they have encountered, all that can be salvaged is a faded kind of self-respect.

And this is what is at once so terrifying and rewarding about both these films, in them

all illusions have evaporated, what are left behind are images of the powerlessness of individuals moving across an emotionally deserted continent, of the difficulty of taking control of one’s life when immersed in the mass migratory patterns and economic forces of contemporary Europe.

And although not for the faint hearted by any means, these two films offer the more intrepid viewer what’s best about European cinema today – something divorced from the saccharine thoughlessness of Hollywood, USA.