Overblown Team effort is all rather far-fetched
identical MO: each victim is a prostitute, each is shot through thelefteyeandeachhasafinger removed. And so enters the team of the title, a trio of investigators working under the watchful eye of Europol. They are taciturn Dane Harald Bjorn (The Killing’s Lars Mikkelsen), punky Belgian cop Alicia Verbeek (Veerle Baetens) and sleek, glamorous German Jackie Mueller (Jasmin Gerat).
There are some neat visual touches in The Team, as when the three investigating teams come together in the mother of all Skype calls (it’s a while before they actually meet). But the sheer preposterousness of the show is hard to swallow. And Mikkelsen’s Cockneyaccented English puts you in mind of Bjork every time he opens his mouth – not a good thing in a slick crime drama. Sony’s classy Criterion Collection imprint, Roman Polanski’s 1966 psychological thriller has been digitally restored with the director’s involvement and looks absolutely gorgeous.
Filmed in black and white on location in eery, evocative Lindisfarne, it stars Donald Pleasence and the mesmerising Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s ill-fated elder sister) as George and Teresa, an AngloFrench couple whose already eccentric home life is made even odder by the arrival of two wounded gangsters, played by blacklisted American actor Lionel Sander and Samuel Beckett regular Jack MacGowran. Teresa, chic and barefoot, plays along with the demands of the overbearing Dickey (Sander) but the spiky, neurotic George bristles with anger and angst.
There are comparisons to be made with Nic Roeg’s Performance – a home invasion, a gangster, dressing up, a meditation on the act of role playing – though there’s more black comedy in Polanski’s film. There are aspects of it which look overly-mannered to 21st Century eyes, but it’s still a gripping watch.
The 2003 documentary included in the extras package is fun too – it’s an absolute bitch-fest in which Polanski, producer Gene Gutowski and cinematographer Gil Taylor cheerfully put the boot into their stars, particularly Pleasence and the truculent Sander, who proved a nightmare on the seven week shot. Look out, too, for a young Jacqueline Bisset as one of a party of George’s friends who arrive unannounced. Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99 It’s safe to say there’s no-one quite like Alejandro Jodorowsky in world cinema. Chilean by birth, JewishUkrainian by background and French by inclination, he’s now 88 and still working.
He made his name with a trio of surreal and psychedelic films in the late 1960s and early 1970s and began a late flourish in2011withTheDanceOf Reality, a film detailing his early life and described by him as an “auto-biopic”.
This2016“sequel”,everybit as vibrant, surreal and startlingly bizarre as The DanceOfReality,takesup where it left off and follows Jodorowsky’s journey from poetry-obsessed teenager to adult member of Santiago’s avant garde.
As with the previous film, the director’s eldest son Brontis plays Jodorowsky’s own father; Jodorowsky himself appears as a sort of walk-on narrator/ counsellor from time to time; and every line delivered by Pamela Flores, who plays Jodorowsky’s mother, is sung, opera-style.
But where Jodorowsky’s grandson played him as a youngmaninTheDanceOf Reality, this time the role goes to the director’s youngest son, Adan. It really is a family affair.
Indulgent or not, it has its bravura moments, such as a set-piece finale involving two massed bands dressed as devils and skeletons, and the masked and black-clad “stagehands” who deliver props to characters. Augmenting Jodorowsky’s vision is cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who adds his own visual flair. If nothing else, Endless Poetry is a riot of carnival-esque colour.