White Material

The setting is an unspecified African country at an unspecified time (it could be any time during the last 30 years) but an all too recognisable brutal civil war is simmering. An air of foreboding permeates the film from the very beginning. We know "The Boxer" is a dead man from the first shots so while the flashback scenes lack tension, they have an unnerving ominous weight. The locals are well aware of the implications of the war and endeavour to remove themselves from the crossfire - as one of Maria's fleeing foremen tells her, the French army helicopter came for *her* family, not her workers. The whites have an opportunity to escape; the locals are to be left to their own devices. Maria's stubborn (arrogant?) refusal to accept the reality of the situation and determination to harvest the coffee crop blinds her to what is actually happening around her, illustrated most vividly by the presence of the wounded Boxer on her property and the child soldiers who wander through her house at will. Her ex-husband might act from venal motives but he at least understands the danger, not that it ultimately does him any good. The violence spreads from the surrounding areas - via the child soldiers and the opposing army - into the very heart of the privileged white home, infecting the occupants with its madness. Cannily the violence itself is kept mostly offscreen and both sides are culpable, although the corruption of the existing regime is also plainly indicated. Both sides commit senseless acts of violence but a key sequence reminds us that the child soldiers are just that: children. The group have raided a pharmacy and killed the staff, and then take a variety of the pills they've stolen. Holed up in Maria's house, several curl up on a bed, hugging soft toys, unaware of the soldiers stealthily making their way through the rooms. The blades slash flesh offscreen but the blood splashes into view. Its restraint makes it all the more shocking. The downfall of Maria's family doesn't have the same impact. After all, for the white colonialists, it's all over. For the native inhabitants the agony continues.

Gainsbourg

Even a biopic as unconventional (and gleefully unreliable) as Gainsbourg falls prey to the usual pitfall - an inherent fragmentariness, and consequently a largely unsatisfying narrative. Figures come and go, barely leaving any impression (Juliette Greco), while others pop up for a couple of scenes before vanishing (Bardot) Only Jane Birkin has any substantial presence. Gainsbourg himself is an annoyingly self-centred and abrasive figure, and quite how he attracted so many beautiful women is a complete mystery. What does enliven proceedings is the figure of a grotesque alter ego (complete with glowing eyes, Nosferatu-esque fingers and a nose worthy of Pinocchio), a reflection of how Gainsbourg essentially views himself and with all his worst instincts. At those moments, the film reaches another level entirely.

Italian Renaissance Drawings

Don't stand on ceremony. In this exhibition it's essential that you can get right up close to the drawings. A handful are so faint that at first glance you seem to be looking at a blank sheet. It's only when you get centimetres away that outlines become clear. Most though are much easier to see than that, even from a distance. All the great Renaissance names are here though it may not be the obvious artists who catch the eye. There's a delicate King David by Fra Angelico; janissaries by Bellini; beautiful female faces by Filippo Lippi and Verrocchio - all alongside drawings by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli. Cannily there are a couple of useful compare-and-contrasts. Raphael's drawing of St George is displayed alongside the painting (the drawing shows a slightly more aggressive saint) and a film superimposes Carpaccio's St Augustine onto the finished work. Possibly my favourite drawing though - as usual, completely unexpected - was a large, wild, landscape by Piero di Cosimo. That sense of the artist's imagination at work is everywhere in the exhibition but nowhere more than here.

Inception

It takes a special kind of talent to consistently construct genuinely complex narratives that manage to retain coherence. Chris Nolan's a past master. His films assume the audience is intelligent (or at least can pay attention) and are never tricksy for the sake of being tricksy. Everything is integral to the plot, whether it be the reverse construction or Memento or the sleight of hand of The Prestige. This is equally true of Inception, where the viewer plunges through multiple dream levels and is never (totally) lost. It also means we never get ahead of the plot either. We might think we know where the story's going but we don't, not entirely. It's definitely a film that requires multiple viewings and I'm sure that when I get round to a second (or third) one I'll change my mind about stuff (the ending for sure as I'm totally undecided about how to interpret it) I think on a first viewing the sheer spectacle and momentum obscure some important piece of information (I wish I'd paid more attention to the matter of totems), and some of the dialogue gets swamped. Yet it somehow manages to make sense.
Considering how long the film is, the time actually flies by, especially once the inception plot itself gets under way. The concept is easy to grasp (plant the seed of an idea deep in the subconscious) which makes the multiplicity of dream levels equally easy to accept. That in turns generates the lovely idea that incidents in one dream impact in unexpected ways on what's happening on the other levels. Because of this, and the differentiation between the dreams, the film can crosscut between the multiple strands without losing clarity. As an extra treat, the deepest dream level unexpectedly turns out to be James Bond-like, complete with Arctic HQ and a bloody great safe. Even for sci-fi, it's delightfully out of place (but then, that's dreams for you)
Amid all the action - and there's a lot - there's also space for some top-notch performances. Leo is of course anguished but the real star turns are Cillian Murphy's Fischer, a man trying to live up to the expectations of others (and who, lest we forget, is actually the *victim* in all of this), and Tom Hardy's Eames, who has a nice sideline in winding up Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur. Cobb's dead wife meanwhile is a worringly malign presence within the dreams, something which he can't control and which he fails to mention to his colleagues, with disastrous repurcussions. It's only in retrospect that the essential amorality of the entire enterprise hits home. This isn't a band of good guys, but nor are they villains, exactly. What they do is morally dubious yet we don't think about that while watching. What we focus on are the astonishing visuals: a Parisian street folding itself over; buildings crashing down into the ocean; Arthur's encounter with zero gravity. But for a change, this is a blockbuster that is about more than just the surface. There's much to ponder and re-watch and re-assess.