Come back, Oliver Stone

Isn’t it strange how so many films about South Africa are made by non-indigenes or, failing that, South Africans who live abroad?

Why would this be? There’s a very simple reason for it. It’s because the National Film and Video Foundation is so busy playing politics and signing co-production agreements in five-star hotels at far-flung festivals overseas that, at the end of the day, very little of that money makes it on to the screen.

And if it does, the final product is usually a pile of politically correct crap.

Anything critical of the present order, like the uneven but powerful Jerusalema, is not going to get a blue farthing because, well, some fellow filmmakers and apparatchiks thought that, “objectively”, it didn’t warrant funding.

I have some personal experience of this. I submitted a script and was told that as a thriller it was “ridiculous”. The gatekeeper, apparently an Iranian-American, was right of course. It didn’t work as a thriller because it was actually a romantic comedy.

So the next best thing for a filmmaker to do is go and live abroad, which most of those who have any talent and money have done, where it’s difficult enough to raise funding for a film as it is.

Then, once they have achieved that and got some big names attached to product Struggle South Africa, they might get some local funding via the Department of Trade and Industry, which will then hasten to stipulate that it doesn’t necessarily agree with the contents of the product.

And so you get a film like The Bang Bang Club, based on the eponymous book by photographers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva.

I have worked with two of the people depicted in this film and they’re not like they're shown at all, which needn’t be a problem but in this case it is. After all, this film is only “based” on a true story. The end credits assure us that all the characters in this film are fictitious, no doubt for legal reasons.

Marinovich, played by Ryan Philippe, in real life talks fast and walks fast. Maybe it has to do with the fact that if you stand still for too long in a war zone you might get killed, as he almost did – a few times.

But Philippe, who is not a bad actor at all, is directed to talk like what New Zealanders call a “Yarpie” (Japie). Obviously the accent is all over the place, which still needn’t be a problem, though Marinovich ends up looking and sounding more like another local photographer, who isn’t featured in the film anyway.

The next person to get a mauling is Robyn Comley, played by Malin Akerman, who is clearly in the film to provide a bit of female “colour”. As integral as she is to the boys in the “club”, she doesn’t get a postscript (she still works as a picture editor, at The Times in Johannesburg) and has more little devils running around in that blonde head of hers than Silver clearly can begin to imagine.

The point is, he is treading on hallowed territory and I’m not talking about South Africa or its townships. I’m talking about Oliver Stone turf. Say what you like about him, but a film like Salvador “captured” all the fear and madness of war and reporting on it that Bang Bang tries and generally fails to do.

But Silver does succeed in making the romantic depictions between Marinovich and Comley as cringe-worthy of Stone, who nevertheless was/is an expert at depicting contradictory male characters and could have had a field day here.

Silver has four mad glory boys here and fails 75% to delineate them and their private and professional lives. Two of the men are played by local actors, Frank Rautenbach and Neels van Jaarsveld, who still don’t work and I don’t think it’s their fault.

So this is not a let-South-Africans-be-played-by-South-Africans-and-death-to-all-foreigners argument, which is still very prevalent in certain circles there. Ken Oosterbroek (Rautenbach) is supposed to be the main victim of the club, yet he is not given enough background or build-up for us to pity him.

In fact, his fatal shooting is treated as secondary to Marinovich’s wound, which is crazy.

Silva (Van Jaarsveld) seems to tag along until the end, when he suddenly loses his cool, but again, no proper build-up to that moment. Presumably the film was already done by the time he lost both his legs in Afghanistan, because that is not mentioned in the postscript either.

Now, I didn’t know Kevin Carter, but Taylor Kitsch as the talented and morally confused photographer “captures” a little of the universal lunacy and confusion of the profession – even some dopey, Cape Town-like pretension. It’s far from a perfect role, but it does show some kind of vulnerability, some kind of humanity.

Yes, the film tries to address the ethics of clicking away while people are being killed, dying or dead, and yes it covers the territory of why should we care about four photographers' precious whites hides when black lives appear to be so much cheaper. But that should be actively implicit, not showing a red flag that it's trying to cover all bases.

Anyway, it was good to see Fiona Ramsay on screen and not just as having a voice-coach credit. She and Patrick Shai, Vusi Kunene and Russel Savadier, among others, prove that they don’t have to stand back for any international "stars" whatsoever.

So, a failure that succeeds in bringing a little more of South Africa’s troubled history to the world. Hell, one day that country might even succeed in doing so all by itself, but don’t hold your breath - especially not about the mess it's in at present.

Neil Sonnekus

A Country - and Game - of Two Halves

New Zealanders are already quietly preparing themselves for their team’s dismal failure at this year’s Rugby World Cup.

Never mind the fact that they have the best team in the world - on paper and on the field - their loyal fans are privately getting ready to be as positive as possible about losing abysmally.

How does one know this? That reliable old crutch of a quiet day at the newsroom, the survey, proves it. About 450 children at one school in admittedly our largest city, Auckland, were asked whether they thought their team would win the William Webb Ellis trophy this time round. In that rather charming way that children have they said no.

They did add, however, that the All Blacks would get to the final, which really is no consolation at all. But because the survey said so it has to be universally true, even though we all know that 7.86 people out of a sample of 10 innately distrust surveys.

But there’s another thing that drives the Kiwis quietly insane. They know that, even if they do win the cup this year - and it’s a big if - they still won’t have proven much. They know that if they win that elusive trophy they will only have won it on home ground - just like the only other time they ever kissed it, back in the mists of 1987.

After all, their three biggest opponents, the Wallabies, the English and the Springboks have taken it on foreign soil. But not the Kiwis, haunted as they are by another fact: the Boks did not play in 1987. It is this “away” factor that torments the outer reaches of Kiwis’ overly decent dreams in a country whose largest export is not mutton, of course, but milk.

So what do New Zealand’s supporters do before they fall into a fitful, feverish sleep every night? Why, they pray, of course. Not on their knees or anything quite so demonstrative, but they pray nevertheless. What do they pray about? They pray that nothing will happen to their two iconic players, captain Richie McCaw and flyhalf Dan Carter.

So much hinges on these two top-notch but injury-prone athletes that a mere bruise to a ligament becomes national news, on all channels, as if they were real icons that have been damaged in a Romanian church by some deranged pornographer.

But there could be a Maori explanation for all of this. Might an absence of those ultra-cool tribal tattoos on these two gentlemen not be the real bad mana, karma, voodoo or spirit for the team? Quite possibly. How do we know that they don’t have any major tattoos? Because they’re always whipping off their clothes to advertise this deodorant or that refreshing sports drink on our TV screens and billboards, that’s why.

Whatever the case, most of the rugby fans here in tiny New Zealand will be waiting to see these giants of the game perform their awesome haka with their team-mates and hopefully not choke against the more brutish, aforementioned opponents - let alone those, no, let us rather not even mention the French and the nightmare of 2007.

That could only open a can of frogs’ legs.

But here they are, the French, and the Romanians. Everybody’s here now, even the Scots, who were the last to arrive. Was it because they really are tightfisted or because they’re being hosted in Invercargill, the town that is the furthest south and therefore the coldest and thus the most like home?

Whatever the case, they were so overwhelmed by the warm reception they got there, what with bagpipes blaring and open-faced children performing a welcoming haka, that they insisted on taking that area’s prize foodstuff – oysters – right off their menu.

Meanwhile, a Maori professor has said that all immigrants from South Africa, the UK and US should be denied entry because they’re racists. She has a point, of course, because there are some racists in Browns Bay, Auckland, but then there are lots of Saffers who get on better with Maoris than Pakehas (whites) for the simple reason that they’re more used to mixing with other races than the local Pakehas.

Professor Mutu also seems oblivious of the fact that plenty of Saffers here are not white: they’re Indian and Coloured. But she does have a point, just like someone would have a point that Maori men should be banned for bashing their babies, wives and partners, especially when their teams lose.

It’s a known fact that medical teams are actually on standby for this eventuality, but then I went up One Tree Hill with Haare Williams last Sunday, and I’ll bet my bottom dollar (if I still had one) that that poet, sage and leader has never touched a woman in anger in his life. 

Anyway, all of this just so happens to coincide with the Pacific Nations Forum, in which the environment and Fiji were top of the agenda. Maybe people are more tolerant of each other here because they have an enemy that is much greater than them. That's not China, but nature. Some of the islands are being threatened by rising oceanic levels and it must be quite hard to discriminate against others when you're drowning.

As for Fiji, sanctions will remain in place against this military-run island until it has democratic elections again. None of its players with military connections were allowed to enter the country and partake, so the last one resigned from his post a week before the finals so that he too could play. Would one be surprised to learn that he resumed his role after the tournament? Hell, yes.

Which brings us to tonight’s opening match between Tonga and N’Zealand, as Prime Minister John Key tends to pronounce it. The former country’s resident and visiting citizens take the prize for the most colourful and enthusiastic supporters so far. We’ve been promised a “physical” match, which comes as a great relief: imagine a psychic game of rugby, with millions just visualising the game.

Then again, it could become a great hit in, say, India.

Obviously there are split loyalties here, since this is a largely a country of immigrants. First you shout for your homeland, if you’re from elsewhere, then for New Zealand.

Or, if you’re a Kiwi you shout (and pray, and hope, and pray again) for New Zealand, and then for your country or island of origin, like the man whose entrance, with its Kiwi and Irish flags I photographed.

When I asked him if I could take a picture of it so that I could share it with my millions of readers worldwide, he responded with all the grace and generosity of this distant country’s people, even though he could hear I was a South African.

Then he rather tellingly added this proviso: “Just don’t win the Cup.”

Neil Sonnekus

Funny Bones

Today’s two movies are comedies, but the one is a work of fiction and the other is a documentary.

The Guard has been compared with Martin McDonagh’s brilliant In Bruges because not only is it similar in tone, casting and structure, it’s also made by his brother, John Michael.

But is The Guard really as good as In Bruges, which has attained virtual cult status?

Well, no, which doesn’t mean it’s bad at all, but the latter had a great setting and a relationship between two men that was not only hilarious but also perfectly touching.

The Guard goes the gruff route, yet again starring Brendan Gleeson. This time he’s a provocative Irish cop who has to team up with an American agent, come all the way to Ireland to prevent a drug consignment from the States getting in.

Big white faux bigot and thin black American. For one, I struggled to hear everything that Gleeson was saying, so colloquial was it. Secondly, the sunny Tijuana music had an extremely tenuous connection with what was happening in overcast Eire, nor did it quite work as ironic counterpoint. Three, women once again don’t feature much, except as secondary characters, if that: Gleeson’s mum is dying and he consorts with prostitutes.

On the plus side it's a very cleverly plotted film, the dialogue is sharp - especially when delivered by Mark Strong's watchable, educated thug - and it's good to see Cheadle playing a hard-nosed character for a change. 

***

Much more complex and moving is the documentary Billy T: Te Movie.

Every country seems to produce its iconic joker and Billy T seems to have been it for New Zealand. When William James Te Wehi Taitoko started making waves it was still unusual to see a Maori on TV. People would talk about a once-off appearance for weeks afterwards. This was as recent as the mid-Seventies.

But the man was so talented he couldn’t be stopped. If a country like, say, South Africa, actively barred people from doing their thing because of their colour, then it was completely different in Aotearoa. It seems Maori were politely included and effectively neutralised.

Billy T’s joke of him being half Maori and half Scottish – “the one half of me wants to get pissed and the other half doesn’t want to pay” - is extremely telling. It takes a swipe at both parties’ ills but does so with what South Africa’s forced icon, Leon Schuster, lacks. That is, charm.

But that joke still sums up the friendly but uneasy relationship between an indigenous minority and a predominantly Scots-based majority, not to mention the yellow danger, at which Billy T's folksy character also takes very funny, un-PC swipes.

If only he could have stepped out of the screen and time and told the macho douche bag sitting next to me that he wasn't at a restaurant where he could talk at will: he was in a cinema.

The docco also explores that quality most highly successful entertainers seem to have. They’ve usually got sad backgrounds and their real family is the audience they feed off. Without that they’re dead, literally.

Director Ian Mune has done an affectionate and entertaining but comprehensive job of summing up an era, a massive talent and a friend.

Neil Sonnekus

Fierce Hearts in Icy Climes

One of the similarities between today’s two movies is that they take place in isolated places.

The first, How I Ended This Summer, takes place on an island in the Arctic circle; the second, Ondine (out on DVD now), takes place in a remote Irish village.

Summer features two meteorologists, a senior and his junior, Gulybin (Sergei Puskepalis) and Davilov (Grigory Dobrygin), respectively. Their only connection to the outside world is a radio.

To say they are isolated and dwarfed by this hard, icy landscape doesn’t begin to explain it. Think of your index finger on your local cinema’s screen and you more or less have the scale.

Gulybin is a bear of a man, a boor and a bully. Davilov makes mistakes, he retreats behind his earphones and earring, and gets the odd smack when he makes wrong readings. So when he hears a bit of bad news about his boss, via the radio, he keeps it to himself. It’s the only power he’s got, and this simple omission gives the film its freezing tension.

The key to all of this is the pace. Nothing happens quickly in the Arctic wastes. The first third of the movie is all about their dull routine, but it’s fraught with expectation. Why, for example, doesn’t Davilov take a rifle with him when he goes outside? Does he not think there are real bears out there too? Or is he so bored, if not unhinged, already that he doesn’t care anymore?

Of course, a slow movie has to deliver the goods as much as a fast one has to. If the former has to reward our patience the latter has to convince us that it’s not just trying to bedazzle us.

How I Ended This Summer, directed by Aleksei Popugrebsky, delivers in a way that becomes a masterful display of deliberate, chess-like patience. There are no quick moves, nor are there any wasted ones. Every cliché is avoided as the film slowly becomes a metaphor for the old and the new Russia, with an endgame and conclusion that is startling in its simplicity.

***

Still on the theme of that country, Colin Farrell starred as a Russian recently, in Peter Weir’s The Way Back (also out on DVD now). If the others are political prisoners in the wastes of Siberia, circa 1941, he’s a lowdown Moscow gangster with comrades Stalin and Lenin tattooed on his chest. At least they care about his circumstances, Valka says.

When these escapees reach the border he cannot conceive of a life beyond Mother Russia and stays behind. The movie dies a kind of death at that point, because he is without a doubt the most interesting character in it.

In Ondine he plays Syracuse, a simple Irish fisherman who is divorced and has a daughter who has to have kidney dialysis. One fine day, however, he catches a woman in his nets and his daughter thinks she’s a mermaid.

The key here is that Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview With the Vampire), is the director: he who can make a woman getting dressed look as sexy as a woman getting undressed is cliched.

If his smart young protagonist, Annie (Alison Barry), looks a little like a fish in the most beautiful possible way, then he adorns his gorgeous leading lady, Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), in a dress that not only accentuates her considerable curves but also her "mermaid-ness".

After all, when she sings her strange songs, out-of-season fish seem to magically appear in Syracuse’s nets. So who says his daughter’s belief is so far-fetched? And there are many who say that when the Atlantians left the ocean, the first land they stepped on to was that of Eire.

That may be one truth, but it’s not the only one. The “real” truth is as much in the headlines (Eastern Europeans flocking to Ireland during that short-lived boom) as it is in How I Ended This Summer (nuclear radiation, poisoning the food of “traitors”).

If Ondine is a bit too long, though Summer is longer, then they have another similarity: they both beat with a fierce, original heart.

More Notes on Rabbit Hole and Chess

Last week I mentioned that Nicole Kidman had to fight to get Rabbit Hole made. Due to the pressure of a ridiculously self-imposed deadline, it only occurred to me afterwards that producers probably objected to her character’s opinion about God in a country obsessed with creationism.

During a group session of bereavement a woman says God wanted her little angel. Becca says if he wanted an angel he could just have made another one – he’s God, after all. Later on, in a conversation with her mother, she calls him “a sadistic prick”. Talk about a woman scorned.

Nor would the PC brigade have liked the fact that Becca’s husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), and another woman, played by Sandra Oh, smoke a joint before a session and burst out laughing as someone talks about losing a child to leukemia!

So more power to Ms Kidman for making a very brave, quietly subversive movie.

***

Moaning about a doccy during the recent New Zealand Film Festival, I forgot to mention that there is an excellent film that captures the independent spirit of something mentioned in Bobby Fischer Versus the World. That is, after the sixth game his opponent, Boris Spassky, joined the audience in applauding the American genius’s victory, Cold War or not.

That spirit is perfectly captured in The Luzhin Defence (2000) as a whole and in a moment when an Italian GM is offered a bribe in order to win. Fabio Sartor’s look of withering contempt is a cinematic moment to savour for life.

Directed by Marleen Gorris and starring John Turturro and Emily Watson, the film is based on the novel by that lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, who was also clearly obsessed with chess. Like the man who made the bribe, of course, he was Russian.

Neil Sonnekus

Fire in the Hole

John Cameron Mitchell’s first feature film concerned a transsexual punk rocker, his second film started off with a very flexible man giving himself a blowjob, and his third film deals with a middle-class couple losing their child.

Some may say he’s gone soft and others might say he’s matured. What is certain is that he’s extremely talented. His treatment of sex is frank without being offensive, which is quite a feat in puritanical America.

In his latest film, Rabbit Hole, there is no sex, yet it is all about sex. More about this later.

Apparently his executive producer and leading lady, Nicole Kidman, had to fight to get this project off the ground, which is commendable, and chose Mitchell to direct it, which is just plain smart. She should have won her Oscar for it rather than Natalie Portman, who can act but not dance. But then Kidman won the statuette for playing Virginia Woolf, which was a mistake on all fronts through no fault of hers.

Kidman, whom a lot of woman don’t like, interestingly, plays the kind of role in which - from a male point of view - she excels. That is, a repressed woman. You could see it in the hugely underrated and terrifying The Others and you can see it here. The more she keeps it in the more she oozes one thing and one thing only. Sex.

As for the story, Mitchell takes us from the obscure to the known in startling ways. Kidman’s Becca sees a boy in a bus and effectively starts stalking him. It’s only much later that we realise he’s the boy who accidentally killed her son. That technique applies to the truth about losing loved ones too. It takes her mother, played by the superb Dianne Wiest, to finally deliver the sad, hard truth that the pain of loss doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.

Aaron Eckhart’s Howie wants to hang on to every visible reminder of his dead son but, eight months on, he also understandably wants sex. Becca, however, wants to get rid of every reminder of her son, because she doesn’t frankly need it to remind her of a child she can see and feel everywhere, but is not interested in sex, whether for its own sake or replacing her dead son with another child. So there you have your classic marital stalemate.

Unfortunately we don’t get to know what Howie does for their rather ideal lifestyle, except that he works in an office that brings in enough moola to afford a double-storey house by a lake and two very expensive German cars. This weakens and limits the drama a little because a lot of people would simply not be interested in what could be described as their comfortable misery.

But as a portrait of a marriage in difficulty it is spot-on, yet it is also more sexual than Mitchell’s second feature, Shortbus, which is as explicit as you can get. After all, even Kidman has said that “you don’t have to be naked to be sexy”.

Exactly, Nicole. Exactly.

***

Also out on DVD now is Restrepo, a documentary featuring an American platoon in the Korengal Valley, apparently the most dangerous area in war-torn Afghanistan.

Made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya this year, we spend a year with these soldiers in what is described as the real The Hurt Locker, about which I beg to differ.

The latter, though fiction, is unbearably tense, and it is set in Iraq. Those are two vastly different “theatres of operation”, but neither addresses the question of why their soldiers are there.

This means they implicitly legitimise the American presence, rightly or wrongly, but therefore the latter especially fails, since it’s supposed to be a journalistic work. We have seen enough films that give us the “feel” of war – Platoon, Full Metal Jacket – to want to know more.

Restrepo, named after one of the soldiers who was killed during that year, doesn’t have a voice-over but gives us the basic facts in text on a black background. Other than that, the soldiers speak directly to camera, mostly after their “tour” is over, which further diminishes the so-called tension.

The camera also annoyingly stays on their eyes, in close up, waiting for these boys to cry. It is a particularly nauseating journalistic technique, which was handled well in the New Zealand doco Brother Number One, reviewed a few weeks ago.

If Junger and Hetherington should be commended for getting as close to the line of fire as possible, then the reason why Inside Job got the Oscar was because it showed us - often entertainingly - just how corrupt the upper echelons of American society are while their working-class compatriots kill and die for them in faraway, oil-rich countries.

Neil Sonnekus

Loving the Americas

Florian Habicht is a German-New Zealander who spent a year’s residency in the Big Apple in 2009 and, though he was under no obligation to make a film, he did.

What is the film “about”? Well, it concerns this guy who sees a woman walking in the street with a slice of cake on a plate. He becomes obsessed with the Russian-born actress, Masha Yakovenko, and starts filming their “relationship”.

Having no idea for a plot he asks people on the street to help him with it, so Love Story becomes just that about a city, too.

Startling things come to light. One man says he believes we come back as animals after we've died. A black woman gives us a philosophy of joy that is sounder than most philosophy. Another man says he doesn’t like New Zealanders. A tramp tells us about his first love. A muscular transvestite, like most of his/her fellow New Yorkers, has a proclivity for romance. A female stockbroker tells Florian to go real slow – that way he’ll get what he wants.

A lot of people suggest that when the sex scene comes (sorry), he should discover that she’s a he, because he wants it to be a letdown. That scene is one of the funniest and also gives us the biggest fright in the film.

At one stage Florian seems to be truly falling for Masha, but by then we don’t know what is “real” or not. He looks genuinely let down when she tells him that he must realise she’s only acting, and she does it with such naturalness – singing a Russian folk song half naked - that you couldn’t exactly blame him if he really did.

Also there to help him with the plot is his very open-minded and enthusiastic father back in New Zealand or Germany, dispensing encouragement from that cyber country, Skype. His enthusiasm has clearly rubbed off on his lanky, dishevelled son, whose offbeat goodwill keeps the film running through the slow spots, and they are there occasionally.

The whole project is helped along by a wonderfully moody soundtrack from other films and eras, and you do come out of the film feeling much better about most things – including Americans, if New Yorkers are indeed such. 

***

About a month ago I missed a festival film and thought I’ll see Copacabana with Isabelle Huppert as an alternative. I like her (lots) and the title promised something bright and, well, festive - which I needed.

But I should have known it was a trap. After all, it’s a French movie, directed by Marc Fitoussi.

The film is set mainly in Oostende, a grey harbour city in Belgium, which is as pleasing on the eye as an old wet rag. I felt a little cheated, but the story has stuck with me.

Huppert plays a freewheeling, middle-aged woman who has travelled the world doing odd jobs. The problem is she had a daughter during those wandering years and Esmerelda (played, I think, by Huppert’s real-life daughter, Lolita Chammah) is so embarrassed by her mother that she doesn’t want her at her wedding. Esmerelda’s going to marry an accountant and settle down to a boring little middle-class life.

Mama decides to prove that she can hold a job and ends up trying to sell timeshares in Oostende, one of those places Keith Richards would call the arse end of the world.

Whence the title, one might ask. Well, Mama wants to go to the country and city of samba once she’s made some money, which she proves she can - rather well. And she does go there in the end, kind of.

But her natural deviance, if not humanity, gets in the way, and if ever there was an indictment of capitalist greed then it’s this droll little comedy, which shows us that it can be as grey and nasty (but sexy, in the guise of chief saleslady Aure Atika) as any socialist dystopia.

Try to remember watching it if you ever see it in your specialist video store. It’ll stay with you like that mother or daughter you neglected. 

Neil Sonnekus

The Sweet Here and Now

Who would ever have thought of Clint Eastwood wondering out visually what happens to us after we die?

More than that, who would ever have thought he’d make a Claude Lelouch-like film about fate bringing three people together?

Knowing nothing about the film, out on DVD now, I wasn’t expecting it to invert Sam Goldwyn’s famous dictum that you should start with an earthquake and build towards a climax.

Well, Eastwood starts off with the result of a quake, a shocking tsunami, and builds towards A Man and a Woman handshake.

You can only do that kind of thing in Hollywood because you’re Eastwood, who delivers the goods as usual in that steady, assured way of his. Only he can take two comedy actors, Richard Kind (of Spin City fame) and Jay Mohr (of Gary Unmarried fame) and cast them in serious roles.

Eastwood and Matt Damon obviously clicked on Invictus and here Damon plays a San Francisco psychic who doesn’t like seeing into other people’s lives. After all, most of it is misery anyway. So he works as a labourer at a sugar mill instead.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays a smallish part as his cooking partner and proves, once again, that she’s a very good (and very beautiful) young actress.

The third strand to the story is a young boy whose mother’s a London junkie and his twin brother is killed by a truck after running away from a gang of young louts. He also misses a metro train bomb thanks to his brother’s cap being swept off his head.

So there you have it. Five things you’ve seen on your TV set recently. A tsunami, talking to the dead via a “medium”, a cooking masterclass, gang warfare on the streets of London – though a knife death would have been more pertinent right now - and terror bombs.

How will le directeur bring a laid-off American labourer with a strange talent, a high-powered French journalist who’s had an after-death experience (played by Belgian-born actress Cecille de France) and a sad little Pom together?

That creates about the only tension in this story, whose premise you either buy or don't, but it's really about unimportant things – politics, career - falling away and finding your inner courage. And that is still firmly Eastwood territory.

If the little-boy section of Hereafter is not entirely convincing, it’s still a gentle, slyly witty and highly original romance that doesn’t ignore the ugly realities of early-21st century life. But then neither does it celebrate or indulge them.

Neil Sonnekus