Aloys (15.)
Directed by Tobias Nölle.
Starring Georg Friedrich, Tilde von Overbeck, Kamil Krejcí, Yufei Li, Koi Lee, Sebastian Krähenbühll, Sebastian Krähenbühl. German with subtitles. 91 mins. Available on Dual format Blu-ray/ DVD from Eureka.
A genuine original is hard to find, and harder to market. A disc of this Swiss oddity has been languishing in my To Watch pile for over a year. I'd always thought it looked intriguing but given the lack of stir caused by its release I always assumed that probably it wouldn't amount to much.
Aloys (Friedrich, looking like a morose and desperate Tommy Cooper) is a private detective who lives a solitary existence, trailing and obssessivily filming the adulteries of balding middle aged men. It could be that his life has gone into a tail spin since the recent death of his father and boss, but there's little to suggest that his life was any better before that. He exists on Capri-sun and taken away portions of rice from the local Chinese; the minimal relationships he has with the other tenants in his tower block are fraught. Then one day the tables are turned when all his cameras and recent recordings are stolen from him and an unknown woman taunts him and involves him in the world of phone walking, the new age equivalent of phone sex.
The language is German but for all the world you'd think this was a Scandinavian. Not one of their Noirs but their oddball studies of isolation and disconnect, i.e, A Bothersome Man. The film has a similar distinctive look. Realistic but uncluttered so you really get the blandness of the urban landscape. The favoured image is condensation on bus and car windows, which is extraordinarily effective.
It is a film that will be called surreal, but it really isn't: it's a state of mind that is communicated in visual terms. You are not sure what is real and what isn't, but it is all too real, mundane even. The press release compares it with Charlie Kaufman, a notion at which you instantly scoff at, but Nölle's approach is similar. Neither of them are consciously trying to be weird, it's just that this the way for them to tell straightforward human stories. If you want a little capsule quote this is like Charlie Kaufman's version of The Conversation.
I thought it was terrific but it doesn't seem to connect with audiences. The complaint is that after the mystery element is resolved a third of the way in, people lose interest in the struggles of people to connect with the world. I think that is the point when it gets interesting: mystery resolved you really don't know what is coming next.
Directed by Tobias Nölle.
Starring Georg Friedrich, Tilde von Overbeck, Kamil Krejcí, Yufei Li, Koi Lee, Sebastian Krähenbühll, Sebastian Krähenbühl. German with subtitles. 91 mins. Available on Dual format Blu-ray/ DVD from Eureka.
A genuine original is hard to find, and harder to market. A disc of this Swiss oddity has been languishing in my To Watch pile for over a year. I'd always thought it looked intriguing but given the lack of stir caused by its release I always assumed that probably it wouldn't amount to much.
Aloys (Friedrich, looking like a morose and desperate Tommy Cooper) is a private detective who lives a solitary existence, trailing and obssessivily filming the adulteries of balding middle aged men. It could be that his life has gone into a tail spin since the recent death of his father and boss, but there's little to suggest that his life was any better before that. He exists on Capri-sun and taken away portions of rice from the local Chinese; the minimal relationships he has with the other tenants in his tower block are fraught. Then one day the tables are turned when all his cameras and recent recordings are stolen from him and an unknown woman taunts him and involves him in the world of phone walking, the new age equivalent of phone sex.
The language is German but for all the world you'd think this was a Scandinavian. Not one of their Noirs but their oddball studies of isolation and disconnect, i.e, A Bothersome Man. The film has a similar distinctive look. Realistic but uncluttered so you really get the blandness of the urban landscape. The favoured image is condensation on bus and car windows, which is extraordinarily effective.
It is a film that will be called surreal, but it really isn't: it's a state of mind that is communicated in visual terms. You are not sure what is real and what isn't, but it is all too real, mundane even. The press release compares it with Charlie Kaufman, a notion at which you instantly scoff at, but Nölle's approach is similar. Neither of them are consciously trying to be weird, it's just that this the way for them to tell straightforward human stories. If you want a little capsule quote this is like Charlie Kaufman's version of The Conversation.
I thought it was terrific but it doesn't seem to connect with audiences. The complaint is that after the mystery element is resolved a third of the way in, people lose interest in the struggles of people to connect with the world. I think that is the point when it gets interesting: mystery resolved you really don't know what is coming next.
