INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (23 page)

VAMPIRE ACADEMY
begins with a carcrash, which in hindsight may have been a bit of a hostage. Richelle Mead’s sextet-and-counting about a high school in Montana for trainee bloodsuckers and their half-blood guardians is a long way from the bottom of the YA barrel, with an attractive focus on the intensity and resilience of teenage girls’ friendships, and some ingenious if exhaustingly overmythologised use of traditional Romanian vampire lore. For teen-movie afics, this film version is a bit of a superhero teamup in itself: a decades-overdue collaboration between
Mean Girls
and
Freaky Friday
director Mark Waters and his screenwriter big brother Daniel, who wrote
Heathers
as well as
Batman Returns
and a wonderful unproduced early
Catwoman
, since which, well, not so much. It should be a can’t-miss, but it became clear as UK release dates approached, whipped past, and receded in the rear mirror that something was not at all well, and after the most fleeting of theatrical appearances it’s shuffled straight off to stream and rent.

This is either a huge shame or a gift to humankind, as
Vampire Academy
is one of those endlessly rewatchable fiascos that restore your joy in films that are able to achieve that perfect balance of awfulness and brilliance.
Vampire Academy
is a UK/Romanian co-production, which isn’t something you see every day and may explain a series of curious references to a Romanian delegation to the school which never materialises, at least in the version seen. It was made entirely in the home counties, a part of the world not known for its insistent resemblance to Montana; St Vladimir’s is played by Charterhouse, and the local mall, which includes a prominently visible Superdrug, is unmistakably Brent Cross Shopping Centre, while the vampires are mostly played by a distinctly low-fat cream of such young British acting talent as hasn’t already been skimmed by every other franchise in the industry. The film does, however, have one absolute killer asset in its star Zoey Deutch, who comes across as yet another of those 26-year-olds preposterously cast as a teenager, whom you can’t quite place but who is thumpingly familiar from something you saw years ago when she was young. In fact it turns out that she’s her character’s age, and that the reason she’s naggingly familiar, effortlessly charismatic, and has the comic timing of someone twice her age is that her mom is Lea Thompson and that stuff is genetic as all hell. But the spice in the recipe is that Deutch’s sassy vamp-guardian is paired, catastrophically and yet also wonderfully, with Australian TV actress Lucy Fry as the teenage vampire-princess bestie she’s sworn to protect, and Fry, bless her, is a proud alumn of the Rosie Huntington-Whiteley school of the dramatic arts. I can’t really describe it. It’s like watching a panther eating a Toblerone. The thing is, they genuinely do lift each other, so that by the end of the film you can’t remember which one is wonderful and which is terrible, or why this isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had.

D
own under in Fry’s homeland, David Michôd’s
THE ROVER
positions itself in the grand tradition of Australian post-apocalyptic westerns, as world-weary badass Guy Pearce pursues the bestids who stole his vintage Holden Commodore across half of South Australia from one Tarantino-inflected interaction to the next, with Robert Pattinson in twitchy tow as the baby brother with learning difficulties that target Scoot McNairy abandoned for dead. Pearce turns in a career top-five performance, right from the wonderful early moment where a sudden sense of absolute purpose appears in his hitherto-dead eyes; while even Pattinson is certainly doing something in very great quantity, even if acting isn’t quite what you’d choose to call it. The event ten years earlier, known only as “the collapse”, seems to be an economic rather than a natural or technological catastrophe, and is fairly peripheral to the film’s central puzzle of what the car means to Pearce and how it’s tied to his dead man’s view of the world. Many will find the answer a bit of a groaner when it comes in the final scene, undoing much of the good work the film has done till then; but Michôd has said when called out on it that that’s of course the whole point, and certainly the signs have long been there that Pearce’s behaviour is diagnostic of a deeper and more systemic moral damage that just being a bit moody and good with a handgun. As Pattinson puts it in his coarse-acting Southern retard drawl, “Not everythin’ has to be about sump’n’” – particularly in a world where order, justice, civilisation, morality, and meaning no longer exist, for reasons all the characters know but nobody is in a hurry to tell us.

A
ri Folman’s
THE CONGRESS
takes an unusual approach to adapting Lem’s
The Futurological Congress
, about a kind of Worldcon on hallucinogens that gets overrun by terrorists, by making the novel just one mezzanine level in a bunker of rabbit-hole realities from which the film has to find its way back to the surface. Lem’s regular comic adventurer Ijon Tichy is here substituted by an actress sharing the name, body, and CV of Robin Wright, who in a long prologue sequence allows herself to be professionally replaced by a
S1m0ne
-style digital avatar, and then twenty years in the future slips inconspicuously into a Congress where everyone appears as a Fleischeresque animation, thanks to the compulsory ingestion of low-level hallucinogens at the border of the “animation zone”. But once inside, she drinks some spiked tapwater and falls into a much deeper pit of weirdness, from which she eventually wakens into a future world in which everyone now lives in a drug-made consensual hallucination overlaid on a grim red-pill dystopia, and her quest takes a different and more poignant personal turn.

Everything about this film is as insane as it sounds. Israeli writer-director Folman is best known for his Flash-animated documentary
Waltz with Bashir
, about the Sabra-Shabila refugee camp massacres in the 1983 Lebanon war.
The Congress
is a fiercely determined attempt to do something as far from that as possible: teeming classical animation, a story of American futures rather than Middle Eastern history, shuffling through genres and mindstates like in-show wardrobe changes. But for those who know Folman’s earlier work, the obsessions sing through: the madness and unreality of the surface of the world, which can be broken at any moment by the detonation of a bomb, the fall of shell, the sudden sound of copters overhead. Almost none of it works at all in any normally recognisable sense, but it’s a film of phenomenal strangeness and power which has, among other things, recognised an unexpected mirror of darkness in Lem’s satire, and stays with you longer than is easily explained. The French got it over a year ago, and I’m still not sure they’ve recovered.

B
ack in the Parisian metropolis of the surreal,
MOOD INDIGO
is the third film version of Boris Vian’s unfilmable 1947 novel
L’Écume des jours
– itself an untranslatable text translated three times into English, but never the modern classic it’s been in French. The novel follows two couples from frothy, surrealised, language-popping romance to darkness and desolation as tragic turns intrude on the cartoon silliness and word jazz: Audrey Tautou develops a growth on her lung, Gad Elmaleh is destroyed by addiction, and both are reduced to destitution and final tragedy as the couples’ resources burn through and the light, joy, and colour drizzle out of their lives; and though the growth is a waterlily and the addiction is to the works of jazz philosopher “Jean-Sol Partre”, the arc into darkness is the more powerful for the adolescent whimsy from which it descends. This latest version being a Michel Gondry film, the visual canvas bubbles with strangeness and the characters (who with hindsight one can see were always hovering in the background of his
Human Nature
,
Eternal Sunshine
, and
Science of Sleep
) travel a path from romantic optimism to existential melancholia that systematically and hauntingly deconstruct the initial whimsy and music-video popping candy for the eye. It’s about as French as a film can get, and undoubtedly a challenge to viewers whose filmic tastebuds have been burned out by the refined sugars and saturated fats of the Hollywood narrative diet. But it’s the only film in this pile of fourteen with no guns, no carchases, and no edged weapons. If that seems odd, perhaps we should use more of our brains.