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Friday 16

February 8.00pm

Three Seasons

Dir Tony Bui 1999, Cert 12, 113 mins

Starring Don Duong, Nguyen Ngoc Hiep, Zoe Bui, Nguyen

Huu Duoc and Harvey Keitel

Three Seasons is an American film which reflects the

uniquely ambivalent tenderness of an immigrant looking

back to the old country. From "Fiddler on the Roof" to

"The Joy Luck Club" to "Angela's Ashes," the realization

that the traditional society of one's ancestry is being

transformed or even vanishing under the tide of history is

a distinctive marker of the American experience. That the

old country was often the site of tremendous suffering and

deprivation -- our ancestors usually had good reason to

leave, after all -- only heightens the sense of sad

ambivalence.

Just as Bui's Saigon is a place where wealth and poverty;

city and country; capitalism and socialism; and ancient

and modern collide, "Three Seasons" is a film with a

divided sensibility. Its gorgeous, almost painterly

composition shows the influence of Asian cinema, but its

unsparing and deeply compassionate portrayal of city life,

viewed from the bottom up, owes a debt to Italian

neorealism, especially to the greatest of all urban-poverty

films, Vittorio de Sica's "The Bicycle Thief."

Friday 16

March 8.00pm

Brokeback Mountain

Dir Ang Lee, 2005, USA Cert 15, 134 mins

Here is a love story from director Ang Lee in which the

taboo word "love" is never spoken. In fact the whole movie

is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not telling,

feelings that dare not speak their name - and doing so

with superb intelligence and magnificent candour.

Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a piece of writing

from 1997 by Annie Proulx that already bears the

burdensome reputation of being the best short story ever

to be published in the New Yorker magazine: the tale of

two itinerant ranch-hands in the early 1960s, Ennis and

Jack, who get a summer's work shepherding on

Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They are played here

by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Beautifully composed and wonderfully acted, this film is

massively superior to the last Proulx adaptation - the

woeful Shipping News - and far better than Ang Lee's last

cowboy movie, his very moderate civil war drama Ride

With the Devil. Most literary adaptations are crushed,

concertina-ed affairs in which a novel's various chapters,

scenes and characters are squeezed out. There is a real

sense here that the dimensions and space of the film

have been stretched, and screenwriters Larry McMurtry

and Diana Ossana have developed and extrapolated the

source material with flair, in particular giving a dramatic

presence to the women in Ennis and Jack's story.

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Friday 13

October 8.00pm

The Constant Gardener

Dir: Fernando Meirelles, 2005, UK, Cert 15, 129 mins

There are some films which have Oscar-contender written

all the way through them like a stick of rock. This version

of John Le Carré's 2001 novel is conceived on a grand,

almost operatic scale with fervent and features passionate

performances from it's actors. Its shrewd producer,

Simon Channing-Williams, had the inspired idea of hiring

the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles to direct, and

Meirelles has brought to this conspiracy-thriller-cum-love-

story the unceasing energy and attack that characterised

his sensational debut film City of God. There is a terrific

pulse of energy in this film, a voltage which drives it over

two hours. It is not just an intricate, despairing meditation

on the shabby compromises involved in maintaining

Britain's interests and waning foreign prestige. There is

real anger here, and a real sense that it is worthwhile

striking back against wrongdoing. The Constant Gardener

is a romance that packs a punch to equal The English

Patient of 10 years ago.