CINEMA AND FILMS REVIEWS

CINEMA AND FILMS REVIEWS. Cont'd.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring. Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Hitherto best-known amongst Asian cinema connoisseurs for such violent fare as The Isle and "Bad Guy", Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk casts off his bad-boy reputation with magical fable Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring. The film's dreamlike setting is a beautiful lake, surrounded by mountains and forests, and on whose waters floats a small wooden temple. Here live an elderly monk (Oh Young-Soo) and his mischievous child pupil (Seo Jae-Kyung). We follow the turbulent passage of the latter's life without moving away from this enclosed environment. Over the course of the film's five concise chapters, Spring, Summer... explores a whole range of human experiences: the pleasure and pain of desire, joy and sorrow, guilt and atonement, thoughtlessness and awareness, death and rebirth. Representatives of the outside world impinge on the lives of the central duo, with the arrival (in Summer) of a young woman seeking treatment for a mysterious illness causing the now teenage monk (Kim Young-Min) to fall passionately in love. "Lust awakens the desire to possess," his unnamed mentor warns prophetically, "which ends in the intent to murder." Animals serve as a recurrent motif within the individual sections, from the frogs and snakes around whose bodies the kid maliciously ties stones, to the cat whose tail is used to paint the calligraphic sutra, an action designed to cleanse a person's anger. And there are plenty of other imaginative touches, such as the stand-alone and often flooded door that serves as an unusual entrance to the lake.

"KI-DUK IMPRESSIVELY FUSES STYLE AND CONTENT": Ki-Duk, who himself takes on a key role in the Winter segment, impressively fuses style and content. He doesn't judge the actions of his characters or rely on Buddhist sermonising to convey the film's ideas. Instead he achieves a sense of serenity through ravishing images of nature, contemplative pacing and the elegance of his storytelling, without losing sight of the burdens of our existence. In Korean with English subtitles.-Tom Dowson.

The Football Factory. Rating: 2 stars out of five

Once the scourge of the terraces, football hooliganism is making a comeback - at the cinema. In 2005 we'll see Elijah Wood as a West Ham yob in The Yank, but first we have The Football Factory, a grim and earthy look at soccer's underbelly based on John King's cult 1996 novel. Danny Dyer plays a young hoodlum who has dedicated his life to "thieving, f***ing and fighting". And that just about sums up Nick Love's forceful but ultimately self-defeating wallow in the worst excesses of male working-class culture. Set in an urban wasteland of grotty pubs, rundown housing estates and building sites, Love's shoestring-budgeted movie is as far removed from the glamour of Premiership football as it is possible to imagine. Indeed, besides a few TV snippets and an FA Cup draw, the "beautiful game" is nowhere to be seen in his episodic and profanity-strewn drama.

"OBSCENE VIOLENCE, GRUESOME SENTIMENTALITY": Narrated trainspotting-style by Dyer's cocky twentysomething Tommy Johnson, The Football Factory instead focuses on the fierce tribal loyalties which set Frank Harper's west London crew on a collision course with a rival mob from Millwall. For Tommy, life is a non-stop orgy of lager, drugs and brutality, with no room for work, family or relationships. Until, that is, a series of harrowing nightmares make him wonder if he's got what it takes to be part of "The Firm". Love expertly captures the self-doubt and insecurity that lies beneath his characters' swaggering bravado, while the fight scenes have a visceral intensity that reeks of authenticity. The writer-director should also be commended for assembling such a persuasive ensemble of mean-looking, shaven-headed gorillas. Alas, no amount of style or veracity can excuse the obscene glamorising of senseless violence, while the avuncular presence of Tommy's grandfather (Dudley Sutton) introduces a gruesome streak of sentimentality that's just as unpalatable.-N. Smith