DVD reviews: Rare Exports - A Christmas Tale | One From the Heart
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
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IT’S the first week of November, which means the annual onslaught of Christmas movies is upon us. That’s usually bad news, thanks largely to the fact that while there’s a fine tradition of ace Christmas-set movies, subversive Christmas-themed movies are a little harder to come by. Helping redress that balance though is Rare Exports, a Finnish oddity that recasts the jolly red “Coca-Cola Claus” as a malevolent demon who deploys an army of emaciated, white-bearded helpers to snatch naughty children in the run up to 25 December. That’s the starting point for a 1980s-style Christmas horror fantasy in which a young boy called Pietari (Onni Tommila) discovers the dark truth about Santa when an American drilling expedition unleashes a destructive force, one that results in kids disappearing, reindeer being slaughtered and old men being caught in traps. As the pint-sized Pietari sets out to save the day, director Jalmari Helander puts a distinctly Spielbergian spin on Yuletide family dynamics, working in a fairly sly critique of the commercialisation of the season with a gleefully reprehensible finale.
One From the Heart
Studio Canal
FIRST released in 1982, Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart feels like an ironically titled stylistic exercise when watched today. His first film after Apocalypse Now, it is, in its own way, similarly grandiose, but there’s just something about its technically dazzling attempt to tell a love story in the form of a big, studio-bound, quasi-musical that feels shallow and phony. Though doubtless buoyed by the his hard-won successes in the 1970s, his creative vision here feels more like the result of a film-maker letting his ego run amok than a director opening up his heart. Its story of a youngish working-class couple (played by Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest) who decide to go their separate ways, hooking up with more exotic partners (Raul Julia and Natassia Kinski, respectively), only to realise what that what their hearts want is each other, is thin to say the least. Coppola’s decision to soundtrack their misadventures Broadway-style, but with songs by Tom Waits, may give it an extra kick, but it remains difficult to get excited about Coppola’s astonishing visual achievements when they’re tethered to such cliché-ridden material.
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