If Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli hadn’t indefinitely shuttered its production wing last year, the recent 30th anniversary might have been a sweeter celebration. This week offers at least one happy return, however, in their rapturous penultimate feature, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (StudioCanal, U) – a reminder of the signature artistry we might lose if the halt proves permanent and their far-from-exhausted capacity for creative exploration.
Veteran director Isao Takahata’s farewell film a typically lovely outing from Ghibli, but it’s far from typical in other senses: the whispery lyricism of its folkloric storytelling, as soft and spry as its pastel-sketch animation style, is miles removed from the dense felt-tip fantasy of Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, though no less vivid. Drawn from a 10th-century fairytale about a reluctant princess, born of a bamboo shoot, yearning for a return to nature, it’s a lush ode to fleeting mortality that perhaps explains something of Takahata’s own chosen resting point for a brilliant career. “Lifetimes come and go in turn,” the film sings sweetly at its close; may Ghibli’s rebirth come sooner rather than later.
Kaguya’s melancholy segues more neatly than you might imagine into that of Roy Andersson’s brilliant, bone-dry absurdist comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Artificial Eye, 12) – a film that smuggles a perversely hopeful view on how to live into its whey-faced meditation on life’s very futility. Completing a trilogy that includes Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, Andersson’s latest can hardly surprise with its tone or technique. Acolytes will by now expect the dolefully droll skits, the serenely seasick-colour palette and the blase expansiveness of form. Told through 37 vignettes, immaculately built tableaux run the gamut from 18th-century military marches to lonely cafe suppers, linked by the tragicomic travails of two gormless novelty-gift salesmen.
Yet this comfortably glum wallow still finds ways to make the heart stop: a late, extended scene of rank human barbarity places the preceding jest in a disquieting context. Newcomers should know it’s not even his richest film: seek out the new Roy Andersson Collection (Artificial Eye, 15), which gathers the trilogy with his 1970 debut A Swedish Love Story, to see why.
The Swede may now have an unlikely rival in the warped arthouse comedy stakes, however, in Bruno Dumont – an auteur whose particular brand of Bressonian severity has hitherto yielded about as much wry humour as the Little Red Book. That all changes with P’tit Quinquin, a dark-bellied but delightfully loose-limbed police caper made as a mini-series for French television – it’s receiving a limited cinema release this week, but at 197 minutes arguably plays more digestibly in its intended format on Curzon Home Cinema, even if you lose some of its gusty widescreen atmosphere.
Either way, it’s a singular treat: a Twin Peaks-twisted mystery, set in starkest rural France yet executed with the knockabout flair of a Keystone Cops jape. Dumont’s tortured sensibility is unchanged – the case begins with dismembered human remains stuffed into cows, after all – as is his customary taste for non-professional actors. But as the bumbling investigation snakes circuitously around a community riddled with eccentrics and malcontents, a peculiarly warm feeling for human failing settles in; antic farce turns out to be as suitable a vessel for Dumont’s spiritual preoccupations as dour allegory, and a good deal more fun.
The weirdness doesn’t end there. Persepolis director Marjane Satrapi’s first English-language film, The Voices (Arrow, 15), is a grisly, almost heroically unhinged curio, starring Ryan Reynolds as an amiable American psycho guided not simply by the voices in his head, but those of his pets. Gamely performed and jazzily designed, it swings wildly and not quite on target – but it’s not likely to be mistaken for anything else.
The same can’t be said for the honest, heart-clutching kid-genius drama X+Y (Koch Media, 12), though that’s not the film’s fault. While it gives every indication of following a sappy triumph-against-adversity path, Morgan Matthews’s film – about an autistic teen, beautifully played by Asa Butterfield, learning broader life lessons on a maths olympiad – saves the toughest questions for the softest opportunities, and is more affecting for it.
If it’s pure formula you want, you could do worse than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (Entertainment One, 15), even as the film could do appreciably better: recycling the mildewed Victorian horror of its predecessor once more without feeling, it offers a few neat jolts, one Jeremy Irvine in appealingly distressed mode and absolutely no reflections on existence. Sometimes that’s enough.
