The Team (15)
Arrow Films, £12.99
If you needed proof that taking the best bits of all your favourite European crime dramas and throwing them into a single series isn't quite the no-brainer it seems, look no further than The Team. From the premise to the plot to the characters, there's a by-the-numbers feel to this sprawling, multi-lingual, multi-national eight part co-production which flits between French, Flemish, German, Danish, Swedish and, of course, English, and involves major broadcasters from Denmark, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland.
The format first. Borrowing from acclaimed Danish-Swedish production The Bridge but upping the ante somewhat, The Team turns on three murders committed in separate jurisdictions (Berlin, Antwerp and Copenhagen) but with an identical MO: each victim is a prostitute, each is shot through the left eye and each has a finger removed. And so enter the team of the title, a trio of investigators working under the watchful eye of Europol. They are taciturn Dane Harald Bjorn (The Killing's Lars Mikkelsen), punky Belgian cop Alicia Verbeek (Veerle Baetens) and sleek, glamorous German Jackie Mueller (Jasmin Gerat), with whom the married Bjorn has had a romantic entanglement in the past.
The plot sees a suspect identified from the off -French journalist Jean-Louis Poquelin (Carlos Leal), who was charged with a similar murder some years earlier - but as the manhunt closes it becomes clear there are other, darker forces at play. One of these is Marius Loukauskis (Nicholas Ofczarek), an unsavoury Lithuanian criminal.
There are some neat visual touches in The Team, as when the three investigating teams come together in the mother of all Skype calls (it's a while before they actually meet). But the sheer preposterousness of the show is hard to swallow. And, though it's hardly his fault, Mikkelsen's Cockney-accented English puts you in mind of Bjork every time he opens his mouth - not a good thing in a slick crime drama.
Cul-De-Sac (15)
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £17.99
Released on Blu-ray under Sony's classy Criterion Collection imprint, Roman Polanski's 1966 psychological thriller has been digitally restored with the director's involvement and looks absolutely gorgeous. Filmed in black and white on location in eery, evocative Lindisfarne, it stars Donald Pleasence and the mesmerising Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve's ill-fated elder sister) as George and Teresa, an Anglo-French couple whose already eccentric home life is made even odder by the arrival of two wounded gangsters, played by blacklisted American actor Lionel Sander and Samuel Beckett regular Jack MacGowran. Teresa, chic and barefoot, plays along with the demands of the over-bearing Dickey (Sander) but the spiky, neurotic George bristles with anger and angst.
There are comparisons to be made with Nic Roeg's Performance – a home invasion, a gangster, dressing up, a meditation on the act of role playing – though there's more black comedy in Polanski's film. There are aspects of it which look overly-mannered to 21st century eyes, but it's still a gripping watch.
The 2003 documentary included in the extras package is fun too – it's an absolute bitch-fest in which Polanski, producer Gene Gutowski and cinematographer Gil Taylor cheerfully put the boot into their stars, particularly Pleasence and the truculent Sander, who proved a nightmare on the seven week shot. Look out, too, for a young Jacqueline Bisset as one of a party of George's friends who arrive unannounced.
There's a sobering coda, though, in a story Polanski tells about Françoise Dorléac almost dying of cold after the third take of a long scene in which she has to run naked into the north sea and stay submerged. A year after the film was made, Dorléac really was dead – burned to death when her car crashed and caught fire.
Endless Poetry (15)
Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99
It's safe to say there's no-one quite like Alejandro Jodorowsky in world cinema. Chilean by birth, Jewish-Ukrainian by background and French by inclination, he's now 88 and still working. He made his name with a trio of surreal and psychedelic films in the late 1960s and early 1970s and began a late flourish in 2011 with The Dance Of Reality, a film detailing his early life and described by him as an “auto-biopic". This 2016 “sequel”, every bit as vibrant, surreal and startlingly bizarre as The Dance Of Reality, takes up where it left off and follows Jodorowsky's journey from poetry-obsessed teenager to adult member of Santiago's avant garde. As with the previous film, the director's eldest son Brontis plays Jodorowsky's own father; Jodorowsky himself appears as a sort of walk-on narrator/counsellor from time to time; and every line delivered by Pamela Flores, who plays Jodorowsky's mother, is sung, opera-style. But where Jodorowsky's grandson played him as a young man in The Dance Of Reality, this time the role goes to the director's youngest son, Adan. It really is a family affair.
Indulgent or not, it has its bravura moments, such as a set-piece finale involving two massed bands dressed as devils and skeletons, and the masked and black-clad “stagehands” who deliver props to characters in mid-scene. Augmenting Jodorowsky's vision is acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who adds his own visual flair. If nothing else, Endless Poetry is a riot of carnival-esque colour.
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