One is always keen to seek out productions that class themselves as low-budget and high quality. Clearly shot on DV, Song Of Songs has its unwatchable phases and some watchable - I am guessing its partly to do with style/mainly to do with lack of lighting...but thats just one of the uncomfortable aesthetics. Am certain that this is a film aimed at the core audience strong on the Jewish contingent and will of course stir some controversy given its subject matter. However, when dealing with such subject matters, it is important to consider having more subplots and strands so as to be more engrossing rather than off putting which it clearly is...maybe its far too cerebral/intellectual for its own good. The performances are generally okay but nothing write home about. The producer and director must be congratulated for embarking on this brave step and am certain that if more attention had been paid to two or three more integral characters, this film would beat with a stronger heart and express a more emotive cinematic atmosphere.
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socrates_note9 March 2006
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paul2001sw-118 June 2009A dying mother, religious instruction, hidden lusts and family secrets define this drama about a rather unhappy Jewish family living in north London. The drama has few words and a low budget feel, but some artistic thought has clearly gone into creating it. Yet I struggled to understand what the film was really supposed to be about. Why was the mother dying, why had the son left, what was the origin nature of the characters' religious faith? - the film gave hints that there were answers to these questions, but left too much unexplained to excite my interest or make me care for the protagonists. A movie doesn't need to spell everything out; but if everything is left mysterious, it's hard for the viewer to relate.
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wheniargueicshapes21 February 2006Far from being an 'easy' film, even difficult at times, I thought that Song of Songs was a pretty visionary piece for a first time director. Visually it's almost stunning; intellectually it's challenging. The images are very striking. The way in which the camera focuses on the backs of the characters' heads makes it very intimate in its emphasis. In fact I found it almost reminiscent of Bergman's Persona at some points. It is this intimacy, which the director explores through image rather than speech, which makes the film something a little special in comparison to other British films around at the moment.
I thought that this investment in the characters was pretty well balanced out by the more existential questions that the film throws up. These questions are to an extent left unanswered, but isn't part of the beauty of cinema that the audience is left still pondering those questions after the credits go up? It does deal with some tricky issues; to link sexuality and its repression to faith and orthodoxy is, in the present climate, an ambitious task. And even if the answers the film does give are shocking and difficult, I think the contradictions that the audience is left with are ultimately not due to any incoherence in the film itself, but reflect the difficulties of the issues the film confronts. An ambitious piece, but well worth seeing for this ambition alone. And if ambition doesn't tempt you, then it's worth seeing to see Nathalie Press - her performance demonstrates her chameleon abilities. Chalfen does a good job too. Finally, a new director who has made something a little different inside the British Film Industry! I hope it gets a general release beyond the ICA. -
sheif21 February 2006A tale of a devout religious girl and her estranged, angry brother who gets into a somewhat incestuous clinch with her, this isn't a film that's too heavy on story. It's more about atmosphere and little details of life. The setting is London orthodox Judaism and its painted as a dry world full of absence and mysterious symbol. It's a dark brooding and intense film - perhaps to a fault - that doesn't give the audience easy answers. At times the claustrophobia of its religious setting is overwhelming, even suffocating. Though there are a few lighter moments and some amusing satire of a closed community.
The portrait of its troubled lead characters almost depends more on the dark, grainy texture of this atmosphere than their actual psychology, which is far from being fully explained. At times the film almost seems to delight in not letting the audience in to its mysteries , the mysteries of the lead characters. But perhaps this is the point. It reminds us that some things remain mysteries; that what we call knowledge is often just arrogance and vanity.
It's abetted by striking, intensely compelling performances from leads Natalie Press and Joel Chalfen. They work well together and as brother and sister seem to inhabit their own private world that we can't quite penetrate.
A perhaps flawed but haunting film that raises questions about transgressive psychology, religion and violence but doesn't necessarily answer them - i think i'll remember it. -
michale_b24 May 2006"Who is your father" intones a disembodied voice over a shadowy mysterious landscape of horrified figures. "Who is your father," the young man reiterates, in a phrase that sets him in question against his own Jewish identity. The father will remain absent throughout the film, and the classical family model of what's left - mother, daughter, and son proceeds inexorably down a path of complete deconstruction. Uttering holy words of prayer and scripture from what will be her death bed, the mother craves to see her son once more. Her daughter Ruth stands by in obedient attendance in their North London home. But troubled son David, distances himself from his mother as surely as if she represented the letter of the Law.Despite excommunicating himself, David, the promising son become transgressor, starts to live his Jewishness vicariously through his sister Ruth. But prohibition yields desire, and their repressed lust towards their own flesh and blood threatens to reach a deadlock, a point of frustration, where the incestuous blends with the religious and boils into violence. King David wasn't he the one who killed in order to get Bathsheba? Ruth becomes his obscure object of desire, and a murky mirror of his own narcissism.Song of Songs, set by Josh Appignanesi on the border between the holy and the sacrilegious, is a dark, minimalistic yet complex "film de chambre". The director skillfully captures the drives and anxieties of his characters, setting up an intimate and claustrophobic space where domination and submission verge on the sadomasochistic. Characters appear as shadows, abandoned, often shot from the back of the head, as if the camera is constantly searching for an identity, never quite reaching it. Blond-haired Ruth, apparently frail and introverted, dons a dark wig, symbol of marriage, playing with her looks as in Godard's Le Mepris. Is she a married woman, a lover, a sister, a daughter ?Stunning cinematography intensifies an obscurity that folds temptation and death together. With cryptic imagery of fire, charged moments of silence, angles that refuse the face, and intense close-ups, one is reminded of Bergman. The director shows us an impossible love, mirroring the biblical text Song of Songs in which the two lovers, constantly yearning for one another, never actually meet. Brother and sister's repeated readings from the Bible seem both an iteration of the Law and an avowal to break it. Other quotations abound, resonating through the film: Ecclesiastes' warnings of vanity butt against a powerful image of child sacrifice from William Blake. Appignanesi seeks to go deeper into the void separating ancient from modern, freedom from transgression, morality from vice, hoping there to find some salvation for being and emptiness.
Michale B -
runamokprods25 February 2011This look inside London's world of orthodox Jews, and the near incestuous relationship between a half-mad, half-brilliant iconoclastic young Jewish scholar, and his equally intelligent but repressed sister is never less than interesting.
With the pressure added by their mother dying slowly in her room, there's a feeling of a pot always about to boil over.
The acting is very good, especially Natalie Press.
But the film's end feels like it tries to wrap things up a little too neatly, explaining the family's complex, fractured psyche in a way that felt like a bit of a come down, not a revelation.
None-the-less, a very interesting first film, and one I'd watch again.