The Singing Detective

A TV mini-series written by Dennis Potter and directed by Jon Amiel.

Detective novelist Philip Marlow suffers from the crippling condition psoriatic arthropathy. Incapacitated both physically and emotionally whilst confined to a hospital bed, Marlow escapes into his imagination, plotting out a murder tale in which he is both a big-band singer and a private eye. As he re-writes his early crime noir thriller, The Singing Detective, he enters into a surreal Chandleresque fantasy of sleazy nightclubs, spies and criminals.

In his hospital bed where he rants and yells at everyone who comes near him, Marlow begins to hallucinate from his high fever. Reality and fantasy constantly overlap and intertwine as the story weaves effortlessly between his present experiences, his past fictions, paranoid imaginings, and the overwhelming memories that still dominate his life from his childhood, growing up amongst a poor, ignorant coal-mining family in the Forest of Dean.

Escaping into this dark inner world, he places himself in the role of the hero of his own novel, and so begins to encounter and explore the guilt he has carried from his tormented childhood days, and the paranoid fantasies he has about his estranged wife Nicola. As he drifts between memories of past events and the mental re-working of his novel, all surfacing in his subconscious, Marlow's tortuous self-analytical voyage of personal discovery provides a key to the conquering of his illness.

A dramatically rich and complex masterpiece, disturbing and shocking, yet also with great depth of insight and humour – a uniquely brilliant work.

Caché

Hidden
a film by Michael Haneke

Georges, a television presenter, and his wife Anne, who works at a publishing house, are living the perfect life of modern comfort and security. But their successful bourgeois lives hide a complacency and general indifference to the outside world.

One day, their idyll is disrupted in the form of a mysterious videotape that appears on their doorstep. On it they are being filmed by a hidden camera from across the street with no clues as to who shot it, or why. At first Anne is dismissive of the tape, which appears to be surveying the exterior of their home, but Georges believes there is a sinister motive behind its unexplained appearance. Soon they receive a second tape accompanied by a disturbing drawing. Nerves become frayed and tension erupts when their twelve-year-old son Pierrot, staying at a friend's house all night without letting them know, brings fears that he has been kidnapped by the stalkers.

A third tape reveals the farmhouse where Georges grew up and where his invalid mother still resides. A visit to his mother brings back long buried memories and he is forced to confront a terrible secret, hidden since his childhood. As he begins to fear for the safety of his family, and as Anne struggles to come to terms with his revelations, their entire comfortable existence begins to disintegrate. Convinced he knows the identity of the person responsible, Georges embarks on a rash and impulsive course of action that leads to shockingly unexpected consequences.

The story is multi-layered – on one level it is a study of the colonial guilt of Europe and race relations; on a deeper level it probes the complacent and bourgeois temperaments of the financially secure classes in society; on yet another level the story explores the attitudes of three distinct generations towards social relationships. A brilliantly conceived and intriguing film, the voyeuristic camera lingering on long static shots as images pass across both foreground and background, enabling us to interpret things at our will.

It is a story about the propagation of lies to avoid confronting the guilt that remains for our past actions – and how we find ourselves ever more enmeshed in that from which we seek to escape. Haneke shows us that we all have things we want to keep hidden, but can we be sure that we are the sole keepers of our secrets? Ultimately he leaves us to decide what the truth is, or indeed whether it is not perhaps better for the truth to remain hidden.

Nadzieja

A film by Stanisław Mucha, from the screenplay trilogy Heaven, Hell and Purgatory by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz.

Nadzieja (Hope) is the last film in a trilogy representing not only the Dantesque concepts of heaven, hell and purgatory, but also the Christian ideals of love, faith and hope. As the film opens we witness a woman being killed in a road accident as she attempts to protect a child's life. She was the mother of the child, Franciszek. Franciszek's father, a renowned musician and conductor, still suffers from his bereavement fifteen years later, having given up his music to become a humble church organist. Franciszek's suicidal older brother, Michal, is currently serving a prison sentence for the murder of two men.

Set in contemporary Warszawa, Franciszek, an angelic-looking young man, has been following the underworld events in the life of Benedykt Weber, a senator, gallery owner and respected art dealer. He has compiled a complete dossier on all of Weber's dealings and knows everything about the man's life. One night Franciszek lies in wait in the same church where his father now plays, to capture with a borrowed videocamera, Weber's theft of a magnificent 15th century Venetian altarpiece called 'Angel with a Violin'. With this video and other supporting evidence Franciszek approaches Weber, making it clear to him that the dossier will be given to the police if he does not return the painting to the church. But instead of trying to extort money from him, Franciszek simply says that he wants to help him.

Weber quickly realises that Franciszek has the means to both destroy his valued reputation and to put him in prison if he does not comply with the boy's request. But already the painting has passed to another intermediary in the underworld of art theft and it will now be impossible to get it back, yet Franciszek is insistent that the painting be returned, despite several warnings being given in an attempt to frighten him off.

We begin to see that Franciszek has no sense of fear. During his freefall flights at the airfield he waits longer and longer before he opens his chute. It's as though in all he does he is protected by angels. But his girlfriend Klara, who loves and admires him even though he does not return her affection, becomes increasingly unable to bear the risks he now takes. There is also the question of whether forcing someone to undo a wrong is of any use if in reality the person simply fears the consequences of not making amends.

Mucha allows the story to unfold as a combination of thriller, moral tale, and metaphysical drama, recalling the films Piesiewicz made with Kieślowski. Likewise, there is a similar sense of cosmic order and chaos, with many elements seemingly mysteriously connected, yet unexplained. Whilst the film focuses on hope, it does so not in any conventionally uplifting way, but rather by an exploration of the capacity of the human spirit.

L'enfer

A film by Danis Tanović, from the screenplay trilogy Heaven, Hell and Purgatory by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz.

In Paris in the 1980s, a man, fresh from his release from prison, is rejected by his wife. After a violent confrontation he throws himself from his apartment window, witnessed by his three young daughters. In present day Paris, the sisters, now grown up, live their own lives – the family bonds are broken. Sophie, the eldest, is married with young children, but suspects her photographer husband of having an affair. The youngest sister, Anne, is a student involved in a messy relationship with one of her tutors. Middle sister Céline lives a solitary and joyless life, caring for her difficult mother. When a young man starts to take an interest in her, she little suspects the true motive behind his approaches.

An intricate tragedy of three sisters, each now with problems in their adult love life, primarily derived from their mother's mistaken understanding of their father's "sexual misbehaviour". The terminally unhappy Sophie is intent upon discovering the truth behind her husband Pierre's loss of affection for her. Anne, seeking the stability and reassurance of a father-figure in her affair with Frédéric – a married Sorbonne professor and her best friend's father – finds her world has been shattered when he tells her he cannot see her again. Céline, a repressed spinster, longing for companionship but devoting her life to the needs of her institutionalised mother, misinterprets the sudden interest a young man, Sébastien, shows in her.

The reference to Medea, the tragedy of tragedies in Greek mythology, parallels the elements of misunderstanding, deceit, vengeance and unforgiveness surrounding the three women haunted by a nightmarish childhood experience. Each of the sisters lives in her own private hell, separated from her siblings. Only when the truth about their father's prison sentence for seducing a young male student is finally revealed, do the family reunite in a final attempt to understand, and come to terms with, their past.

An intense and riveting drama, subtly crafted and portrayed. The film includes a few delightful little cameos, most notably one involving an elderly lady at a bottle-bank. Tanović's realisation of the original screenplay (of which he expressed surprise at its having been written by two men) is an absolute delight. He dedicates his film simply and affectionately: à KK.

Heaven

A film by Tom Tykwer, from the screenplay trilogy Heaven, Hell and Purgatory by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz.

Philippa, a British teacher living in Turin, Italy, has watched helplessly as her husband and friends have fallen victim to drug overdoses. To compound her desperation, the Carabinieri – who are complicit in the actions of Turin's biggest drug dealer – have completely ignored her repeated offers of information.

We follow Philippa as she assembles a bomb and places it in the office of the drug dealer, and then confesses her crime by telephone to the police, forty seconds before the bomb is due to explode. Having witnessed the loss of so many innocent young lives at the hands of this man, she feels this to be the only course of action left to her, and is willing to pay the price for what she is doing.

During her interrogation following arrest, it is revealed to her that her plan has gone terribly wrong and that instead of the intended victim dying, four innocent people including two children have been killed in the explosion. The police are convinced she is part of a terrorist group and refuse to accept her reasons for the attempted murder of the drug dealer. With the unexpected help of Filippo, a sympathetic young police officer, she escapes detention and is given a second chance to kill her victim, and with nothing to lose she takes divine justice into her own hands.

A probing exploration of the modern world and its moral choices, in which we witness Philippa's transformation from a grieving widow to a wanted fugitive on a journey through retribution, redemption, innocence and crime. A mesmerising art film, full of refined camera work and scarce in dialogue, with a slowly evolving story of the relationship between two people caught in a nightmarish situation. With magnificent cinematography and breathtaking aerial shots over the Tuscan countryside, it is a subtly told story of fate and destiny.