Could someone work for a German-run film studio without being a collaborator? And how could you build a set when half of your timber was being requisitioned for military coffins? Dealing with these quandaries are real figures, Jean Devaivre, an assistant director and family man who spied for the Resistance, and Jean Aurenche, a bohemian screenwriter.Bertrand Tavernier, the director and co-writer, is as much a film historian as he is a film-maker. He adapted Laissez-Passer from his two old friends' reminiscences, but reveres the men so much that he squeezes in every last anecdote, from the painting of props to an escapade right out of 'Allo 'Allo. The camera pans industriously to keep up with all 125 actors, and the viewer works just as hard, for three overcrowded hours. I couldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't as ardent about the subject as Tavernier is.n.barber independent.co.uk. Talking last week at the National Film Theatre, my colleague David Thomson made an interesting prognosis of cinema's future. The real innovations, he proposed, would come from the world of animation: for young audiences, the long established game of photographing live actors was already looking like old hat. I couldn't agree more about animation's vitality – in the last two years, Hollywood has hardly produced a more innovative film than Monsters, Inc., purely in terms of rediscovering the luminous, tactile pleasures of image-making.
Most spectacularly, we've had The Matrix, which has little to do with how live bodies perform in real space, everything to do with marvels that can only be dreamed digitally. It's not simply a question of live pictures being digitally tweaked, as has been the common practice for going on a decade and a half: we're beginning now to look at live images so extensively processed that they practically relinquish contact with real-world optics altogether.Avalon is a particularly bewildering example of this phenomenon. Its Japanese director Mamoru Oshii is a leading practitioner of drawn sci-fi animation – anime – whose features Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2 are much prized by genre aficionados. Avalon is Oshii's first live-action film – up to a point. The locale is a city of the near future, where the populace is hooked on an illegal and highly dangerous virtual reality game called Avalon: strap on an electrode-spiked helmet, and you're an intrepid guerilla doing battle with sinister hovering helicopters and Dalek-like tanks. When we meet heroine Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) on the virtual battlefield, the screen is steeped in heavy soft-focus sepia: shot with oddly dreamy delicacy by Grzegorz Kedzierski, the imagery is digitally treated so that everything seems to move in a slow-motion blur. We're treated to copious explosions and zap-gun effects, but hardly of the usual Hollywood action-movie strain: here, plumes of fire and smoke freeze in mid-air to be revealed as flat planes of light.
When Ash shoots her enemies, they turn two-dimensional in mid-move, then shatter into glassy splinters. This is shoot'em-up console stuff, but oddly distanced, coolly presented for our aesthetic consideration.I began to panic early on: the prospect of watching 106 minutes of deep sepia suddenly felt unbearably oppressive. But the film becomes even more claustrophobic when we enter the world in which Ash lives: a crumbling European city bled of colour. What makes Avalon a genuinely bizarre one-off is that – although the story seems the routine stuff of Japanese anime, right down to its asexual heroine – Oshii chose to shoot the film in Poland, with Polish actors speaking Polish dialogue.