Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 30/5/2013)

As played by Déborah François and Romain Duris, this engaging couple could easily spark a retro fashion trend, as Charlotte David's costumes are as sublime as Sylvie Olive's impossibly chic production design, while cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman, who lit Michel Hazanavicius's Oscar winner, The Artist (2011), proves he is just as much a master of vibrant colour as he is of stylised monochrome. There may even be a rush to purchase the soundtrack album, which complements the jaunty score by Rob and Emmanuel d'Orlando with classic pop hits by such enduring Gallic acts as Jacqueline Boyer, Gilbert Bécaud, Jack Ary and Les Chaussettes Noires, as well as American legends like Ella Fitzgerald, Duane Eddy and Muzzy Marcellino.

The story opens with 21 year-old Déborah François leaving father Frédéric Pierrot's grocery store in the Norman village of St Fraimbaut and the prospect of marrying the local mechanic (a nod, no doubt, to Jacques Demy's similarly candy-coloured gem, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) to become a secretary in the nearby town of Lisieux. Despite her lack of experience or qualification, she is hired over several much plainer applicants by tennis star-turned-insurance agent Romain Duris, who is intrigued by her fresh looks and eagerness to please. Yet, while she quickly proves herself to be an absolutely dreadful personal assistant, François can type like the wind, even though she only uses two fingers, and, missing the thrill of being able to compete himself, Duris coaxes her into entering a speed typing contest.

François loses in her first outing, but gets to meet Duris's childhood friend, Bérénice Bejo, who is now married to onetime GI and successful architect, Shaun Benson. They wonder about the thirtysomething Duris's intentions towards François when he invites her to move into his rambling home. However, he is solely interested in turning her into a typing machine and sets her to work copying Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary so that she can learn to anticipate stylistic tics and sentence structures. He even employs specialist trainer Dominique Reymond and asks Bejo to give her piano lessons to improve her finger work and stamina.

Despite his wealth and poise, Duris is something of a stuffed shirt when it comes to women and he is deeply embarrassed by the sight of François's underwear around the house and blushes when she falls off her bicycle cycling home and he realises he can see through her rain-soaked blouse. François, however, slowly develops a crush on Duris and is cross with him for refusing to treat her as an equal. Indeed, the throws a tantrum when he buys her a keyboard cover for her birthday, so she can brush up on her touch typing. But the thrill of winning her next competition steels her resolve and she begins to dedicate herself to practice,  even though Pierrot is less than amused when he sees his daughter's picture in the paper.

Duris insists that François goes home for Christmas, but she is so miserable when Pierrot decides to spend the day with the mechanic that she returns to Lisieux and Bejo drives her to meet Duris's family. Parents Eddy Mitchell and Miou-Miou and siblings Marius Colucci, Emeline Bayart, Yannik Landrein and Nastassja Girard are initially sniffy towards her. But they warm up when Bejo declares that she is Duris's fiancée and he dances with her after she stands up to the cantankerous Mitchell over dinner. Moreover, he is so taken with her when she wears a modern red dress when they go to Paris for the national finals that he makes love to her in a hotel room bathed in the neon shades of the Tricolour.

Arriving at the venue next morning, François is impressed by champion Mélanie Bernier, who represents the typewriter company run by Nicolas Bedos and his feckless son Féodor Atkine. Bernier oozes confidence, is feted by the press and has gaggles of squealing female fans in the audience. But François holds her nerve and manages to tie with her in the final. Duris reassures François that she has what it takes to win, but cannot bear to watch and smokes outside as the keys are pounded and François emerges as the victor. Returning to the hall, Duris watches wistfully as his protégée becomes the toast of the town and Bedos sidles over to tell him that he wants him to take a backseat while he prepares François to beat the best in the world in New York.

Realising he cannot allow his feelings to stand in her way, Duris tells François that he doesn't love her and drives away. A montage follows showing her becoming a celebrity, as she gives blindfold typing demonstrations and appears in advertisements for the new Populaire machine. Pierrot sees her being interviewed on television and has a customer ask to buy the typewriter in the window that François used when she started out. Duris also sees her rise to fame and tries to drown his sorrows in the company of vamp Caroline Tillette. However, when she puts on the record to which the family had danced at Yuletide, Duris throws her out and goes to pour out his troubles to Bejo. He asks why she had chosen to marry Benson not him and is stung when she replies that he had not been afraid to love her. He now wishes he had picked up the phone when François had called, but she is being wooed by Atkine and trained for her big showdown with the American champion, Sara Haskell.

Once more refusing to allow herself to be overawed by the occasion, François breezes through to the final to face Haskell. She wins the first of the three legs, but is pegged back in the second. Duris arrives during the interval and slips backstage to tell François he loves her. He also gives her the typewriter that Pierrot had asked him to bring and she is happy to ditch the Populaire and tell Bedos and Atkine that she wants nothing more to do with them. However, the keys jam on her old machine and she looks in danger of losing the decider. But, such is her speed, that François wins the day and her fans watching back home in France go wild. As she kisses her beau, Benson takes Duris's idea for a golf ball mechanism to the sponsors and it seems as though everything is going to work out just fine.

This may be Régis Roinsard's first feature, but he has been making shorts, commercials and music videos for almost two decades. Along with Les Petits-Salés (1995), Madame Dron (1997) and SimOn (2001), he also made the documentary Rendez-vous avec Jane (2004), with Jane Birkin, before teaming with co-scenarists Daniel Presley and Romain Compingt for this impeccable period piece, which not only bears the influence of Michael Gordon and Ross Hunter, but also Billy Wilder, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin and the nouvelle vague duo of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who burst on to the scene in the very year that Rose Pamphyle takes America by storm. There are even hints of Howard Hawks in the approach to a professional task being mastered and Alfred Hitchcock in the shifts between wit, suspense and romance (most notably in a late sequence that borrows blatantly from Vertigo, 1958) .

Although its insights into the status of women at the end of the 1950s, France's inferiority complex to the United States and the obsession of society (both then and now) with gadgets are sharp enough, the plot offers few surprises. However, what matters here is the attention to detail, the visual sheen and the chemistry between François and Duris, which is deftly counterpointed by the more emancipated relationship between Shaun Benson and Bérénice Bejo, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes last week for her work in Asghar Farhadi's latest drama, The Past.

The editing of Laure Gardette and Sophie Reine is also outstanding, particularly during the competition scenes, when the images flit between nimble fingers, furrowed brows, thudding keys and inky letters on crisp sheets of white paper with all the dynamism of a wuxia fight sequence. Roinsard and Schiffman also keep the camera moving around the glorious mise-en-scène to the sounds of a pretty much forgotten era of transatlantic pop and, if Don Draper (Joe Hamm) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) didn't already exist, one might have been tempted to say that a Hollywood remake would almost have been an inevitability.

The week's second accomplished debut is Ana Piterbarg's Everybody Has a Plan, which makes evocative use of its setting in Argentina's Paraná Delta and simmers with the intensity and uncertainty of one of compatriot Lucrecia Martel's compelling dramas. However, the influence of David Cronenberg and Roman Polanksi is also evident here, as is the tendency to equate character with landscape that is such a key component of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog and Lisandro Alonso, whose 2004 jungle saga, Los Muertos, was also punctuated by the lengthy silences and spare dialogue that give this noirish thriller its brooding aura. But, while the 41 year-old television veteran demonstrates a keen eye for detail and a sure hand with actors, she often allows the storyline to meander like one of the labyrinthine forest inlets. Moreover, she never quite convinces with the central conceit.

Fortysomething Pedro (Viggo Mortensen) keeps bees on an island in the more rundown El Tigre part of a rural area that was once the playground of the capital's weekending rich. Dishevelled, taciturn and plagued by a hacking cough, Pedro is assisted by 21 year-old Rosa (Sofía Gala Castaglione), who also works at the El Dorado grocery store run by the cantankerous Amadeo Mendizabal (Oscar Alegre). When not trying to increase yields by replacing a failing queen, Pedro is also involved with childhood pal Adrían (Daniel Fanego), a bible-quoting thug with a penchant for kidnapping and murdering those whose families fail to pay up. He has reluctantly added godson Rubén (Javier Godino) to the gang and is furious when he bungles Amadeo's abduction and he is forced to shoot him.

Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, Pedro's identical paediatrician twin, Agustín (also Mortensen), is trying to summon up the courage to tell his high-flying executive wife Claudia (Soledad Villamil) that he doesn't want the baby she is so desperate to adopt. On finally coming clean after watching some patients misbehaving in his waiting-room, Agustín locks himself in the bedroom and refuses to come out before Claudia leaves on a trip. She has heard an answerphone message from Pedro, but thought nothing of it. But Agustín is surprised when his brothers shows up at his door and announces he is dying from cancer. They reminisce about old times in the delta and Pedro entrusts Agustín with a gun and tells him about the cash that will be affixed to the lid of one of his hives as his share of a nefarious transaction. Suddenly, Agustín sees a way out of his dilemma and, when Pedro starts coughing up blood in the bath, he catches him off guard and holds him under the water.

Sporting a scrubby beard and Pedro's mangy clothes, Agustín takes a water taxi along the winding waterway and nervously surveys his fellow passengers and the scene on the bank. Having grown up in the region, he had always seen the city as an escape, but now he is reduced to seeking sanctuary in his former prison. He is watched by the neighbours as he walks up the jetty to Pedro's shack and is relieved when the barking dog is mollified by his master's scent.

Inside the dimly lit dwelling, Agustín finds photos of the siblings as boys in a cigar box. He also locates the loot in the beehive, but gets badly stung by bees crawling under the hood of his protective suit and Rosa is surprised to learn that he had been so careless when he calls into El Dorado for supplies. She is also curious why he has come to the store when Francisco (Sergio Boris) and Fernando (Alberto Ajaca) are convinced that he and Adrían are behind their father's disappearance and looks on anxiously as the brothers mete out a vicious beating and pitch `Pedro' back into his boat. Moreover, she cannot fathom why he is being so distant when she comes to see him under cover of darkness and Agustín decides to hide the cash and gun in a plant pot in the shed for safe keeping.

Back in Buenos Aires, Claudia discovers Pedro's body in the bath. But the focus remains with Agustín, as he strolls around the shell of the former family home and bumps into Rubén, who is keen to do another job, even though Adrían has gone into hiding. He invites Agustín for supper and is puzzled why he needs him to translate his grandmother's Indian dialect. But he says nothing about it and Rosa also keeps her qualms to herself when she tells Agustín he seems different since visiting his brother. He denies having been to the city, but is grateful to her for telling the police that he was on a fishing trip when Amadeo was snatched. As they sit by the fire after chopping wood, he kisses her and examines the cut on the palm of her hand. She is intrigued by his gentleness and concern, but he says it's probably not wise for them to get involved and she agrees before leaving in evident confusion.

The next morning, Agustín wakes to find cops searching the premises and he is subjected to water torture by a brutal lieutenant (Claudio Torres) before being locked in a cell. He receives an unexpected visit from Claudia, who had found a lighter in the study and recalled the enigmatic phone message. But she quickly recognises her husband by the mark on his ring finger and is appalled that he could have gone to such extremes to ditch her. She tearfully announces that she is going through with the adoption and Agustín is relieved that she says nothing to the duty officer as she shoots him a look of betrayed hatred.

As Agustín languishes in jail, the Mendizabals burn down Adrían's house and there is murder in his eyes as he returns to rifle through the charred remains. In order to celebrate his release and Rosa's birthday, Agustín takes her out for the night and gives her a lucky charm necklace. As they row on the river, she says that her plan in life is to be nice to everyone even if they don't deserve it and he concedes that he hasn't given the future much thought and is content, for the moment, simply to drift along. They make love in Pedro's shack and, as Rosa looks through his photographs in the morning, she suspects for the first time that the man being so solicitous towards her is not the one she once knew.

On coming to reclaim his gun, Adrían is not amused to discover that `Pedro' is seeing Rosa, whom he considers private property. In a fit of pique, he torches the El Dorado delivery boat and orders Agustín and Rubén to join him in staking out a girl he intended kidnapping from her school in the nearby town. As they stroll in the woods, Adrían admits to being unhappy about using Rubén and (perhaps because he knows, but scarcely cares) taunts `Pedro' about how useless Agustín was as a youth. Adrían also insists that he leaves Rosa alone and, after they make love that night, Agustín reads her diary and discovers that she has been Adrían's mistress for quite some time. When she wakes, he asks her whether she allowed him to mistreat her because she liked it or because of the money he spent on her and Rosa leaves in a huff.

The following day, Agustín goes to the supermarket where Rosa now works and invites her for a date. However, he is later disturbed by a fish being left on his doorstep, along with a newspaper cutting of Agustín's obituary and, on checking the shed, finds the abducted schoolgirl bound and gagged in a corner. Reassuring her that he will not harm her, Agustín sets her free and heads for a rendezvous with Adrían. However, he has Rubén and Rosa for company and pulls a gun on Agustín and mocks him for being a soft city boy. But, as they go towards the boat to fetch the ransom, Agustín makes a grab for the weapon and the ensuing struggle ends when Rubén shoots his godfather dead for disrespecting him. Agustín has also been wounded in the melee, however, and he dies after telling Rosa he loves her, as she sails their small craft through the narrow inlets and out into the wider delta.

Having spent large parts of his childhood in Venezuela and Argentina, Viggo Mortensen is quite at home speaking Spanish. Yet, while he manages to make Pedro and Agustín reasonably distinctive, it's never entirely clear why the latter would want to take his brother's place in a backwater that he dislikes and is evidently dangerous. Moreover, once he has fallen for Rosa, it would seem to make more sense to get her away from the psychotic Adrían as quickly as possible and make a new life for themselves somewhere far away. But, while this fuzzy motivation and the contrivance required to set up the fatal denouement are slightly cumbersome, Piterbarg tells her tale with an unhurried fervency that is reinforced by Lucio Bonelli's lowering views of El Tigre and its amazing light, Irene Blecua and Alejandro Lázaro's measured editing and the moody score composed by Lucio Godoy and Federico Jusid.

Deftly using his eyes to convey the outsider's gnawing fear of detection, Mortensen is well supported by the seething Fanego and the doting Gala Castaglione, whose quiet resourcefulness contrasts tellingly with the more strident capability of Villamil. But, considering how slowly everything else moves, the swiftness of Agustín's passion for Rosa feels forced and Piterbarg might have jettisoned the odd longueur in order to give the romance a firmer basis. She might also have made more of the wider geography of the region to emphasise Agustín's sense of entrapment. Yet she creditably builds suspense through personality rather than incident and this more than bears comparison with Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó's equally lowering Delta (2008). But Pitarbarg still has a way to go to match the cinematic acuity of Martel and Alonso, who is currently collaborating with Mortensen on a still untitled drama about a Dane who journeys with his daughter into an unknown desert that exists in a realm beyond the confines of civilisation.

The third feature bow on show this week is less accomplished than its companions, but it is certainly no less courageous. Having completed the shorts Headphones (2003), A Picture of Me (2005), In the Dark (2007) and One Happy Moment (2010), the Israeli-born, London-based Tom Shkolnik applies his tried-and-trusted workshopping method to The Comedian, which follows a series of Dogme-like rules that insist upon authentic locations, the regular functioning of space, improvised dialogue, single takes (albeit with two cameras) and an organically developing storyline. Shkolnik is on record as saying he wanted to `make a film about a London that I could recognise; about people who were poor but not starving, living on estates but not in council housing, who were foreign but not asylum seekers, black but not gang members, gay but not camp' and, in this regard, he has succeeded admirably. However, he has also produced a picture that is far too insular to allow for easy audience engagement and has over-indulged actors whose instinct for the pacing and pertinence of a scene is sometimes questionable. Yet, as Shkolnik would say: `Smile. It's only a movie.'

By day, Edward Hogg sells cancer insurance over the phone. At night, he tries his luck as a stand-up comedian in the pubs and clubs of East London. He isn't particularly funny, but has an abrasive style that ensures the pun-based gags come thick and fast while keeping the audience on edge. His French roommate, Elisa Lasowski, is a musician and he watches her playing guitar and singing a so-so song before a male admirer comes over to flirt with her. As they play basketball in a deserted playground the following morning, Hogg teases Lasowski about the fan and whether she wants to see him again. They jokingly sing `Que Sera Sera' and it seems as though Hogg is nursing a crush he cannot quite summon the courage to act upon.

At work, Hogg is admonished by boss Jamie Baugham for eating at his desk and he pulls faces at Scottish pal Steven Robertson further along the row of desks. That night, he gets a frosty reception from a crowd that bellows with laughter at the next act as Hogg sits backstage trying to work out where he went wrong. His material is mediocre and hardly suited to his strident delivery style and he defends himself when a black stranger offers a critique on the top deck of the bus home. As they chat, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett introduces himself as an artist from Wandsworth and Hogg reveals that he hails from Sheffield, but has been in the capital for several years.

They go back to Stewart-Jarrett's studio and have energetic sex. Next morning, Hogg is home in time to cook lunch with Lasowski and listen to her trying to compose a song. He says nothing to her about Stewart-Jarrett and remains entirely disengaged at work. Having berated him for his disappointing sales figures, Baugham ticks off him for his smart alec attitude during a meeting to refresh the phone scripts, which ends with Hogg being reminded that life can't be all fun and games and that he needs to concentrate on doing the job he is paid for.

Hogg shares a bath with Stewart-Jarrett and notices that he has lots of scars on his body. However, he refuses to talk about them and they hug. Hogg introduces his lover to Lasowski and Robertson and gets jealous as he watches him dancing in a nightclub. This sequence is a self-conscious montage of abruptly cut handheld snippets that are enacted without dialogue to the pounding accompaniment of loud music. Hogg remains snarky as he watches through the window of a fast food joint as Lasowski and Stewart-Jarrett chat and she tries to fend off the unwanted attentions of the tipsy Robertson.

Whipping himself into a right old state, Hogg walks around the corner and smashes something up in the darkness. Leaving Lasowski to deal with Robertson, Stewart-Jarrett goes in search of Hogg and lectures him for wandering off without saying where he was going. Back at the flat, Hogg tries to apologise to Lasowski for abandoning her at 3am on a busy London street and she finds it impossible to remain angry with him. He asks her what is really getting her down and she avoids answering. Not really interested in her problems, Hogg contents himself with making her laugh and they fall asleep after kissing.

The situation at the call centre continues to deteriorate and Baugham asks Hogg why he always sounds so negative on the phone. Initially, Hogg accepts the criticism and promises to try and be more professional. But, within minutes, he is squirting water up Baugham's back and stalking out of the office. He meets up with Stewart-Jarrett and admits that he behaved so badly during their night out because he was jealous. They have make-up sex and Stewart-Jarrett urges Hogg not to be so self-indulgent. The next morning, Hogg stands on the balcony and looks across the city wondering where his life is going and how much of his predicament is down to himself.

Following another night on the tiles, Hogg, Stewart-Jarrett and Lasowski are upstairs on a bus and are jokingly discussing who has first dibs on Hogg. Their conversation is overheard by a group of raucous teenage girls, whose tone changes the moment they realise Hogg and Stewart-Jarrett are a couple. One Jamaican lambastes the latter for being a disgrace to their race and sneeringly remarks that anal intercourse makes AIDS not babies. Hogg loses his temper with Stewart-Jarrett for wasting his time arguing with such bigots and they end up squabbling about the fact that Lasowski obviously adores Hogg and that this will always come between them.

Hogg tries to reassure Stewart-Jarrett that nothing has ever happened with his flatmate, but he is also tired and just wants to go home to bed. Stewart-Jarrett snaps back that their apartment can never feel like home to him, but Hogg refuses to raise to the bait. Frustrated at his failure to provoke, Stewart-Jarrett says he cannot be with such a superficial person and starts to walk away. Any hopes he had that Hogg would come after him are dashed, however, and he is left to wander off into the darkness.

Next morning, Lasowski complains to Hogg that he should not have allowed Stewart-Jarrett to have been so rude to her. He tells her they have split up and that she doesn't have to worry about him anymore  But she has made up her mind that it would be best if Hogg moved out and he fights back the tears as she insists that she wants something real and suggests that he should go as soon as possible. Hogg tried to coddle her, but she refuses to succumb. Yet, she starts weeping the second he leaves the room.

Hogg heads north and endures an uncomfortable stay with parents Gerard Murphy and Kate Rutter and his younger brother, Caolan Byrne. He just about copes with Murphy reading out a story from the local paper over tea, but the banality of the conversation grates on him during supper and he is soon back in the south huddled in the corner of a minicab. Driver Nyasha Hatendi asks if he is okay and they get talking. Hatendi reveals that he used to live in Brookyln, although his parents are now in Zimbabwe. He reckons that New York is a much crazier place than London, but that nobody really listens.

When Hogg shows no sign of picking up the conversation, Hatendi explains how he married an old student acquaintance when his visa was about to expire and now finds it tough trying to find reasons to stay together. Unsmilingly, Hogg admits that his parents are in a similar quandary and Hatendi opines that sometimes it is best to follow your heart and stick to the choice. However, Hogg counters that there is no point slogging it out if one has made a mistake and they fall silent, as the camera picks up blurred circles of light from the passing neon signs and streetlights. Eventually, Hogg sighs that he is sick of everything and is not even sure he wants to be himself any longer. He complains that he feels much older than his 32 years and Hatendi sympathises that life isn't always easy. But he consoles Hogg with the blithe promise that he will be fine.

With Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Brothers of the Head (2005), Dominic Murphy's White Lightnin', Paul King's Bunny and the Bull (both 2009) and Viv Fongenie's Ollie Kepler's Expanding Purple World (2010) already to his credit, the RADA-trained Edward Hogg is fast becoming a fixture in the avowedly left-field British picture. However, The Comedian tries far too hard to be distinctive in its ordinariness and the strain is discomfitingly evident in such interminable sequences as the two bus conversations, Hogg's break-ups with Stewart-Jarrett and Lasowski, the Sheffield interlude and the closing encounter with Hatendi's platitude-spouting cabby.

Social realism is relatively easy to achieve. The tricky thing is making it interesting and Shkolnik and his willing cast frequently fall short in this regard. Considering how extensively the dialogue had been mulled over, it's surprising how lifeless it sounds and clearly this cannot be put this down entirely to Shkolnik being continuously unlucky in his sole take being rambling and unfocused. It doesn't help, either, that there isn't a jot of humour in the scenario or that the characters are so sketchily drawn and essentially unsympathetic, with Hogg's persona on and off the stage being both eminently resistible and goadingly equivocal and inert. Given Shkolnik's modus operandi, it's probably asking too much for some psychological insight, but one can hardly expect an audience to become involved in the work-a-day experiences of three self-obsessed nobodies when the director himself is so detached from them.

As one who has banged on for aeons about British indie cinema moving in the direction of Mumblecore, it seems disingenuous to criticise when the end result is imperfect. But this smacks much more of Joanna Hogg and late period Mike Leigh than Andrew Bujalski, Lynn Shelton, the Duplass brothers or Joe Swanberg. But, what is impressive is Shkolnik's commitment to flipping pompous UK issue cinema on its head and showing the other side of the gay, race, class and social malaise coins. Yet it says much that editor Pierre Haberer had to wade through 90 hours of footage captured by cinematographer Benjamin Kracun and sound recordist Howard Peryer to produce the four-hour rough cut from which the final 80-minute release version was hewn. This may well be `the first wildlife documentary about human relations'. It may also have its laudable autobiographical moments. But, while the intentions behind his stylistic purism are beyond reproach, Shkolnik needs to recognise that a narrative can still be engaging without resorting to melodrama or contrivance.

Actorliness was also the watchword in British cinema two decades ago when Tilda Swinton asked John Maybury to record her one woman show, Man to Man. Jointly sponsored by the BBC and the BFI, this adaptation of East German Manfred Karge's 1982 play, Jacke wie Hose, feels like a volatile variation on one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads pieces. But, while the focus falls firmly on Swinton's remarkable performance, Maybury also takes the opportunity to experiment with the then still new video technology that has quickly come to seem as quaintly antiquated as the monochrome stills and newsreel clips he used to illuminate the monologue. Yet, for all its flaws and superbity, this ambitious picture (which is showing exclusively at The ICA in London) is well worth catching, if only to see what convinced Sally Potter to cast Swinton in her take on Virginia Woolf''s Orlando (1992).

First seen as an old woman in a shabby apartment with a television crackling fuzzily in the centre of the room, Ella Gericke (Tilda Swinton) reveals in a rather unconvincing Cockney accent how Germany was a much bigger (and possibly better) place under Hitler. She swigs her beer and takes a drag on her cigarette and chunters about the unseen people and minor incidents that make up her world. But the scene shifts back several decades to a much younger Ella reminiscing in extreme close-up about her ill-luck in love and how she married crane driver Max Gericke at 19 soon after the tragic loss of a man she truly idolised.

They had not been a couple long, however, before Max was diagnosed with cancer and Ella began quizzing him about how to operate his crane so that she could assume his identity and keep earning his steady wage at a time of crippling recession. She feared that his friend Erwin would see through the ruse. But the best dressed man in Mecklenburg knew too little about Max to realise that he had been buried in a grave marked with his wife's name in a country churchyard and Ella soon found herself as one of the boys at the local hostelry (even though she often wondered why being a woman was insufficient reason for acceptance).

Suddenly sporting a head bandage, Ella explains how she stuffed a rabbit's foot down her trousers to allay suspicions - although she suddenly whips out a large phallus at the end of an anecdote about eating pork to convince a couple of drunken chums that she was not Jewish. Indeed, she seems proud of being able to proclaim herself a German man, even though she admits (as the screen is filled with a rows of hammer and sickle logos and then tiny swastikas) that she sometimes felt unnerved by the growing tensions in a Weimar slumped in the depths of the Great Depression. She also had to fight off maternal pangs and she stuffs a cushion up her dress and coddles the homemade doll she speaks to as a son before Maybury cuts dramatically to a shot of Ella's hunched form being spattered by an explosion of red liquid designed to symbolise the violence of the showdowns between the Communists and the Fascists in the run up to the 1933 Reichstag election.

Ella knew at the time that a vote for Hitler was a vote for war and she began to worry from that day that she would be conscripted and her deception would be discovered. She had a recurring dream of doctors gazing down on her under an operating theatre light and reaching into her pants, only to pull out a rabbit with a missing foot that begins to grow so big that it blots out everything and she wakes to the awful realisation that the National Socialists are in irreversible power. Lying awake on her bed (and bearing a striking resemblance to Renée Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), Ella consoles herself with the fact that she still has her own passport under the bed and can resume her true identity whenever she likes, even though she knows this will put her in a much less advantageous position.

Over superimposed footage of men walking to factories and then retracing their steps in rewind, Ella discloses that the menfolk are being sent to the front or being dispatched to build autobahns. She dreads getting the call and is always glad to close her door for the night so she can be herself. As she removes her working clothes, she confides that Pünktchen the new canteen girl (also Swinton) has a soft spot for her and not only gives her extra rations, but has also tried to kiss her during a night out. Ella had tried to explain that she already had a sweetheart and she seemed to take the hint, but she began to feel that gnawing in the pit of the stomach that she remembered from her first adolescent crushes and enigmatically describes herself as a knife-grinder when a nosy neighbour asks if she is okay.

Holding the corpse of a dead rabbit, Ella recalls how someone in her building was caught with a BBC transmitter and was shot for treason. She felt sorry for him and, thus, she gave Pünktchen her passport when she knocked on the door in the dead of night seeking sanctuary because of her Communist convictions. Pünktchen tells `Max' (or does she know it is really Ella) that she loves him and, as they kiss, a purple firework explodes between their lips.

Suddenly, the scene switches to an extreme close-up of Ella's face (complete with her increasingly rotting teeth) over which is superimposed a medium shot of a naked figure looking upwards in abject misery. Ella describes the agony of being in a cell so small that it is impossible to lie flat on the bed that only leaves room for four steps between the window and the door. Yet, as she outlines the grim routine of a prisoner, the camera pulls back to reveal her grinning in a brown SA uniform with a red swastika armband and she jokes that volunteering was the only way left open to her to avoid the dreaded medical. She manages to survive the conflict, however, and shoots two SS officers with her pistol as she leaves her post at a castle in the sticks in March 1945 and heads west to avoid being captured by the Red Army. Proud of her resourcefulness, Ella puts her survival instinct down to the fact that she was left to run the household at the age of seven when her mother died. Now, therefore, she has the nous to pose as a farm labourer and use her physique to her advantage when the farmer proves willing to trade bags of grain for sexual favours.

Cutting away from a shot of Ella in a tuxedo with a pencil moustache singing a song and taking a drag on a GI cigarette, she explains how she dreams of a prince kissing her Brandenburg grave to enable her to resurrect the Snow White character that Max had married. She longs to be swept off to the Caucuses for a honeymoon and live in a flat with mod cons. But, instead, she winds up working in a factory making plastic and elastic and (as the narration starts rhyming with greater frequency) she recalls a romance between Castor and Jocasta that only ended when he was arrested for importing cheap labour from across the continent and she had to find herself another crane-driving job.

Following a rant about Christmas being an overrated time, the camera returns to the ageing Ella's humble abode. She complains (against a backdrop of rapidly changing colour images) about the television being dominated by programmes about the Third Reich and old Zarah Leander films. She is grateful to Max for enabling her to have made it through life relatively unscathed, but she wishes she could have been Snow White and the film ends with her wizened old face transforming into the younger, smiling visage of a (wicked?) witch.

Belying its subtitle, `Another Night of Rubbish on the Telly', this is a compelling alternative chronicle of 20th-century German history. Yet, while there's no doubting the ingenuity of Swinton's performance (especially in her ability to assume a masculine persona and physicality), she does seem to forget at times that she is acting for a camera and not an audience in an auditorium. Consequently, certain moments feel overplayed, although this has something to do with Anthony Vivis's translation of the original German text. Elsewhere, the staging also seems a little laboured, most notably in the use of props like the rubber phallus, the dummy baby and the dead rabbit.  But, otherwise, Lawrence G. Paull's production design is as solid as Dominique le Riguleur's photography, while John Maybury and Nigel Hadley's intricate editing and layering of the images is often as inspired as it is sometimes lurid and overwhelming. In truth, it hasn't worn particularly well. But it serves to remind us of what both Swinton and Maybury were once capable of before they started taking artistically safer options.