Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 28/7/2011)

Ever since her daughter left to work in Pusan, sixtysomething Yoon Jung-hee has raised grandson Lee David on welfare in a small apartment in a town outside Seoul. He's a sullen, ungrateful youth who expects to be waited on and left to his own devices. Yet Yoon dotes on him and feels guilty at asking him to play badminton with her when the doctor suggests some gentle exercise might alleviate the tingling in her right arm. However, Yoon also tends to live in her own little world, even though she has a job as a part-time carer to stroke victim Kim Hee-ra, who lives above daughter-in-law Kim Gye-seon's convenience store. Thus, she almost surprises herself when she signs up for Kim Yong-taek's poetry class at the local community centre and soon finds herself striving to tap into the creativity he insists that everyone possesses.

Deciding against telling her daughter that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Yoon begins contemplating apples and trees in search of inspiration. She amuses her classmates with her naive questions and proves equally willing to speak her mind when she starts attending readings with accomplished woman poet Kim Hye-jeong and the lewd Kim Jong-goo, a police detective who is recovering from a car crash that occurred shortly after he was demoted for uncovering corruption among his colleagues in the capital. But the law threatens to intrude closer to home when Yoon learns that David and his five pals have driven Kim Hera to suicide by serially raping her at school.

Led by Ahn Nae-sang, the fathers of the other culprits act quickly with school principal Choi Moon-soon to suppress the story and arrange a compensation payment to the victim's widowed mother, Park Myeong-sin. However, Yoon can't afford her share of the 30 million won and is reluctant to ask her daughter to pay as she doesn't want her to think she's incapable of caring for David. Consequently, she throws herself into her poetry in a desperate bid to find beauty and consolation in the chaos raging around her and even bungles a visit to appease Park by becoming distracted by the taste of the apricots she grows on her humble farm.

Yoon is admonished by Ahn for discussing the case with prying journalist Hong Seong-beom and attracts Kim Jong-goo's sympathy after crying during a drunken poetry session. But, even though David has expressed no remorse for his crime, she knows she has to protect his future and asks Kim Hee-ra for a loan in return for the sexual favours she had granted him during his bathtimes. However, there is one last twist in the tale before Kim Yong-taek reads out Yoon's poem on the last day of term.

Bookended by ominous shots of the Han River, this is a quietly devastating study of Korean mores and the casual attitude to violence shared with Japanese society. Yet, while Lee focuses on Yoon's quixotic quest for lyricism and significance, he never lets her escape the gnawing knowledge of grandson's barbarism or her own proclivity for eccentric behaviour. She may dress smartly in floral jackets and cute hats, but the demure Yoon consistently withholds the truth, delays making inconvenient decisions and even strips naked with a Viagra-fuelled lech. Thus, even though Lee reveals nothing of her past, one is left with the suspicion she once had plenty of admirers and knew how to manipulate them to her advantage.

Returning to the screen after an absence of over 15 years and intimately captured by Kim Hyun-seok's fluid camera, Yoon is exceptional, whether she's struggling to understand the complex poetic process or coping with the mounting problems of being an elderly lady in a patronisingly patriarchal milieu. But it's her eschewal of easy sentiment that makes her character so credible and her somewhat contrived situation seem more natural. The callously uncommunicative David also impresses, as he reacts more effusively to being told to turn down his music or clear up his mess than he does to being confronted with his grievous misdemeanour. Yet Lee avoids inter-generational platitudes and explores the recurring theme of militant masculinity with more subtlety than the debuting Yoon Sung-hyun managed in another story sparked by a suicide, Bleak Night (2010).

Nevertheless, Lee doesn't always succeed in accommodating the eponymous poetics into the action, with the open-mike sessions and the direct-to-camera student descriptions of moments that made them happy adding little to the Sirkian narrative until Yoon recalls a cosy childhood incident that exposes how vulnerable and alone she now feels as she faces losing her reasons for living. However, Lee redeems himself with an elegantly poignant coda that makes neat use of montage to illustrate Yoon's parting verses and reinforce the bond she feels with the dead girl whose photograph she stole from the church porch during her funeral service.

An unlikely liaison and some acts of pitiless violence also prove crucial to Our Day Will Come, the feature debut of Romain Gavras, the son of iconic director Costa-Gavras, who has made his name with a series of pop videos that includes MIA's `Born Free', which essentially provided the inspiration for Gavras and Karim Boukercha's scenario with its depiction of LAPD SWAT teams rounding up and executing redheads. Taking its title from an IRA slogan and seething with style and attitude, this feels like one of those pictures that's been primed to expose those who criticise it as fuddy-duddies. But this is no A Bout de souffle (1959) or La Haine (1995). Indeed, it's not even as accomplished or contentious as Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi (2000). Consequently, apart from the odd flash of visual panache from cinematographer André Chemetoff, a disconcerting score by Sébastien Akchoté and the consistently steely playing of Vincent Cassel, this self-consciously modish road movie has little to recommend it.

Teenager Olivier Barthelemy is convinced he is ostracised by his football teammates and disrespected by mother Mathilde Braure and sister Julie Vergult because he has red hair. So, one night when he can't get on to the computer to chat to the girl he has met in a gaming room, he strikes Braure and runs off into the night. He is offered a lift by disillusioned psychiatrist Vincent Cassel, whose hair is also on the rusty side and who is on the look out for a distraction from his stultifying routine. They head for the cemetery where Barthelemy hopes to rendezvous with his cyber girlfriend and wind up in the internet café where she turns out to be a male goth with one white eyeball.

Humiliated at being taunted for being gay, Barthelemy sulks in a bar on the outskirts of town, where Cassel forces him to stand up for himself by landing him a fight with a trio of angry Arabs. Undaunted by the fact that Barthelemy gets pulped, Cassel tries to pass him off as a Russian kickboxer to impress teens Justine Lerooy and Vanessa Decat, who are hanging on a deserted beach with rappers Jérémy Bienvenu and Johnny Descamps. Cassel gets Lerooy's phone number and calls her that night after securing a red Porsche during a fearsome verbal attack on Jewish car salesman, Cyrus Atory.

The girls show up with black pal Boris Gamthety and blonde Rodolphe Blanchet and, while the former does handbrake turns in the Porsche, the latter shows Cassel round the supermarket where he works as a security guard. Cassel commandeers a motorbike and zooms along the aisles before encouraging Bathelemy to take Lerooy for a spin. However, he gets distracted by a display advertising Ireland and becomes convinced it is populated entirely by red-haired people, who, like him are `without a country, without a language, without an army'.

He vows to go there immediately, even though Cassel views the scheme with disdain. But, having watched with begrudging pleasure as Bathelemy gets a snog on the beach, he allows him to go on a shopping spree for new clothes and a crossbow. However, after Bathelemy beats up a tollbooth operator he mistook for a kid who had bullied him at school, Cassel loses his temper and, when they run out of petrol, he insists they spend the night in a swanky country hotel.

Their arrival is welcomed by podgy red-headed tweenager Chloé Catoen, who seems to staying without a supervising adult and goes to sit with them by the swimming pool. She even follows them to their suite when Cassel picks up topless English girls Camille Rowe, Joséphine de La Baume and Alexandra Dahlström and begins fooling around with them on the bed while Bathelemy tries to contact his cyber friend. However, they run away when Cassel ignites alcohol on their skin and he proceeds to go down to the gym and urinate in the jacuzzi being used by a business executive and his lover while Barthelemy aims the crossbow at them and cycles furiously on an exercise bike as Cassel begins to masturbate.

Next morning, Cassel shaves his head and beard while Barthelemy is making a clumsy bid to seduce receptionist Pierre Boulanger. Desperate to remove his own hair, Barthelemy hijacks Sylvain Le Mynez's car on a back road and drives into the nearest town to ransack a pharmacy in search of exfoliating cream and a razor. By the time he's finished, Cassel has crashed the car into a wall outside a church where a wedding is taking place (leaving Le Mynez unconscious in the back seat). Barthelemy orders the male guests to French kiss each other before they wander off in the general direction of the ferry terminal.

On the dunes, Barthelemy shoots a man who challenges them and is wounded himself when the victim's mates come after them. However, they over-power them and steal their truck and speed along the docks looking for the Irish boat. They miss it by minutes and Barthelemy is mesmerised by a coach-load of redheads standing in the car park. But Cassel is aware his new friend is dying and he races along the dock road to commandeer a hot-air balloon on the shore. Barthelemy just about has the strength to torch the truck and make it across the sand to the waiting basket and he sinks into Cassel's arms as they take off into the leaden magic hour sky.

It's pretty evident from the above that this is a film with plenty going on, but not much happening. Somewhere beneath the posturing performances and stylised flourishes, Gavras intends us to spot the piercing critique of a society in which prejudice, injustice and violence have become so ubiquitous that they have almost lost their meaning and their power to disturb. But the points are so trite and they are so laboriously made that it's hard to take this seriously as a brutal treatise on the state of the nation still to come to terms with its post-colonial composition.

That's not to say this isn't destined for cult status. Cassel struts imposingly before going terrifyingly off the deep end in the final reel, while Gavras does enough with the bleak Nord-Pas de Calais landscapes beloved of Bruno Dumont to suggest he will make a fine film-maker once he stops trying to be the Gallic Harmony Korine and distance himself from the work of his father and sister Julie (who made a much more controlled debut with Blame It on Fidel in 2006). For the moment, however, it's hard not to quibble with the absurdities of a shambolic storyline and the tediously unjustified antics of a couple of nihilist misfits, whose hair isn't actually all that ginger.

Aktan Arym Kubat kicks against the system in an altogether gentler manner in The Light Thief, the fourth feature by the Kyrgyz auteur who had already released Where's Your Home, Snail? (1992), The Adopted Son (1998) and The Chimp (2001) under his Russian name, Aktan Abdykalykov. In addition to directing, Kubat also takes the title role in a gentle, folksy satire on the corruption, nepotism and exploitation that existed under the detested regime of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who came to power in the 2005 Tulip Revolution and was ousted in a 2010 coup shortly after Kubat completed his picture.

Known to everyone as `Mr Light', Kubat is the sole electrician in a remote town near the southern border. He has grand plans to harness the wind gusting across the steppe to power an Aeolian generator he has constructed in his backyard. But, in the meantime, he contents himself with fiddling the meters of neighbours who cannot afford the prices charged by his employers.

Kubat has four young daughters with long-suffering wife Taalaikan Abazova, who fears for their future when he is arrested on the insistence of a visiting company agent. However, he is released following the overthrow of President Askar Akayev in Bishkek and informs Mayor Asan Amanov that he is ready to quit his job and look for new opportunities elsewhere. Moreover, he drunkenly confides in best friend Stanbek Toichubaev that he feels so emasculated by his detention that he wants him to sleep with Abazova in the hope of giving them a son.

Having survived a reckless attempt to eradicate his female genes with a jolt of electricity from an overhead cable, Kubat returns to doing good deeds and rescues a small boy who has climbed to the top of a tall tree. However, everything changes when Amanov dies while arguing with shady urban politician Askat Sulaimanov, who is desperate to secure a lucrative land deal with some Chinese businessmen. Kubat feels he should honour Amanov's memory by opposing the transaction. But when Sulaimanov gatecrashes the wake and proposes Toichubaev as the new mayor, Kubat has his loyalty tested, especially when his friend offers him the opportunity to wire the yurt that is to be used to entertain the visiting dignitaries.

An air of inevitability pervades this dry comedy and Kubat's fate is sealed the moment he decides to disrupt the erotic floor show being staged to entice the Chinese into putting pen to paper. But the belly dancing routine and the described untying the camel ritual to which he takes exception are nowhere near as shocking as the game of kok boru that involves horsemen charging around a field in pursuit of a traumatised goat and there's a grim irony in that he finds himself the quarry in a grotesque climactic parody. Yet not all is gloom and doom, as the breeze snaps the chain tethering Kubat's generator and the hesitant flicker of a bulb adorning his garden wall suggests his sacrifice may not have been in vain.

The significance of several scenes will elude those unversed in the intricacies of Kyrgyz culture and politics. But Kubat's naive underdog geniality remains highly appealing and there's a Capraesque universality about his refusal to permit the abuse of country's hard-won freedoms. Moreover, his relationship with Abazova is genuinely touching, even though she spends more time chiding him for his daydreaming than exhibiting the affection with which she bathes him in a tiny tub on the kitchen floor after his release from prison.

The intimacy achieved in this sequence contrasts with the vastness of the vistas evocatively photographed by Khasan Kydyraliyev and the towering top shots that Kubat uses to emphasise the negligibility of individuals in the grander scheme of things. But the parting shot of the glimmering filament suggests that capitalism may not have it all its own way after all.

Curiously, The Light Thief finds a very British companion in Whisky Galore!, which pits the residents of an Outer Hebridean island against a Home Guard commander as determined to impose his authority as protect them from invading Nazis. Adapted by Compton Mackenzie and Angus MacPhail from the former's fact-based novel, this sly study in civil disobedience was the second of the three 1949 features - along with Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets - that reinforced Ealing's burgeoning reputation for cosy comedies with a deceptively sharp edge. Released at the height of postwar austerity, it also caught the mood of a nation tired of rationing and restriction and became the studio's most profitable picture.

Despite having to extend their hospitality to a Dad's Army platoon, the inhabitants of Todday have barely been touched by the Second World War. But, one day in 1943, the island's whisky supply runs out and captain Norman Macowan is so dismayed by the news that he takes to his bed and dies. The sense of despondency increases when ferry skipper Alastair Hunter fails to bring a fresh consignment aboard the Island Queen and sergeant Bruce Seton is surprised by the coolness of his reception on returning after two years away.

Seton plans to ask postmaster Wylie Watson for permission to marry his daughter, Joan Greenwood. But his prospects are scarcely improved when Watson takes a dim view of teacher Gordon Jackson's request to wed his other daughter, Gabrielle Blunt, in the face of fierce opposition from his piously possessive mother, Jean Cadell. Moreover, the islanders are becoming increasingly frustrated by the tin-pot martinetry of Home Guard captain Basil Radford, who incurs the special ire of doctor James Robertson Justice after detaining him at a roadblock.

Radford is also at loggerheads with Hunter, who refuses to ship some wrongly delivered cases of ammunition back to the mainland. But he soon has something more pressing to fuss about when the SS Cabinet Minister gets lost in the fog and runs aground on some rocks. Morland Graham and John Gregson row out to rescue the crew and learn that the ship is carrying 50,000 cases of whisky and plans to liberate them are only frustrated by the midnight chimes signalling the start of the Sabbath.

Radford orders Jackson to guard the cargo, but he is unable to comply because Cadell has locked him in his room to keep him away from Blunt. Meanwhile Watson has informed Seton that he will only consent to his marrying Greenwood if he can ensure there will be whisky at the traditional rèiteach celebration. Taking the hint, Seton allows himself to be overwhelmed while on duty that night and Jackson climbs out of his bedroom window to join his neighbours in the small flotilla heading out to the stricken vessel. Indeed, he rescues Graham from the hold as it begins to sink and he is hailed as a hero after they stash the contraband in a cave on the beach.

Radford is furious at being outmanoeuvred and becomes even more apoplectic when colonel AE Matthews refuses to send assistance from the mainland. Constable Jameson Clark is more supportive, however, and they vow to bring the smugglers to justice. But the locals are too intoxicated to care and Jackson is so fortified by a wee dram or ten that he succeeds in standing up to his mother. However, publican James Woodburn is less than amused by the sudden drop in his takings and he betrays the hiding place to Radford, who appals wife Catherine Lacey by summoning Customs & Excise man Henry Mollison.

Fortunately, the islanders are tipped off and abandon the rèiteach to remove the plunder and set up a roadblock that prevents Radford from giving chase. Moreover, he is further humiliated when six bottles of scotch show up in the ammunition cases being stored at the Post Office and even Lacey joins in the laughter as he is reprimanded. However, as narrator Finlay Currie reveals, the fun only lasted as long as the whisky and Todday soon found itself back in the doldrums.

The ending caused a bit of tension between Mackendrick and Monja Danischewsky, as the American-born Calvinist director wanted justice to prevail while the Russian-born Jewish producer was in favour of letting the little people get one over the establishment. But rather the diminish the denouement, the compromise enhances it by giving the islanders a hangover dose of reality after their over-indulgence in the escapist elixir. Indeed, this restoration of the status quo after a glorious, but all-too-brief respite became a leitmotif of the Ealing comedies, which were always slyly disrespectful of the authority wielded by Clement Attlee and his Labour administration. But the scenario could have been considerably more subversive had Mackenzie (who also cameo'd as the captain of the wrecked ship) stuck to the story of the SS Politician, which, in addition to 22,000 cases of whisky, was also carrying 290,000 Jamaican ten shilling notes when it foundered near the Hebridean islands of Eriskay and South Uist in 1941.

The Isle of Barra provided the setting for Todday. But, while the natives helped the mostly Scottish cast perfect their accents, the inclement weather caused lengthy delays in the shooting schedule and the picture ran £20,000 over budget. Yet, even as its popularity grew, Mackendrick remained unimpressed with the `home movie' feel of Gerald Gibbs's photography. The performances were splendid, however, with Radford amusingly playing against the genial Charters persona he had forged in partnership with Naunton Wayne's Caldicott in several films after Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938). But, as in Kind Hearts and Coronets, it's Joan Greenwood who most entices with her husky voice and suggestive allure.

Sadly, Mackenzie and Danischewsky misfired when they returned to their tight little island for Rockets Galore! (1958), which saw the denizens resist the construction of a missile site. Only Jackson, Cadell, Blunt, Lacey and Clark made the reunion and not even the addition of John Lurie, a young Ronnie Corbett and historian AJP Taylor could atone for the contrivances. However, the spirit of Todday very much informed the atmosphere of the Irish village of Tullymore in Kirk Jones's Waking Ned (1998).

Finally, this week, a gentle reminder that Liz Garbus's documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World is screening at the Phoenix. See the In Cinemas column for 14 July for the full review.