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The list of minor films continues, with only occasional interest, with Berkoff treating the roles as salary earners. His real work now is solely on stage and in print.
Head in the Clouds, a film by John Duigan, who also wrote the script. 2004. A love story with the background of the Spanish Civil War then the Second World War.
Gilda (Charlize Theron) and Guy (Stuart Townsend) start an on-off relationship with Guy the thoughtful narrator and Gilda living a giddy life of privilege.
Mia (Penelope Cruz) joins the couple. She is Spanish and from London follows reports of the events of the Spanish Civil War.
The first half of the film covers Brideshead Revisited territory, but doesn't bring out any sympathy for the characters.
Steven Berkoff plays Charles Bessé, father of Gilda, but his role does little to drive the plot.
Guy and Mia join the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, he as a soldier, she as a nurse. Gilda feels like they have left her, and she ignores the letters to her from the front.
Mia in her role as a nurse. But if there is a three-some, and two go to war, it is clear the film has to have one die (Tragedy) and one survive (fortune).
In under two minutes Mia is killed in the war, a funeral is held, the war ends and people celebrate. The film is that superficial. Then World War II starts with Guy and Gilda in Paris when Germans take over the city. Guy has a role in intelligence, spying in the Germans.
Gilda is spotted wining and dining with a German officer and Guy assumes she wants to maintain her fun life. But again in films she will typically be misunderstood and she is actually playing a double role. Remorse from the death of Mia has changed her, and she is now spying on her German lovers.
As the war turns and Germans abandon Paris, she is targeted as a collaborator. The film is tiresome, the script is as bloated and superficial as a five part television min-series, and the acting, with the exception at times of Penelope Cruz, is workaday. "Written and directed by John Duigan, Head in the Clouds plays like an entertaining compilation of Hollywood's favorite World War II clichés… Maybe it's time for Hollywood to take a break from World War II. Could it be that Hollywood's six decades of replaying the Good War has left us with nobility fatigue? ... But if World War II is to continue to mean anything anymore, it has to be reimagined as a real event, not a deluxe, romantically spiced-up newsreel” (Stephen Holden , New York Times, 17 Sept 2004). “I know Head in the Clouds is silly and the plot is preposterous, but it labors under no delusions otherwise. It wants to be a hard-panting melodrama, with spies and sex and love and death, and there are times when a movie like this is exactly what you feel like indulging” (Roger Ebert, 1 Oct, 2004, click here). The Director of Photography was Paul Sarossy and the Editor was Dominique Fortin.
All images from the film.
Brides (Νύφες), a film by Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris, with high profile support from Martin Scorsese as production supervisor. The script is by Ioanne Karystiani. 2004. A few hundred mail order brides are on a ship to America in the 1920s. Berkoff plays the pimp Karaboulat.
All images from the film. Naked in London / Moving Target Berkoff acts in the independent film Naked in London. The films is based on John Cheever's The Swimmer. Mark Tierney directs. Thanks to Mark R for the information.
The Headsman - Shadow of the Sword - A Headsman's Tale, a film by Simon Aeby with script by Susanne Freund. 2005. It doesn't bode well when the producers can't agree on a title, so fit all three together. The Austrian title is the simpler- Henker. A drama set in 1520 Tyrol in Austria, described as the one of the biggest Austrian co-productions.
Two children grow up together in an orphanage. The one, George (played by Peter McDonald) becomes a prior, the other Martin (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) a solder. The script is set up for a future clash between their divergent paths.
Martin sees Anna (Anastasia Griffith) in the marketplace. The villagers call her a witch because she uses herbal medicine to cure illness and ease pain. In the religious climate anything seen as heresy has to be stamped out by the inquisition.
Martin and Anna fall in love, but her reputation could destroy his career.
The established church will not marry them, so they are secretly married by the Anabaptists...
... and the only work Martin can get is as a headsman- an executioner.
The inquisitor (Steven Berkoff) arrives and everyone is under suspicion.
The inquisitor who uses torture to find out if someone is innocent.
It doesn't all go the inquisitor's way. Other actors are John Schrapnel (who appeared, like Berkoff, in Nicholas and Alexander), Julie Cox (like Berkoff in Children of Dune). The Director of Photography was Vladimir Smutney and the Editor was Karin Hartusch.  All images from the film.
Dievu Miskas (Forest of the Gods) directed by Lithuanian director Algimantas Puipa in 2005.
The film is based on the book by Balys Sruoga documenting his time in the Nazi Stutthof Concentration Camp. The film centres round a professor (played by Valentinas Masalskis) imprisoned by both the Nazis and later the Soviet authorities.
The professor is imprisoned on vague charges along with many others, and is soon helping moving dead bodies.
The film is meant to convey a concentration camp, but the women still seem to wear makeup and the prisoners have fun building a snowman.
Only occasionally is the horror a concentration camp shown with an execution. Berkoff, playing Commandant Hoppe, signals for the execution to begin. Here Berkoff revives his Nazi officer role, but his voice is dubbed in this Lithuanian language film.
When it seems the camp may be liberated Hoppe tries to show a humane side...
... but soon he is ordering the execution of all prisoners.
Allied planes signal the end of German occupation...
... and prisoners are free for a short while.
Vladislovas Telksnys, who was actually a prisoner in the camp, says of the film "He made a piece of nonsense. What business of his was it to make this serious and painful episode into a mockery, a piece of absurdity? He knew I was still alive, he could have come to me and talked, I would have told him (Puipa) everything. There was no such thing like... a woman with an umbrella following behind. There were no such things" and "But if people ask me, I do tell them. I went through hell. Stutthof was a camp for exterminating people. Those who call it a disciplinary camp or otherwise, they are telling lies. When they took us there, I saw a pile of ashes of people burnt in the crematorium, a pile perhaps bigger than my house. There were three furnaces that would be kept working day and night. A smell of burning flesh permeated everything". (Šarūnas Bulota, 9 May 2013, on 15min.it, click here).
All images from the film.  The Flying Scotsman, not the famous train with that name, but on World Champion cyclist Graeme Obree. A Scottish film, 98 minutes, by television director Douglas Mackinnon made in 2006. With Jonny Lee Miller as Obree.
"Graeme Obree was one of the UK’s top cyclists. During an eventful career, he twice broke the prestigious world hour record (1993 and 1994) and became World Champion for the 4Km pursuit in 1993 and 1995. He was also well known for his innovative approach to bike design and aerodynamics. He invented new positions to gain the maximum aerodynamic advantage. His successful cycling career was undertaken against a backdrop of personal turmoil, in which he suffered periods of depression" (from Cycling Uphill website, click here).
Steven Berkoff plays Ernst Hagermann, head of the World Cycling Federation. When Obree develops a newly designed racing bike, Hagermann declares it does not conform the regulations, even if this means modifying the regulations. The film is as slow as Obree is fast, with average acting- though Berkoff is convincing- and a mediocre script. Mackinnon would direct Berkoff again in the Dr. Who episode Power of Three. Cinematography is by Gavin Finney and the editor is Colin Monie. Graeme Obree is credited as Bikecam Operator. The film has fifteen producers as well as four FDP Co-producers! "The Flying Scotsman... is a conventional underdog sports movie that should have been much more gripping. Mr. Miller gives a creditable performance as this clenched, closed-off loner who suffered from bipolar disorder and suicidal tendencies. But partly because the character is so remote, the movie, directed by Douglas Mackinnon from a shallow screenplay by John Brown, Simon Rose and Decla n Hughes, is curiously inert. The rote racing sequences fail to work up much sweat or suspense" (Stephen Holden, 4 May 2007, New York Times). "It's a remarkable story, but this movie version puffs evenly uphill for 90 minutes, grinding its gears. The director, Douglas Mackinnon, seems set on playing it essentially as a feelgood heartwarmer... Obree's dark and despairing moments don't fit very easily into this template and, in Miller's hands, Obree is an opaque and unsympathetic figure, whose emotional peaks and troughs are equally uninteresting" (Peter Bradshaw, 15 Aug 2006, the Guardian).
All images from the film.
"charismatic, terrifying performances by Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Steven Berkoff" (Cinando website, 2006, click here) PU-239 directed by Scott Z. Burns in 2007, his first film.
Timofey Berezin, played by Paddy Considine, works in the Nuclear Processing Facility Skotoprigonyevsk 16. When there is a leak he is radiated with plutonium (PU-239). He discovers the authorities will not give him compensation, and are trying to blame him for the leak.
He has a lethal dose of plutonium, so to provide his wife and child with some security he tries to sell plutonium to Russian gangs.
One of the gang leaders is Starkov, played by Steven Berkoff shown here playing tennis- the credits include Tennis Instructor Dragos Tache.
It does not end well for Berezin
The film suffers from having only stereotype characters- the cheap low-level gangsters, the gang bosses, the gangster's moll. The film was previously called The Half Life of Timofey Berezin.
All images from the film. |
