03/09/2012 - British director Bernard Rose takes an allegorical look at capitalism in the third and last instalment of his trilogy of Tolstoy story adaptations. Screened in the Orizzonti section in Venice

Bernard Rose's career has been far from ordinary. The British director was first noticed in Hollywood at the beginning of the 1990s with the horror film Candyman, but no title could be more different from his latest opus Boxing Day [+see also:
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film profile] recently screened out of competition at the 69th Venice Film Festival in its Orizzonti section.

It's Christmas and Basil (Danny Huston), a father and broke businessman, has an real estate money-making idea to keep himself afloat. He leaves home and sets off to buy repossessed buildings back from the bank with the intention of re-selling them at great benefit after minimum repairs. Basil employs a local inexperienced driver (Matthew Jacobs, an occasional actor and the scriptwriter for the director's first film Paperhouse) to guide him from property to property up in the Colorado mountains. But when the car becomes stuck in the snow on the side of a deserted track and freezing night starts to fall, the two men's future suddenly feels a little uncertain...

Boxing Day is an annual holiday in Great Britain. On the day after Christmas, custom dictates that the better-off leave money in a box for their staff or those less fortunate than them. The spirit of this tradition is clearly present in the film's ending, but this third act stands out in stark contrast to a demanding game of questions and answers that founds the budding relationship between man and chauffeur. The film is an adaptation of Tolstoy's Master and Man. Rose is now a specialist in adapting the writer's work for the big screen as Boxing Day is his fourth adaptation of one of his works and the third in a trilogy dedicated to him, after Anna Karenina, Ivansxtc (based on The Death of Ivan Ilych), and The Kreutzer Sonata.

Shot in digital on a very low budget with a small crew, Boxing Day is not a feature that aims for any kind of sophistication in its mise-en-scene. The storyline is almost entirely devoid of any twists in the plot, and instead dialogue takes centre stage. The camera is fixed to the side of the car, the centre of most "action" between the two men and a virtual presence called Cynthia, the voice of the car's GPS and a pretext for the odd digression from the at times suffocating soliloquies about capitalism on this apparently never-ending journey. Around one last bend, the adventure takes on airs of a survival film, as the story's allegorical dimension is reinforced, and the audience is left with a feeling of a glass half empty, or half full, depending on their level of empathy for the characters.

(Translated from French)