FILM / Deep, head-scratching stuff

IN THE 24-COUNTRY, six-continent tour that Ron Fricke undertook to shoot Baraka (PG), he somehow missed out on Britain. That's probably as well: at least we're spared the Houses of Parliament shot through a dense blue filter and a fish-eye lens, Big Ben from an extreme low angle, clouds scudding past furiously in time-lapse photography. Fricke has hunted the strange and wondrous across the globe, and has bagged the obvious and the banal. In Jerusalem, we're at the Western Wall; in France, at Chartres; in China on Tiannamen Square; in Egypt before the pyramids. The film's a succession of high-tech postcards.

It's also, to be fair, superbly beautiful. Fricke has filmed in the expensive, rarely-used 70mm format (not, as is common, 35mm blown up to 70mm with a consequent loss of image quality). He has a fine eye for the odd composition and knows the technical artifice to achieve it. Often, the film becomes stylised to the point of near-abstraction. Indians chant in Busby Berkeley-esque formation. Commuters swirl down tube plugholes across the world. Taxis rush down the gullies in New York City. The camera hops from Australian Aboriginals to Kenyan Masaai - none of the tribes are identified and you have no idea what the ceremonies mean, but who cares? After all, the film implies that one singing, dancing, brightly beaded native is much like another (for all the New Age pretensions, it's peculiarly patronising towards its subjects).

Baraka derives its rhubarby ethnic name (apparently 'an ancient Sufi word which can simply be translated as a blessing or as the breath or essence of life') and its chosen form of 'story-telling without words' from Koyaanisqatsi (can anyone remember what that means?), which Fricke photographed, co-wrote and co-edited. And it appears, at first sight, to share the earlier film's neo-hippie concerns - deep, head-scratching stuff to do with our despoliation of the planet and the futility of war.

But, where Koyaanisqatsi (made in 1983) was meant to be consumed on a college campus, late at night, dreamily, in a cloud of fragrant smoke, this is a fast movie for MTV attention spans; it doesn't burden us with anything like a structure or, really, an argument. Fricke is grandly described in the press notes as 'wrestling with the broad philosophical concepts that underlie his films' but there's more intellectual roughage to be found in Jurassic Park.

Children of Nature (no cert), which boasts the slightly dubious honour of being the first Icelandic film nominated for an Oscar, goes on a smaller-scale odyssey. An old farmer goes to live with his daughter in Reykjavik, is sent to a retirement home where he meets an old flame, and finally makes off with her in a stolen jeep to the remote area where they grew up. The film starts like a glum Kaurismaki piece (no dialogue at all for the first 10 minutes or so, which show the lonely old man preparing for his trip), then thaws into something sweeter and more comedic. But the story often seems to lose its way, and is spoiled by silly supernatural trimmings - a vanishing car, a naked ghost, Bruno Ganz in a pointless cameo reprising his angelic ministrations in Wings of Desire - that don't achieve the intended poetic grandeur.

In a lean week, viewers in the Cambridge area are the luckiest: the city's film festival fields a number of British premieres as well as, more unusually, several interesting movies with no UK distributor. Stalingrad (today and Sunday), is a gruelling recreation of Hitler's first serious defeat that has been controversial in Germany; The Punk, Mike Sarne's updated Romeo and Juliet (tomorrow), caused much excitement at Cannes (Sarne is interviewed on these pages tomorrow); The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (Sunday and Tuesday) was directed by Juzo Itami, who made Tampopo, and its comic take on the Tokyo underworld caused Itami to be slashed by yakuza gangsters the day after the film opened in Japan.