{"id":2194,"date":"2010-09-03T14:13:18","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T14:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2194"},"modified":"2010-09-03T14:15:36","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T14:15:36","slug":"hans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/hans\/","title":{"rendered":"Hans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Louis<\/a>
Louis Nero's HANS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

2005
\nOriginal running time: 105 mins
\nItaly
\nAn Altro Film production
\nDirector: Louis\u00a0 Nero
\nStory & screenplay: Adriano\u00a0 Cavallo, Louis\u00a0 Nero
\nCinematography: Louis\u00a0 Nero
\nMusic: Louis\u00a0 Nero
\nEditor: Louis\u00a0 Nero
\nCast: Daniele\u00a0 Savoca (Hans Schabe), Simona\u00a0 Nasi (Rita Fox), Franco\u00a0 Nero (homeless man \/ magistrate), Silvano\u00a0 Agosti (homeless man), Caterina\u00a0 De Regibus (nurse), Eugenio\u00a0 Allegri (ill person)<\/p>\n

Hans <\/strong>is a 2006 release directed by Louis Nero, a young Torinese filmmaker who\u2019s made a handful of low budget films since his 2000 debut, Golem<\/strong>.\u00a0 As with most of his work, this is an Artuadian work, heavily influenced by the avant-garde, and about as far from the romantic comedies that make up the majority of domestically produced Italian cinema as it\u2019s possible to get.\u00a0 Think of Cavallone or Arrabal, add a dash of Greenaway and a big slice of Lynch, and you\u2019re just about there.<\/p>\n

Hans Schabe is a young man who suffers from extreme psychological problems, partly because of the behaviour of his disturbed parents, who had beaten and abused him mercilessly, and partly because of the dodgy genes he has inherited from them.\u00a0 He becomes convinced that the world is becoming consumed by its own waste, that black people in particular are responsible for it all – because most of the poor sods who work at the huge municipal rubbish dumps are black – and, furthermore, that they’re out to get him because he’s discovered their secret.<\/p>\n

As his paranoia increases, he begins thinking that people are following him, that body parts are hidden in the bin liners stacked up by the roadside and that he’s being pursued by a driverless dustcart.<\/p>\n

\"Odd<\/a>
Odd man with a box, from HANS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is a curious film, chockfull of camera tricks and coloured lenses, deliberately out of focus sequences and people shouting at each other, eating loudly or shagging in extreme slow motion.\u00a0 Sometimes this all gets a bit much: although the cinematography is fine, certain moments border on the unintentionally comic, which rather pierces the self-consciously morbid atmosphere the filmmakers are intending to conjure up.\u00a0 Most particularly, the handheld camera sequences of Hans running through the streets of Turin are a bit too like Mitchell and Webb\u2019s Sir Digby Chicken Caeser sketches to take in any way seriously.\u00a0 Some of the imagery, though, is quite arresting: some weird dudes using a public urinal in unison, Hans’s office drowning under bags of rubbish.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an entirely successful production, then, and these kinds of deliberately provocative, difficult films are often less substantial than they think they are.\u00a0 The non-linear approach can only hold the attention for a certain amount of time, and this lasts about 20 minutes longer than it should do, causing it to drag rather in the second half; especially as the little plot that there is goes totally out of the window and it starts becoming a continuous stream of Hans’s demented visions.\u00a0 This is a real shame, as there’s an entirely logical point after about 85 minutes which should <\/em>have been the ending, but after a fade out it all just starts up again in much the same fashion.<\/p>\n

\"Token<\/a>
Token arthouse dwarf, from HANS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite its problems, though, it’s actually rather refreshing to see something that’s so contrary to the polished, Hollywood kind of film-making that has become the norm, and the gloomy strangeness of it all is rather compulsive.\u00a0 I\u2019d guess that the whole waste theme was inspired by the Neapolitan garbage problems that have been popular in the Italian press for some years now, and there are numerous nods to Nero\u2019s experimental antecedents: the similarly leftfield director Silvano Agosti has a cameo part, and there\u2019s a dwarf dressed in red, a musique concret soundtrack and weird baby, all of which are familiar from David Lynch\u2019s canon.<\/p>\n

Although prominently billed in the credits, Franco Nero only really has a bit part \u2013 or, to be more exact, two bit parts –\u00a0 made up of two scenes, which were probably both filmed in a day. The rest of the actors are all unknowns, although several of them seem to be frequent collaborators of the director.<\/p>\n

Hans <\/strong>was shown in about 15 cinemas from January to March 2006 as well as several festivals.\u00a0 It looks to have been extremely low budget, and I can\u2019t imagine it being a barnstorming box-office success.\u00a0 As far as I know, it has never shown internationally.\u00a0 Nero\u2019s latest film, Rasputin<\/strong>, again starring Daniele Savoca, is just about to come out in Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hans is a 2006 release directed by Louis Nero, a young Torinese filmmaker who\u2019s made a handful of low budget films since his 2000 debut, Golem. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[814,414],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2199,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}