Cannes double: Aurora and Chatroom

Cannes (Un Certain Regard) – Two of the movies in this year's Un Certain Regard, and on the surface they couldn't appear more different. One is a glacially paced, three-hour diary of a crime, featuring non-professional actors. The other is a glossily slick British teen drama starring a posse of hot young up-and-comers. Paul Martin gives his verdict on both.

To watch Aurora is to spend two days in the company of Viorel (played by Aurora's writer-director Cristi Puiu), a middle-aged man so inexpressive as to make your average coma patient seem like a noisy chatterbox. Though we don't view the full 48 hours, events unfold so agonisingly slowly that it often feels as if Puiu's movie is not even shot in real-time but at quarter-speed. Stoic funbag Viorel gets up to a range of activities during the filmed period; lurking behind some lorry trailers, listening to Elton John, finding water on the ceiling of his bathroom, packing his dinky cars away, whipping out a shotgun and blowing a few people away.

Cannes 2010 finds Cristi Puiu aiming for a reprise of his greatest prior critical triumph, the Romanian having already won the Un Certain Regard prize in 2005 for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. And Aurora is a kind of semi-sequel to Lazarescu, with Puiu having stated that he views them as parts one and two of a planned film series, Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest. However on this showing, very few will have any desire whatsoever to check out the four parts still to come.

Puiu made Aurora as an antidote to the manner in which murder is generally depicted at the movies. He wanted to excise any aspects of glamour and drama, instead showing the crime as it is in reality; a near-unaccountable action by a human being like you and me. This he accomplishes, using a fly-on-the-wall style of filming in order to position Viorel's killings as brief acts amidst all his other daily actions and encounters. So Puiu can feel pleased about that. Now can we please have his reasons why anyone should be expected to give over three hours of their life to his dull, dull, dull formal exercise?

Aurora feels like an example of emperor's new clothes filmmaking, where those critics who style themselves as highbrow intellectuals, perceptively dissecting the art of cinema, will be afraid to admit how soul-crushingly boring this flick truly is. Okay, there is craft, there is an underlying ideology. There are even moments of interest and engagement sparsely studded throughout the excessive running time. But would I want to watch it again or recommend to anyone else that they should watch it? No. Not even if a dour Romanian burst in and pressed a shotgun to my head.

Rating on a scale of 5 leaks in the bathroom: 1

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Cristi Puiu
Written by: Cristi Puiu
Cast: Cristi Puiu, Clara Voda, Valeria Seciu, Luminita Gheorghiu
Rating: TBC
Running time: 181 minutes

While the very point of Aurora is that an explanation for Viorel's acts of violence is never provided, there is contrastingly a surplus of motivations in Chatroom, a busy Brit thriller helmed by The Ring and Dark Water director Hideo Nakata. The quintet of youngsters who start up the social website Chelsea Teens in which the key interactions of the movie occur are sagging down under the weight of issues afflicting their lives. Eva (Imogen Poots) is disillusioned with her superficial social scene, timid Jim (Matthew Beard) leans heavily on anti-depressants, Sloane Ranger-in-training Emily (Hannah Murray) feels stifled by her parents, and Mo (Daniel Kuluuya, like Murray a Skins alumnus) is attracted to his best friend's 11-year-old sister.

Then there is William (Kick-Ass star Aaron Johnson), the agitator of the bunch, manipulating all of the other four, but soon honing in on Jim and pushing him down a path of darkness. The reasons underpinning William's machinations prove disappointingly threadbare, with the fact his J.K. Rowling-alike author mother (Megan Dodds) named the protagonist of her mega-successful series of kid's books after his older brother seeming an unlikely trigger for turning him into a scheming sociopath.

The performances from the five leads prove somewhat mixed. Chatroom is based on the play of the same name by Enda Walsh, who also pens the movie's script, and that familiar stage-to-screen problem of an excess of dialogue rears its head here. You certainly feel some sympathy for the young cast as they wrestle with words which you suspect even the most experienced thesps would struggle to make sound wholly authentic in a cinematic milieu. Even so, only Kaluuya really impresses, with Beard coming off worst. We're supposed to sympathise with his lonely and miserable Jim, yet he simply comes over as a tedious berk.

Perhaps the best thing about the film version of Chatroom is the expressionistic treatment director Nakata gives to the main characters' online dealings with one another. The J-horror bigwig wisely elects not to depict William and the others simply tapping away at their keyboards, instead fashioning a luridly atmospheric hotel set, in which each room pertains to a different social website. Nakata overcooks the stylistics a shade though, with barely a scene passing without some throbbing pop music accompaniment. The movie's structuring is uneven too, with Mo and Emily simply vanishing from the story for long stretches, and the forced chase finale proves an improbable route to wrapping things up.

Rating on a scale of 5 LOLs: 2

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Hideo Nakata
Written by: Enda Walsh, based on his own play
Cast: Aaron Johnson, Imogen Poots, Matthew Beard, Daniel Kaluuya
Rating: TBC
Running time: 97 minutes