Ivul (2-disc Special Edition) [DVD]

Ivul is what is said in the title, Evil. The inner plot is like reminder of some greater moralist stories, say Walerian Borowczyk's La Marge: all is well and beautiful but then, as in a nightmare, all turns to a catastrophe that can only originate in a bad person, in this case Ivul, a man of foreign pedigree, assumably Romanian. The film is shot beautifully, the actors are ok, but a certain lack of message becomes annoying when the film matures. In the end the watcher has a bad taste in mouth and an an empty mind but does not know why. The story is entirely devoid of any humor.

There is no one quite like Andrew Kotting working in British cinema today. Actually, there's no one quite like Andrew Kotting in cinema anywhere. Perhaps there's no one like Andrew Kotting full stop. He's a one-man awkward squad, a restless energy-magician who makes other film makers, arthouse or mainstream, seem like lily-livered dilettantes. His work, whether in films such as Gallivant (1996) and This Filthy Earth (2001), his 2004 sound piece Visionary Landscapes (created alongside Jem Finer), or in his extraordinary book In The Wake of a Deadad (2006), is sinewy, bloody-minded and spry: a series of antic and visceral journeys through real places and head spaces, maniacal traipses in pursuit of fierce joy.

The ability to embody ideas fully, to embed them in topography, to think of the intellect as a muscle rather than as a mere analytical device: it's these impulses that make Kotting something of a fringe figure in Britain, one forced to seek funding from Europe. Ivul, his first feature since This Filthy Earth, was shot in France, is in French, and stars a mainly French cast. This is no handicap. It's actually a blessing: not only does it underscore what a fundamentally unparochial film this is, but it adds another dimension of beguiling, mysterious estrangement to a story that is already tantalizing and ensnaring.

Ivul is named after the family who live in a secluded and rather crumbling country house lorded over by a Russian patriarch (Jean-Luc Bideau) and tended to by a mute bruiser of a groundsman called Lek (Xavier Tchili). Wood is chopped, machines tinkered with, hair washed in sinks. For dinner, the Ivuls eat roasted crow and stroganoff. This could be, in its vigorous, sometimes sensual, largely self-sufficient fashion, a family at ease: parents (the wife is played by Aurélia Petit) who playfully liken each other to "a coy carp" and a "degenerate smelly old ram"; an artistic daughter Freya (Adélaïde Leroux) who reads poetry and dreams of marrying moustachioed versifiers.

One afternoon, though, the father walks in on his son Alex (Jacob Auzanneau) kissing -- at her bidding -- his sister's navel. Furious, he orders him to "get off my land", an injunction Alex takes literally, promptly clambering onto the house's rooftop and from then on, weeks turning into months turning into wintry seasons, confining himself to trees, portable wheelie bins and raised caravans. It's aerial resistance in the spirit of the young hero in Italo Calvino's 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees, or even Simeon Stylites, the Christian saint who lived on top of a pillar for 37 years. But it causes heartache for the family: the mother starts drinking, the father is stricken and confined to bed, his sister howls at him to stop being so selfish. Auzanneau, a trained acrobat, is fascinating to watch as he climbs and moves across slippery surfaces and brittle branches. This isn't Man on Wire: there's nothing balletic or that romantic about his actions; being a refusenik, or an internal exile -- for him just as much as it has been for his family -- is a matter of labour and graft. And while it can be celebrated -- even the father initially applauds his son's energy as an antidote to the hamburger-chomping, television-fixated habits of other teenagers -- it's a form of violence, too.

Ivul is much more than a character drama. It deploys artful sound design, timelapse photography and archival footage of families larking about to create cinema that seems pickled in memories -- some of them with the bluntness and darkness of personal experience, some refracted through off-kilter gems such as Philip Trevelyan's The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) about a hermetic family living just outside London.
It's a film about improvisation: the higgledy-piggledy, bruised-and-abraded, hopeful-but-haunted ways we come up with to stumble through life and around our loved ones. Trying and failing. Failing and trying. Keeping on -- until we topple.