And unlike most viewers who feel an aversion to the movie, it isn’t because of the bone-splintering, spleen-rupturing brutality.The shoot was a breeze. But two months into post-production, Helgeland refused to give the studio the happy ending it wanted, with the result that roughly a third of the film ended up being finished by someone else (contrary to rumour, it wasn’t Gibson). Paramount, he’s convinced, never meant to go with his ending. “In their heads, they’d already set aside $3m for reshoots,” he notes wryly “It was a joke. For all my little complaints about Conspiracy Theory, the first movie I directed was less what I wanted it to be than ever.”And, this time, test audiences didn’t come to his rescue “I still think those things are rigged,” he sighs. “Imagine if something like Love Story had gone through test screenings.

There would have been a question like, ‘Did you like it when Ali MacGraw died of cancer?’ and everyone would obviously say no. When they screened my cut of Payback, the question was, ‘Did you like it when Mel Gibson died?’ Everyone said no. The studio showed it to me and I said, ‘But that’s the right answer! If they said they liked it,then we’d have a problem.’”Payback doesn’t end with Gibson dying, and after two thwarted attempts to kill him off, Helgeland has accepted that it is time to move on. Next up is a thriller, Blood Work, which Clint Eastwood will direct. And if it all goes wrong again? If Clint decides to write in a part for Clyde the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose?”Well, I’ve always got that scene in Conspiracy Theory, when Julia realises how crazy Mel is, and he breaks down,” beams Helgeland “It’s the best thing I’ve written That character, Jerry Fletcher, really took its toll on Mel.

Just before Payback, he said, ‘I gotta get rid of Jerry – I gotta start killing people again!’”. Set in the parched, poverty-stricken Brazilian northeast, the folk fable Me You Them offers a sly dig at Latin American machismo. Pregnant Darlene (Regina Cas? jilted on her wedding day, leaves her village and returns three years later with a son in tow. She accepts the marriage proposal of an elderly neighbour, Osias (Lima Duarte), whose curmudgeonly nature looks ominous even before the wedding celebrations are over: he complains that the noise of the carousing will keep his goats awake. Sure enough, he proves to be a chauvinist oaf, lazing at home while Darlene slaves in the fields cutting sugar cane. Set in the parched, poverty-stricken Brazilian northeast, the folk fable Me You Them offers a sly dig at Latin American machismo.

Pregnant Darlene (Regina Cas? jilted on her wedding day, leaves her village and returns three years later with a son in tow. She accepts the marriage proposal of an elderly neighbour, Osias (Lima Duarte), whose curmudgeonly nature looks ominous even before the wedding celebrations are over: he complains that the noise of the carousing will keep his goats awake. Sure enough, he proves to be a chauvinist oaf, lazing at home while Darlene slaves in the fields cutting sugar cane.
Yet the wife’s apparent meekness hides a self-sufficiency that can juggle the demands of work and pleasure. Fed up with nights in a single hammock, she starts doubling up with the old man’s genial cousin Zezinho (St?o Garcia), and produces a son by him; then a young cane worker (Luis Carlos Vasconcelos) ends up lodging with them, and Darlene quietly shifts allegiances once again, until she has all three men in unspoken rivalry for her affections.How likely is this? Not very, given that gossip would have broken up this irregular m?ge in no time, or else spurred the jealous Osias into taking action; and the only hint of outside disapproval comes from Osias’s sourpuss sister (“Cuckold,” she hisses at him, long after he must have twigged the fact for himself).Yet Andrucha Waddington’s direction is so relaxed and the playing of his cast so controlled that Me You Them slips down very easily indeed.

Regina Cas?a national treasure in Brazil, projects a cheerful resilience in her long, characterful face, while Lima Duarte and St?o Garcia play an amusing duet of caginess in the background. It’s also beautifully shot by Breno Silveira, working from a palette of roasted golds, caramels and ochres, while the wide blue skies make a benign canopy over Waddington’s rueful comedy of human desire.Jan Sch?’s The Farewell portrays the twilight hours of Bertolt Brecht, though its bickering end-of-the-summer atmosphere is actually more suggestive of Chekhov. Set during the last day of Brecht’s holiday in his lakeside retreat at Brandenburg, the film considers the ensemble of women – relatives, actresses, mistresses, past and present – who are all competing for the ailing playwright’s attention as he fades towards death. “You gawk at him as if he were the messiah,” sneers his chain-smoking wife Helene (Monica Bleibtreu), soured by years of his womanising yet still immensely tender towards his flagging frame. Josef Bierbichler, stout, stubbly, with a cigar clamped between his teeth, is an uncanny match for the historical Brecht, and conveys a degree of the self-absorption that is both the privilege of the artist and the mark of the egotist. Brecht may have had regrets about the way he treated his women, but at this stage – death’s door, in short – his main concern is getting his thoughts down on paper; that, and discovering the whereabouts of his favourite cloth cap.There’s not much of a plot to speak of. This being 1956, the German secret police lurk in the background, plotting the arrest of Brecht’s activist friend Wolfgang Harich (Samuel Fintzi) and his wife Isot (Rena Zednikowa) on a charge of treason.