UK

The Zone of Interest (2023)

André Crous

With the horrors of Auschwitz audibly playing out on the periphery, The Zone of Interest paints a unique portrait of life during the Holocaust, but the director mucks it all up with a ghastly and pointlessly artsy aesthetic.

Zone of InterestUnited States/United Kingdom/Poland
3*

Director:
Jonathan Glazer
Screenwriter:
Jonathan Glazer
Director of Photography:
Łukasz Żal

Running time: 105 minutes

Roger Ebert once wrote that “if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen”. That certainly holds true for Jonathan Glazer’s austere Auschwitz drama, entitled The Zone of Interest, which finds itself teetering between a bloodless horror film and a historical art installation. It includes many a scene or shot that lingers far beyond what it merits while revealing little to nothing at all.

Following the most basic of opening credits, the white title emerges on a black screen in a silly font that calls to mind some horror-inspired WordArt, accompanied by eerie sounds that border on comedic. As the title slowly fades and ultimately vanishes into the black screen (presumably a very gross visual representation of the millions of Jews turned to ash inside the crematoriums at Auschwitz), we anticipate a cut. But none comes. Instead, we are left staring at a black screen that probably only lasts a minute or two, though it feels much longer. When we finally encounter an actual diegetic scene, we see a group of people picnicking among lush greenery next to a river. Again, we remain at a distance, waiting an uncomfortably long time for a cut.

We are not introduced to these characters, and can barely see them, as the camera makes no effort to present them to us. Their actions lack both interest and significance, a trend that persists as the movie meanders through its nearly two-hour runtime set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland’s most infamous locale. Occasionally, Glazer opts for artistic detours that alienate more than they enchant. These include using thermal night vision to craft unsettling visuals of a young girl distributing apples in the countryside – presumably to offer sustenance to prisoners labouring outside the camp walls during daytime, although these scenes don’t go anywhere and add nothing except some colour (in black in white) to the narrative. Moreover, the director experiments with auditory elements, presenting blank screens overlaid with sounds that swing between the ominously bizarre and the comically absurd, reminiscent of a frog belching in bass or a cat being strangled.

The primary zone of interest is the house where Rudolf Höss, the commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife, Hedwig, and their two sons, two daughters and a baby. What’s intriguing about the house, and the main reason the film exists, is its proximity to the camp. With a vast flower bed full of dahlias, sunflowers and marigolds, as well as an admirable vegetable garden, the property shares a wall with the extermination camp, and it is close enough to hear what is happening on the other side of the wall. 

The scenes at the family home are a mixed bag. The mere proximity of Auschwitz and the audible yet always unseen terror imbue every moment at the Höss home with an undercurrent of tension, despite the seemingly eternal summer weather. Yet, at the same time, Glazer, who also wrote the screenplay, fails to create much drama in these scenes. Life at the Germans’ home is carefree but dull. There is very little to maintain our interest, and many a scene leaves the viewer questioning its inclusion at all.

The only real drama unfolds with Höss’s imminent reassignment to Oranienburg. He has learnt about this but hesitates to inform Hedwig. His wife has dedicated three years to transforming their house into a home, notably commanding Auschwitz prisoners loaned out for labour to fulfil her demands on the property. She also relishes her nickname as the “Queen of Auschwitz”. At home, Höss feels particularly vulnerable, and his high-pitched voice and somewhat effeminate demeanour (despite, or perhaps because of, his undercut hairstyle) weaken his position further. This makes him hesitant to share the news with Hedwig. When he eventually does, her aggressive emotional breakdown confirms his fears were justified.

Hedwig, portrayed by the remarkable Sandra Hüller, embodies a chilling blend of banality and malevolence. Her plain appearance conceals a deep-seated cruelty. Early in the film, she nonchalantly distributes silk panties, plundered from Jewish women, to her maids, while she herself has obtained a giant fur coat with red lipstick in the coat pocket. Neither of the items can work miracles on her bland look, however. Her power over the Jewish labourers in her home enables her sudden shifts to vileness, culminating in a disturbing remark that leaves viewers aghast, wishing upon her the very atrocities her husband perpetrates at Auschwitz.

The rest of the time, however, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the “banality of evil”, we observe life proceeding as usual on the family’s side of the wall, with no acknowledgment of the persistent gunshots, blood-curdling screams or plumes of ash rising from the towering chimneys. Most poignantly, people being cremated alive is described with clinical, emotionless precision, while Höss sends dictation after dictation about mundane issues. This is not the life of someone tormented by the genocide he supervises and implements.

And yet, there are glimmers of complexity. While the film thankfully never tries to portray any of the Germans as having genuine concerns about the misery or torture they are inflicting or allowing to be inflicted on the Jews in and around the house, there are hints that these are flesh-and-blood people with flickers of innate humanity that are being suppressed by their decisions to behave in this abominable manner. One is Hedwig’s mother, who arrives for a short visit, and although she is full of praise for and evidently proud of daughter, she also witnesses the giant red flames at night and hears the screams, leading her to a fateful yet understated decision. Even Höss himself, who seems ill at ease in many a social situation, appears to show an inherent and uncontrollable repulsion (one that manifests in an unforgettable, physical way towards the end) to the mass extermination, although he keeps lunging straight into darkness.

The contrast between the banality in the foreground and the horror in the background is silent but shocking. Every time we see fragments of the Auschwitz camp, its watchtower, its row upon row of tightly packed multi-story prison buildings, it is impossible for our imagination not conjure the worst possible images of what is happening, even as we are never shown a single thing inside the camp while it is operated by the Nazis. But the ever-present clouds of human remains spread everywhere, and there is some solace to be taken that all of this eventually did come to an end.

In its closing frames, The Zone of Interest aims to cast a fresh perspective on the enthusiastic complicity of Germans in the atrocities of the Second World War yet finds itself caught in a web of stylistic excess that detracts from the depth of drama it seeks to portray, especially within the domestic sphere of the Höss family. The concluding sequences, set against the grim backdrop of Berlin’s bureaucratic machinery orchestrating the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, resort to fish-eye aerial shots that aspire to a godlike surveillance of the unfolding horror, a technique that comes across as both superficial and awkwardly incorporated into the overarching narrative. This emphasis on aesthetic over narrative substance, a hallmark of Glazer’s directorial approach, serves more to obscure than illuminate the film’s core themes, diluting its capacity to engage and disturb its audience.

Despite its bold attempt to navigate the Holocaust’s peripheries with an unyielding gaze, the film ultimately falters, presenting a fragmented tale that fails to resonate on an emotional level. The goal of balancing visual innovation with the monumental scale of its historical subject matter ends in a dissonance that leaves viewers more alienated than enlightened, rendering the film a lamentable venture into Holocaust cinema, its potential dimmed by an overzealous commitment to form at the expense of impactful storytelling, mirroring the disquieting aloofness of its protagonists and falling markedly short of its ambitious goal to make a significant contribution to the narrative of one of history’s bleakest periods.

One Plus One (1968)

André Crous

By far the best film he made in 1968, One Plus One shows Godard at a crossroads between pure reality (behind the scenes with the Rolling Stones) and fiction allegedly concerned with reality (long stretches of verbalised Black Power literature).

One plus oneUK
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Anthony B. Richmond

Running time: 110 minutes

Alternate titles: Sympathy for the Devil
                           One + One

Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard to film the Rolling Stones but then overlay so much voiceover and spoken readings that it turns the production into an inept love letter to Mao. Godard filmed the band as it developed its hit single “Sympathy for the Devil” at London’s Olympic Studios and collected some magnificent material over time as the song absorbed the band members’ musical input. However, he never interviews them, and we barely ever hear them speak. The focus is on the song, as it should be. The other half of the film is a helter-skelter jumble of the Black Power movement, punny communist graffiti, pornography and Adolf Hitler in scenes that show little regard for the audience’s enjoyment or comprehension.

But then, this is a film (for lack of a better word) made by Godard, who has never shied away from being a terribly shallow intellectual. Entitled One Plus One, this semi-documentary appears to be rooted in the director’s political activism. It is important to note that it was made in the summer of 1968, right after the mass student protests in France. However, any ideas that may be found fluttering around inside it are the words of others: mostly black freedom fighters and thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver.

In theory, the title refers to the two tracks – one reproduction and one very staged production – on which the film advances with starts and stops. The reproduction shows us the (seemingly) unstaged bits of performance by the Rolling Stones, who only ever perform parts of a single song: “Sympathy for the Devil”, which would be released on their 10th studio album, Beggars Banquet, a few months later. The very staged production involves multiple venues where we see people reading aloud from books (sometimes Black Power literature, sometimes proto-Nazi literature) or spraying graffiti in Godard’s dreadfully annoying pun-ridden style: FREUDEMOCRACY; SOVIETCONG; CINEMARXISM. On occasion, these tired puns also spill over into the title cards (e.g. SoCIAty).

The reproduction may just be small doses of the band rehearsing the same song over and over, but the long takes and proximity to the band members bring the viewer back to life after every dull stretch of ideological recitation. And although we often see the boom microphone at the edge of the frame, the song is never stripped of its magic. Perhaps it is because the music is pure bliss and the 25-year-old Mick Jagger is such a delight: Relaxed, often seen smoking a cigarette after the song has started already and before he starts singing, he is the epitome of cool. 

The fragments of the production, by contrast, are far from entertaining. However, thanks to the colourful locations along the Thames in Central London, they are much more interesting than Godard’s comparable but positively unwatchable Joy of Learning (Le gai savoir), produced earlier the same year. The four parts of the production are: random scenes of people spraying graffiti; Black Power supporters reading pages of ideological propaganda out loud in or next to burnt-out cars on the Thames riverbank; a man wearing a purple costume reading from Mein Kampf in an adult bookshop; and a taciturn woman named Eve Democracy (played by Anne Wiazemsky) walking around a lush forest answering a journalist’s increasingly complex questions with only a “yes” or a “no”. 

Eve is a serene but comically shallow figure who is never heard from again until the final metatextual scene, in which she becomes a sacrificial lamb of sorts. Her scene in the forest (labelled, in quintessentially Godardian fashion, “ALL ABOUT EVE“) is presented in an unbroken take just over 9 minutes long, and while it conveys little of substance, Wiazemsky, wearing a faded lemon-coloured peasant dress, holds our attention throughout because of the fuss around her. A man with a handheld television camera films her, another man holds the microphone, one asks a stream of questions, and a fourth is the clapper loader.

But no matter how urgent or how well developed an ideology is, it is worthless in a film if it is not firmly absorbed by the characters, the narrative and/or the landscape of the diegesis. At the pornographic bookstore, two white Maoists sit bloodied against a wall and are slapped across the face by children who visit the shop with their parents (!). In response, they yell out slogans like “Long live Mao!” or “Victory to the NLF!”. The NLF had secured Algerian independence six years earlier. Besides the Black Power literature, we are also bombarded with a disembodied but ever-so-serious voice’s narrativised descriptions of sex acts involving Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin.

To some extent, the mish-mash of approaches – observations alternating with very clearly staged pieces of cinematic theatre – reflects the unstable point in his career at which Godard made One Plus One. Having shot it just a few short months after the landmark events of the 1968 student uprisings, Godard was in the midst of an artistic revolution. His recent films (Masculin féminin, La chinoise, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Joy of Learning) had been explicitly political, and Godard, emulating many a young Paris intellectual at the time, had been seduced by Maoism. He was about to embark on a handful of projects with Jean-Pierre Gorin that would completely bulldoze the foundations of storytelling (and, in all honesty, of entertainment), but when he made One Plus One, he still straddled two worlds: his past and future approaches to film.

Despite 1967’s Weekend proclaiming itself the end of cinema, despite the vapid nonsense that was A Film Like Any Other and despite the scenes with the Rolling Stones containing no story at all, the film almost succeeds in spite of itself. We keep watching because we keep anticipating the next scene, when the film will return to the comfortable confines of the recording studio. The snippets of rehearsal we are privy to contain people who are not shot from the neck down, as Godard was apt to do in his more austere films around this time. No, we get tracking shots and pans and a crane shot or two. It is almost as if the music and the opportunity inspired the director to use the toys at his disposal rather than throw them out of his pram.

It is a shame that Godard is so incurious, though, as he completely misses the behind-the-scenes drama with the band. Brian Jones, who had been a founding member of the band, appears in the opening scene but then is barely heard from again and inexplicably disappears before the final credits. In reality, the rift between him and the other members of the band would lead to him leaving the band by the end of the year. By the following summer, he would be dead. But this is only clear in retrospect and basically absent from the film, despite Godard’s privileged first-person access.

But then, Godard was never much of a director, and it would be unfair to expect him to know the answer to the filmic equivalent of 1 + 1.

1917 (2019)

André Crous

As a purely technical exercise in depicting the First World War, 1917 (and its seemingly unbroken single take) is successful but offers no insight into the characters it depicts or the events it recreates.

1917UK
3*

Director:
Sam Mendes
Screenwriters:
Sam Mendes
Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 120 minutes

One of the most infamous examples of a camera movement is the push-in of Kapò, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film about the Second World War. When a young Jewish woman in a concentration camp throws herself on an electrified fence and dies instantaneously, the camera dollies in see her corpse up close. The shot is grotesque and was justly condemned at the time by Jacques Rivette and subsequently by Serge Daney and many others. While showing something that everyone can agree is horrific, the camera seeks to beautify the moment for no purpose whatsoever.

Sam Mendes’s film about a single mission in the First World War, entitled 1917, does not commit quite the same atrocity, but it does use the camera to reach for beauty when that is precisely what a director should avoid if seeking to examine the human cost of war in any serious way. We follow along with two very young British lance corporals, William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (‎Dean-Charles Chapman), when they are sent across no man’s land to warn some 1,600 soldiers they are walking into a trap and should call off a planned attack. The director’s choice of a seemingly unbroken take, whose aim is clearly to immerse the viewer in the experience of war, is not without merit, but the execution makes it clear how shallow his reasoning was.

The single take appears to be the film’s raison d’être because it certainly isn’t the plot. Such a shot is often used to emphasise both the passage of time and the unity of action. We are meant to see development or interaction in a much more personal way as the point of view is generally tied to a single character. While The Lady in the Lake is the well-known but rather unrefined archetype, the best example is unquestionably the close focus of László Nemes’s Son of Saul.

In 1917, the camera starts with the two young men and ultimately settles on just one, who appears to mature over the course of around 18 hours of ominous calm, brutal warfare, bloody injury, a near-death experience and worse. But the camera has no particular point of view. While it starts as a humanlike observer alongside Schofield and Blake, it doesn’t take long before it flies low over a lake or high above a roaring river while the characters have to trudge around it or struggle to keep their head above water.

The notion of being immersed in the action also suggests that the viewer gets to experience the events (more or less, given the relative safety of the movie theatre) in the same way. But 1917 is so chock-full of Thomas Newman’s music, whose volume is dialled up all the way, that it is often impossible to focus on anything other than the mood being communicated: fear, happiness, danger, etc. The climactic battle scene is little more than soldiers running across a field as bombs explode to punctuate the heroic boom of Newman’s score. A scene in a medic’s tent after the battle is filled with bleeding injured soldiers, but they are mostly whimpering, and any loud screaming is drowned out by the music on the soundtrack.

Mendes is not showing us the war as it is. He is showing us the war as a work of art and uses a continuous tracking shot to do so. In addition, the camera and the lens stay squeaky clean for the duration of the running time, despite the explosions, the water, the dust and the mud that at least one of the characters has to wade through. This approach is simply unacceptable. The fact that the shot is, in fact, stitched together from multiple smaller shots, with some of the stitches easily noticeable, does not mitigate this problem, as the film’s ultimate goal is still, quite clearly, to look pretty rather than convey the visceral experience of being down in the tranches, not flying above them. 

But what is particularly irksome is the camera’s inhuman movements, as when Schofield plunges down a waterfall while the camera is not only suspended above him but tracks backwards high up in the air. Or when the same character charges down a trench packed with soldiers, and the camera, instead of following closely behind to show us the chaos at close range, rises up out of the trench and follows smoothly above the soldiers’ heads. These are pretty shots, but they undercut the very role of the camera here, which is to serve as an invisible soldier.

The story itself is as thin as a rail, and the two major characters have little to no complexity. One long scene is wasted in a French town so that 1917 can implicitly hint at Schofield’s past, which is a secret it could have kept to itself until the final moments, when this implicitness is made explicit, in case we had missed the earlier scene.

This was a purely technical exercise aimed at further developing the skills Mendes had already showcased in the opening scene of Spectre. However, unlike, say, Alfonso Cuarón (and, specifically, DoP Emmanuel Lubezki), who has mastered the use of the unbroken take, the result here feels vapid and inconsequential, devoid of significance because it contains so little and says even less.

The Best Offer (2013)

André Crous

In The Best Offer, Giuseppe Tornatore reminds us that while love is blind, the love of art can be blinding.

The Best OfferUK/Italy
3*

Director:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Screenwriter:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Director of Photography:
Fabio Zamarion

Running time 125 minutes

Alternate title: La migliore offerta

Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is a respected auctioneer in Vienna and lives a very lonely life of luxury. He is surrounded by works of art every day at work, and he dines at some of the most expensive restaurants in the city at night. But he does so alone.

At home, he has a special room where his most-prized possessions adorn three very high walls: portraits of women, all staring back at him while he lounges in a comfortable chair in the centre of the room, reads gilded literature and consumes a glass of pricey wine.

He has dedicated his life to his job at the auction house, and he has not let anybody get close to him in all that time (he always wears gloves, because he distrusts other people’s hygiene). However, his frequent sessions at the barbershop, where he dyes his hair, suggest he has not given up looking quite yet.

And then, one day, he gets a call from Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), a woman who wants him to appraise the value of her substantial collection of paintings and antique furniture. She phones him, arranges to meet with him, and he starts appraising the objects in the expansive villa. But there is something a bit off: He never sees her.

It transpires that she has been living alone in the house for many years, and she has an assistant, who has never seen her either but delivers her groceries and cleans up after her. This mystery casts a spell over Oldman, and of course, he slowly gets reeled in by this creature not only because of her sensuous voice but also because of the many items that suggest a great deal of value. Mostly, however, it is because of a few unexplained metal objects he finds lying around the cellar.

He gives these bits and pieces, which he inexplicably finds lying around the cellar every time he visits the villa, to Robert (a very engaging Jim Sturgess), a charming young clocksmith he has become friends with (although, significantly, we do not see how this friendship is struck). Robert puts the pieces together without much trouble, and the two of them quickly realise these are all part of an automaton – the kind of 19th-century robot, perhaps even older, that also made an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Moreover, the supposed inventor is someone Oldman has been studying his whole life. If they manage to put the pieces together, this would be a stunning discovery.

While the relationship between Oldman and Claire becomes more intimate, and he grows more and more fond of her, despite her hysterical outbursts of “I love you! I hate you! Oh, forgive me, I do love you!”, he also confides his feelings – heretofore alien to him – of romantic interest in the young woman to Robert.

But Claire remains an enigma. At some point, the viewer may very well start to suspect she may be an automaton herself, or perhaps the real-life version of one of the portraits on his wall, but the director doesn’t drop enough hints to make us pursue this line of thought, which could have led us down some interesting rabbit holes.

The director is Giuseppe Tornatore, whose 1988 film Cinema Paradiso may very well be the most evocative film about the cinema ever made, but his handling of English material is as mediocre as can be expected. The dialogue is at times silly, and the delivery is far from polished.

The theme of forgery could have been exploited to a much greater degree, and so too Oldman’s statement that there is always something authentic in a fake. Tornatore loses a real opportunity for depth here by not relating it better to his own film. But with Oldman at the centre of every single scene, we obliquely take on his point of view, which is a very good strategy, given the revelations towards the end of the story. 

The cinematography is badly handled and very rough around the edges. Despite a beautiful opening sequence that underlines the exquisite service of the restaurant Oldman frequents, a particularly grating moment occurs halfway through the film when he is given access to a hidden room, but instead of a tracking shot following him into the room, the camera starts to follow him and then abruptly cuts to a position in front of him, inside the room. The reverse tracking shot that ends the film demonstrates what kind of approach Tornatore could have taken here, in a scene that actually needed such a shot.

The music of Ennio Morricone, which is not altogether dissimilar to some of his work on Once Upon a Time in America, suggests a measure of mystery but is never strong enough to make any real impact on our experience of the film.

Far below his marquee Cinema Paradiso, The Best Offer is certainly not the best the director has offered in quite some time.

The Double (2013)

André Crous

In The Double, Richard Ayoade’s stylish thriller set in a futuristic underworld, one plus one does not make two.

The DoubleUK
3.5*

Director:
Richard Ayoade
Screenwriters:
Avi Korine
Richard Ayoade
Director of Photography:
Erik Wilson

Running time: 90 minutes

Not unlike Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, which was released in the same year, Richard Ayoade’s The Double shows signs of noir, with a lot of the action taking place in yellow-hued, toxic-looking daylight (Enemy) or at night time and inside windowless buildings where the rooms are lit with hard yellow lights (The Double). Also, both stories are adaptations of works by renowned novelists – the former from José Saramago and the latter from Dostoyevsky. The two films are surprisingly similar in tone, with very thin storylines enveloped in a sense of utter hopelessness that, especially in The Double, seems positively Kafkaesque.

Set in an anonymous city at an unknown time in what is more a world of nightmares than that of actual reality (thus differing slightly from the recognisable yet alien Toronto landscape presented in Enemy), Ayoade’s film seems to have borrowed its sombre ambience from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with all devices simultaneously appearing to be advancements of and regressions from those of the present day.

The main character here is an awkward, gangly fellow named Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), who loses his briefcase in the subway when he fails to be assertive. This lack of action pervades the film, and at times the viewer will be thoroughly demoralised by how pathetic he is. But when he arrives at the reception desk of the behemoth that is his workplace, where he has been employed for more than seven years, he discovers that the clerk doesn’t recognise him without his ID card. In fact, he slowly realises he is mostly invisible to those around him.

But then, something extraordinary happens. A fellow who looks and dresses exactly like him arrives. This doppelgänger is called James Simon, and he is everything Simon James wishes he was: pro-active, confident, charming, likeable and immediately noticeable.

As in Enemy, we are provided with no reason why the two of them look the same, but here our frustration is compounded by the utter lack of investigation from Simon James’s side. Whenever he wants to say something, he fidgets, clenches his teeth and grunts, but he doesn’t speak up.

It is a thrill to watch Eisenberg in these two roles. The actor alternately draws on both of his strengths – the awkward goody-two-shoes we know from Zombieland and the snake capable of delivering rapid-fire retorts in Social Network – and whenever he is onscreen (which is all the time), he lights up the story and grabs our attention, even when we want to give him a kick up the backside to make him move, or to stop moving.

What is even more thrilling is the interaction between the two characters, especially when the relationship is one built on working together rather than against each other. This collaboration doesn’t last very long, however, and before we know it the two are at each other’s throats again, with James Simon making it clear he will do whatever it takes to dash any hopes his original has of getting the girl or proving his worth to the man at the top, the founder of the mysterious company: the Colonel.

There are bursts of music, mostly from 1960s Japan, and other strange sounds regularly pepper the soundtrack for brief moments before ending just as abruptly as they started. But in terms of sound, nothing is as good as what happens at a restaurant on a date between the girl from the local copy shop (Mia Wasikowska) and Simon (who, she thinks, is James). During a major argument, the volume on the radio is turned up past 11, and other implements start whizzing so loudly we can’t hear anything. It’s the North by Northwest trick of using noise to drown out dialogue for effect, and it is used brilliantly.

Less brilliant, however, is the plot, which is deliberately enigmatic and offers the viewer little opportunity to follow what exactly is going on. We know where things will end up eventually, but just as in Fight Club, whose two main characters are analogous to the ones here, the film doesn’t really explain the eventual demise (or murder) of the more reckless one, except to imply a kind of Pleasantville transformation brought on by choosing action instead of stagnation.

Paddy Considine stars in Simon’s beloved sci-fi television series here as an unnamed laser-gun toter whom he eventually tries to emulate, but even this explanation is fraught with a lack of clarity and doesn’t help us all that much.

The Double is a stylish, surrealist neo-noir that you shouldn’t be watching if you expect all your questions answered, but on top of wonderful casting and a frightening sense of doom throughout, this may be one of the most original films in recent memory.

Profile (2018)

André Crous

Profile, Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller for the 21st century, makes clever and abundant use of everyday technology to replicate immediacy and inspire fear in the viewer. 

ProfileUK
4*

Director:
Timur Bekmambetov
Screenwriters:
Brittany Poulton
Olga Kharina
Timur Bekmambetov
Anna Érelle

Running time: 105 minutes

“Screen live” is the new hand-held. By having the film screen essentially replicate a computer screen, the viewer gets the visceral sensation that things are taking place “for real” without any apparent staging or editing. Of course, in the back of our heads, we know this is all directed (in this case, by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov), but onscreen, we see applications or services that we know – Skype, FaceTime, Gmail – used as we use them, and thus, we sympathise with the main character. But because the lesson of positioning the camera in the physical space of the protagonist failed as far back as the infamous Lady in the Lake, “screen live” films use a much better option: the Web cam.

Obviously, the reason for using “screen live” is to emphasise both the pivotal role that electronic communication plays in the story and to create a novel sense of immediacy and enhance the feeling of realism. The astounding Canadian short film Noah was one of the earliest examples and is still the benchmark, particularly because of its dynamic style of filmmaking that also incorporates a kind of a fast motion to bridge gaps in time, but Bekmambetov’s Profile is another serious and largely successful push for this kind of approach to narrative representation.

Based on the real-life story of French journalist Anna Érelle, who posed as a Muslim girl online to find out more about the recruitment of girls from the West by ISIS fighters and was swept up in a web of trouble, Profile transposes its story to the UK, where Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) is looking for her next big story to break. Constantly behind on her rent and desperate to be taken more seriously in the newsroom, especially by her fast-talking boss, Vicky (a flawless, pirouette-like performance by Christine Adams, who dominates every Skype broadcast in which we see her), she creates a fake Facebook profile as a recent convert to Islam and starts liking and sharing ISIS videos.

She quickly gets noticed by a young man named Abu Bilel Al-Britani (Shazad Latif), a British-born ISIS fighter now living in Syria who asks her about her path to finding Islam and gently quizzes her about one day coming to Syria to join their noble cause. Every conversation with him is a giant lie, and she has to record it all on Skype. At the beginning, an IT employee at the news station, who knows Arabic and whose mother is from Syria, listens in on the conversation and finds the whole thing chilling. So do we, because the full-screen format of the interaction makes us feel we are also implicated in the lie, and we know the punishment for crossing an ISIS fighter – we have seen it in glimpses of the beheading videos that Amy reposts on her profile under the moniker “Melody Nelson”.

To make herself feel more integrated and in order to prevent herself from feeling guilty, helped along by the devastatingly handsome, charming and persuasive Bilel, she gradually cuts off her social interaction with her boyfriend and other friends and focuses on extracting as much information as possible from Bilel. She wants to know how young girls become vulnerable enough to contemplate leaving their community for ISIS-controlled Syria, and the picture Bilel paints is one of a paradise of freedom with ample opportunities to live in luxury for very little money. Compared with the financial difficulty Amy faces in London, we can quickly see how she might be enticed and how she is simulating the conditions for herself to be radicalised, too.

Bekmambetov manages to sustain this constant dread in the pit of our stomachs for a very long time as we see Amy being gripped ever more tightly in the hands of the terrorist, even as she knows better, a bit like the fable of the boiling frog. They spend a great deal of time together, with Bilel doing most of the talking, and she sees him in many different situations, from him playing football with his fellow fighters to cooking at home – an activity they share via Skype that is terrifying precisely because it is so intimate.

The acting from both players is superb, particularly because Kane and Latif are asked to do something quite unusual: always look directly into the (Web) camera. There is almost never any direct physical interaction between the person appearing onscreen and anyone else. And yet, this virtual interaction, nourished mostly by the tension that is generated by all the windows opening and closing as Amy tries to collect information in secret, consistently grabs our attention. Thus, “screen live” is used not only to convey a sense of immediacy and a feeling of familiarity but also to grab our attention and raise our level of anxiety.

On an interesting side note, we see the breathless coverage of ISIS in the media, as Amy locates articles online while she is chatting with Bilel. Most of this coverage is about the atrocities committed by the radical Islamists, complete with videos of their actions. But funnily enough, Profile shows all of this information is usually blared across the website of the Daily Telegraph tabloid, which has the opposite effect on many of its readers than the one that is intended: The sheer volume of videos makes the events feel less distant, and thus, those who are susceptible may just be supported in their radicalisation.

While the last 15 minutes of the film devolve into slight hysteria, and the film does cheat a little by skipping over all of Amy’s offline conversations and interactions, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking that lays out a clear path for other directors looking to profit off of this relatively novel format. Time has to be limited, the focus has to be very clear, and the filmmaker should make every effort to utilise the possibilities of his or her screen, which means switching between programmes and windows for the sake of dynamism, secrecy and revelation. Profile does all of this, and the importance of the real-life origins of the story in framing the events as more than just feasible cannot be underestimated. On top of the message that even the smallest interactions online can have very real-life consequences and that you are never really anonymous in the virtual world, this is a very topical film.

This is Bekmambetov’s first time directing but third time producing a “screen live” film. The other two were the 2014 horror Unfriended and 2018 Sundance thriller Search. 

Film viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.

God’s Own Country (2017)

André Crous

God’s Own Country borrows so much from Ang Lee’s famous cowboy romance it should have been titled “Brokeback on the Moors”.

God's Own CountryUK
3.5*

Director:
Francis Lee
Screenwriter:
Francis Lee
Director of Photography:
Joshua James Richards

Running time: 105 minutes

Two strapping young lads herding sheep by day and making love to each other one night out in the field? Check. Do we see spit being used instead of lube? Yes. Is there an awkward silence the next morning? Absolutely. Does the one deliberately look in front of him while the other changes his underwear in the background? That, too. And is there evident yearning when one of them smells a piece of clothing left behind by the one who is no longer there? Yes, even that.

God’s Own Country, an often assured feature-film début by British director Francis Lee, borrows whole-cloth from Brokeback Mountain without adding much of its own, although the story has been altered slightly for the sake of updating and transposing Ang Lee’s landmark 2005 film to the grittier moors of the English countryside.

The central character here is Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor), a farm boy barely out of his teens, whom we first lay eyes on late one night when he is throwing up in the toilet bowl of his parents’ farmhouse in Yorkshire. The next morning, we learn this is a regular occurrence, and we soon realise why: In this small farming community, being gay is not yet entirely acceptable, and even though Johnny has frequent encounters (penetration, never kissing) with whoever locks eyes with him at the bar or an auction, the idea of a relationship with a man is a foreign concept to him.

His father has suffered a stroke and realises his son is not up to the job of taking on his role on the farm. Thus, a (presumably) low-paying position as a temporary farmhand opens up, and this is when a brooding young Romanian migrant, Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu, who looks like he could be Oscar Isaac’s brother) arrives on the scene, not without his own baggage. Things develop more or less as we expect, although these two characters are much more secure in their sexuality than Jack and Ennis the cowboys, their famous fictional counterparts from the early 2000s, who were admittedly a product of their time.

Lee’s handling of the relationship is very sensitive at the outset, and the two characters complement each other in just the right way: the immature Johnny, whose idea of the world only extends as far as the closest pub, has had plenty of sexual encounters but no intimacy, while Gheorghe, who has travelled to the United Kingdom on his own and seems much wiser about the ways of the world, takes on the role of both lover and father to the slightly awkward Englishman. The scene in which the two finally kiss, after much reluctance from Johnny, is paced just right and a striking testament to Gheorghe’s patience and tenderness.

Unfortunately, the film’s final moments are an absolute travesty – the kind of fairytale development that lessens the film’s thoughtfulness and is wholly at odds with the rest of the plot. It feels almost like it was tacked on as an afterthought for the sake of greater viewer satisfaction and commercial success, but the resolution to the climax’s dramatic complication is a myopic idea of romance that one character is too callow to deserve and the other is too good to concede.

The ending is a big disappointment, but the rest of the film does a good job of making the rough contours of a relationship seem less sharp-edged.

All in all, while the meaning of its title remains an enigma, God’s Own Country is mostly a compelling reworking of a tale we have seen before, and the reason lies primarily with the small group of very committed actors. Besides O’Connor and Secăreanu, Ian Hart as Johnny’s stern but paternal father and Gemma Jones as the devoted grandmother both warm our hearts with their candid but caring interactions with Johnny.

Viewed at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival.

The Danish Girl (2014)

André Crous

Tom Hooper’s Danish Girl, which tells an important story about a historic, groundbreaking gender transition, struggles to confront its own identity crisis.

UK
3*

Directed by:
Tom Hooper
Screenwriter:
Lucinda Coxon
Director of Photography:
Danny Cohen

Running time: 120 minutes

The Danish Girl, which was 2014’s much-talked-about transgender movie, puts on a very strange face right at the outset, for no apparent reason. Given the title, one would expect the film to open in Denmark, and indeed it does, except the landscape is about as un-Danish as one can imagine. Instead of the ever so slightly rolling countryside, we see giant mountains rising up from the coast. In fact, despite the plot (and this scene!) being set in Denmark, these mountains are in western Norway’s Møre og Romsdal county. For a film that is supposed to be all about its main character’s true nature, this is an absolutely unforgivable and truly puzzling moment.

The sudden fame of Caitlyn Jenner over the year immediately preceding the release of the film had catapulted transgender individuals onto centre stage at about the same time as the rest of the LGBT family was finally granted the opportunity to marry, on an equal footing with all the rights and responsibilities of heterosexual marriage, in the United States. Jenner was praised in some quarters and reviled in others by both gay and straight people alike, but it is rather obvious that the central character in The Danish Girl, Lili Elbe (born Einar Wegener), was chosen because she was the first person ever to undergo sex reassignment surgery — nearly 90 years ago — and because she is much more likeable than Jenner.

Even if the film stupidly deceives us with its opening (and closing) visuals, the story of Einar (played by the very suitably delicate-featured Eddie Redmayne) accepting his inner Lili has the advantage of being both true and topical. It is a story that will find a certain audience, but the reasons are unfortunate. For one, there is very little drama, both internal and external. The film contains only a single scene of violence committed against Einar because of his sexually ambiguous features and provides precious little insight into his moments of self-doubt or self-reflection. He writes a diary to make sense of his feelings, but we never discover what he writes.

Luckily for him, but unfortunately for the film, there is surprisingly little drama in his marriage, too. Einar, an artist, is married to a fellow painter, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who appears to care for him so deeply that she simply accepts her husband’s transition almost without blinking an eye. While her response is unquestionably loving and beautiful, it also removes any drama that might result in a better understanding of the situation from either side.

The major challenge here is to get the audience to fully appreciate the situation from Einar’s point of view. Despite his feminine features, he appears to be living a happy life with Gerda in the early 1920s, even though they have been trying without success to have a child of their own. Early in the film, Gerda asks Einar to pose for her in women’s clothing so that she can add a final touch to one of her paintings. Embarrassed, he acquiesces, and then he suddenly has a eureka moment with the fabric as he is stroking it across his skin.

Before long, he is wearing his wife’s clothes under his own, putting on makeup and dressing up to go out into the world as Lili. Gerda is a little surprised but not entirely shocked, until she discovers Lili has been seeing a young man, Henrik (Ben Whishaw), for companionship. While the viewer can come up with reasons for this behaviour, the film does not provide them and instead glosses over any discussion of them entirely.

We get small but very simplistic hints to fill in Einar’s back story — for example, Gerda relates how she propositioned him on their first date, how she kissed him, instead of the other way around, and how it felt like she was kissing herself. The writing here is utterly transparent and about as helpful as having a gay character say he once played with a doll when he was a boy.

The story starts to pick up once the couple relocates to Paris, where Einar gradually starts to mimic the gestures of the women around him in order to appear more feminine when he behaves as Lili. Here, Einar/Lili and Gerda also meet up with Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts), a childhood friend of Hans’s, who brings some much-needed complexity to the storyline.

The film’s desire to be accessible has watered down the emotional turmoil that one would expect from Einar/Lili and Gerda. Its depiction of the many doctors who fail to understand Einar’s condition, each of whom comes across as vile if not sadistic, is just as ridiculous. At other times, shocking revelations are not followed by the expected conversations but rather by ellipses that are incredibly frustrating because the director does not have the stomach to show us how the couple argues.

The Danish Girl brought the world the story of a groundbreaking icon of the movement for acceptance of (unconventional) sexual identity, but its reliance on suggestion rather than a rich narrative and sturdier characters undermines its own significance. While the film is far more capably directed than Hooper’s laughable Les Misérables, it never comes close to the sheer whirlwind of passion that so vividly brought his The King’s Speech to life.

The Angels’ Share (2012)

André Crous

Ken Loach goes easy on the grit, promotes the inspirational side of this dramatic fairy tale in which Scottish whisky plays a central role. 

Angels’ ShareUK
3.5*

Director:
Ken Loach
Screenwriter:
Paul Laverty
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 100 minutes

Ken Loach is not exactly known for the flippant nature of his films. He has, together with fellow British director Mike Leigh, carved out the gritty social-realist niche of his country’s film industry and has done so methodically over more than four decades since one of his first films, Kes, burst onto the screen in 1969.

His primary focus on the working class and his obviously sincere attempts to capture their toil and struggles, and represent them by actors in a fictional film, has gained him a large following of filmgoers who perceive the cinema as a tool to bring such naturalism to people’s attention.

In The Angels’ Share, he still follows that line, though the territory he stakes out is a bit more obviously cinematic than one would have expected from him. Nonetheless, the film’s best bits are all firmly tied to the central, slightly contrived, thrust of the narrative, and oddly enough the bits of social drama we would have guessed to be Loach’s strong suit come across as little more than an afterthought.

Set in Glasgow, the film opens with a gorgeous introductory sequence in juvenile court, where many young boys and girls are mostly sentenced to community service for their various crimes. One of the boys is a young man called Robbie (Paul Brannigan), who has a scar across his face, which he got, we soon learn, one night when he was walking the streets while coked up and decided it would be a good idea to kick a random stranger to within an inch of his life.

We never see the rest of Robbie’s family, and he spends most of his evenings on a mattress at a friend’s apartment. He has just become a father, but his girlfriend’s family has no intention of allowing him to associate with his new-born son. There are other young men, too, who threaten to beat him up if they see him around, and the fear he has for his well-being is as warranted as it is constant.

These threats manifest themselves in a few small scenes of mild violence, but Robbie doesn’t seem to live in any fear and refuses to let the young hoodlums get to him. This storyline doesn’t always come across as coherently as it should, as Robbie’s girlfriend appears and disappears for the sake of a narrative that seems to pretend it has powerful domestic questions to resolve, but actually this is just padding for the other storyline.

This other part of the film is much more interesting, though it is by no means exceptional. It has to do with Robbie’s friendship with Harry (John Henshaw), the father-like guard on duty during the community service hours, from whom he learns all about whisky and discovers he has a natural talent for appreciating this malt spirit. He is noticed by a whisky collector, Thaddeus (Roger Allam), who is impressed by Robbie’s knowledge and feeling for the drink. And the time Robbie has spent in jail comes in handy enough when he recognises the potential money to be made from the whisky industry.

Like magic dust on the grim, directionless lives of the main characters, most of them involved in community service projects after run-ins with the law, the “angels’ share” in the title refers to the small fraction of whisky that disappears over time while it is kept in the oak barrels. It evaporates and is therefore handed to the angels, as it were. The film’s intention is to make whisky a kind of golden elixir that gives Robbie a new lease on life, or perhaps a new life altogether, pulling him up into the ranks of honest work, and for this purpose the drink is well-chosen.

Like the work of fellow countryman Leigh, Loach draws very credible performances from his actors, many of whom, including lead actor Brannigan, had never starred in a film before. There is very little in the film that feels acted or staged, with the exception of Robbie’s girlfriend, who sometimes delivers her lines with visibly less poise than her fellow cast members.

The Angels’ Share is performed in a very strong Glaswegian accent that is not always easy to follow, though the actions and the general ambience of the film are put onscreen very well and allow viewers outside Glasgow to follow the storyline and easily empathise with these characters. While issues of drugs and poverty are touched on, the film has an optimistic approach to the representation of this working-class segment of the population and seeks to inspire the viewer.

This inspirational approach produces something a bit like a fairy tale that may not be credible to everyone, but it makes for a film well worth watching.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

André Crous

While 12 Years a Slave has its share of problems moving from the page to the screen, it is a haunting film that raises the bar for all other depictions of the 19th-century South.

12-years-a-slaveUSA/UK
3.5*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriter:
John Ridley
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 135 minutes

The most famous shot in Gaspar Noë’s agonising Irréversible shows a woman in an underground passage in Paris being raped while the camera remains nearly static in front of her, and we helplessly watch her face as she endures relentless brutality. There is a similar shot near the beginning of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, in which we see the formerly freeman Solomon Northup strapped in chains to the floor of a small cell, kneeling towards a barred opening in the wall and being beaten again and again – so hard, in fact, that the implements break upon his back – by a slave owner who bought him from money-hungry kidnappers.

While not without its minor faults, the film is a powerful portrayal of one man’s journey into slavery and is a much-needed improvement over other films in recent years that dealt with the unequal rights of African Americans in U.S. history, such as The Butler.

This adaptation of the real-life Northup’s autobiographical tale relates in great detail how he was a freeman but was likely drugged and sold into slavery, shipped to plantations in Louisiana and had to spend 12 gruelling years (most of them under the whip of a vicious plantation owner named Epps) as someone’s property in conditions that are equally inhuman.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Northup, who has to take the name “Platt” during a slave auction and is stuck with the name for the rest of his time as a slave. Ejiofor’s portrayal of his character, very evidently guided by McQueen’s firm hand, is subtle but consistent, and the film’s ending is a magnificent display of the emotional power that is unleashed when anticipation meets catharsis – with Northup at the centre.

This being a McQueen film, the visuals are breathtaking and slightly unconventional. He is fond of shots that last longer than they would in most other films, and while the beating of Northup, described above, is the most evident example, another impressive shot is the static shot showing the aftermath of an attempted lynching. The horror of the scene is stunningly underscored by the daily activities on the farm continuing to take place as if the victim – straining his neck to free him from the noose – wasn’t even present and struggling for his life. Some viewers may be put off by the use of a few of these lingering shots, as they very often serve to pause rather than emphasise, with the striking exception of this excruciating post-lynching portrait.

The film opens halfway through the story, with Northup trying to fashion a writing implement to no avail and rebuffing the nocturnal advances of a girl who sleeps next to him in the tiny wooden slave cabin.

We then flash back to his life as a free citizen of the northern states, where he lives with his wife and two young children and makes his living as an accomplished violinist. He is called upon by two mysterious gentlemen who promise him great financial reward, and together they travel southward, where he is taken captive in the dark of night, having knocked back too many glasses of alcohol in celebration of his big journey to Washington, D.C. He wakes up in a slave pen, chained, naked and alone, and he has to deny his own status as a freeman.

In Northup’s memoir, he soon impresses with his skills as a violinist, but the film changes this detail in order to establish a bond between Northup and his first owner, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who seems like a man he can trust to set him free. However, Ford’s unwillingness or powerlessness is revealed in two wonderful interactions (between Northup and Ford; and Northup and fellow slave Eliza), neither of which features in the novel, that make clear Ford’s wilful blindness even while we still share Northup’s view of him as a man whom we can call noble in many other respects.

12 Years a Slave is a very faithful cinematic adaptation of the eponymous novel, although it has its share of modifications, two of which stand out: The first concerns the scene in which Northup is chased through the swamp and has to hide from the bloodhounds. It has been omitted from the film, which is a shame, as it was without a doubt the most riveting scene of the entire book.

The second regards the story’s point of view. As the novel was written in the first person, Northup always made it clear which events he experienced with his own body and which ones he learned about from someone else. We had complete faith in Northup when he told the story from his perspective, and we believed the other stories because he believed them. Northup is in almost every single scene of McQueen’s film, but the inclusion of a scene in which he is not present at all – the late-night rape of the young Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o) by the plantation owner Epps (Michael Fassbender) – make no sense beyond upping our indignation, which by that stage has already reached fever pitch. The terror, violence and disrespect inflicted on Northup are enough to get our empathy: We didn’t need McQueen deploying other characters to mine our souls for pity.

But while the focus could have been tighter and the scenes stitched together more smoothly (indications of the passage of time also would have been helpful, although perhaps this frustration with chronological orientation is exactly what the director intended), the direction is firm, and the effect on the audience is at times devastating. The storyline involving Patsy – particularly those scenes in which Northup is also present, and we can see his reaction to the injustice committed against this young woman whom Epps’s wife despises because of her beauty – is heartrending and produces a very successful depiction of what the book merely mentions in passing.

12 Years a Slave is McQueen’s third film as a director (following Hunger and Shame) and is his best attempt yet to fuse his artistic sensibility with more commercial narrative demands.