Author: André Crous

Daisies (1966)

André Crous

Věra Chytilová’s inventive Daisies is never straightforward, and more than 50 years on, it still has some kooky flashes of brilliance.

Daisies SedmikráskyCzechoslovakia
4*

Director:
Věra Chytilová
Screenwriters:
Věra Chytilová
Ester Krumbachová
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Sedmikrásky

Her name might be “Jarmila”, or it could be “Julie”. That is how she variously introduces herself to others. She calls her best friend “Marcelka” in public, but when they’re alone, they address each other as “Marie”. This is all beside the point, however, because the name that shines the brightest across this quirky narrative landscape is “Věra”.

The two young women in question have come to be referred to as the dark-haired “Marie I” (Jitka Cerhová) and the fair-haired “Marie II” (Ivana Karbanová), the stars of Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film, Daisies (Sedmikrásky). The duo is not only the story’s main characters but also the only characters of any consequence. This is their tale, and they couldn’t care less about the people around them, especially the men. (Every single scene would pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.) In fact, the same may be said of Chytilová’s attitude towards traditional narrative filmmaking.

Considered one of the highlights of the Czech New Wave, Daisies made a splash for a whole host of reasons. In the director’s native Czechoslovakia, it sparked controversy upon its release, and its local distribution was heavily suppressed after it drew the ire of the country’s president. A few months later, a deputy in the National Assembly called it “trash” and heatedly enquired what the film might offer “working people in factories, in fields and on construction sites”. One specific point of criticism he had was the film’s apparent delight in showing food wastage.

Admittedly, it does feature a stunning amount of food being wasted, and no reference is made to factories, fields or construction sites. The goal was to offer a different vision: a story that, on the surface, is far removed from the humdrum of everyday life but pokes the stifling social order by using a wild and atypical approach to depict the escapades of two happy-go-lucky girls. Chytilová issued a particular challenge to the country’s totalitarian government because her criticism was wrapped up in an exuberantly artistic sensibility – one whose subversive message was evident but difficult to define and, thus, perturbed those seeking to control creative endeavours.

In the first seven decades of the cinematic art form, a small number of films had been made by female directors, and there had been a few more starring women in the lead roles, but these two circles hardly ever overlapped. Prior to Chytilová, women were not prohibited from making films or portraying anything other than damsels in distress or femmes fatales, but her Daisies broke the mould: It was directed by a woman, written by two women (Chytilová and influential screenwriter/costume designer Ester Krumbachová) and featured its two wholly independent-minded Maries in every single scene. It had been – and remains – a rarity for women to be so fully represented in this creative triad.

But the film’s unusual nature didn’t stop there. In contrast to the more dramatic, serious films of her peers at the time, like Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Chytilová chose to undertake a delightfully playful project. She deployed several unconventional editing techniques to inject visual surprises into her work and even undercut the male characters by having the women perform a memorable act of symbolic castration.

In the monochromatic opening scene, the Maries, wearing similarly patterned bikinis, make up their minds to shake things up. After deciding to “be bad” (in other words, to reject the status quo), they promptly jump off-screen into a brightly lit meadow, where they are shown, for the first time, in full colour. Evidently, the rather subversive implication is that being “bad” adds colour to life.

Throughout the episodic but free-flowing film, they play the children’s game Vadí nevadí (“It matters, it doesn’t matter”, similar to “Truth or Dare”) without getting flustered or hesitating to carry out each other’s wishes and, in so doing, push past social conventions. But their relationship remains undefined, and because they don’t seem to have lives beyond their friendship, they are mere ciphers, marionettes in the hands of Chytilová. At one point, sharing a bathtub filled to the brim with milk, they rightfully question whether they even exist.

Speaking of liquid being wasted, the film’s climax is a scene of such gastronomic debauchery it still hasn’t lost any of its shock value: Upon discovering a banquet-style buffet laid out in an empty hall, the two women move from one seat to the next, gorging themselves on a variety of meats, vegetables and desserts. After lobbing cakes at each other, they start throwing everything else that is edible, too, and turn the event into a proper food fight before strutting on the table, using it as a catwalk to crush the food under their high heels. All that’s missing is a literal applecart for them to upset.

The biggest twist of the knife in the heart of the regime comes a few moments later, when they suddenly decide to no longer be bad and return to being “good”: Back in monochrome, whispering to each other that hard work will make them happy, they carefully place all the broken pieces of crockery on the table, as if preparing for a meal, before lying down and meeting a grisly end. Chytilová appears to suggest that, under the strictures of communism, life is about going through the motions: You mechanically engage in (pointless) work, you pretend to be happy, and then you die – not quite the message the government wanted people to contemplate.

As she would continue to do in subsequent productions, Chytilová also shatters the illusion that men play any substantial role in women’s lives. In a very cheeky scene, Marie II uses scissors to cut a bread roll, a gherkin, some sausages, an egg and finally a banana into pieces while a man – who, significantly, is never shown – unsuccessfully tries to woo her over the phone.

But the destruction is much more widespread than a few sliced-up snacks. It also seeps into the physical manifestation of the film itself. In the restaurant, the two Maries upend convention by starting with dessert and finishing with the main course. And when Marie II devours the whole chicken she has on her plate, the camera essentially takes it personally as it begins to sputter and squirt in colour, alternately converting greys to purples, oranges, greens and blues and leaping across time. Later, to further underscore the notion that films themselves have traditionally been male, the images shatter into fragments when the Maries play with scissors.

Here and there, one can draw parallels with other films (perhaps most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark 1960 film Breathless, because of the jump-cut transitions), but Daisies is indisputably sui generis. Chytilová’s creation is a joyous celebration of turning the grim and dreary communist reality on its head and replacing it with something vivid and refreshing, albeit at times maddeningly incomprehensible.

Despite the short 80-minute running time, however, many viewers today might be put off by the characters’ lack of growth. Marie I and Marie II agree on everything, quite unlike the slow identity melding of the two women in Ingmar Bergman’s cerebral Persona, released the same year. While Daisies is dynamic and reaches for ever more imaginative ways to subvert the art form and its conventions, the Maries never face any real crisis in need of a resolution.

In addition, the visual gimmicks are inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary, the film doesn’t fall neatly into a genre, and at times the actresses’ deliberately mechanical, unnatural performances render their Maries silly and hard to relate to. They are neither glorified nor put on trial for their vapid conduct and their excess. And yet, perhaps because the “bad” behaviour they so nonchalantly engage in is much more interesting than the “good”, it doesn’t matter, because their brash hedonism is positively contagious.

Daisies may be more than 50 years old, but as a collage of female expression and a light-hearted romp in the face of suffocating state control, it holds up well and continues to entertain.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

André Crous

Thirteen years after Peter Jackson’s first Tolkien film, his sixth offers little proof he has matured as a filmmaker.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five ArmiesUSA/New Zealand
3.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Desolation of Smaug

With the release of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, the sixth and hopefully the last film in Peter Jackson’s canon of J.R.R. Tolkien productions, the New Zealand director has proved decisively that he is not so much a storyteller as he is a choreographer, or more particularly an orchestrator of epic spectacle. He trains his focus on presenting and overwhelming the viewer with the larger-than-life world where the magnificent story is set, but the way in which the characters behave or appear is often riddled with clichés that speak of his immaturity as a teller of tales or a director of actors.

Such an assessment may sound harsh and unjustified, especially because Jackson’s name, in connection with the world of Middle-earth, rouses much admiration for his ability to use or create a vast canvas filled with battles and wizards that seem part of a familiar reality rather than a fantasy. This third instalment is the best of the Hobbit trilogy, but as a whole, these three films are surprisingly disappointing in comparison with his work on The Lord of the Rings, released 2001–03.

The reasons for this are legion and range from the quality and scale of the books themselves to the much-criticised approach of breaking the short novel (The Hobbit) into three separate films. But what is particularly irksome is the almost soap-opera acting in the director’s most recent works.

From characters looking off into the distance as they digest bad news (the elves, in particular, are prone to such conduct, and sometimes the camera tracks in on their faces for even greater emphasis) to histrionic displays of emotion (e.g. the face-pulling that Bain, the son of Lake-town’s Bard, engages in), there is plenty of theatrics to undermine our suspension of disbelief. And the less said about the corrupt councillor, Alfrid, who is an odious fellow that ultimately dresses up in women’s clothing and scampers off with gold coins in his voluptuous bosom, supposedly intended as a source of comedy, the better.

As the title indicates, a giant battle is central to this final part of The Hobbit. It takes place at the Lonely Mountain, where the Dwarves, along with the Elves and the humans, have little time to celebrate the departure of the dragon Smaug, as they soon face hordes of Orcs and Wargs that seek to capitalise on the mountain’s strategic position and the riches that remain inside it.

Smaug, which lent its name to the second instalment, is killed off very early on in the film, and this death firmly establishes Bard’s significance and determination. Played by Luke Evans, this character is a mixture of emotion and bravery, but the actor ensures there is never any doubt about the character’s commitment to justice, and unlike some of the others, we can always take him seriously.

One would expect a film with a sub-title like “Battle of the Five Armies” to be about bloodshed and courage, but while there are such moments involving the two main characters, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), it is in fact more about friendship, loyalty and understanding than anything else. More to the point, it is about the necessity of living together in harmony, avoiding the dark side and allowing others to love whomever they choose. The sentiment is sincere, but Jackson’s attempts to make these ideas visible in his story are overblown.

He handles the relationship between Kíli the Dwarf and Tauriel the Elf slightly better than was the case in The Desolation of Smaug, only because these two spend very little time together. However, the back story to Elvenking Thranduil’s objections to Tauriel’s love offers only superficial psychological insights into his character that culminate in embarrassing final heart-to-hearts between him and his son, Legolas, and him and Tauriel. (He acknowledges he was wrong about the purity of her love when he utters the cringeworthy statement, “It hurts because it was real.”)

And for the most part, Jackson is content to keep using the same cinematic language he used in The Lord of the Rings more than a decade ago to render spirits. He also still clearly enjoys employing slow motion as often as possible. His aerial shots are used somewhat more judiciously than in Smaug, but when it comes to the photography of vast vistas framed on either side by steep mountainsides, we get the feeling of déjà vu.

The world the director depicts can be the same without him having to revert to the same shots and same framing he used on previous outings. Jackson’s back projection in some of his scenes is just terrible, and the composition of the shots is generally the same: Gandalf on a horse, or Legolas hanging onto a cave bat, shot from up close and well lit, with the fuzzy and more sombre background in motion behind them. One would never guess this is the most expensive trilogy in motion picture history: This film alone reportedly cost $250 million, or around $1.7 million a minute.

The titular battle, which starts exactly at the halfway mark and lasts for most of the rest of the film, is not nearly as impressively staged as Jackson’s all-time great, the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, because he focuses too strenuously on Thorin’s development from being a power-hungry king to proving his friendship with Bilbo. And despite the 145-minute running time, there are major gaps in the narrative, especially regarding the movements of Bard during this battle.

As with Return of the King, the ending takes a while and could have been much shorter, because the screenplay keeps dropping intertextual references to Jackson’s earlier trilogy that seek to dovetail this story with the other one. Poor Bilbo returns from his adventure a whimpering, stuttering mess filled with emotion, a sight we certainly could have been spared.

While the best (and, thankfully, the shortest) of the trilogy, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies underlines what should have been obvious by now: Peter Jackson has substantial imagination and obviously enough technical know-how to conjure a world of wonder, but he lacks the ability to tell his stories without reverting to the most banal narrative clichés. Moreover, his actors are more or less left to their own (all too often defective) devices. The film will make a generous profit despite its astronomical budget, and filmmakers like James Cameron will likely follow the same path of simplifying their stories while maximising the visuals of the world they offer for the viewer’s consumption.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

André Crous

In The Desolation of Smaug, the second Hobbit instalment, Peter Jackson takes an unfortunate page from Spielberg’s book.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of SmaugUSA/New Zealand
3*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 160 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Battle of the Five Armies

When the first film in the Hobbit trilogy was released, everyone kept talking about the disproportionate length of the films (totalling around nine hours) compared with the size of the source text, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 300-page novel. If War and Peace could be made into a three-hour film, what prevented Jackson from producing a film length commensurate with the size of his story?

It doesn’t take an outsized intellect to recognise financial considerations playing an important role here, and one would expect that, if anyone could entertain us for such an extended period of time, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson would be the man for the job. But just as The Hobbit precedes the story contained in The Lord of the Rings, so too does this current batch of films seem to be the work of a much less experienced director.

Because this second instalment of The Hobbit, titled The Desolation of Smaug, is the second film of a three-part series, we cannot have expected there to be much to get excited about, as it functions mostly as a bridge between the first and last parts of the story. But the same was true of the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, and yet Jackson used majestic battle scenes and spectacular locations to his advantage to keep our attention.

Very little happens in Smaug, at least until the very end, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarfs reach the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), where Smaug the dragon has lain in a chamber full of gold ever since he chased out the dwarfs, to whose kingdom he had laid waste. For the most part, we are on a journey with the dozen characters as they travel through Mirkwood Forest, arrive at Lake-town thanks to a complicated and conflicted widower and cross Long Lake to Erebor, where Bilbo is charged with stealing the Arkenstone gem from Smaug. On a parallel track, we see Gandalf the Grey’s realisation that he and his companions are up against something much more evil than they had anticipated.

But our unease with this film has as much to do with the thin storyline – once more spread over some two hours and 40 minutes – as it does with the embarrassingly amateurish presentation of romance onscreen.

We can all remember the weepy relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Return of the King; in Smaug, the focus is on Kíli the Dwarf (Aidan Turner), the nephew of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a female elf from Mirkwood who is the object of Elven Prince Legolas’ affections. In the film, at any rate, Kíli certainly stands out among his band of brothers as he is the only dwarf without a beard, and when he and his fellow dwarfs are taken prisoner by Elvenking Thranduil, Legolas’ father, he immediately hits it off with Tauriel.

This initial attraction, in no way hidden, will quickly lead to the two swooning over each other. Jackson, for all his filmmaking prowess, simply cannot resist the temptation to go melodramatic on us. When Kíli is struck by a poisoned arrow in the thigh, it is up to Tauriel to rub the healing herb into his flesh while intoning a spell, and when Kíli looks up at her, would you believe, she seems to shimmer with a blinding angelic light. It is difficult not to laugh, as we get unfortunate flashbacks to the worst film in the Jackson canon, his calamitous The Lovely Bones from 2009.

Jackson’s camera also flies all over the place, often making us nauseous when a wild helicopter shot is inserted between much calmer visuals. For the director, it would seem that “coverage” implies catapulting his machinery in every direction and using that footage whenever he needs to cut away from someone for a brief moment. Reckless track-ins, especially in one of the opening scenes, in the Prancing Pony inn in Bree, are also tiresome because their use speaks to Jackson’s apparent inability to come up with creative solutions to creating tension – in this case, to suggest the potential dangers around Thorin.

One truly adventurous scene, however, occurs during the dwarfs’ escape from Mirkwood: At one point, the camera seems to be floating on the wild river and pans from side to side as one of the dwarfs rolls around in a barrel, mowing down the Orcs on the riverbank as he careers full-speed across the river bends. It is a breathtakingly choreographed bit of action, all in a single take, thoroughly reminiscent of the epic single-take chase scene in the Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg–directed The Adventures of Tintin.

Smaug may be Bilbo’s tale, but it belongs entirely to the titular dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is much more clever than he appears to be, and while he certainly poses a threat to the existence of all in Middle-earth – and the glint in his eye looks almost exactly like Sauron – we cannot help but respect his intelligence and even his wiliness, and Cumberbatch’s work here is mesmerizing.

While Smaug isn’t at the same level as Jackson’s three films from the beginning of the millennium, and despite the often amateurish representation of romance or infatuation, it is certainly an improvement on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and time goes by more quickly (that might be because the film is nearly 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor).

Unfortunately, Bilbo is not as active as we would like him to be, and he all but completely disappears from view in the Lake-town scenes. After we had lost Gandalf in The Two Towers, he reappeared towards the end with reinforcements at Helm’s Deep and provided one of the most memorable moments of that extraordinary film. But by the end of Smaug, Bilbo has done so little that we forget about him, and the film literally leaves him hanging – in a cage at Dol Guldur, where he discovers the Necromancer.

The Desolation of Smaug showcases little of the imagination we have come to associate with Jackson and his previous depictions of Middle-earth. At times Spielbergian with his sentimentality, here he rarely awes us with the breadth of his vision. The scenes with Bilbo or Smaug – and especially with the two of them – are marvellous, and so is an early scene with giant spiders, but overall it would seem Jackson has lost his Midas touch.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

André Crous

Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit is faithful to the novel, but the epic length of this three-part production is unjustified.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected JourneyUSA/New Zealand
2.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 165 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Desolation of Smaug
– The Battle of the Five Armies

During the 10 years that elapsed between the making of the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the three films that compose the The Hobbit trilogy, it was unthinkable that anyone other than Peter Jackson could do justice to the original novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackson had created a landmark piece of cinema that melded a vast array of special effects, motion-capture technology and epic storytelling to produce films that were held together by a very strong story and dazzled us with some remarkable set pieces in the genres of adventure, drama, fantasy and war.

Perhaps it is true that Jackson was the only person who could have made The Hobbit at the same level as the Lord of the Rings films, but it is a pity he wasn’t aiming higher. In his previous trilogy, he pulled together a disparate group of individuals – four hobbits, a dwarf, an Elf, a wizard and two humans – with a dynamic sense of tension, action and friendship.

The Hobbit doesn’t reach the same level of excitement or provoke the same interest. At the beginning of the film, we see the dwarf kingdom prosper before being attacked and evicted from their own treasure-filled mountain, Erebor, by the dragon Smaug. Shortly afterwards, Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellen) knocks on the door of Bilbo Baggins’s (Martin Freeman) door in Hobbiton and manages to convince him, with some reverse psychology courtesy of a horde of dwarves – who raid his pantry – led by heir apparent Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), to join in the journey back to Erebor, somehow slay the dragon and win them their kingdom back.

In this sense, the story resembles, in broad strokes, the quest of the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings; however, the group is by no means as interesting as in the other films. This weak spot greatly impedes our engagement in the social fabric, despite magisterial efforts by Freeman.

But there is at least one marked difference between the narrative structures of the two series. Whereas The Lord of the Rings was told entirely in the present tense, except for that exquisite prologue narrated by Cate Blanchett in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit is framed as a story written by the old Bilbo to his nephew Frodo. The cuts back to him, 60 years after the events, which for those who haven’t seen the other films or read the books spoils the story by revealing he survived the ordeal, border on the tedious, and Frodo’s appearance here also seems more like a cameo than a necessity.

There is little variety in terms of the storyline and its different groupings of characters, but the film reaches a high point when Bilbo is separated from the group of dwarves, finds the One Ring and plays a game of riddles with Gollum. Gollum, even more than Gandalf or any of the elves, is the one character from The Lord of the Rings whom we are really glad to see again, and every minute spent in his company is electric with tension and expectation.

There is one aspect of the film, however, that is groundbreaking, and this deserves to be mentioned in every review. Films are usually recorded and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. That is the minimum amount of frames necessary to render a moving image that doesn’t suffer from the stuttering movements of early cinema. With The Hobbit, Jackson collected double the data and had many of the prints projected at 48 frames per second, a process that is called High Frame Rate, or HFR, coupled with 3-D effects.

The result is distracting as we are confronted with twice the amount of data as usual, and while things move at a more “natural” speed, it nonetheless seems to be too fast. It is effectively high-definition images, and with the three dimensions, rendered here more strikingly than in any other film this reviewer has ever seen, all pretense of fiction seems to disappear.

But, ironically, that is a problem. While the quest for so-called realism in the cinema is important for the viewer to feel somehow part of the action, there is a difference between feeling like you’re there and feeling like it’s reality.

Middle-earth is a realm of fantasy, and any illusion that the creatures are almost “real” will be easily rejected by the viewer, creating a barrier to our investment in the events, or feeling of being present.

Maybe it is merely a question of getting used to the HFR – it will almost certainly be used in the future – but this new technology would seem to benefit a documentary film much more than one set in a fictional fantasy land.

The two-dimensional version is much more palatable, and the same will be true of the 3-D version screened at the conventional 24 frames per second. In terms of tone and story, this first film, whose running time of 165 minutes is pure self-indulgence (the entire series is based on a book that is one-third as long as the Lord of the Rings supertome), is far from the success one had expected from Jackson.

Moffie (2019)

André Crous

In Moffie, an English-speaking conscript with an Afrikaans surname has to learn how to navigate the army’s world of machismo as a gay man during apartheid.

MoffieSouth Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Oliver Hermanus
Jack Sidey
Director of Photography:
Jamie D Ramsay

Running time: 100 minutes

Either you fall in line or you suffer the consequences. That is the message of the army and, let’s be honest, of society at large. If a recruit (or any other member of society) is brainwashed to believe that the fatherland should be defended even at the cost of sacrificing their own life, any resistance will seem like the work of the enemy. Those who are different, who cannot (or refuse to) toe the line and, therefore, hamper the development of a strong, homogeneous unit, become targets for removal.

In one of the first scenes of Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, a train the colour of blood is chugging along deep into the South African heartland. On the soundtrack, menacing strings with a Penderecki-like quality evoke a palpable fear. The year is 1981, the country is at war, and this cross-country railway is filled with adolescent flesh and bone – for the moment, still alive. Military service became compulsory for white South African men in June 1967 and was a practice that would last until shortly before the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

In the 1980s, scared of the danger of communism brewing in Angola, South Africa sent its young men to defend the ramparts. It was known as the South African Border War and was waged at the edge of the country’s mandate (colony), which it called South West Africa (Namibia). In many respects, South Africa amounted to a military theocracy whose authorities saw themselves and their purpose in biblical terms, and many of those fighting its war were Afrikaans boys around the age of 18. 

In Afrikaans, “moffie” means “faggot”. Incidentally, those two f’s in the middle, which here emphasise the condition of being (in the eyes of the speaker) effeminate and therefore afflicted, also pop up in the Afrikaans equivalent of the n-word. For whites in apartheid South Africa, being in control while being a minority meant standing up to the majority. To do this required (white) machismo, and to prove one’s mettle, war – often considered the manly activity par excellence – was the perfect testing ground. Being a moffie, by contrast, was regarded as unmanly. These two characteristics came head to head during the war on the border.

More than half the film is set at a training camp outside the town of Middelburg, in the middle of nowhere. Upon arrival, the conscripts are (and continue to be) mistreated and humiliated to the point of being dehumanised. Most strikingly, they are called various epithets rooted in the titular insult and told that they have to transform into real men. In charge of this sadistic torture is Sergeant Brand (“blaze” in Afrikaans), who appears to take glee in the youngsters’ despair and exhaustion.

One of them is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He is an outsider twice over: Among these dozens of Afrikaans boys, who speak the country’s language of power and authority, he is one of the only ones from an English family. He is also gay, as we can surmise from the opening scene when his father gives him a saucy present and he responds with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Lucky for him, he quickly finds Michael (Matthew Vey), another English boy, and the two bond over “Sugar Man” and, more superficially, being outsiders in this environment that values and promotes not only ethnic but also linguistic nationalism.

Before long, two young men with bloody faces are publicly paraded in front of their fellow soldiers. Nicholas hears they were caught kissing and then beaten up by a whole mob inside the camp. Now they are being sent off to the dreaded Ward 22. For the duration of the film, he lives in fear that this could happen to him, too. Meanwhile, everywhere he looks, he sees the straight guys touching each other and joking about their genitalia.

In the army, as in life, to be considered a man often means having to take part in a dick-measuring contest. And yet, this contest, by its very nature, vibrates with homoeroticism, as the Top Gun–inspired volleyball match reminds us. Hermanus adroitly conveys the confusion all of this creates in the young Nicholas, whose world becomes ever more complicated the closer he moves to what he desires.

At the same time, the training camp and its activities are designed to make the privates feel like children while scolding them for not behaving like men. This contradiction can only lead to conflict and combustion that many of these adolescent men simply cannot handle.

Hermanus’s debut feature, Shirley Adams, had a suicide. His sophomore film featured a rape in near silence. His third film had a triple murder followed by another murder. Although Moffie, his fourth film, also follows this trend (after all, it is a film about soldiers during wartime), even the moments of relative calm are rife with tension and the nauseating fear that such violence can erupt again at any time. The constant drumbeat of male-on-male violence and brutal macho aggression suffuses the narrative and thoroughly unsettles our experience of watching it.

The film proves the saying correct that mediocre books tend to make the best movies. The eponymous 2006 novel by André Carl van der Merwe has been completely overhauled, and the resulting adaptation is a vast improvement over the original text. Not only because the focus is much stronger but also because all the characters onscreen – even the most contemptible ones – have more nuance than their literary counterparts.

However, when choosing between showing too little or showing too much, Hermanus has consistently preferred the former. Unfortunately, this means that we get to know very little about Nicholas and his aspirations beyond his otherness. The intention may well be that he serves as a stand-in onto which the viewer can project their own stories, but this inscrutability does not always help to elicit our sympathy.

Apart from a peculiarly staged flashback (this is a memory, and there is no reason to highlight the continuity of time and space), we get no real insight into Nicholas’s life outside the army. It was a wise decision to forgo the novel’s multiple interludes into the past. However, the film is still stuck with this flashback that, clever as its depiction of a domineering but anonymous threat is, the director could have easily done away with altogether.

The film is a much more austere and melancholy portrayal of a white gay soldier in apartheid-era South Africa than Canary, which used camaraderie to alleviate the terror its characters experienced. In Moffie, there are no escape hatches. The flawless camerawork and the exquisite soundtrack (including Schubert’s “Piano Trio in E-flat major”, most famously used in Barry Lyndon but here countering the visuals in a jarring yet poetic way that would make Stanley Kubrick proud) do not portend a happy ending. In Hermanus’s films, the characters always end up having to negotiate a truce with disappointment. To survive, Nicholas will have to learn that, in the words of one Nobel Prize laureate who is cited in the film, “All I can be is me, whoever that is.”

With Moffie, Oliver Hermanus has seamlessly welded his stylistic ambitions to his raw material, shaping it to form – by far – the most elegant and coherently visceral film he has made to date. 

Atlantics (2019)

André Crous

Migration, an arranged marriage and zombies form the backbone of Atlantics, all under the ominous glow of an unfinished megatower in Dakar.

AtlanticsSenegal
3.5*

Director:
Mati Diop
Screenwriters:
Mati Diop
Olivier Demangel
Director of Photography:
Claire Mathon

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Atlantique

Resembling something straight out of Metropolis, Muejiza reaches into the sky like the Tower of Babel. It is still unfinished, but those working on the construction site are very unhappy – and with good reason. The developer, Mr. N’Diaye, hasn’t paid them in months. They have girlfriends or families to support, but Mr. N’Diaye is out of reach. They can’t wait any longer, and by nightfall, a group of them take a boat out to Spain. Within days, news reaches their community in Dakar that all of them have perished at sea.

One of the people hardest hit by the news is Ada (Mama Sané). Barely out of school, she was secretly seeing the dashing but now-late Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré). Their relationship was a secret because she is promised to Omar, a wealthy young Senegalese man working in Italy. But her mind is clearly elsewhere, and by the time her wedding night rolls around, her white nuptial bed bursts into flames. Not out of passion but, according to one police investigator, because of spontaneous combustion.

The policeman in charge of this apparent case of arson is Issa, who is around the same age as Souleiman. His boss, the commissioner, refers to him as a “young star”, though his investigative techniques leave us wondering whether he ever received any training. For some reason, he quickly suspects Souleiman of having survived, returned to Dakar, infiltrated the wedding party and set his girlfriend’s bed alight, all incognito. He is so adamant about this theory that he goes straight to Souleiman’s parents’ house, where he tells the grieving mother her son is still alive and has likely committed a crime. None of this endears him to the viewer. But there is something else that is weird. He keeps sweating so much that he collapses. This happens very often around sunset.

Soon enough, we see what all of this means. Halfway through the film, a group of women show up at the mansion belonging to Mr. N’Diaye and demand the three months of wages. Their eyes are all white as an oval moon. They are zombies, although we have seen some of them before among the living. Why these women, in particular, are the vessels for those who drowned at sea is left unexplained. Clearly, they represent the tens of thousands of women who are left behind in Senegal while men make the hazardous journey across the ocean to try their luck in Europe. But then, Issa also becomes a zombie and channels the departed Souleiman.

Again, we don’t get any explanation for why Issa serves as a vessel for Souleiman, nor is it evident why he is the only man to take on such a role. Most likely, the director wanted to avoid girl-on-girl intimacy at the film’s climax, but the screenplay suffers mightily because of this inconsistency and lack of a proper explanation. What makes it all the more confusing is that Issa had already started collapsing before his involvement in Ada’s case.

While the film has a certain charm about it, it leaves the viewer with many questions that are never answered. Ada and Souleiman spend very little time together before his fateful departure, and their interaction is limited. Souleiman doesn’t let Ada know when he leaves, so perhaps he didn’t view the relationship as anything substantive. This makes it difficult to empathise with Ada, whose melancholy persists for most of the film. And almost all of her best friends who come to the wedding are shocked to learn that she doesn’t really care for her new husband. Hadn’t she ever spoken to them before? In addition, there is also zero chemistry between her and Omar, and we get no hint of an explanation for their marriage.

Atlantics is full of images of the ocean that remind us again and again of the tide rolling out with boats of migrants and, presumably, rolling back in with the spirits of the dead. And the film does a wonderful lo-fi job with mirrors, while the grotesque, conspicuous tower is very realistically rendered through CGI. But the screenplay is seriously flawed with almost no backstory to the main characters and very little development of some major peripheral characters.

This is a memorable and ambitiously staged (though problematic) depiction of the consequences migration has on those who are left behind. Diop shows herself to be a very able filmmaker, but in the future, she would be wise to wait until the screenplay is ready before starting production. 

War Horse (2011)

André Crous

The First World War–set War Horse is Steven Spielberg’s formulaic, epic ode to friendship, courage and horses.

War HorseUSA
3*

Director:
Steven Spielberg
Screenwriters:
Lee Hall
Richard Curtis
Director of Photography:
Janusz Kaminski

Running time: 145 minutes

The key to understanding War Horse lies in a shot that occurs about 45 minutes into the film.

What starts as a close-up of a horse lying on the battlefield gradually shifts, as the camera moves backwards and upwards, to reveal an entire field strewn with equine carcasses. The image is a direct copy of the signature shot of the classic Gone with the Wind, in which a city street in downtown Atlanta is filled with hundreds of bloodied bodies of the injured, the dying and the dead – all victims of the Civil War.

The link between the two shots is director Steven Spielberg’s very clear desire to present his central character, the titular war horse named Joey, as he would a human being. If you fail to see this horse as any less human than the individuals who dot the narrative, you will find the experience very frustrating indeed. Though Spielberg stops short of having the animal speak, one has the very firm impression throughout that the horse can understand the humans perfectly.

War Horse starts by making a play for the audience’s emotions immediately. The teenage Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) lives on his parents’ farm in Devon, England, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills. In a drunken stupor, his father – as in most of Spielberg’s films, here too the father is either absent or somehow severely lacking as a parent – buys a show horse for the astronomical price of 30 guineas in an attempt to rile up the other bidder, his landlord. But the family doesn’t have the money, so the landlord gives them an ultimatum: Train the horse to plough the field and earn back the money by next summer or lose the house.

Of course, despite the odds, Joey the horse is trained remarkably easily by young Albert, who by virtue of his combination of sincerity, determination and humility seems to speak to the horse. Actually, he does speak to the horse, and the horse listens. Also, in the matter of a few minutes, Albert and Joey establish their own code of communication: If Albert cups his hands and blows into them to imitate an owl, Joey will come running. When the boy and the horse are tragically separated, we already start imagining what this framing device will look like come the climax.

This listening is one of the baffling aspects of the film that many viewers might find too difficult to swallow. Though it is often noted that Joey is “a remarkable horse”, its reason for being so extraordinary is never explained. To be sure, Joey overcomes some terrible obstacles along the way, most notably the First World War, and accomplishes some daring feats, but mostly it is taken for granted the horse will make it to the end of the film no matter what.

Joey travels between many owners, sometimes because they are killed, sometimes because the horse is captured by someone else. A significant part of the film is made up of these loose threads in which the individual, briefly in possession of the horse but always respectful towards the animal, discovers just how wonderful the young stallion is. In the end, the threads are loosely connected, but by that stage, you might need to have some teeth pulled because of the syrupy storyline you’ve been subjected to already.

Again and again, War Horse portrays Joey as a horse with human qualities, and in the face of the obvious sentimentality that Spielberg conveys with his spotlights and his soft focus, many of these scenes work almost in spite of themselves. A particularly touching moment comes when Joey cares for Topthorn, a companion horse that resembles everyone’s idea of Black Beauty.

Joey is clearly the film’s central attraction, but he is special only because he is the title character and Spielberg’s camera loves him. At one point, in a dazzling moment that will forever be associated with the film, just as the boys riding their bicycles toward the moon is tied to E.T., Joey gallops heroically across a battlefield in a single, unbroken take, while explosions rock the night sky.

For all the galloping and the detailed recreations of battle scenes and the ghastly trenches of the First World War, the film is about a promise Albert made to Joey: “Wherever you are, I will find you, and I will bring you home!” The stench of sentimentality could easily have been worse than the stench of the dugouts on the frontlines, but for the most part, Spielberg’s creativity transcends his material.

Mindwalk (1990)

André Crous

Mindwalk is a philosophical talkathon that promotes a vision of the world as an interconnected whole even as its central trio barely interacts with anyone or anything else.

MindwalkUSA
3*

Director:
Bernt Capra
Screenwriters:
Floyd Byars
Fritjof Capra
Director of Photography:
Karl Kases

Running time: 110 minutes

Mindwalk is a film with talking heads. It engages in deep philosophical discussions about the complexity of life and the shortfalls of the Cartesian way of thinking. But it features very little human drama and completely ignores its spectacular setting, the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey off the coast of France.

Written by Fritjof Capra, a physicist and expert in systems theory, and directed by his brother, Bernt, the film features a politician, a poet and a scientist ruminating at length on whether one can understand life by approaching it piece by piece, like a machine. Actually, it is mostly the scientist, Sonia Hoffman, doing the ruminating. As the clear proxy for the systems theorist who wrote the screenplay, Ingmar Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann takes charge of the conversation and never lets up. Shifting back and forth between physics and philosophy, she elaborates in detail on the two fields and quickly plays the role of wise teacher lecturing to her curious students.

Sam Waterston plays Jack Edwards, a conservative Democratic senator who is fresh off an unsuccessful run for the White House and has come to France for a long weekend to recuperate. His longtime friend and former speechwriter, Thomas Harriman (John Heard), is living in Paris and accompanies him on his trip. No sooner do they land at Mont-Saint-Michel than they come across Sonia, who comes here to think big thoughts. But this is where the action, limited as it is, stops for the next 90-odd minutes. And what follows is scene after scene of Sonia explaining her “ecological” vision of the world that emphasises interconnectedness.

And yet, this intellectual trio is completely cut off. With rare exceptions, they do not interact with anyone but move about in empty spaces in and around the abbey. They resemble the electrons inside the vast expanses of the atom over which Sonia waxes lyrical. She is continuously in a position of power. Seemingly all-knowing, she is the one who teaches but speaks with the force and the tone of someone used to having to speak over people to convince them. Now and then, Waterston and Heard make quick quips or ask a question, but they are like well-read middle-schoolers attending a lecture for PhD students.

But given the setting, namely the famous abbey on an island that is only accessible on foot during low tide, it is astonishing that religion never features in their exchanges. Nor, for that matter, does Jack’s or Thomas’s personal life. And the conversation twists and turns at the whim of the speakers. Very little is based on the actual environment they move through. This is a truly breathtaking lack of imagination and creativity and proves the film’s real purpose: to educate rather than to entertain.

Sonia swings wildly between pure physics and the heavy burden of being connected to (and, therefore, responsible for) everything. She even appears to promote Béchamp’s terrain theory by pointing to the relative difference in cost between maintaining a healthy diet and paying for a medical procedure because of bad eating habits. But what she is talking about is nothing short of a systemic overhaul where the modern world (and politicians, like Jack) prioritise quick fixes and incremental change, if any. She mentions the Native Americans making decisions by considering their impact seven generations down the line. And there are some worthy insights about the impact of our perception on the thing we perceive. 

These are all interesting thoughts, but in a narrative vacuum, they struggle to breathe and ultimately suffocate under their own weight. There is a very meek attempt to show that Sonia does not, in fact, have all the answers. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, who is always in a huff, and seems to live a very solitary life with her books and her theories. But Mindwalk offers us no insight into her life, and she shows no signs of personal development.

Every now and again, Thomas quotes a philosopher (“as Heraclitus once said…”) or a mythical figure (“as Merlin once said to King Arthur…”) or recites an entire poem (Pablo Neruda’s “Enigmas”), however tangentially relevant to the conversation. But no connections are as bad as the filmmaker’s attempts to jump from one scene to another. The cuts are hard and sharp and there is no winding down of a comment, just a realisation that the scene has come to an end, and it’s time for a change of locale.

Although it is unclear how far Jack came in the race for the presidency, his mere presence here should provide a rich opportunity to investigate the potential for implementing Sonia’s ideas in practice. Jack freely admits he is beholden to lobbyists and the whims of his constituents, but his tendency to compromise is at odds with the paradigmatic shift that Sonia desires. And yet, this clash of approaches is never seriously tackled. All three seem to agree that all of this talk of change is hopelessly impractical, at least within the current system. But no one is willing to change the system itself; they would rather be content with merely discussing the benefits of living in a different system.

The film, bereft as it is of narrative development, could easily have been staged as a theatre play instead. What saves it from utter mediocrity is the performances of its three leads, who all do the best they can under the circumstances. Waterston, in particular, conveys a genuine empathy and intellectual curiosity to stand in for those viewers who find this kind of thing more appealing.

Mindwalk is not a work of entertainment, not by a long shot. It is a video with a single purpose: For Capra to have something to screen for his first-year systems theory students on their first day of class. The question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there something when it mostly consists of nothing?” We could easily ask the same of the film.

Toyland (2007)

André Crous

During the Second World War, a young non-Jewish boy who doesn’t want his Jewish friend to leave unknowingly alters their lives forever in Toyland.

SpielzeuglandGermany
4*

Director:
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Screenwriters:
Johann A. Bunners
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Director of Photography:
Christoph “Cico” Nicolaisen

Running time: 14 minutes

Original title: Spielzeugland

From Life is Beautiful and Fateless to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Painted Bird, stories of children caught up in the chaos and brutality of the Holocaust are nothing new. The horrors are often a turning point that inevitably marks the end of their innocent, protected childhood. But what happens less often is that the children’s loss of safety is that there is an explicit (and inextricable) link to the adults’ loss of control. Life is Beautiful hinted at this, and Sophie’s Choice centred on it. But Jochen Alexander Freydank’s innocently titled short film, Toyland, presents it with devastating clarity.

In a German city during the Second World War, the Meißners (Meissners) and the Silbersteins are next-door neighbours in their apartment block. Both families have boys who are the same age, play piano together and are the best of friends. Despite the war, it appears the two boys are unaware that one of them is Jewish. One evening, when Mrs Marianne Meißner and her son, Heinrich, are at the Silbersteins’, the boys’ duet on the piano is interrupted by someone else in the building screaming at the “the Jews” to keep it down. It is only a matter of time before the Gestapo hauls them off to the concentration camps.

Marianne has been trying to prepare Heinrich for the inevitable departure of his friend, David, and his family. She tells him that David is going on a trip to the “toyland” but that he can’t go with them. This place sounds like so much fun that Heinrich barks back at her that his father would have allowed him to go with the Silbersteins. But Marianne sticks to her story, even as she knows that her son will have his heart broken either way.

What follows, amid the period’s historic barbarity, is an extraordinarily touching demonstration of humanity that involves every single one of the five characters. The twist ending will grab at many a viewer’s heart, although the more sceptical amongst us will question the likelihood of such a drama being resolved so seamlessly.

Set in the deep of winter, the ominous greys everywhere shy away from the pageantry of the Nazis’ trademark crimson. It is a desperate, unforgiving landscape, and because Jews are not inherently distinct from other Germans, everyone can be a suspect. At one point, Marianne is mistaken for a Jew, and at another, David Silberstein is presumed to be Aryan. These mistakes remind us of the nonsense of the Nazis’ ideology of Aryan identity, but Toyland does not belabour the point. 

The acting from the main boy, Heinrich, is not the best, and Toyland’s final scene has an unfortunate Titanic quality to it, but the rest of the production is excellent.

Hugo (2011)

André Crous

Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s ode to silent cinema and serves as a fantastic treat for children and cinephiles alike.

HugoUSA
4*

Director:
Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter:
John Logan
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 125 minutes

It was always just going to be a matter of time before Martin Scorsese made a film about a filmmaker. In 2004, the fast-talking film encyclopedia of a director had already dipped his toe in the water with the Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. But in his latest film, Hugo, an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he goes all out. In the process, he rehabilitates one of the pioneers of the seventh art, Georges Méliès, and exhilarates the audience.

The first filmmakers, the Lumière brothers, emphasised cinema’s potential to capture daily life exactly as it takes place. By contrast, Méliès, who had evolved from magician to director, wanted to inspire the audience with flights of fancy made real. Even those viewers today who have never seen a silent film will recognise the shot from his Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket ship crashes straight into the eye of the Man in the Moon.

Scorsese, better known for using the Lumière brothers’ brand of objective realism, fully embraces Méliès and his kind of magic in Hugo. The film is a love letter to the era of silent films and features many clips from films dating to the early years of the cinema.

With action set in a snow-swept interwar Paris, whose blues and yellows have been amplified to suit the fanciful mood of the picture, the film shimmers with fantasy. Scorsese here takes full advantage of the digital format’s ability to liberate the camera, since the content isn’t always real. In the very first scene, the camera descends from the heavens above Paris, swoops down through falling snowflakes, makes its way onto the platform, swerves between trains and passengers at Montparnasse train station, arrives at the concourse and finally rises up toward the clock, behind which we can make out the figure of young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

The 13-year-old Hugo has been living between the walls of the station since the untimely death of his father, a watchmaker, a few months earlier. He stays alive by stealing scraps of food from the dining carts inside the station and swipes clock parts from a toy stand to use in an “automaton”, a kind of robot he inherited from his father.

The man behind the counter at the toy stand is Méliès (Ben Kingsley), whose fame all but evaporated after the Great War and who is now producing mechanical toys that keep children’s dreams alive. An encounter between him and Hugo leads to an eventual friendship between Hugo and Méliès’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a precocious girl whose love of books has her using big words and falling in love with characters ranging from Heathcliff to David Copperfield.

The sets and the background characters don’t always look particularly realistic. But regardless of whether this was done deliberately or is a consequence of the as-yet-imperfect 3-D technology, the almost dreamlike images are exactly in line with the films of Méliès himself. Unfortunately, the film’s dialogue occasionally comes across as rather forced, while a nutty performance by Sacha Baron Cohen as the station commissioner verges on the farcical. His actions, including a stubborn commitment to send stray children to the orphanage, don’t allow us any room for pathos, which the film desperately needs toward the end.

A more general problem is the characterisation of adults as somehow conspiring against children, before having a sudden change of heart to reveal that they have been acting out because they were scared to believe their dreams could be realised.

Hugo is a kind of time machine that takes the viewer back to the days of black and white, when it was so clear there was something magical about going to the movies. It is a work of which Georges Méliès would have been very proud. The clips from films by Harold Lloyd, D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton contain moments that far surpass Scorsese’s film in terms of wonder and excitement, but the importance of making Méliès accessible to a new generation of viewers can’t be understated and is one of the central reasons for recommending this enchanting film.