Countries

The Counselor (2013)

André Crous

A drug war on the border does not produce the most original of storylines, but the raunchy film certainly includes its fair share of brutality.

counselorUSA
2.5*

Director:
Ridley Scott
Screenwriter:
Cormac McCarthy
Director of Photography:
Dariusz Wolski

Running time: 115 minutes

Novelist Cormac McCarthy is known for his sombre vision of humanity, and the two best-known films made from his work, the Academy Award–winning No Country for Old Men and the harrowing post-apocalyptic The Road, were both shrouded in a suffocating pessimism about the direction of the world.

Such pessimism is on minimal display in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, which doesn’t even have a touch of the McCarthy melancholy we would expect. Instead, the images are crisp, imbued with a stark clarity that is wholly at odds with the clumsy narrative. Although the content is far from joyful, and the film contains countless scenes of people getting killed whom we would have preferred to see alive, the overwhelming sense of doom of the other two films is almost entirely absent from this one.

The titular “Counselor”, otherwise nameless for whatever reason, is the main character. Irishman Michael Fassbender brings an indefinable and entirely appropriate accent to the role, providing him with just the right amount of enigma. He is a lawyer who lives a happy life in the border town of El Paso, Texas, and has just proposed to his girlfriend, the fragile and religious Laura, played by Penélope Cruz.

The utopia of their existence soon disappears, however, when he decides to take part in a drug operation that is high risk but even higher reward. The risk becomes real when, because of a few coincidences that stretch back all the way to his appointment by a court to defend a murderer in a Texas jail, the cartel suddenly has the Counselor in its sights, and the cartel should not be messed with.

Members of the cartel engage in an escalating torrent of violence, and their preferred method of killing someone invariably seems to involve decapitation. In the first scene between the Counselor and drug lord Reiner, an unlikely friendship that is never explained, Reiner mentions a device called the bolito, which is a motorised decapitation device that, when we inevitably see it used, produces thick blood splattering directly onto the camera in a way we haven’t seen in a long time, if ever, in a film that is not a comedy.

Scott struggles with tone, as his characters can be both funny (we need look no further than Reiner’s cold-hearted girlfriend, Malkina, having an orgasm while making love to the front windshield of his Ferrari) and ruthless, but the ups and downs are never smoothly stitched together. Reiner, one of the most important individuals in the narrative, always seems out of his depth, with much of his dialogue consisting of three words: “I don’t know.” And yet, he is supposed to be the big kahuna in the area.

The Counselor isn’t much more eloquent, and a surprising number of his lines invoke the Almighty. But God is nowhere to be found in this wasteland of a film. Not that Scott is incompetent, but we simply cannot relate to these people whose relationship with each other is vague and whose motives for acting the way they do are never examined.

In one of the opening scenes, the Counselor has flown from El Paso all the way to Amsterdam – just to buy a ring for his fiancée, mind you – where he has a long, recognisably McCarthy-like talk with the diamond dealer about the brevity of life. It is more of a monologue by the dealer (not coincidentally played by Wings of Desire’s angel, Bruno Ganz), and it would look great on the page, but in this beast of a film, it feels out of place and quite silly. 

Cheetahs pop up onscreen from time to time, perhaps as a reminder that we should be mindful of those creatures that are graceful but can incite terror and inflict terrible harm to those who are not as fast or as clever. Although in some ways it resembles the cheetah, the film is also closely aligned with the jackrabbit, as it scurries hither and thither in a vain struggle for survival before the ineluctable bloodletting.

For all the commendable sensitivity Fassbender brings to his role, his character is simply too weak to even know where to start managing this situation that is only somewhat of his own making. He lacks the wisdom of those in Ciudad Juárez whose help he seeks late in the film – people who have spent their lives reflecting on the fragility of life.

The Counselor does not look or feel like the other big films that have been produced from McCarthy’s work, but that is not its only fault. Except for the mostly superfluous meditations on life and death, not dissimilar from Tommy Lee Jones’s droning in No Country for Old Men, it brings nothing new to the type of film we already know about drug-running across the border.

Miracle (2013)

André Crous

Attempt to show mental problems of a girl in Slovak working class is a failure about as dismal as the central character’s prospects in life.

zazrak-miracleSlovakia/Czech Republic
2*

Director:
Juraj Lehotský
Screenwriters:
Martin Leščák
Juraj Lehotský
Director of Photography:
Noro Hudec

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Zázrak

Miracle by documentary filmmaker Juraj Lehotský is a fiction film that was clearly influenced by the work of the Dardenne brothers. Unfortunately, a very flimsy storyline, continual jumps in the narrative and a main character who is about as inactive and unlikeable as they come produce a film that is equally uninspiring and far removed from the Dardennes’ studies of the working class.

We first meet Ela, from the Malacky District, the country’s westernmost area, asleep in the car; she is on her way to a correctional facility, where she will spend an indeterminate period of time recuperating with many other girls her age whose scarred arms speak volumes about their emotional state. Ela is expressionless for almost the entire film, but she is also nearly speechless, refusing to share her problems or thoughts because she is certain no one will understand her or care for her.

She had a breakdown when her mother started dating a man Ela describes as “a moron”, but for the most part, Ela is annoyed that the relationship between her and her mother is non-existent and that she has, for all intents and purposes, lost both of her parents.

Having established the disintegration of family life, it is perhaps no surprise that Ela soon discovers she is pregnant, but without a high-school diploma, no money and few prospects, any hope of taking care of herself, never mind a child, is far-fetched at best. Roby, the father of her child, is a drug addict who lives in a small storage room on the side of the highway and already has a child, whom he has never spoken to.

At the facility in the woods where she discovers her pregnancy after a fainting spell, she tells another girl that Roby had caught her stealing something in the shop where he works, and because he didn’t know what to do with her, they ended up together. That’s not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, but Ela seems convinced – despite the evidence to the contrary – Roby would support her if she just escaped from her temporary home.

Ela shows almost no growth throughout the film; we cannot empathise with her because we know nothing of her life prior to the events depicted here (it seems she never had any friends, or at least anyone who would care about where she now finds herself), and because she treats her mother much worse than her mother treats her, we actually end up sympathising with the mother, who is certainly not without faults of her own.

In general, Ela is not just a problem child but seems like a genuinely stupid individual who makes her own life hard, irritates those around her and doesn’t have any social skills. She insults her stepfather even though her boyfriend is exactly the same kind of drone and has a drug habit to boot, and to get money when they need to pay back the drug dealers, she offers to become a prostitute, only to close up like a clam when she has to perform for her new clients.

Miracle‘s director of photography, Noro Hudec, is also at fault here, because all the scenes of Ela having sex are shot from behind her partner, which obscures her face and leaves us with absolutely no idea what she is thinking or feeling, thereby making her more of an object than a human participant.

Ela is generally so unpleasant we actually root for her to have an abortion out of fear that the world would be polluted with another one like her in it. Her cantankerousness isn’t helped by the fact scenes don’t evolve but are rather shown as dots that we simply cannot connect in a smooth way. The film is filled with impressions, mostly just showing Ela’s unsmiling face, that do not present us with a complete character.

At one point, Ela gets out of her mother’s car in a huff and storms down the highway. Instead of showing us what happens when her mother catches up to her, there is a cut to a later scene that suggests she didn’t see her mother again, which is difficult to believe.

Miracle is a badly executed product that, even at a short running time of 78 minutes, feels like a mess the characters have got themselves stuck in and cannot escape. The only miracle here is that the film was made at all.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Lucy (2014)

André Crous

Luc Besson’s fantastical, mad rush of a movie reminds us that the cinema is capable of wonderful things.

lucy-luc-besson-posterFrance/USA
4*

Director:
Luc Besson
Screenwriter:
Luc Besson
Director of Photography:
Thierry Arbogast

Running time: 90 minutes

Effortlessly referencing films as disparate as Nymphomaniac, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Transcendence, although with a deliberate lack of seriousness, Luc Besson’s Lucy is a breathless combination of visual effects and sympathetic fantasy like only the cinema can deliver. It never strives for anything more than pure entertainment and even sidesteps issues of power in favour of showing us unexpected domination, often by very gentle means, but the result is a thrilling ride you won’t want to miss.

The central (widely debunked) idea is one that most people have heard about at school or at college: Humans use a very small amount of their brain, and there is no telling what deeds we may be capable of if we used more. The screenplay hypothesises what would happen in a scenario where someone absorbed large quantities of CPH4, which is supposedly formed in the bodies of pregnant women to help the fetus grow, thereby rendering the individual almost infinitely brilliant.

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, the girlfriend of a smalltime drug dealer in Taiwan, who is kidnapped and forced to be a drug mule carrying CPH4, hidden in a bag stitched into her stomach. But when one of her kidnappers tries to fondle her and she fights back, she also gets kicked in the stomach, and the CPH4 bursts into her veins, filling her with immense power and boosting her mental capacity into the higher double-digits.

The person who gives meaning and a measure of credibility to her rapid development is the brain researcher, Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman, who provides the fantastical plot with the right measure of gravitas it needs while also linking the material with that of Wally Pfister’s Transcendence, a similar but far inferior movie in which he played a very similar part). Norman has written volumes on the potential of the human brain, but most of it is pure conjecture. That is, until Lucy contacts him. She has just read all his work in a matter of minutes and tells him he is on the right track. However, she has only about 24 hours left on Earth as her mind will expand to the point where her body cannot contain her any longer.

And so the clock starts ticking while director Luc Besson points us in strange but thoroughly entertaining directions. The first half of the film is unexpectedly closely tied to Lars von Trier’s two-part Nymphomaniac films, as simplistic metaphors are made very vivid, although the effect is at times laughable, such as when Lucy is in danger and there is a sudden cut to an antelope being chased by a cheetah. These references culminate with Besson’s use of Mozart’s “Requiem”, which Von Trier also used in his film.

But the film’s loose structure enables Besson to incorporate references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular the stargate sequence but also the unforgettable monkey, obviously played by someone in an ape suit, with which both Kubrick’s and Besson’s films open. By the time we meet up with the monkey again towards the end of Lucy, having gone through something of a magical ride on a time machine that conjures up haunting images, we realise that Besson is attracting us on a primal level, through memories and desires to see moments from the past in a way only made possible by the technology of the present.

The film is not entirely successful, however, as it suffers from a few dialogues that don’t come across as particularly believable, such as the overly descriptive telephone conversation between Lucy and her mother, and a faux stargate sequence that simply cannot compete with the one that came 45 years earlier in one of Kubrick’s masterpieces.

A few details are also missing, such as an explanation for her ability to learn languages without any significant exposure to them, or her inability to notice her car being tailed when her level of brain use is nearing 99 percent. But in general, the plot is very easy to follow and while the film never appears to be pretentious, it certainly strikes a very able balance between amusement and intelligence, inasmuch as the one is constrained by the other in a form of mass entertainment like this one.

This may seem at times like a dumbed-down version of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, but while there is enough to keep the popcorn gallery entertained, Lucy also shows us the wonders the cinema can make us a witness to by recreating time in its almost unimaginable richness. Words cannot adequately describe the sense of awe we feel seeing the world going in reverse in fast motion, and while these sequences are also slightly comical, they remind us what movies can make us see and feel that we can never experience in the world outside the theatre.

Boyhood (2014)

André Crous

Childhood and adolescence are explored in film that was shot over more than 10 years with the same cast.

boyhoodUSA
3*

Director:
Richard Linklater
Screenwriter:
Richard Linklater
Directors of Photography:
Lee Daniel
Shane Kelly

Running time: 160 minutes

Sprawling but not unwieldy, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood takes the eventful but not overly dramatised life of an ordinary teenager from a broken home to construct an epic tale of one boy’s slow transition to manhood. His role models – a mother whose many husbands always end up drinking the relationship into calamity and a father who doesn’t hold a steady job and seems to be entirely carefree – don’t have the strongest or the most ambitious personalities in the world, but they form him nonetheless in their own ways.

Linklater shot the film over an unusually lengthy period of time (from 2002 until 2013), using the same trio of actors at its core: Ellar Coltrane as Mason Jr., Lorelei Linklater as his older sister, Samantha, and Patricia Arquette as their mother, Olivia. Ethan Hawke also features in many of the scenes as the children’s biological father, Mason Sr., who has already divorced Olivia by the time we meet them all in the opening scenes.

Obviously, Boyhood’s peculiar production schedule is the primary reason many readers will be intrigued to watch it. But another, related rationale better explains the attraction to the film: The process of ageing has been compressed into 160 minutes, and time flows much more quickly, perhaps too quickly, as we come to realise towards the end, when we sympathise with Olivia during the most heartrending moments of the production.

While it lasts, as Marcus Jr. says, the present is “always right now”: That is what we deal with. It is only at the end of a sequence of these moments that we can take a step back and consider the history of our lives, however long or short they might be, and appreciate the people who have been there with us through it all.

But the first act already points towards a life of memories that might not be shown but are unequivocally present in the lives of the characters. It is a powerful moment when the family ups and moves from their small town to Houston, selling their house and repainting the inside, including the years of pen markings of the children’s heights in the door frame that vanish with the stroke of a brush.

With a title like Boyhood, one would expect the focus to be solely on Marcus Jr., but the importance of his mother’s turbulent life, tied to and impacting his own, becomes more and more clear as the film progresses. Despite the many years of them living together, the inevitable cutting of the chord still comes as a punch to the stomach, as we realise she has kind of been taken for granted.

The film contains many beautiful moments, perhaps the best of which is captured in a long, unbroken take (calling to mind the work Linklater did with Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset, the opposite of this film in that it took place in a single afternoon) between Marcus Jr., walking back from school, and a girl on a bicycle next to him. The girl is teasing out Marcus’s feelings for one of her friends, Lee Anne, but in the process of a single camera take, we see these two actually ought to strike up a relationship. The moment is comparable to a short but strong exchange in You, Me and Everyone We Know, as we see an entire world can change within the space of a few words exchanged between people who were strangers when the shot started.

Overall, however, the film has a meandering quality that many viewers might find frustrating. We don’t have any sense that the story is going anywhere, except that time is passing, and everyone is growing older. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but in terms of content, there is no clear issue that needs to be resolved or question that needs to be answered.

Many would argue this is what life is like, and that may be true, but Boyhood would have benefited from having a tighter focus on the narrative as it relates directly and visibly to the development of Mason’s character. Furthermore, Mason is simply too nice to relate to, especially over such an extended period of time. He never seems to do anything he feels bad about, or anything that embarrasses him. A scene with bullies at school goes nowhere, and Linklater patches up the boy’s frustration with his drunken stepfather’s decision with ellipses that show off spectacular scenes of conflict rather than seething scenes of anger, which are sorely missed by their absence.

It is also understandable and even commendable that Linklater didn’t show too much of his own daughter growing up (she plays Mason’s sister), but we lose any indication that she has much of a relationship with her brother, a bond that could have supported or undermined the boy in a way that would almost certainly have been successful with the audience.

Boyhood may be original, even unique, in its treatment of the teenage years of a single character by the same actor, but the final product feels too much like a documentary about a mostly ordinary family, leaving us with the question why the director felt so compelled to tell their story. Yes, people grow old and experience ups and downs, and usually they don’t grow as wise as the other movies tend to suggest. Is that an insight that warrants a running time of 160 minutes? Time will tell.

Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Diana (2013)

André Crous

Film about the late princess of Wales shows her reckless, romantic sides but marks a terrible Anglophone début for its revered German director.

dianaUK
2*

Director:
Oliver Hirschbiegel
Screenwriter:
Stephen Jeffreys
Director of Photography:
Rainer Klausmann

Running time: 115 minutes

With Diana, director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made a film about Adolf Hitler in 2004 (Der Untergang, released for the English-speaking market under the title Downfall), has created a movie about another figure who is not exactly loved in her own country. Though not generating the same kind of vitriol as Margaret Thatcher, the late princess of Wales was thought to be enjoying the limelight a little more than she let on when she was publicly denouncing the British press’s lack of respect for her privacy.

The film only focuses on the last two years of her life, and in particular her on-again, off-again relationship with cardiologist Hasnat Khan. It is easy to see why Hirschbiegel was drawn to this project, as this is again a historical character who was a point of conversation and always in the public eye. Far from empathising with her, the director shows the situation in which she finds herself – at the mercy and yet simultaneously at the beck and call of Buckingham Palace – and her inability to realise how difficult it would be to make a relationship work with someone who cherishes his privacy much more than she does, and for whom hers is an alien world.

Khan seems like a very intelligent man who would give Diana the world if he could, but he refuses to give up his own identity. While the princess claims she is not asking him to do that, she simply fails to realise what an impact the constant flashing of the paparazzi’s cameras – or, for that matter, the hush-hush, the whispering or the finger-pointing in the street or in a restaurant – has on the life of an otherwise ordinary citizen. Having lived with such trifles for a long time already, she simply cannot sympathise with how little desire Khan has to interact with the nosy press.

We are shown what a narcissist Diana was by her constant looks in the mirror, and that goes some way towards explaining her actions late in the film, when she intimately plays along with members of the press, hinting at where she will be so she can be photographed and thus annoy “the Windsors” with her antics. She was anything but a damsel in distress when it came to the media; on the contrary, it almost seems she would start to drool Pavlov-style at the click of a shutter.

But we never get closer to her than did all the tabloids that covered her for so many years. While we see some details about her relationship with Khan, enormous chunks of her life are left out. She interacts with her own children in one single scene, and by the time we meet them she is seeing them off at the airport. For a woman who boasts about having four mobile phones, such an absence of communication between her and her children is impossible to understand.

Poor Naomi Watts, though not given much to work with in the title role, doesn’t meet our expectations either, as her delivery is often histrionic, and especially in the recreation of the well-publicised BBC television with Martin Bashir, Watts tries to interpret rather than mimic the real Diana but ends up appearing robotic and embarrassing.

Hirschbiegel nearly gets into Diana’s mind when she meets famed South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard (who performed the world’s first heart transplant) at an event in Italy and opens up about her love for Khan, but instead of asking him about his own experience reconciling his public and his private lives, she doesn’t even flinch when she asks him to find a job for her boyfriend so they can move abroad. The scene isn’t helped either by actor Michael Byrne, who plays Barnard, making a truly ghastly attempt at an Afrikaans accent.

The viewer will have many questions, most pressing of which is probably why Diana dons a wig only some of the time instead of carrying it around with her to avoid being recognised. But here is one of the most famous women in the world prancing around the streets of London at 3 a.m., completely exposed. Such lunacy does not elicit empathy, and neither does her self-pitying piano rendition of Bach’s “Aria”, which she performs not once but twice.

Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage with Prince Charles, referring to his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, but going by this film, even if they were only two, the marriage would have been too crowded with her ego taking up so much space.

This is a story about a very troubled woman whose problems we are supposed to know from the real world and not because the film tells us or even hints at them, and such a reliance on facts outside the immediate world of the film nearly sinks the production, because it undercuts its very existence. That, on top of the slightly deranged central character whom we never really warm up to, the flat delivery of mediocre dialogue and truly odd directing choices (the opening scene prepares us for a Hitchcockian thriller), makes this film just another run-of-the-mill biopic.

White God (2014)

André Crous

The (under)dogs will not take abuse lying down; expect them to fight back with a vengeance in this gorgeous film from Hungary’s Kornél Mundruczó.

white-godHungary
4*

Director:
Kornél Mundruczó 
Screenwriters:
Kornél Mundruczó
Viktória Petrányi
Kata Wéber
Director of Photography:
Marcell Rév

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Fehér isten

White God, a Hungarian film about a crossbreed dog thrown out on the street after new laws come into force banning its kind, the underworld of dogfighting he is exposed to and ultimately the revenge he exacts, is both gory and glorious, with scenes of great poignancy admirably offsetting some brutal violence.

The film is for those who like dogs but perhaps not for those who like them too much: A central part of the narrative involves the dog, named Hagen, being enslaved, drugged, physically and psychologically abused, and made to fight against other dogs. The scene of two dogs fighting, and the half-dead, soon-to-be carcasses of the hounds littered around the site, may be too tough for some to take. However, despite the bloodbath that concludes the film, it is at heart a story about a dog whose emotional development is immediately recognisable. For days after seeing the film, you will likely find yourself walking the street, noticing a dog and acknowledging it as more than just a furry pet. Director Kornél Mundruczó deserves tremendous acclaim for his ability to portray animals with astonishing humanity.

The film opens with what at first seems to be a dream sequence: Budapest has come to a standstill, and all we see is a single girl on her bicycle driving through the capital’s desolate streets. Suddenly, a large group of rabid dogs turn a corner and chase her down. She rides her bike faster and faster, but they are gaining on her.

Some could easily argue that this opening scene, repeated later in the film, when we realise it is all too real, is superfluous, but it does set a mood of uneasiness for us, as the viewer is thrown into the deep end while getting the strong flavour of contrasts in the film: Beautiful tracking shots accompany this otherwise startling event, and for much of the rest of the film we will find ourselves riveted by the images while often being repulsed by the actions of both people and dogs.

We meet the girl from the opening scene just after the title appears onscreen. The title is never explained, although it probably refers both to Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, in which a dog trained to attack black people undergoes retraining, with ambiguous results, and to the status of the white man in the life of the Hungarian dog, and more generally to the race’s cachet across Europe.

The girl’s name is Lili, and when her mother and stepfather go on holiday to Australia, she has to stay with her unwilling father, Daniél. But Daniél dislikes the dog she has brought with her, Hagen, and has no problem throwing it out on the street when he gets a warning from the authorities that all crossbreeds now have to be put down. This is where the narrative splits into two strands, as we follow the stories of Hagen and Lili, both trying to cope in new worlds they know very little about: life on the street, and life as a teenager, respectively.

Lili’s story is almost entirely forgettable and doesn’t offer much of interest. This is the most serious misstep of the production, as Mundruczó easily could have spared us this rather monotonous view of life as a teenager. Her father, Daniél, also displays a limited range of emotions, and his character has exasperatingly little depth. By contrast, every scene with Hagen contains either a thrill, a shock or a moment of pathos, the latter most often occurring during the dog’s interaction with other dogs, in particular a rough-coated Jack Russell terrier that memorably shares a couch with Hagen.

These scenes are simply phenomenal because they offer us a glimpse of Mundruczó’s ability to tell a story and to move us with amazing tenderness, without using any words. Animal trainer Teresa Ann Miller deserves great kudos for her work to assure our immediate recognition of traits like friendship, kindness, goodwill and even intimacy in these animals.

Towards the end, unfortunately, there are some jumps in the narrative that don’t make much sense, in particular Lili’s seemingly clairvoyant ability to know where to go look for her dog in downtown Budapest.

The uprising of the crossbreed canines should serve as a wakeup call to those in Europe, and perhaps around the world, that the downtrodden will not go quietly into the night. They may be smaller in size, and they may not conform to traditional categories, but if they are mistreated, they will eventually fight back, and those who have power today should take note. This is a powerful message for the people of the Continent who believe their way of life is threatened by those who are different from them and that the minorities need to be kept underfoot because there is no telling how violent the reactions will be.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

André Crous

Iranian-American filmmaker’s Farsi-language vampire film is unusual in all the right ways.

a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-nightUSA
4*

Director:
Ana Lily Amirpour
Screenwriter:
Ana Lily Amirpour
Director of Photography:
Lyle Vincent

Running time: 100 minutes

The gorgeously greyscale landscape of a noir reality that seems familiar yet distant, sweet yet mysterious, even mystifying, is the setting for a Farsi-language vampire film that is certainly unlike your average Iranian film. With major themes of drug use and prostitution, and even a very revealing scene in the bathtub, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as unusual as it is entertaining, and while the filmmaking is minimalist rather than schlocky, the Farsi-speaking female vampire is as appealing as any femme fatale.

Set in Bad City, the two threads of the narrative – involving a lonely vampire on the prowl and a young man whose father has drug problems – come together when the two main characters meet late at night. As usual, the girl, who always walks home alone at night, is on the hunt for a fresh jugular vein, but when she sees the young Arash, dressed up as Dracula and crashing after an Ecstasy high, looking up in wonder at a street lamp, she has second thoughts, and that is when the magic happens.

The magic is an unexpected moment of audiovisual bliss, as a static camera captures the two slowly moving toward each other in the girl’s subterranean dwelling while a disco ball inexplicably keeps spinning, throwing little spatterings of light on the wall behind them. All the while, the music on the soundtrack, the White Lies’ “Death”, is infectious and can easily rouse the viewer out of her seat. But even this scene is just a forerunner to greatness, as a few minutes later, a prostitute, a balloon and an unbroken take from a mobile perspective come together to create the most poetic and poignant moment of the entire film.

Director Ana Lily Amirpour, a British-born Iranian-American who collected money for her film online through Kickstarter in 2012, has crafted a film that doesn’t seek to subvert the conventions of the vampire genre as much as it wants to play with those conventions to tell a story of two unusual individuals who find love in a way neither of them ever would have expected.

The girl’s black-as-night waist-length hijab, which looks a bit like a fashion accessory, suggests mourning, and she is certainly not a barrel of laughs; on the contrary, she barely says a word. But it is this silence that makes her so mysterious, and while we might have our suspicions that she is up to no good, we are also very happy when one of her first victims is the drug dealer who is keeping Arash’s father in crushing debt. She also appears to care a great deal about the prostitute, Atti, who just wants to get by but is tormented by loneliness, and she becomes a friend of sorts to her.

Despite the Farsi-language signage on the street, Bad City is very obviously neither in Iran nor in the United States. It forms part of a filmic reality that suits the genre and functions remarkably well because there is always a feeling that we don’t exactly know what to expect.

While the characters speak Farsi, the film’s sexual imagery – which includes, among others, fingers that find their way to mouths, and pumpjacks that piston in and out of the ground across the desert landscape on the outskirts of the city – is wholly unexpected for an Iranian production and contributes to the pleasure of watching something wholly unorthodox. The film was shot in the United States and was produced in part by Elijah Wood.

Director Amirpour has a light touch when it comes to the use of the vampire genre conventions, and while the title character only drinks blood, doesn’t eat and doesn’t appear during daytime, she does have a mirror (all the better to put on her lipstick) and there is no mention of garlic or stakes or coffins that serve as night-time sanctuaries of repose. Amirpour’s use of music is equally laudable, with the soundtrack, ranging from Western-like and Morricone-inspired to British post-punk, impossible to fault and thoroughly enjoyable.

The girl who walks home alone at night is a vampire, but that doesn’t take away from her romantic timidity, and when she finds a man willing to love her in spite of her immortality and thirst for blood, we readily share her initial reluctance to pursue the affair. The character, whom we still don’t know much about by the end of the film, suggests enough complexity for the viewer to keep watching.

The result is very different from the noirs or the Westerns we may know (and it very well may not live up to the expectations of fans of the latter), and although there are small quibbles with the development of the story, this heavily stylised film is comical, moving and sexy, and it will entertain many a moviegoer.

Hany (2014)

André Crous

With almost no editing, Czech director Michal Samir’s first film depicts the spectacular tumult of a night out in Plzeň.

hanyCzech Republic
4*

Director:
Michal Samir
Screenwriter:
Michal Samir
Director of Photography:
Martin Žiaran

Running time: 85 minutes

James Joyce had Dublin, Richard Linklater had Paris, and Michal Samir has Plzeň.

Each deploying their respective, considerable talents, these three storytellers used the space of a city that already existed to let their tales play out in real time: Joyce in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of his Ulysses, Linklater in Before Sunset and Samir in Hany, which is somewhat of a technical watermark in filmmaking. Samir may not have the experience of either of the other two, but the risk he took with this project has paid off handsomely and provided the movie-going public with a work that is equal parts funny, jaw-dropping, shocking, gentle and raw.

When people talk about this particular film, however, the first thing they discuss very likely won’t be the identity of the space, but rather how the camera moves around inside it. That is because Hany is that rare breed of film that was shot almost entirely in a single take, without any visible cuts. The film consists of one long take lasting most of the film, before a short epilogue (once again, shot in a single take) that occurs a little later in time.

In 2002, Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (Russkij Kovcheg) focused the art film world’s attention on the use of the long take in the cinema today, and his ballroom scene, in particular, remains a remarkable demonstration of one director’s ability to control dozens of actors and camera movements simultaneously. But the film was filled with vignettes separated from each other as the halls of Saint Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum were divided by walls, doors and corridors.

Hany moves into different territory – to which the long takes of Soy Cuba, Boogie Nights and Kill Bill belong – where the camera is not limited by space and can move freely into and out of buildings and even up and down along the vertical axis. It is important to note, however, that the camera never completely frees itself from its terrestrial shackles (by contrast, think of that beautiful shot in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine when the camera flies out through an open window over a public housing development), and the crane shots deliberately do not convey a sense of freedom but rather a brief sensation of release.

The “single take” actually comprises three separate takes, shot on three consecutive nights and imperceptibly stitched together; one would guess the stitches occur when the horizontal and vertical axes change, but these transitions are all but impossible to detect.

But even before we notice the long take, there is a moment early on that catches our attention. The film opens at 10 p.m. inside a bar (we don’t see the name, but it’s the Anděl Café and Music Bar on Plzeň’s Bezručova Street). A poet named Egon Alter is about to start a one-man reading of his latest play. Next to him, his friend Dušan sits beside a chessboard. The camera slowly pulls back and eventually tracks back and makes a 360-degree turn to show us the entire bar and its band of revellers. Such panoramic shots, which seem to reveal there is no one standing behind the camera directing the action or holding a boom, support our belief that this is all happening “for real”. A shot like that is rare, and when it happens, the audience had better sit up and take notice.

The black and white pieces on the chessboard in that opening shot suggest the tension between the darkness and the light that pervades the film in many ways and comes to a head during one of the final scenes, taking place at main character Jiří’s flat, in which the darkness is lit up by lasers in the colours of the rainbow.

Jiří is a guy in his 20s who sells drugs in a back room of the bar and has no problem provoking those around him. For most of the first part of the film, he is in the company of Míla, Hana, Hanka and Zuzana. By the end of the film, he will have alienated some of his friends, but we will have learned a little about him in a way that is wholly credible and far from contrived.

The scant knowledge we gain has to do with one of the themes that underlie the narrative in a way that is nearly cloaked from our sight by the events of the film. That theme is family, and although it doesn’t seem to influence Jiří or Egon directly, a few small moments clue us into the depth of their characters. Egon, who remains in the background almost throughout, suddenly takes centre stage towards the end, when his storyline unexpectedly delivers the most poignant scene of the entire film.

The image of moths drawn to a flame – which the camera also seems to embody as it floats between its sources of light, the characters – is presented to us early on, when we leave the bar for the first time, and it starts to become clear the camera will really be travelling around the city in a seemingly unbroken take. There are almost as many moths circling the lights on the street as there are characters with speaking parts, and Samir accomplishes something of a Robert Altman effect by sometimes having people talk over each other. While this is going on in the foreground, more things are happening in the background, adding to an impression of richness that is unusual in the cinema but that ought to be a prime concern for the works that want to reflect reality in all its glorious messiness.

For all the movement and spectacle, especially towards the end, it is the opening and – in retrospect – relatively subdued sequence in the bar that shows Samir’s skill as a director, as he interweaves multiple layers of action to create a shimmering, vibrant atmosphere that is dynamic, authentic, believable and entertaining.

The problem with having so much going on and following so many groups of characters is of course that there is no clear central storyline, and the viewer may struggle to summarise the plot in terms of action rather than space. Despite the occasional impression that the connections between all the pieces elude us, the epilogue delivers a stunning narrative blow as we reassess some of the scenes that came before (including one in a pub that at first seems random) with our newly acquired knowledge.

Not all of our questions are always answered, and at times this uncertainty works to bring about the feeling of ambiguity that André Bazin credited for making films seem realistic. In one scene, a tram from 1954 arrives to pick up two characters on Plzeň’s Square of the Republic and among the passengers, at the side of the frame, we see someone with a scarf covering his mouth. Is this the same man we see a few minutes later striking the first blow against the police, thus ushering in a quick transition to the chaos that reigns over the final act?

The quick descent into disorder is preceded by an elegant shot of a man on a bicycle whom we watch while Egon’s rich, melodious voice reverberates in a voice-over on the soundtrack. Egon is one of the film’s many outsiders, which include the naïve and apologetic Míla, the Arab referred to as “Salaam”, and Martin the Slovak, a genuinely nice guy who experiences the malice of a drunken Jiří.

While Jiří is the main character by virtue of making the most noise and the one we see most often, the others are there to offer a mixture of hope for humanity and fear of what may happen to the ones who are weaker than the rest. The director doesn’t take sides, and he doesn’t judge, and while we never laugh directly at anyone, there are many moments that make us laugh out loud at the antics of some of these people. We can nitpick about the empty streets, the acting of a Vietnamese saleswoman who has her merchandise stolen, or a car crash that is not particularly believable, but these are negligible exceptions in a film that is in many respects astounding.

Director of photography Martin Žiaran’s work with the Arri Alexa doesn’t draw unnecessary attention, and Samir’s blocking of his actors is equally laudable because they seem to move freely, even though almost every single movement was planned out in advance. And when the camera floats down the street and the score swells on the soundtrack for the very first time, we cannot help but shiver with wonder.

Hany contributes to the art of filmmaking by immersing us in the world of the film, explicitly situated on the border of fiction and reality but presented in a way that is absolutely thrilling and never dull, even if the riot scene so ominously announced in an opening voiceover is over all too quickly. Whatever the achievements of Russian Ark, it was not a constant thrill.

The film eschews artifice and succeeds in representing a lively night out. In life, things sometimes happen out of the blue, and in that regard perhaps the film’s sudden switch in tone from restraint to anarchy is not all that far-fetched. The dirty, alcohol-soaked and drug-infused final scenes can be difficult to stomach, but the images will stay with you.

Egon refers to his unbroken performance in the bar as a literary night. Samir’s unbroken performance through the streets of Plzeň doesn’t aim to be literary, but despite its thin storyline, his is undeniably one for the books.

Stories We Tell (2013)

André Crous

Sarah Polley’s semi-documentary seeks to tell the truth, insofar as it can be told honestly, even while openly admitting it is necessarily constructed and incomplete.

stories-we-tellCanada
4.5*

Director:
Sarah Polley
Screenwriter:
Sarah Polley
Director of Photography:
Iris Ng

Running time: 110 minutes

Not unlike the powerful 2012 Slovak film Nový život, in which documentary filmmaker Adam Oľha looked at the deterioration of his parents’ relationship with the help of archive footage from his childhood, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell builds an insightful film from the family’s Super-8 home movies.

The result is astounding, not only because of the breathtaking revelation at its core, but because the way in which it was constructed is pure genius: The film is intelligent, entertaining and informative, but we also come to realise that Polley’s decision to show how the film itself was made fits perfectly with her subject matter and in fact shields her from expected criticism, not least of which comes from the mouth of one of the main players.

Polley, a 34-year-old Canadian actress and director who has starred in My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words, among others, here traces her own life through the eyes of her father, her siblings and her parents’ friends and acquaintances. The goal is to get at the real story that involves her late mother, the only person directly implicated who does not provide her side of the events.

These events entailed a secret that became an open secret before it became a bombshell. I can be general here without giving much away by saying that Polley was not the daughter of the man she always thought was her father. But who this other person was, and how she found him, is the domain of the film’s content, which you have to see for yourself to believe.

At first glance, it seems Polley approaches her subject matter very matter-of-factly, by interviewing all the parties who are still alive and quizzing them on what they knew and when they knew it. Their facts take the form of a story, necessarily tied to their own points of view and subjective experiences, but we get a very coherent and cohesive, although not entirely comprehensive, narrative that flows together and is fed by the words of all these individuals.

However, as archive footage accumulates of incidents that couldn’t possibly have been filmed at the time, or of which such footage would be incredibly hard to come by, we start asking ourselves whether Polley in fact staged some of the historical events she purports to portray with actual footage.

When Polley answers our question late in the film, it immediately becomes apparent why she shot her story in a way that is not strictly the domain of the documentary film. While her focus is always on her mother, and the strategy is to use as much material as possible, be it from the past or from her interviews in the present, Polley does eventually come around to examining her own role as storyteller.

Her parents were both actors; in fact, her mother, Diane, fell in love with Michael because the role he was playing at the time was strong and interesting. The secret Diane kept from Michael, about Sarah’s father, would also require her to play a role by pretending that her lie was the truth. But at one point a central character says his side of the story may contain elements that are misremembered but none that is a lie. That throwaway comment, as well as his objection to the director’s inclusion of other voices besides his in the story, makes us understand the film can only be the asymptote of reality (an old idea borrowed from film André Bazin), reaching toward it but never reaching it entirely faithfully.

Super 8 continues to signal reality very strongly to an audience for whom anything that resembles home video footage still evokes a robust feeling of truthfulness for the vast majority of viewers. That is, of course, what made J.J. Abrams’ monster film Super 8 both compelling and disorientating.

But when Polley starts showing us how the film was actually made, in a way that sought to enhance the storytelling potential of her work without any attempt to defraud the audience or misrepresent the story itself, it is a stunning moment of realisation that this is much more than just another documentary. It is a work that reflects on the possibility of finding truth in a work that is always already edited and therefore manipulated.

Stories We Tell has moments of fun and tremendous comedy scattered along the generally informal quest for truth, and even if we agree that no film can reproduce the past as it was, Polley has given future filmmakers a roadmap to engage the audience by deploying very sympathetic individuals and asking the questions we ask ourselves while watching the film.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Leviathan (2014)

André Crous

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s fourth film is a scathing take on religion and politics in modern-day Russia.

leviathanRussia
4.5*

Director:
Andrey Zvyagintsev
Screenwriters:
Andrey Zvyagintsev
Oleg Negin
Director of Photography:
Mikhail Krichman

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Левиафан
Transliterated title: Leviafan

Towards the end of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, the long-suffering main character, Nikolai, meets an old priest in the grocery store of the small town in far northeastern Russia where the story takes place. Nikolai, or Kolya, the nickname by which almost everyone calls him, has faced hardships the past year that no hardworking man should have to deal with, and perhaps predictably the priest quotes Scripture, from the Book of Job: “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook, or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words?”

The quotation doesn’t help Kolya all that much (the priest also basically encourages him to grin and bear it), but at least we have the beginning of an explanation for the title, which refers to the giant sea monster God allegedly slew. However, Zvyagintsev’s view of present-day Russian society is very bleak, and it would seem this time Leviathan is a monster even God himself is unable to tame, much less destroy.

The film is a devastating indictment not only of the rotten core of the country’s authorities, including the police, the judicial and the political systems, but also of the role of the Orthodox Church in the business of the state. Just as Jesus looks down from his cross on the congregation during a service, so, too, does Putin’s portrait (albeit a much younger version of the man) in the office of the town’s mayor, Vadim. Vadim’s deeds, however, read like “a horror story”, according to Kolya’s brother, Dmitri, a Moscovite lawyer who has come to help him fight the system.

What makes Leviathan such a daring work of art is that the director doesn’t shy away from taking on a handful of evil foes that one would assume can get him in trouble with the authorities. After all, the infamous Pussy Riot incident (and the subsequent penalties imposed on those who publicly criticise the regime), not long before the film’s release, made the power of the Church in Russian politics inescapably clear to the world.

The plot is mainly about the town’s decision to take prime land next to the sea, where Kolya has lived for many years, in a move that would be described as eminent domain, except there is no clear reason why the town would have to do this, save perhaps its sublime location. The case has ended up in the courts, because Kolya refused to accept the puny sum of money offered to him by the town (a slap in the face, considering the size of the house and the effort he has put into it over the years), and in a breathtaking scene, the court’s judge dismisses all Kolya’s objections with a slew of legalese, siding with the town. We later see the judge and her assistants taking notes from the mayor, who assures them that their continued cooperation would mean they will be re-appointed to the bench come the next election.

This scene in the courtroom – shot almost entirely in a single take, during which the camera slowly zooms in on the judge’s face as she reads out, at the pace of a machine gun going off, the history of the case and the complete rejection of Kolya’s claims – is simply amazing. It is subtly paralleled with a later scene in the Orthodox Church, in which the priest speaks at a similar tempo for a comparable amount of time.

But the film’s most pointed criticism of the state comes during a vodka-soaked hunting trip. When the man celebrating his birthday has had enough of shooting bottles, he suggests making things more interesting, and he brings portraits of former Soviet leaders to place as the target. We see Brezhnev and Lenin and Gorbachev. But then one of those in attendance slyly asks, “And do you have anyone more recent?” Of course, the audience knows exactly whom he has in mind.

This kind of lèse-majesté, which delicately suggests Putin should be shot, or at least that he is as flawed as previous Soviet leaders, may seem entirely appropriate to a Western audience, but Zvyagintsev has to know he is walking a very fine line here between art and resistance, which Putin is not exactly known for tolerating.

Leviathan flows inexorably towards its tragic conclusion, the plot more rich and lively than we would expect from a Zvyagintsev movie. The pace is less contemplative than we are used to in his films, except for the continual reminders of the waters rhythmically and unstoppably breaking on the shore. Philip Glass’s expressive “Akhnaten”, which bookends the film, resonates with us the moment it starts and proves to be a powerful way of suggesting the almost operatically tragic aspect of the events we see unfolding. At the same time, however, the church is never far from implicated, and a brief shot of a painting on the wall of an old church, showing the head of John the Baptist on a plate, reminds us that things will not necessarily turn out well for those who live a righteous life.

In his most powerful film to date, Zvyagintsev uses the confluence of religion and politics to make a statement about the endemic corruption and the far-reaching tentacles of those in power, portrayed with his always exquisite eye for stunning imagery. This is one to see.

Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival