Countries

American Graffiti (1973)

André Crous

American GraffitiUSA
5*

Director:
George Lucas
Screenwriters:
George Lucas
Gloria Katz
Willard Huyck
Directors of Photography:
Ron Eveslage
Jan D’Alquen

Running time: 112 minutes

What a difference a night makes. The entertainment value of George Lucas’ second feature film, American Graffiti, does not depend on special effects or easy laughs from pratfalls or whatever childish behaviour we have come to behave from film teenagers. The action takes place over the course of a single night, from sunset to sunrise, when everyone’s lives will inevitably change forever as some of the individuals go off to college while others stay behind to either stagnate or begin their lives as adults.

It doesn’t matter that this film was made many decades ago, at the beginning of the 1970s, and took as its central characters a group of friends in 1962, the seriousness of their decisions is timeless and still relevant to viewers in the present day.

Set in California in the last year of innocence in the United States, before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the soundtrack to the lives of the handful of friends we follow is a compilation of music from the 1950s and the early 1960s so lively that the only viewers who don’t feel like dancing along are those who don’t have a pulse. The music is not just extra-diegetic but also produced in the world of the film itself, be it on the radio or by a band at the high-school dance.

At the brightly illuminated Mels (sic) drive-in, where cars pull up to order meals that are delivered to their open windows by waitresses on roller-skates, four friends barely out of high school gather to spend their night together. Steve (Ron Howard) is waiting for his longtime girlfriend, Laurie, whom he will be separated from for months at a time once he is away at college. She is expecting him to ask her to marry him, but when he suggests, instead, that they see other people to test the strength of their relationship, she is understandably rattled and after giving him the cold shoulder, she gives him a proper tongue lashing (and not the kind he was expecting) at a dance. More on that dance later.

Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is conflicted over his imminent departure to the north-east for college. He has received a scholarship from a local diner, but he doesn’t know whether he is the kind of person who is “competitive” to survive the college environment. At the beginning of the film, a blond “goddess” drives past him and seems to mouth “I love you” in his direction, but he will spend the whole film looking for her, further rooting himself to the town and his hopes there. He also becomes involved in the activities of the local gang, the Pharaohs, and seems to have a hidden talent for criminality.

Terry “The Toad” (Charles Martin Smith) is an awkward boy with glasses whose life is made when Steve bequeaths his 1958  Chevy Impala to him for the night. This car gives him the self-confidence he never had, and he ends up with a platinum blonde girl named Debbie with whom he has adventures no one could have imagined when evening fell, or just how right he was when he predicted at the beginning of the film that “Tonight, things are gonna be different.”

And then there is John Milner (Paul Le Mat), the boy who never grew up, who drives his pimped-up car up (with license plate THX 138, the title of Lucas’ very different previous film) and down the streets to race anyone who dares challenge his superiority on the road. John, who is also looking forward to spending the night with a girl, ends up babysitting his potential prey’s teenage sister, and what this does to his character development and our empathy for him is truly stunning.

The writing as a whole is equally “boss,” and while the songs on the soundtrack — ranging from “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” and “The Great Pretender” to “Johnny B Goode,” “A Thousand Miles Away” and “Get a Job” — are as appropriate and relevant as they are full of rhythm, they never overwhelm nor amateurishly overemphasize the scenes they accompany.

One of the highlights of the film sneaks up on us totally unexpectedly. A rare crane shot swoops down on a parked car, where Steve and Laurie are discussing their relationship while Five Satins’ “To the Aisle” softly plays on the soundtrack. Their short conversation is followed by Steve’s pathetic attempt at seduction that borders on assault, before he is thrown from the car. Laurie, far from being hysterical or made a victim, is in the driver’s seat.

This follows an earlier altercation between the couple, once again perfectly captured by Lucas, who uses an unbroken take of some 92 seconds that comprises a backward tracking shot and a nearly 360-degree pan as the camera focuses in close-up on Steve and Laurie dancing while she makes it clear she knows his secrets and has made her peace with them.

In terms of the strength of the screenplay, one need look no farther than the opening sequence, in which the dashing of Laurie’s expectations to get married is followed by Steve giving Terry the keys to his car, and Terry promising to “love and protect this car till death do us part.” But it is the combination of the dialogue, the soundtrack and the acting that make the film so compelling and ensure all the stories continue to grab us, even as four different trajectories are woven through the night. Perhaps it is because the camera doesn’t look down on its characters: Even when they sit on the curb or slide underneath a car, the camera goes where they go.

Whether it is credible for the whole town to seemingly keep driving up and down and around throughout the night is a little beside the point, as the experience is so thoroughly immersive we follow the characters wherever they choose to go, even if they wander without much of a goal except to have fun.

This is what a coming-of-age film is supposed to look and feel like. Never treating the children like infants, never abusing the expected anguish over the transitional nature of things but highlighting the beauty of experiences when we (and they) know these may never be repeated again. American Graffiti remains the most enjoyable, heartfelt film George Lucas ever directed and one of the best films about the bittersweet end of childhood.

Hawaii (2013)

André Crous

Hawaii poster2Argentina
4*

Director:
Marco Berger
Screenwriter:
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomás Perez Silva

Running time: 101 minutes

It’s difficult to imagine Marco Berger making a winter movie.

From the beautiful sunset of one of his first short films, The Watch, to the evergreen bubble of lush gardens in rural Argentina that is a constant metaphor for the budding relationship in Hawaii, his films have always been optimistic about the possibility of finding love, or at least of finding someone. That possibility, however, is not without its ups and downs, and one should never make assumptions about anyone else’s interests or intentions.

Hawaii is a refreshing return to form for Berger after his tense and visually frigid second film, Ausente. Having secured more than $22,000 through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter (disclaimer: I also made a contribution of less than one-half of 1 percent), Marco Berger and co-producer Pedro Irusta set about shooting a film they had initially planned to make with twice the budget. The product is surprisingly well-crafted, and perhaps thanks to Berger’s experience on the short-film anthology Sexual Tension: Volatile, he appears to be in complete control even as he tells a story that one expects to take up much less time.

The world of the film almost exclusively belongs to its two central characters, Eugenio and Martin, played by Manuel Vignau and the curious, wide-eyed Uruguayan actor Mateo Chiarino, respectively. With the exception of three brief scenes, they provide the only interaction of the film, and our attention is focused on the flowering of their relationship alone over the course of a few weeks during the summer.

Martin is homeless. He sleeps in the bushes under a small blanket and goes from house to house during the day asking for work. Eventually, he arrives at the gates of a large property, where the slightly bearded Eugenio, two or three years his senior, tells him the house actually belongs to his uncle, but that he needs help around the house. As Martin is about to leave, he realises he knows Eugenio from many years ago, when he spent time in the area before moving to Uruguay.

The rest of the film looks at the gradual shedding of secrets and the intimacy of shared childhood memories, which bring the two closer together.

Hawaii’s simplicity is only illusory, but the questions the viewer has as the action unfolds will be answered – or, at the very least, framed through the prism of humanity – by the end of the film in a way that ties together the loose ends. Berger expertly manages his characters’ secrets, some of which we know from the beginning, and some of which he only lets us in on over time. Almost surprisingly, homosexuality is not really one of these secrets, although it is referenced obliquely, but Berger knows that we would assume these two characters are keeping that secret, and in the process we may see the forest for the trees – in other words, we may miss the more important story, which is the growth of a relationship outside the limits imposed by supposedly keeping sexuality a secret.

Such optimism also illuminated Berger’s début feature, Plan B, in which two straight men realise they have feelings for each other. That is not to say Hawaii is devoid of tension: After a major revelation, we can feel the characters almost unable to speak to each other, and yet we will soon come to realise the source of anxiety is not quite what we think. Berger is not fooling us on purpose as much as he seems to indicate that people have their reasons, and we have to be more patient to fully comprehend them, instead of drawing an all-too-simple conclusion.

His hair styled in a butch cut, Martin at first appears to be a very straightforward role, but over time we recognise the combination of vulnerability and survival that has brought him this far, and he doesn’t want anyone’s pity. He only appears to be slightly naïve, but just because he does not spend his time writing or drawing, like Eugenio, does not mean he is not sensitive.

He, and the viewer, wants questions answered, but he does not blindly rush toward an explanation. Perhaps the viewer is more impatient, trying to figure out what it means when one touches the other lightly on the shoulder, or when Martin puts his hand on Eugenio’s chest to feel his heartbeat. Is this a game? And do they both know what they are feeling themselves, or are they in the dark about their own emotions? How close can the one allow himself to be to the other without causing suspicion?

These questions are central to the experience, and it is impressive to see Berger pose them to us without seeming to tease us, and yet, at the same time, he keeps our attention on the development of the story and of these characters.

Later, when Martin picks up one of Eugenio’s T-shirts and puts it on, we wonder whether he wants to be more like Eugenio or if there is something more intimate to this gesture. Berger keeps us in the dark, but it is not to create some false kind of tension. It is the most natural scene in the world, and yet he has imbued it with an ambiguity that is audacious and spot-on.

The first 15 minutes of the film, almost entirely without dialogue, seem to belong to a different film altogether, but far from being an artistic flaw, we eventually there is some meaning behind this, too: These 15 minutes are used to sketch a world where Eugenio and Martin have not yet met each other as adults. Once they do, it is as if the world they inhabit also changes, and the result is a film that we can savour.

Hawaii contains clever compositions that do not attract attention but demand more attention because they are deceptively simple. One example is when Martin looks at himself in the mirror in Eugenio’s room. A few minutes later, Berger only needs to show us Eugenio looking in front of him to realise he is actually looking at a reflection of Martin behind him, changing his clothes, and no reverse shot is even necessary.

That kind of oblique look, of knowing what the viewer sees and what the character sees without showing him looking, is missing, unfortunately, from a later scene next to the river. That scene in Brokeback Mountain when Jake Gyllenhaal is peeling a potato and refuses to look behind him at Heath Ledger changing his clothes was awe-inspiring because we knew exactly what was going on in Gyllenhaal’s character’s mind. The scene next to the river in Hawaii eschews this subtlety in favour of more explicit leering.

The rest of the film contains a great deal of contemplation, and while we often don’t know what goes through the characters’ minds, we have some idea. An early shot shows Martin filling a water bottle at a tap before the camera focuses on his crotch. It is a subtle hint at the frustration he keeps hidden, but this frustration helps us understand his character rather than the story, which is a good thing, even though it does make Eugenio rather difficult to decipher.

Then again, perhaps that is life. This is the world occupied by the two main characters, and by them alone, and yet we don’t feel like voyeurs but rather like explorers (incidentally, the film cites Jules Verne from time to time) who share some of the joy of their experience.

Just like Plan B, Berger’s Hawaii is a film that will make its many homosexual viewers happy to be gay. It is not political, and it is not about gay guilt or repression or angst about coming out. On the contrary, it shows how wonderful it is to be alive and be with someone who is comfortable around you, and it treats the possibility of finding love as a reality.

About Elly (2009)

André Crous

About EllyIran
4.5*

Director:
Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriter:
Asghar Farhadi
Director of Photography:
Hossein Jafarian

Running time: 114 minutes

Original title: درباره الی‎
Transliterated title: Darbareye Elly

Because her name is right there in the title, we do all we can in the first act to understand who this mysterious young woman is who has been invited along to the beach by a few other families. She reveals little about her own life, except for being the teacher of the one family’s daughter, but whenever she is not looking, the others talk about her, and in particular they ask the one bachelor in the group, Ahmad, how he is getting along with her.

The woman who invited her, and who seems to be the closest to her, is Sepideh, who gives the impression of being in control of the group and makes decisions she expects everyone else to obey and agree with. But once disaster strikes and Elly goes missing, Sepideh admits she doesn’t even know Elly’s full name. And whatever other details about her life she has, she refuses to share with the group.

Sepideh is a very unlikeable character, at first because she assumes to know best for the increasingly awkward Elly, who wants to leave but is told not to by Sepideh, and then because she obviously knows much more than she is letting on but instead keeps critical information to herself in the name of “honouring” Elly, who has disappeared.

The comparison may seem appropriate, but this is far from being a Persian version of L’Avventura. Whereas Antonioni’s film was much more cynical about human relationships and their longevity even in the face of tragedy, director Asghar Farhadi’s (whose next film, A Separation, would bring him to worldwide attention) About Elly revels in the opposing forces in such a group of individuals who, from the outside, may seem to constitute a very orderly unit.

Sepideh plays a central role in this enduring tension, as even when she tells her side of the story, or Elly’s story, decisions are made to protect others by continuing the lies, or modifying the official story, which inevitably ends up too weak to be credible and makes these people, most of whom have the purest intentions, look like outright liars. One person who doesn’t lie is the straight-talking Peyman (played by Peiman Ma’adi, who starred as one of the two main characters in A Separation), and the dynamics between him and his wife, Shohreh, throughout the film are fascinating to watch.

Peyman’s son, Arash, nearly drowns when Elly is supposed to watch over him. Meanwhile, she is busy flying a kite on the very same beach. She seems happy but also completely disconnected from her responsibility to watch over the children. Granted, this momentary happiness only masks the pain she feels at having been told to stay put by Sepideh, and in an extended sequence of shots showing her smiling face in close-up as she runs with the kite across the beach, the background completely blurred, we realise her inner world has taken over completely.

The circumstances surrounding Arash’s near-drowning remain murky, as the adults only have the children as witnesses and they are still trying to find more details about Elly’s whereabouts. Shortly before her disappearance, she had said she wanted to leave and go back to Tehran, even if she had to accomplish that on foot. But would she have left her bag and her phone, and not even said goodbye to anyone there? That is the question that hangs above the proceedings for most of the film.

We are not only interested in whether Elly has died or not, but what her disappearance reveals about the relationships between the characters as a result of this tragic event, and while Sepideh certainly bears most of the blame for instigating a sequence of events that turns toxic, the temporary solutions found by family and friends to try and protect her or themselves are always insufficient, insofar as they are always only half-truths or lies.

The image of a car stuck in the wet sand on the beach ends the film, and it is a fitting visual metaphor for the sticky territory in which the characters have unwittingly become entangled because of a few simple missteps, despite Peyman’s best efforts to get to the truth and tell the truth to those who deserve to know it.

One such person is someone very close to Elly, who is much more sympathetic than we are led to believe, and his appearance late in the film proves once more that it is better to know the truth than to hear stories told by others, however close they may appear to be to the tales they are telling.

About Elly is a very engaging ensemble piece that has a handful of characters who are frustrating to watch because we know they are behaving in a way that slows down the gathering of information, but in the end, however much we disagree with their methods, we can understand why they are acting in such a way. Farhadi gives us tiny glimpses of individual characters doing things on their own, isolated from other people, to suggest joy or secrecy or intense pain. He does this without spending excessive energy to highlight a fact easily surmised from the film itself: This is a simple story rendered complex by the actions of people who have their reasons, and the mix of reasons and individuals almost inevitably leads to tension of which the consequences are often impossible to predict.

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

André Crous

Le gamin au véloBelgium
4.5*

Directors:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Screenwriters:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Director of Photography:
Alain Marcoen

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: Le Gamin au vélo

The young Cyril has a very scientific mind, but this creates plenty of problems when he is faced with real-world problems that involve emotions. He doesn’t trust whatever anyone else says, unless he has seen it with his own eyes. At least, that is the case with the bicycle he assumed his father would never sell. But now, not only the bicycle but his father, too, have disappeared, and it takes a while for him to accept that they are both gone and that it was his father’s own decision to break the promise. It is interesting to note an early scene, however, in which Cyril is asked whether his father told him he was leaving. Cyril, without missing a beat, says he did, but that he can’t remember exactly what he was told.

Cyril is a character of flesh and blood, even though some early scenes may make the viewer shake her head in dismay at his foolhardy refusal to accept what he is told by others. His reaction is often to lash out, or, as in the scene where he lies about his own knowledge of his father’s actions, it seems he finds it easier to lie to himself. His own actions are not easily predictable, and this is exactly what makes him interesting.

In an early scene, he goes to the building where his father used to live but when no one answers the door and he refuses to leave the premises and the guardians from his boarding school come looking for him, he races through the building and ends up at the medical centre, where he latches onto a woman he doesn’t know for dear life. She is a hairdresser named Samantha, and she decides to look after him over weekends since he doesn’t have anyone else.

Why she does this is a mystery, a question Cyril asks her directly but which she answers with “I don’t know.” That would be fine, except that it comes almost immediately after another, slightly creepy scene in which the area’s greasy teenage drug dealer, Wes, invites Cyril to his room to drink and play video games. We don’t know what Wes’s intentions are, not what Samantha’s are beyond what we can assume is her desire to look after someone besides herself. And we can assume that Wes doesn’t want to engage with Cyril except to use him in one of his criminal schemes, but why does he leer at him while Cyril’s not looking?

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who directed The Kid with a Bike, seem to be implying that Wes and Samantha are actually quite similar at first, and may act with the same intention (in this case, perhaps, selfishness), but as both stories develop, we see their trajectories and end games clearly diverge, and maybe that is where the complexity is to be found. 

Cyril’s father, Guy, is cast perfectly and played by Jérémie Renier, who looks more like a young adult than a full-grown adult. He is not a bad guy who has forsaken his son out of ill will; on the contrary, he is scared and we learn it was actually his own mother who had taken care of Cyril. When she died, he didn’t have enough faith in himself and continues to shirk his parental responsibility. He is a nice person and certainly has more in his head than the character Renier played in the Dardennes’ The Child (L’Enfant), but he is still immature, and the moment when he asks Samantha to tell Cyril he won’t see him any more instead of doing it himself is one of the dramatic highlights of the film.

What makes this all the more poignant is that nearly the entire scene leading up to that moment, the three or four minutes that Guy spends with Cyril in the kitchen and during which he is very accommodating and never rude or disrespectful, are shot almost entirely in a single take, heightening the tension and the intimacy of the exchange. 

There are points in the film when we almost want to throw up our hands in despair and exasperation at the hysterical tantrums of the boy who is going through a rough patch in his childhood and has to learn how to cope with his new life. Late in the film, we find ourselves sympathising with him in a scene that recalls Alex DeLarge’s confrontation with the two policemen (and his former gang members) in A Clockwork Orange, when he wants to fight back but finds himself unable to do that because he has changed.

This perspective brings a disturbing twist to our interpretation of the film (Beethoven, DeLarge’s favourite composer, has a piece on the soundtrack of The Kid with a Bike that is repeated at regular intervals, his Piano Concerto, No. 5, Adagio un poco mosso), but while Kubrick and the Dardenne brothers are completely different kinds of filmmakers, neither of them are content with easy answers.

In the end, we cannot know to what extent Cyril has really grown up. He is still quite young, Wes may be looking for him, and he puts enormous pressure on any relationship Samantha may have with other men. Despite these hanging questions, the ending is strong and satisfying but certainly not sentimental. This is a Dardenne brothers film, after all.

Chungking Express (1994)

André Crous

Chungking Express 2Hong Kong

5*
Director:
Wong Kar-wai
Screenwriter:
Wong Kar-wai
Director of Photography:
Christopher Doyle

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: 重慶森林
Transliterated title: Chung Hing sam lam

Chungking Express has boundless energy, revels in repetition and is quite simply one of the most absorbing films ever made. This may be the only film made by director Wong Kar-wai that I have ever enjoyed (with the possible exception of Fallen Angels, released in 1995), and it is because whatever stylisation takes place always serves to propel the story forward. There is never a dull moment. The repetition is aural, not visual, and although often slightly manipulated, the images are infused with a gritty Hong Kong realism and feature two of the most likeable cops you’re ever likely to see.

These two cops are #223 and #663, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, respectively, and they both suffer from broken hearts. Their tales are told in two separate storylines, with the Midnight Express fast-food stall serving as the only solid connecting thread between the two. 

The film has one of the most exhilarating opening scenes I have seen in my life. The images jump off the screen, and for a while we are blinded, not by the visuals, but by the music. Michael Galasso’s “Baroque” cranks the action forward with rhythms and sounds that immerse you in a world that is audibly — and then, you notice, visibly, too — in motion. Coming after about 1 minute of opening credits (simple white text on a black screen) in complete silence, the score hits a nerve.

The pictures we get are also different from what we’re used to. A step-printed sequence of images (which means the 24 frames per second shot by the camera were altered in post-production to unspool at the same speed, but every second frame has been duplicated, and every other frame discarded) makes for dizzying action, captured with a mobile camera that seems to move both more quickly and more slowly than we are used to from the world around us — or, for that matter, the worlds we know on film. The step-printing process is used again at various points in the film, and it continually succeeds in adding another layer of frenzy to a film that positively throbs with adrenaline in the stiflingly humid, concrete jungle that is Hong Kong.

The action in this first scene, and elsewhere in the first story, takes place at Chungking Mansions, a marketplace where everything can be found because every colour and creed on the face of the earth seems to be hawking their wares here.

In the first story, Cop #223 — whose name, He Qiwu, is only mentioned at rare intervals — has just broken up with his girlfriend, May, whom we never see. He hangs out at Midnight Express, a fast-food joint, almost every night, where the manager (played by “Piggy” Chan Kam-Chuen, who was the film’s still photographer) tries to set him up with girls who are waitresses in his employment. But #223 is not interested. He has decided to grieve for one month, until the 1st of May (yes, the name of his ex), when it will also be his birthday, before seriously pursuing any girl again.

The film’s joyous opening scene ends with #223 brushing past a woman in a blonde wig and is accompanied by a voice-over in which the cop tells us he would soon fall in love with her. At the same time as we follow his melancholy-laden trips to grocery stores where he buys canned pineapples set to expire May 1, we also see snippets of this mysterious blonde’s life. She is dealing with a group of drug smugglers but when she delivers them to the airport and turns around, they’ve suddenly absconded with copious amounts of cocaine.

Honestly, there are parts of this film that do not gel together all that smoothly. The blonde’s working relationship with the owner of a nightclub, who is also deeply involved in the drug business, takes a few viewings to piece together, and even then it’s not entirely clear, because we are asked to infer meaning and function from mere glances. But thanks to the rapid editing that also accelerates the pace at which the stories are told, small jumps are effortlessly papered over, as it were, by the colourful neon.

The first time around, the viewer may be disoriented by the first part, as there are a few very brief shots (lasting no more than a few seconds) with the three main characters from the second part, whom we don’t know yet. But first, a word about the second story.

Cop #663 meets Faye at Midnight Express, where she starts working at the end of the first story, just as #223 disappears from the film (something else that is never explained). He has a sometime girlfriend, an air hostess, but she gives up on their relationship and hands the key with the “Dear John” letter to Faye, who hangs on to the letter for a while, and on to the key to #663’s apartment for much longer. Meanwhile, she becomes fascinated by this man and even starts going to his place (these scenes were shot in DOP Christopher Doyle’s apartment) to clean and reinvigorate his home (some may think of Amélie here). Here, there are questions of credibility, as she replaces certain items, which #663 notices but doesn’t question.

Faye, the air hostess and the cop all make surprise appearances in the first part. First, the air hostess appears outside the airport when the woman with a blonde wig escorts her Indians with their drugs to the departure gate. While the woman in the blonde wig waits outside a toy store, Faye exits with a massive Garfield toy, which we will see again in #663’s flat later on. Moments later, when #223 leaves Midnight Express, there is a short take on #663 looking down from a raised platform, seemingly at #223, but since geography is rarely established in this film, we cannot be certain.

These are very minor points, but they suggest a film that is slightly experimental and strives to make it clear all the buzzing belongs to the same world yet tells its story at full speed in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion, producing a vibrant combination of narrative, sound and colour that stays with you.

You’ll never hear The Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin'” again without thinking of Tony Leung and Faye Wong. Few other directors — Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terrence Malick with Badlands and A Thin Red Line, and Oliver Stone with Platoon — have managed to pull off such an exquisite audiovisual melding using music that had been around for a long time.

Oddly enough, the repetition of the music holds the unconventional storytelling together: Not only is the film divided into two parts, and do the characters from the one turn up unannounced in the other, but like the sequence in Citizen Kane that telegraphs the dissolution of a marriage, a quick succession of scenes involving an array of fast food for the girlfriend precedes the actual introduction of the girlfriend — in a flashback, no less! But Wong Kar-wai breezily ignores the convention of narrative linearity, and yet the viewer stays riveted because these are all such wonderful people.

We love the movies we love despite their faults, not because we think they lack any. Chungking Express, with its numerous awkward plot transitions, is as good an example as any of this, but because I trusted the film from the very first moment and let myself be carried along the stream of images of audio and was never let down by the story or its gentle characters, this remains a truly dazzling film.

Villegas (2012)

André Crous

VillegasArgentina
3*

Director:
Gonzalo Tobal
Screenwriter:
Gonzalo Tobal
Director of Photography:
Lucas Gaynor

Running time: 100 minutes

An odd film with interesting characters who nonetheless leave you cold, Villegas is the début feature of Argentine director Gonzalo Tobal, who always turns away just as his characters are about to become vulnerable and doesn’t give us anything concrete, least of all the storyline.

It opens with two cousins, living very different lives, who receive a phone call that brings bad news. Their grandfather, living in the remote village of Villegas in the Argentine countryside, has died, and although the two young men haven’t seen each other in a while, they leave together from Buenos Aires to attend the funeral.

The more serious of the two, the clean-shaven one with a job and a girlfriend, is Esteban. His cousin is Pipa, a bearded musician whom we meet lying sprawled out on his bed in his underwear, the sun streaming in through the curtains, in a room that needs a serious tidying-up. These two cousins are completely disconnected from each other, and each still harbours ideas about the other from a long time ago when there was still some interaction between them.

Pipa lashes out with sarcasm because he feels vulnerable, and also because he doesn’t want to show his cousin how much he is actually hurting after his band kicked him out. At first, he seems a bit too interested in annoying Esteban, but over time we come to realise he is sincere and still finding his way. Pipa meets Jazmín, a girl at a gas station on the highway, and asks her about a small restaurant he and his cousin used to go to that ought to be nearby. He charms her, although he was actually just looking to hook up with her, and this cute, very unexpected twist takes us by surprise.

It’s too bad the film doesn’t build on this initial moment that reveals some of Pipa’s character. It is true, there are a few other pieces to the puzzle we take notice of, but they are almost always dead-ends. For example, his cousin’s sister, Clara, is a little infatuated with him, but all he wants to do is listen to Marlene Dietrich sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on their late grandfather’s gramophone in the now-empty house.

One small act that does pay off, however, is when Pipa sets up Esteban with a girl because he senses his cousin, deep down and despite what he says, wants to have some fun. This meeting, though purely for pleasure with no possibility of lasting longer than a few hours, does change Esteban, but again we are left to wonder how much or what exactly will happen as a result.

Villegas doesn’t give many answers to our questions, and the story itself is also too minimal, with too few moments of significant narrative weight, to keep us interested in the journey we’re taking. The countryside could have played a much bigger role in this film, especially the scene of the two men getting lost in a field in the middle of the night, but despite a great backdrop, the story in the foreground is badly drawn and ultimately not stimulating enough to keep our attention.

Viewed at the Sarajevo Film Festival 2013.

A Last Wish (2008)

André Crous

Una ultima voluntadArgentina
3.5*

Director:
Marco Berger
Screenwriter:
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomás Perez Silva

Running time: 9 minutes

Original title: Una última voluntad

Argentine filmmaker Marco Berger’s very first short film has as much ambiguity as anything he would make in the future, and unlike so-called gay cinema in general, but exactly like the rest of Berger’s oeuvre, this film lacks any kind of overt anguish over sexuality.

In A Last Wish (Una última voluntad), set deep in a forest at an unknown time in history, we find a soldier, already captured by a foreign army, about to be executed by a firing squad. He is granted one last wish, and we learn this wish has to be executed as a final courtesy to a man who is about to die, as long as it is possible, takes less than five minutes to complete, and does not nullify his imminent execution.

The final wish of the man, credited as The Condemned (Manuel Vignau), who is never named, is very simple: a kiss. Besides the unusual request that he makes (we surmise it is unusual because the general doesn’t understand how such a request can be granted if the company consists exclusively of men), he also has a sense of mystery about him because we never hear him speak. He conveys his wish to an officer in charge, who shares it with the others.

Initially, there is some confusion, but when a thorough examination of the manual reveals there is no legal reason to deny the request, a solution must be found. Who will kiss him? The officers decide to draw straws, or matches, to be more precise, and thereby determine the other participant in the execution of this act, credited as The Chosen Soldier (played by Lucas Ferraro, who also starred opposite Vignau in Berger’s début feature, Plan B).

The short is barely 7 minutes long, and its cinematography does not exactly elicit enthusiasm, but there is a moment towards the end, once the man has been executed, that we get a pensive 360-degree pan that reveals the true purpose of the film: It is not about what happens (whether the prisoner is executed or not, whether he is kissed or not) what about the effect these events, and in particular that kiss, have on the officer who likely did not expect to share such an intimate moment with his enemy that day.

The 360-degree pan reveals The Condemned and The Chosen Soldier, both entirely still, and the relationship between the two in this scene is striking on Ferraro’s face. He doesn’t quite know what to make of everything that has happened, and neither do we, but we know that one instant had an effect on him and that sometimes love can hit you harder than violence.

Berger’s film is about a moment of discovery, not of sexuality but of intimacy, and although the setup is terribly contrived and the visuals are mostly uninteresting, his story as a framing device for a powerful moment that is sure to linger with you.

Flower Buds (2011)

André Crous

PoupataCzech Republic
4.5*

Director:
Zdeněk Jiráský
Screenwriter:
Zdeněk Jiráský
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný

Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Poupata

Misery loves company, and whatever shape that company takes, real or illusory, the happiness, however short-lived, can make for powerful storytelling.

The plot of the Czech film Flower Buds (Poupata) is steeped in distress and hopelessness, but it is a slow-motion car crash from which we cannot turn our eyes away even for a second.

Similar in tone, though not in style, to the despair that seeps through the work of Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Inárritu (especially in 21 Grams and Biutiful), Flower Buds is constructed out of small, well-chosen incidents that sustain each other and never come across as either contrived or superfluous.

Set around Christmastime in and around the small industrial town of Nové Sedlo in the north-west of the country, most of the scenes feature a factory in the background that pumps smoke into the crisp air of the countryside.

In the opening scene, we find Jarda at his post next to a railway crossing, where he receives telephone calls to inform him of approaching trains, as a result of which he has to lower and raise the boom for the odd car that passes by. After work, he heads straight for the local herna bar, or mini-casino, one of those infamous bastions of decadence found almost everywhere in the Czech Republic, where he exchanges yet another heirloom for a shot at the jackpot.

Jarda is, without a doubt, the most tragic character in the film, and Vladimír Javorský plays him without any sugarcoating. Though he is already on a steady downhill slide when we meet him, we quickly realise he has been caught in the web of his gambling addiction for a very long time. His wife, Kamila, knows the family is in dire straits (though she has no idea just how bad the situation actually is, or is about to be) and tries to help out by undressing to pose for a calendar, together with fellow exercise friends, with the goal of earning some extra money. Kamila has dreams of visiting the Amazon and believes her husband is saving up to make that dream come true.

Meanwhile, Jarda’s teenage son, Honza, is smitten with a stripper named Carmen, or Zuzana, who performs at the same herna bar from time to time, and he sets his sights on “saving” her, although he luckily doesn’t have any ambitions of being Travis Bickle.

The characters are all at the end of a slippery rope – we also learn early on that Honza’s sister is pregnant, though the identity of the father is left ambiguous – and have little to no hope of climbing back up. A Vietnamese couple, friends of the family, is also enduring enormous hardship. Despite having spent many years in the Czech Republic, they do not speak the language well and feel completely out of place in this place where it seems, from the look of the film, they have been condemned to an eternal winter.

Jarda tells them to get used to living here, to start thinking in this language and let it be a part of who they are, but it is difficult to consider him a serious model to look up to, given his own spiral of hopelessness. Viewers will find themselves easily sympathising with the Vietnamese couple, though, as their refrain of “Do prdele se sněhem!” (Roughly translated as “This snow can go to hell!”) is both endearing and a very understandable, perhaps even recognisable, cry for help, especially to anyone who has ever suffered from a feeling dépaysement in a new, very different environment.

On the surface, this is a small, character-driven drama set in a small town where the herna bar offers hope of a better tomorrow while at the same time crushing those dreams in front of our very eyes.

It is therefore refreshing to see how director Zdeněk Jiráský discovers surprising lyricism – beauty is too strong a word – in the rough elements that make up his story: a middle-aged woman in a red tracksuit doing her morning exercise outside in the snow with a fuming factory behind her; a drunk teenager dressed up as an angel walking around in the snow at night time, eerily lit up by the lights of the same factory in the distance; a short but agonising track-out from Jarda as he feeds his life insurance to the slot machine, a shot that embodies our desire to flee such a scene of desperation.

Flower Buds is an examination of obsession every bit as potent as Requiem for a Dream, but it is rooted firmly in realism rather than hyperrealism. This is an epically tragic film that is not at all a depressing viewing experience and demands to be seen.

This Must Be the Place (2011)

André Crous

This Must Be the PlaceItaly/Ireland
3.5*

Director:
Paolo Sorrentino
Screenwriters:
Paolo Sorrentino
Umberto Contarello
Director of Photography:
Luca Bigazzi

Running time: 118 minutes

You will be forgiven for thinking This Must Be the Place is a film about a cross-dressing Sean Penn. But if you look past the black nail polish, the lipstick and the eye shadow, not to mention the monotonous high-pitched squeals that pass for his side of a conversation, you come to realize his character, Cheyenne, is a bored former rock star from whom a calmness emanates that can soothe those around him, be they friends of strangers.

He lives in Ireland with his wife of many decades, a fire-fighter played by the always dependably quirky Frances McDormand, but the enormous mansion around him and the estate that extends into a forest-like garden do not thrill him; on the contrary, he seems to be drowning in all the space he owns.

He receives a phone call informing him his father, whom he hasn’t seen since moving to Ireland 35 years before, is on his deathbed; Cheyenne’s fear of flying leads him to take a ship to New York, where he arrives just in time for the wake.

Among the items his father left is a journal filled with pictures and details about his concentration camp warden whom he was tracing and who now lives somewhere deep in the American Midwest. It takes Cheyenne less than a beat to recognize the need to confront this man and take revenge for what he did.

Thus starts a journey filled with strange moments, ranging from a bison grazing on a front porch in Utah and a borrowed SUV spontaneously combusting on the open road to a grown man in a small town called Bad Axe, Michigan, walking around in a superhero costume in the middle of the night, and The Talking Heads’ David Byrne performing their hit “This Must Be the Place” in a New York club while a woman reading a magazine rotates around the stage. The film is filled with these stunningly surreal moments of Americana that all seem to be rooted in reality but are also very removed from our immediate lives; their meaning seems to be very straightforward but at the simultaneously elusive.

Time after time, Cheyenne is right there in the frame to ensure the moment is even stranger. His physique and the sadness behind his facial expressions remind us of Buster Keaton, if only Keaton had donned makeup and styled his hair to look like he had stuck his finger in an electric socket.

The film’s visual style has a distinctly minimalist feeling, though the camera movements are dynamic. Perhaps no film besides The Tree of Life has as many tracking shots for no apparent reason. The shots are certainly meant to be noticed, like when the camera rises up out of a golden wheat field to follow a car passing next to it, and the insistence on camera fluidity becomes irritating as time goes on, because the style is hollow.

This Must Be the Place sets itself up as a road movie of which the inciting incident is Cheyenne’s discovery that his father had uncovered the identity of his former captor. Along the way, schlepping his hand luggage with him everywhere he goes, Cheyenne meets a variety of people that suggest the real reason director Paolo Sorrentino made the film: His focus is the hodgepodge of characters as colourful as the American landscape that produced them, and visually the idea of “a land of contrasts” is hammered home very powerfully with separate scenes in which the television in the background shows Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

There are many times when Sorrentino’s approach is perfectly complemented by Sean Penn’s acting, as a single-take scene with Penn having a near-nervous breakdown in front of David Byrne clearly shows, or when Penn humours a young boy whose father was killed in Iraq by performing the title song on his guitar.

But Sorrentino’s artistic sensibility, which sometimes skirts the edges of Jarmusch territory, tends to get him into trouble: Arvo Pärt’s exquisite “Spiegel im Spiegel” does not belong on the soundtrack when the scene is a lonely, overlit supermarket aisle, and neither does the climax warrant three consecutive, identical tracking shots of a man delivering a monologue. What follows the monologue, however, is exactly what the plot needed to come to a satisfying conclusion.

A refrain from Cheyenne describes the viewer’s impression very well: “Something’s not quite right here. I don’t know what exactly, but something.”

The film has good intentions, the camera makes the picture dynamic, a bit like a music video, and many of the smaller character parts are really touching. Unfortunately, the film never allows us to get close to them.

 

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

André Crous

Great GatsbyUSA
3*

Director:
Baz Luhrmann
Screenwriters:
Baz Luhrmann
Craig Pearce
Director of Photography:
Simon Duggan

Running time: 143 minutes

After the disappointing Australia, Baz Luhrmann marks his return to the world of supersized, kaleidoscopic entertainment with The Great Gatsby. His film is the adaptation of the eponymous 1926 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is as short and compact as this film is long and sprawling, clocking in at nearly two and a half hours.

Set on Long Island in 1922, a stone’s throw from New York City, in the posh villages of West Egg and East Egg, the protagonist and narrator of the story, the 29-year-old Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), moves into a small cottage on the grounds immediately bordering a palatial fortress where there are nightly parties that draw elegant crowds from across the state and beyond partaking in the near-orgiastic celebrations of money and booze.

The host, we learn, is a mysterious man called Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is Nick’s age, and rumours swirl as to the origin of his fortune. When Nick finally meets Gatsby, he is most impressed by his smile, about which Nick waxes lyrical when he describes it as “one of those rare smiles you may come across four or five times in your life.” Alas, despite the faithful (unlike most of the story’s characters, who effortlessly two-time their partners) adaptation of nearly every single line in the novel, this very important character trait does not make its way onto the big screen.

However, Gatsby’s first appearance onscreen certainly presents him as a star worthy of Nick’s ultimate devotion, as we, seemingly from Nick’s point of view, look almost directly at him while fireworks fill the night sky in slow motion behind him. This point-of-view shot obviously seeks to make us identify with Nick, and consequently with his interest in Gatsby, but such appreciation is undercut by the pointless bookend structure of the film that is meant to mirror the writer’s voice in the novel.

The film opens with Nick, at a sanatorium in winter time, a few years after the events; he is struggling to come to terms with his friendship with Gatsby and is urged by his psychiatrist to write out his memories. These notes, typed out just like in Moulin Rouge!, become, as we realise by the end of the film with a sense of dread, the novel itself. It is a jarring structuring device that makes it seem like Fitzgerald could be equated with Nick, although it does illuminate the reason why there are a few scenes in both the novel and the film, related to us by Nick, where he nonetheless wasn’t present.

The Great Gatsby is mostly a story of love and admiration, between the dainty, ditsy Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a distant relative of Nick’s, and Gatsby. Despite his riches, Gatsby is a man who still yearns for the heart of the woman he has loved for many years and because of whom he has become the man he is at present. Nick is a man trying to make ends meet after the Great War and enjoying the life of a bachelor at a time of roaring debauchery. This wasn’t quite the case in the novel, but fortunately, Luhrmann is better at subtlety here than usual.

The set and costume design, as should be expected from a Luhrmann production, is gorgeous (“full of money”, to borrow Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy’s voice), and when late at night during one party the girls splash around the pool at Gatsby’s place with some inflatable zebras, one has a feeling of awe at how many things are going on at once inside the frame. The director was in the mood for indulgence, however, and the party scenes sometimes feel like a bit of a sideshow to the central drama.

The film generally isn’t very visually inventive, with scenes of fast cars shot the same way every time to provoke an impression of confusion, and whereas the director’s digital tracking shots whipped the viewer from Montmartre to an operatic moon in a single movement in Moulin Rouge!, here they seem both irrelevant and less sophisticated as we rush from one side of the bay to the other without a sense of exhilaration. The special effects are sometimes stunningly bad, as it seems the technical team forgot that backgrounds or rear projection don’t always have to be blurred to such an extent it becomes a distracting wasteland of colourful ash. The film has little feeling for place or people, and too many of the scenes feel like they were shot on a sound stage.

The Great Gatsby’s final 10 minutes are a mess and show Luhrmann’s intention was not to reflect on loss but rather to skim over it completely. The final chapter of Fitzgerald’s novel was riveting because it showed how tenuous Gatsby’s connection to the rest of humanity was, while the film nearly glosses over this significant matter entirely.

There are a few references to Sunset Blvd., another film about a longing for the glamour of yesteryear (Nick asks Gatsby “Are you ready for your close-up?” and one character’s death in a swimming pool immediately brings to mind the bookends of Wyler’s film), but Luhrmann is mostly his energetic self, and we realise that while his fingerprints are all over the film, his creativity has more or less run dry. A long sequence of dissolves towards the end of the film is almost sad, and so is the lingering close-up on Nick’s face when he gives Gatsby a heartfelt compliment a few moments later.

Despite the raunchy parties, we all go home at the end feeling little for Luhrmann the host, and while there are a few rare moments of joy to be had, among them the introduction of the many partygoers — transforming the novel’s list into a memorable smorgasbord of characters — the overall impression is one of excess rather than excitement.