Countries

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

André Crous

How to Survive a PlagueUSA
4*

Director:
David France
Screenwriters:
David France
T. Woody Richman
Tyler H. Walk
Director of Photography:
Derek Wiesehahn

Running time: 120 minutes

Once, there was a terrible disease in the United States and around the world. It seemed to affect only homosexuals, and the discrimination against this already marginalised community increased as fear gripped the country over the fatality of the human immunodeficiency virus that led to blindness, deafness, sensitivity to the smallest illness, the unsightly Kaposi’s sarcoma, and almost certain death.

The 1980s and the first half of the 1990s were the worst for those suffering from the AIDS epidemic, as first the Reagan government was unwilling to address the epidemic (President Reagan infamously mentioned the word AIDS for the first time in public as late as 1987), the Ed Koch administration of New York City dragged its feet, and then the George H.W. Bush government didn’t push its drug administration and National Institute of Health to pursue research of the disease and of a potential cure with greater urgency.

How to Survive a Plague is a documentary that tells the story of how a group of activists brought down enormous pressure on the government, informed themselves about the virus, worked to raise public awareness and make the influential drug companies aware how their policies were affecting a large swathe of the population.

These activists formed part of a grassroots organisation called ACT UP, and there can be no doubt that it is because of the work of ACT UP that AIDS deaths have drastically decreased and medication is affordable to a very significant amount of people infected with the lethal virus. AIDS has not disappeared, but the AIDS crisis has, and it is because of the protests and the perseverance of ACT UP.

This documentary, comprised almost entirely of footage shot by dozens of individuals at the time of the epidemic that follows some of the main figures in the movement, starts in what is clearly presented as another lifetime: The appearance of the Twin Towers reminds us this was another lifetime. Labelled “Year 6”, the film opens in 1987 at a protest march against the policies of New York City Mayor Ed Koch, whom activist Ann Northrop beseeches to declare a state of emergency, so that those suffering in the emergency rooms, often for days before they are treated, usually assaulted by homophobic assailants right there in the waiting rooms, can be properly treated, with dignity.

There is incredible anger at Koch, and this anger, which extends to the government as a whole, fuels the movement for most of its existence, coupled with a strong urge to find a cure and stop the suffering and the death of thousands upon thousands of people. “It’s like living in a war,” says Peter Staley, a former bond trader on Wall Street, who is one of the main characters in the film. “All around me, friends are dropping dead. And you’re scared for your own life at the same time.”

The fear and the anger translated into many activists throwing caution to the wind and acting out in ways they may not have considered had they been healthy or unaffected, although some of the important individuals, like retired chemist Iris Long or Merck research scientist Emilio Emini, were not activists but participated because they cared, they knew they could make a difference and help all of these people in any way afflicted by HIV and AIDS.

Without a doubt, one of the most engaging figures is Peter Staley, who is good-looking, passionate and eloquent about the message of the movement. He scales government buildings to hang banners that proclaim “Silence = Death”, he appears on television programs to debate politicians about the government’s health policies, and he speaks at AIDS conferences that until then had largely excluded the voices of the movement. This last point is not really dealt with in any detail, however, and the film would have benefited from greater context.

We follow ACT UP’s fight against Burroughs Wellcome Company, the pharmaceutical firm that produced AZT, the first AIDS drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration, at the astronomical cost of $10,000 a year per patient, to getting DHPG approved, which would save the eyesight of tens of thousands of AIDS sufferers. Their actions are not just the result of their anger but also of an enormous amount of research, often by members who studied at Ivy League schools. They help people understand the virus and huddle with everyone else to come up with the best strategy to proceed. They would go on to form the Treatment and Data Committee, which would ultimately become the Treatment Action Group (TAG).

We follow the action as if someone had taken a camera back in time to record everything as it happened. Meetings in basements, interviews with some of the main people, family gatherings… everything is there in the film — even Staley riding his bike.

This film contains incredibly powerful moments, and they are almost always the result of inherent emotion on the faces of characters deeply affected by this epidemic, often the victims of decisions made by bureaucrats who don’t yet understand what ordinary people are going through on a day-to-day basis. And that is why it brings such insight to notice people like Ellen Cooper, who used to be an FDA regulator who had to explain the administration’s decisions to an angry ACT UP crowd, become AIDS activists themselves.

Interestingly, the scene that moved me more than anything else was also the most obviously filmic. It was the protest march against President George H.W. Bush’s apparent inaction on AIDS research. Tens of thousands of protesters flocked to Washington, D.C., and some even dumped the bones and ashes of their loved ones on the front lawn of the White House, their actions set to the eerie sounds of “Happiness” by Jónsi and Alex. This scene is incredibly powerful.

How to Survive a Plague tells a breathtaking story but falters towards the end when it starts using shorthand once Bill Clinton becomes president, skipping from 1993 to 1995, which is when research had picked up and the government agencies and public opinion had finally come around (with the exception of eternally homophobic Senator Jesse Helms) to agreeing that a cure should be sought. We are told these were the worst years, but we don’t know why. That is a terrible omission from the narrative.

However, suddenly seeing Mark Harrington (one of the leaders of TAG) and others appear as a much older man, knowing what that means, and hearing videographer Bill Bahlman confirm that “the dying was stopping,” quickly stuns us into silence.

Although it is only a few years since AIDS decimated entire communities, this film is a very vivid reminder of the trauma that accompanied the disease and shows how activism accelerated the research that eventually led to the cocktail, achieving major triumphs along the way, like getting DHPG approved and highlighting the absurdity of the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition on using condoms.

If you want to know anything about the struggle against AIDS, this is the film to watch.

Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes, when that day has come and gone, there’ll be people alive on this earth — gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white — who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought, and in some cases gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free. — Vito Russo

In a Bedroom (2012)

André Crous

In a BedroomPoland
2.5*

Director:
Tomasz Wasilewski
Screenwriter:
Tomasz Wasilewski
Director of Photography:
Marcin Martinez Swystun

Running time: 72 minutes

Original title: W sypialni

Not to be confused with the striking, New England-set 2002 masterpiece In the Bedroom, directed by Todd Field, the Polish In a Bedroom is a film that seems determined to gives us too little information every step of the way, using jump cuts not to create a sense of energy or rhythm but rather repetitive ellipses that quickly become tiresome and render the action uninvolving.

Edyta is a call girl who finds men over the Internet, but at their homes she drugs them and either takes their money or their food, or uses their out-of-town wife’s face cream. She doesn’t seem to have any particularly villainous intentions, but the reason she behaves this way is left unexplained until late in the film.

In the meantime, her anxious demeanour — which Tomasz Wasilewski conveys well enough and even manages to transfer to the viewer in a minimalistic but well-crafted scene taking place at a supermarket, where Edyta surreptitiously eats and drinks without paying — often makes her seem like she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and yet we know not why. Until she takes her first drag of a joint and immediately spills her secret: She has a son, somewhere, doing something, and she is not a part of his life, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Let’s not say anything important,” she asks Patryk, a very nice young man in whose company she spends the second half of the film. Her involvement with him starts off in a sequence so fragmented and opaque, we simply cannot root for them to be happy together, because so much information has been withheld. We meet Patryk for the first time when he knocks on the bathroom door, where Edyta has taken refuge while waiting for her date-rape drug to take effect.

But this moment comes at the end of a mysterious yet interesting sequence of moments in which we see her — always wearing the same dress — next to or close to men sleeping on their beds next to her, and once, bizarrely, dressed in a towel, next to a woman on a couch in the living room, whom she tries to wake her up. We don’t know whether these moments are real or not, but they end with the brutal intrusion of Patryk.

Such brutal intrusions occur from time to time, and Wasilewski is adept at using them to both utilise an emotion generated by his story and present it in a way we were not expecting. One example is when Patryk is on the phone to a friend who may have located his brother Bartek. He slams down the phone, and when he looks up, he notices Edyta around the corner, who has been eavesdropping. Instead of screaming at her, the cut to him in the rough seas, the camera loudly bobbing up and down in the water to the rhythm of his shortness of breath on the soundtrack, is a very good transition, but the scene lasts only a few seconds, and we don’t know when this takes place or even whether Edyta accompanied him to the beach.

The film is set in Warsaw, though Edyta is from Gdynia, and her being out of place is certainly significant, although we too frequently lack the detail to understand her behaviour or her desires. The camera is handheld but only slightly unsteady, which creates an unease that is difficult to pinpoint at first but a very good decision on the part of Wasilewski and director of photography Marcin Martinez Swystun.

The main problem In a Bedroom has is its presentation: The editing sometimes makes it seem this is only half a film, and all the interesting bits that connect the different shots and would have created a more cohesive narrative have been excised. The uneasiness this creates is, of course, the goal of the director, but for a viewer who knows very little about the central character and is saddled with her compulsive lying, we cannot even guess that what she says when she seems to be honest is in fact the truth, a fact that continues to alienate us until the very end.

This may be one of the most prudish hookers we’ve seen since Fellini’s Cabiria, but while a character arc would have helped us immensely to understand how she feels when she does this job, the disjointed narrative comprising wholly disconnected moments does little to inspire any kind of empathy, especially when she rejects the care of good Samaritans. A moment in an Internet café, when she is speaking to a potential client but we cannot hear the other person, is gorgeous, because it emphasises her utter loneliness, but in the end, the lack of empathy we have for a character whom we cannot understand and who does little to confront the pain and sadness in her own life except to keep running is not interesting at all.

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)

André Crous

The Place Beyond the PinesUSA
4*

Director:
Derek Cianfrance
Screenwriters:
Derek Cianfrance
Ben Coccio
Darius Marder
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 140 minutes

Derek Cianfrance is the unsung hero of contemporary cinema. Despite the grim and outright pessimistic perspective on relationships that he made so visible in his 2010 film Blue Valentine, in which a young man and woman constantly fight, bicker and make up, only to crush each other again — and the viewer, too — his films very realistically accentuate something very few others can boast of: the dark side of love.

The Place Beyond the Pines is a departure from his previous film in the sense that it doesn’t focus narrowly on the ups and many downs of a relationship but rather takes the consequences of fathers’ actions and project them over a generation to examine what happens down the line, although the director has much more interest in the drama of life than in any religious interpretation the viewer may bring to it.

The result, as is to be expected with Cianfrance, is not pretty, and yet life, though always complicated, is not without hope. There is a chance for characters to redeem themselves, but there is a big caveat: provided that other people don’t bring them down in the process. There are no guardian angels here, and even the actions that seem to spark a temporary reprieve for someone in dire need are usually motivated by the so-called protector’s selfish need for self-protection.

In this film, Cianfrance teams up with noted director of photography Sean Bobbitt, who has a background in documentary work (as does the director) and worked with Michael Winterbottom on the marvellous depiction of domestic turmoil in the underrated 1998 film Wonderland.

The collaboration produces a very gritty representation of life that includes drugs and violence. But these are merely props in a story that runs much deeper.

The film tells the story of Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) who earns the bare minimum riding a motorcycle inside a steel “globe of death,” and when he learns he has a son he drops everything to commit his life to being a good father. However, he is stubborn and aggressive and behaves like a real miscreant towards the man whose life he is making miserable: Kofi, the stepfather of his son. Kofi turns out to be one of the most interesting characters in the film, and he is portrayed with a quiet sense of dignity and fatherly love for a child who is not his own by actor Mahershala Ali.

Events transpire that lead to a confrontation with rookie police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), who is about to lose his naiveté about life as a policeman. His actions, as well as those of Glanton, will follow him for years to come and impact his relationship with his son.

The film is set in upstate New York, in the town of Schenectady, which is the approximate Mohawk translation of the film’s title. However, this factoid doesn’t feature anywhere in the story, which will certainly animate many post-screenings discussions at the bar (because, yes, you probably will need a drink after this film).

As we saw in the gorgeous but disturbing Little Children, the green foliage of New England towns can hide terrible secrets (of course, American Beauty had the same message), and The Place Beyond the Pines also seeks to pull the curtain back ever so slightly on the goings-on in the small town where its story takes place. Corruption, drugs and violence are just a few of the issues that the film raises, and they don’t even come close to the emotional violence done to us by these fictional characters.

As bookends, the opening and the closing shot are as magnificent as their meaning seems to be just out of reach. The opening Steadicam shot will make the viewer think of GoodFellas and its famous Copacabana tracking shot through the kitchen as we follow Ray Liotta (who also appears in this film) deeper and deeper into a place where he wields great influence. In Cianfrance’s film, it’s Gosling whose back is turned to the camera as he walks shirtless and supremely confidently through an amusement park in a shot that lasts nearly three and a half minutes from beginning to end; he is serene despite the wild sounds all around him as he heads towards the abovementioned “globe of death”, where — in a seemingly unbroken take — he will mount his motorcycle and perform the deadly stunt for a raucous crowd.

The film’s closing shot shows this same character’s son, many years later, taking up a motorcycle and driving off into the distance, this time across a peaceful autumn landscape that in no way represents his inner turmoil. Where he is headed we do not know (very likely he doesn’t know, either), and it would be incredibly simplistic and presumptuous to assume this scene neatly slots in with the events of the opening shot, but there is an unspoken hint of filiality between the two, and tenuous as the connection may be, we get a feeling of cohesion that is simply gorgeous.

Cianfrance’s films may be bleak, but his work proves the ever greater richness and complexity of life, and he should get more credit as a storyteller and a documenter of human emotion.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

André Crous

We Need to Talk About KevinUK/USA
4*

Director:
Lynne Ramsay
Screenwriters:
Lynne Ramsay
Rory Stewart Kinnear
Director of Photography:
Seamus McGarvey

Running time: 112 minutes

Young Kevin (Ezra Miller) is a monster. From the moment he is born until the night he is arrested at school, a creepy, stomach-turning malice is palpable, and at various points, the viewer will rightly wonder whether the film might unfold as an adaptation of The Omen.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a film about the effect a child’s killing rampage at his school has on his parents, but compared with other films like Beautiful Boy, Gus van Sant’s Elephant or the astonishing The Class (Klass) from Estonia, the focus here is purely on the mother and her very traumatic recollection of her son’s childhood.

The film does not pretend to be interested in the reasons behind Kevin’s actions, and this is an important point to keep in mind. Whether we eventually get any kind of explanation or motivation is quite beside the point — the point being an examination of his mother Eva’s (Tilda Swinton) struggle to make peace with the events of the past 18 years that culminated in the deaths of many innocent children, at the hands of her own flesh and blood.

But this does not mean the film is indifferent toward Kevin’s psychology. It is made evident that Kevin was an unwanted baby and that Eva did not plan on being a mother. It is impossible to tell whether the film assigns the blame to her for Kevin’s unstable character, but we do get a sense she is not blameless and may even be responsible for his ultimate breakdown.

The glimpses we get are all presented as wholly subjective impressions, and perhaps for the first time since Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, we are made aware of the colour red in almost every single scene. But unlike Roeg’s film, which was an effective exercise in making a stylized thriller, We Need to Talk About Kevin uses red as a way to visibly stain the memories of the main character. Such visual intelligence is rarely seen on the big screen.

It is also to the screenplay’s credit that Eva is at the centre of events since this is the only way for the film to present her son and his actions as perplexing without testing our patience and our desire for rational motivation. Kevin has no sense of shame and fearlessly humiliates his mother, who tries to rationalize his behaviour and refuses to discipline him. Often, Eva’s sense of culpability makes her blame herself for the petulance displayed by her son, who forever remains a stranger to her.

Eva’s emotional turmoil, her angst and her frustration at always being the victim are staged very competently, though the constant staring of the people she passes in her small town does become more than a little irritating.

Kevin is not a likeable boy, nor does he reveal any sense of a moral compass. He is allowed to be passive-aggressive throughout his entire childhood and always gets away with this kind of behaviour, perhaps because his family seems to be isolated from the rest of society. Though neither of his parents is particularly quick-witted, Kevin somehow manages to be a genius at social manipulation, and his dark side will send shivers down the spine of any adult viewer. But even if we accept him as just a loose cannon, this aspect of his character comes across as contrived.

With its focus on Eva’s ostracism in society and her stoic acceptance that the days ahead will be as gloomy as the days behind her, We Need to Talk About Kevin is likely to elicit a sense of frustration at this remarkably passive character who never fights against the injustices committed against her and who often remains quiet about her sense of helplessness.

A film about a child who is born unwanted and finally takes his revenge by mowing down his classmates is certainly one way to promote a pro-choice message, one I have no qualms with, but the radical characterization of Kevin as being something close to the Antichrist does not help the cause.

Though far from brilliant, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a potent and haunting depiction of a mother’s conflicted response to being rejected by her own son, made by a filmmaker clearly in control of her craft.

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

A Separation (2011)

André Crous

SeparationIran
4.5*

Director:
Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriter:
Asghar Farhadi
Director of Photography:
Mahmoud Kalari

Running time: 123 minutes

Original title: جدایی نادر از سیمین‎
Transliterated title: Jodaeiye Nader az Simin

A woman anxiously tries to cross a busy road in downtown Tehran to prevent an old man from being hit by oncoming traffic. She stands there, helpless, while cars whizz past her and the man fatefully shuffles closer and closer towards what seems like certain death.

Then, something unusual happens: There is a cut to a few hours later at an apartment, where the old man silently rocks back and forth, seemingly unaffected by the chaotic scene from earlier. This single cut, instead of being a cop-out on the part of director Asghar Farhadi, sets up a mystery that will last the entire running time of A Separation. Filmically, it is also a decision that makes perfect sense, since it immediately compels us, the viewers, to start figuring out what might have happened — and in so doing puts us in the same boat as the lion’s share of the film’s characters.

This incident, as well as another major event in the plot, when this same woman is tossed out of the flat and collapses in the stairwell, besides being a mystery that needs to be resolved by the end of the film, is also indirectly the result of the “separation” in the title. In the opening scene, staged so the viewers take the place of judges who will decide the fate of the couple that looks straight at us, we learn that husband and wife Nader and Simin want to separate so she can move to the United States while her husband stays behind to look after his elderly father, the man who would later seek to cross the road.

Though the situation and the motivations seem clear-cut enough, the film quickly reveals itself to be a very perceptive study of human drama, which puts forward an array of sometimes contradictory actions that cannot easily be understood or pigeonholed for the purposes of entertainment. Many small tragedies unfold along the way, not with melodramatic outbursts or big scenes of betrayal, but in very methodical increments that eventually escalate into a full-blown crisis.

Nader (Peyman Moaadi), who works during the day, cannot take care of his father and therefore enlists the help of a kindly woman named Razieh (Shahab Hosseini) to clean the flat and make sure the father doesn’t hurt himself. But on Razieh’s first day at work, the old man, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and rarely speaks, wets himself. This episode, which puts Razieh in a tough position, because she wants to help him without touching him — for, viewed in religious terms, that might mean she is committing a sin by making herself impure — is presented with genuine sympathy for both characters despite the filmmaker’s unmistakable view that it would be patently absurd for a religion to prevent someone from changing the soiled pants of an invalid.

The film’s focus is on the role of truth and lies in daily life, and it is Razieh who best captures this tension. She is obviously a good person and tells white lies to her husband in an effort to make his own life better, but moreover, her docile attitude is likely the result of her husband’s rigid religious beliefs. While Razieh’s lies finally catch up with her, a lie that Nader’s daughter tells keeps him from going to jail, and this ambiguity of life is what many filmmakers over time have sought to capture.

It is truly admirable for a film to take on such complicated matters and keep them in line with the legal drama that occupies a large part of the plot. Going way beyond the constraints of a film such as Kramer vs. Kramer, A Separation is insightful enough to realize the truth, at times, can make things more difficult rather than easier, and the film is a journey, for the characters and for the viewer, towards discovering the truth behind the lies and the reasons for people’s actions.

The one major flaw of A Separation is the film’s rapid-fire editing that often covers a single scene from multiple angles in quick succession without offering a new perspective on the material. However, against the background of intelligent, understated commentary on Iranian society and with a visible representation of many different kinds of characters, this remains an emotionally satisfying film that is a significant milestone in Iranian filmmaking.

Margaret (2011)

André Crous

Superlative performances make Margaret, director Kenneth Longeran’s gloomy comeback released more than half a decade after shooting, a charm.

MargaretUSA
3.5*

Director:
Kenneth Lonergan
Screenwriter:
Kenneth Lonergan
Director of Photography:
Ryszard Lenczewski

Running time: 150 minutes

By the time Margaret was finally released, it had aged so much it had probably passed its expiration date already.

Shot in 2005, it took a full six years before this film saw the light of day and was finally released for distribution. One of the main reasons for the delay was director Kenneth Lonergan’s insistence on a three-hour running time. Given enormous opposition on the part of the distributors, Lonergan eventually relented, and in the end, his film is 150 minutes long.

Two and a half hours is an ambitious length for a film whose plot can easily be summarised, and although the film evinces much of Lonergan’s skill as a storyteller, it doesn’t do him justice as a filmmaker. One of the best films of the first decade of the 21st century was his début feature, You Can Count On Me, a masterpiece of contemporary cinema that has a small story about infidelity and sibling rivalry and first made critics sit up and notice Mark Ruffalo.

Ruffalo makes a return in Margaret, though his brief presence is a great disappointment: He plays a significant role in the development of the film and yet he appears only in two short scenes — both in which, it must be said, he delivers a performance worthy of enormous praise.

Taking its title from the eponymous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that speaks of grief and a child’s response to the concept of death as it is represented by dead leaves, an emotional reaction as strong as an adult’s reaction to the death of a friend, or of oneself. The poem is very appropriate, as it encapsulates the essence of the film’s plot very accurately.

Lisa (Anna Paquin) is a sharp-tongued teenager living with her mother and younger brother in the Upper West Side in New York City. She will soon join her absent father (played by Lonergan) on a trip to New Mexico and decides to try to find a cowboy hat somewhere in upper Manhattan. She fails, until she notices a bus driver wearing one on the job. She runs after the bus, waving to get the driver’s attention, but the driver only waves back, and not paying attention, he runs a red light and crushes a woman pushing a shopping cart over the road.

When the police ask Lisa whether the light was red at the time of the accident, she looks over at the bus driver (Ruffalo) and when he looks back, she takes it as a sign there is silent complicity between them, and she decides to protect him by saying the light was green. But she is deeply affected by the woman who was run over, a woman who slipped the surly bonds of Earth while lying in Lisa’s arms, and she tracks down the woman’s family.

But Lisa is a piece of work. She is a bit of a stereotypical teenage girl, with all the drama and snotty retorts to her mother that go along with it, and she always tries to ensure she has the upper hand in conversations, even if that upper hand is (usually) gained with sarcasm. She is immature even as she verbally abuses and bullies many people around her, breaking hearts and testing their good will towards her. Over the course of the film, she steamrolls many men in her life, and many women, including her mother, are also terribly hurt. The film is a good companion piece to Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, a film that navigates with an equally despicable but more vulnerable teenage protagonist, though Margaret lacks the latter film’s tight focus.

The film is not always easy to watch, but Lonergan finds raw emotion in the everyday details of New York that are dark but not without hope and presents that emotion with compelling clarity. Sometimes he veers a bit too far toward so-called gritty realism by inserting seemingly random fragments of footage into his scenes — a ferry on the Hudson here, a seagull soaring over Central Park there — but these moments do not contribute as powerfully to the viewer’s impression of realism as the cast’s performances.

Unfortunately, the film’s release puts it at a slight disadvantage, as the obviously significant events of 9/11 and the Iraq War seemed outdated upon its release, though the theme of revenge, for the death of one woman on the street, or thousands in the two World Trade Centre towers or in the Middle East, is obviously very relevant to the plot itself. This objection will certainly fade with time, and perhaps the film can be more fully appreciated after an interval of another six years.

Margaret is, if not a brilliant piece of cinema, at least another affirmation of Lonergan’s talent as a screenwriter and artist of human emotions. Paquin plays her vile character with great passion and supports the equally superlative cast, from J. Smith-Cameron, who plays her mother, a theatre actress, to side characters like the happy-go-lucky Paul (Kieran Culkin).

7 Days in Havana (2012)

André Crous

7 Days in HavanaSpain
3*

Directors:
Various (see review)
Screenwriters:
Various
Directors of Photography:
Various

Original title: 7 días en La Habana

Running time: 129 minutes

Anthology films are often a bad idea. The exceptions to the rule are Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You — although, truth be told, they aren’t all that good, either.

7 Days in Havana is the same as most other anthology films: up and down, but mostly down, with only the city to keep it all from falling apart. Well, that’s not entirely true, but, for the large part, the spectrum of tones and approaches in 7 Days in Havana is as varied as the filmmakers themselves are, with almost no attempt to reconcile the different storylines. The list of filmmakers involved in this production is made up of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Médem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabío and Laurent Cantet.

The title says it all: 7 Days in Havana takes place over a week in the Cuban capital, and each day has been assigned to a different filmmaker, with his own cast and crew, though there is nothing to prevent “Sunday” from being “Tuesday,” except for one or two linking themes or character types. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday have scenes set at the fancy Hotel Nacional de Cuba; Monday and Tuesday have mostly English dialogue, while the rest of the film is in Spanish; Thursday and Friday have almost no dialogue; Monday has an LGBT character, Friday has a gay character, and Saturday has a gay character. One actor playing a taxi driver pops up now and again, and a young singer named Cecilia (Melvis Estévez) has an important role in two stories, but, even as a character, the city of Havana is strangely neglected, and the stories all seem to be sadly disconnected from each other.

Judged on their own, some of the episodes are not uninteresting and have some potential, but others have clearly just been added for the sake of completing the simple-minded theme of “seven days, seven stories, seven directors.”

The film starts off on firm footing, as a young actor from California (Josh Hutcherson), who is taking some classes in Havana and has a rudimentary grasp of Spanish, arrives — and we realize it was his point of view over the city that we shared during the opening credits, as the airplane came in to land. As so many tourists before him, he is in Havana to have fun and eventually gets involved with a girl who isn’t exactly what she seems. It’s a nice story, it has the requisite “secret” that is revealed, and it doesn’t drag.

The second story is equally good, though much thinner. In one of the film’s rare moments of comedy, we can hear someone throwing up while we are shown the black screen that always separates one day (and one story) from the next. When there is a cut to the actual scene, Emir Kusturica looks up at us from an underground bathroom in a Havana bar. He doesn’t look good, but the camera follows him — in a dazzling, unbroken take — upstairs, out of the bar, where his taxi driver finds him, puts him in the car and drives him to the hotel while Kusturica phones up his wife in Serbia and makes a drunken plea to her to listen to him. More action continues at the hotel, and everything is followed by the single camera that stays on him. Kusturica has no pretensions about himself or his image, and what we get is such self-deprecation that it is completely disarming and eventually utterly engaging. Little of note happens, but Kusturica is one of the strongest, most interesting cast members of the entire production and whenever the camera is on him, we are spellbound.

The third film is at times laughable, as Cecilia’s voice constantly features on the soundtrack as she sings in sugary tones about love and romance, while she herself is cheating on her handsome Puerto Rican baseball player boyfriend. However, the actress is charming, and it is a relief to find her again in the sixth story.

In the fourth, filmmaker Elia Suleiman takes his usual Buster Keaton–like tack and endures life around him in this strange city with an expressionless face. This episode pokes gentle fun at Fidel Castro, as the movements of Suleiman are punctuated by him coming back to his hotel at various points during the day to find the president on television, still orating at the same podium.

The fifth film, by Gaspar Noé, is a disaster and could potentially be the point at which most viewers flee from the theatre. When a girl’s parents find her in bed with another girl, they send her to be cleansed, and this process — during which she is ritually smeared with oils and rubbed with leaves and undergoes an immersion baptism by torchlight — is accompanied by a seemingly never-ending deep bass heartbeat on the soundtrack. The film is pointless, monotonous and a total and utter waste of time.

The weekend films (days six and seven) are much lighter than the others and benefit from some great ensemble acting. Juan Carlos Tabío, the only Cuban director on the production, made the sixth film, about a hot day in the kitchen, and on the Sunday an old woman gathers all the people in her building to help make real the dream she had about a Virgin Mary statue in her living room.

Some of the films have no respect for the 24-hour timeline, and there is no transition other than a blank screen. Few of them warrant the 15-minute running time they have, and that film by Noé is enough to make you get up and leave. Overall, 7 Days in Havana doesn’t show many sides of Havana, and the superficial sides it does have are only fragments of a very confused production.

Directors (in chronological order):
Benicio Del Toro
Pablo Trapero
Julio Médem
Elia Suleiman
Gaspar Noé
Juan Carlos Tabío
Laurent Cantet

The Beloved (2011)

André Crous

Les Bien-AimesFrance
1.5*

Director:
Christophe Honoré
Screenwriter:
Christophe Honoré
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Les Bien-aimés

Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it’s any good.

The Beloved (Les Bien-aimés) tries to be everything and nothing at once, incorporating some terribly dramatic events into a film that shrieks with ostentation yet encourages us to forgive its sins because it is set to the melody of so-called love. Over a period of more than four decades, in a globe-trotting tale played out in locales from Paris to Prague to Montreal, we get a look at the world’s oldest profession with many songs that are somehow supposed to lift the mood but only make the viewer roll her eyes at the exasperating ordeal.

In a very promising opening scene that takes place in Paris during the early 1960s and pays homage to François Truffaut, we see plenty of women parading their legs onscreen. These legs are clearly meant to seduce, and they work their charms a little too well: A Frenchman mistakes Madeleine, a young demoiselle leisurely lingering on the sidewalk, for a prostitute. But she has nothing better to do and, seizing the day for a quick buck, unexpectedly finds her calling.

News travels fast, and before long, Madeleine is approached by every Tom, Dick and Harry for a good time. One day, she meets a young Czech doctor called Jaromil — for some confounding reason played by Raša Bukvić, a Franco-Serb actor who speaks Czech with an accent — and elopes with him to Czechoslovakia, shortly before 1968.

Love can make the world turn round, but it makes this film fall flat on its face, and we know things are going pear-shaped when the actors soon start belting out dreadfully dull songs on the street. The songs are too long, too numerous and too boring to make us care about the characters, and while (or, perhaps, because) director Christophe Honoré tries to jazz up his sets by using bright colours or, on one occasion, lighting his characters with an enormous spotlight, the action has a consistently phoney feel to it.

As the young Madeleine, Ludivine Seignier does bring a certain shine to the boggy waters of the plot, but once she disappears, any interest disappears along with her. As an adult, she is played by the grand dame of French acting, Catherine Deneuve, and Madeleine’s daughter Vera is also Deneuve’s real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Perhaps the casting of these two actresses as the film’s mother-daughter duo of nymphos could have provided some wonderful moments of chemistry, but in this event, it brings nothing of note to the production and appears as gratuitous as much else onscreen.

Vera quickly takes centre stage and has an interesting face but fails to be a force strong enough to join the rambling series of plot developments. At one point, it seems we should believe she has magical powers of seduction since she more or less turns a gay man straight, but even this ridiculous development has no pay-off since there are merely hints at complex human emotions without any real engagement of the questions raised.

Furthermore, we get scenes built around narrative threads no less bleak than Prague Spring, AIDS and 9/11, without any attempt to integrate such topics in a less than flippant fashion. Honoré tries to be both courageous and playful but ends up with a very cowardly treatment of his material.

By the time the very Czech Miloš Forman (taking over as the elderly Jaromil from the youthful Bukvić) appears as a bumbling fool halfway through the film, serving as a kind of comic relief, it is with a sense of dread that we realize this is as good as it will get.

At 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Beloved is grossly overweight, and despite the 40 years covered in the script, one has the sense we’ve spent half the time looking at senseless close-ups of the mole on Mastroianni’s face and listening to an excessive amount of second-tier songs. The sight of people like Deneuve prostituting her talents for an awful film like this one makes the viewer plunge into despair. There is nothing to love here, so move along.

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

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

André Crous

Beasts of the Southern WildUSA
4*

Director:
Benh Zeitlin
Screenwriters:
Lucy Alibar
Benh Zeitlin
Director of Photography:
Ben Richardson

Running time: 93 minutes

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a masterfully directed piece of naturalism that puts under the microscope nature and the people who treat it as a friend, even a relative, as it weaves together their daily routines in a way that integrates magical fantasy with hard reality. If you are looking for a strong narrative, you will not find it here, but the power of the film’s intimacy with its characters and their dreams is outstanding.

The film is all the more remarkable for being the début feature of Benh Zeitlin, who co-wrote the screenplay and contributed to the majestic score that often adds a very distinct dash of optimism to the events. Zeitlin’s film, set on the bayou around New Orleans, shows an encouraging affinity to George Washington, David Gordon Green’s strong and perceptive first feature released in 2000, which took place in North Carolina and whose plot was limited to small but meaningful interactions between children. Green’s film generated a lot of critical praise at the time for its honest depiction of children living in poverty and the world they create for themselves to make their physical and social circumstances bearable.

Zeitlin approaches his subjects — a 6-year-old girl called Hushpuppy (played by the astonishing first-time performer Quvenzhané Wallis) and her sickly father, Wink — with understanding and curiosity, and the story never seems contrived or judgmental. Such compassion for the characters is not seen very often on film, but Zeitlin has the gift to evoke our empathy with his interest.

The plot is almost secondary to the cohesive network of very naturalistic overtones onscreen, though the events are certainly significant. Around the time of a hurricane, which may or may not be Katrina, on a bayou around New Orleans called “The Bathtub”, Hushpuppy and Wink do their best to survive the daily turmoil of living in poverty. As Hushpuppy’s mother is no longer with them, the girl speaks to her mother’s clothes, which seem to speak back in very unsentimental tones.

The film contains one of the most tension-laden hurricane scenes I have ever seen. Short though it is, mostly relying on the sound of the constant rush of water from the ceiling of Hushpuppy’s and Wink’s makeshift shack in the forest, it packs a punch and reminds us of the profound effect a strong soundtrack can have on the audience.

The reality of the characters comprises their immediate surroundings but also their fantasies and their memories, and the representation of these is captivating, even hypnotic. We are introduced, early on in the film, to enormous fabled creatures called Aurochs that pique Hushpuppy’s interest in the mythical. Whether they are real, and what exactly they might represent, is open to interpretation, but their presence is a surprising yet wholly justifiable tactic that supports an ever so slight magical-realist ambience. This is strengthened by imagery such as characters constructing a houseboat on the high waters brought by the hurricane, calling to mind Noah’s Ark.

The young Wallis never sets a foot wrong as her character is self-confident and focused without being smart-alecky or playing older than her age. It is a shame, however, that the screenplay doesn’t expand her character so that we may know more about her friendships beyond the confines of the crude quarters Hushpuppy and her father call home.

But the way in which her point of view is communicated to us cannot be faulted. It is her own — rather than a generic “childlike” — perspective, as very intimate details are related with images and sounds that echo her own emotions. When Hushpuppy puts her ear to the chest of a pig or a chicken, she (and we, too) can hear the heartbeat of the animals. And the fragments of memories that she has of her mother, that she either personally witnessed or was told of by her father, are infused with a very openly romanticized sensibility that tells us something about the characters as well as the actual events.

From what we can gather, Hushpuppy’s father tries to raise her as a boy, always calling her “dude” or “man” and engaging in arm-wrestling matches with her. This line of thought isn’t really pursued by the director, but certainly contributes to a feeling that these individuals have more history and complexity to them than films generally tend to demonstrate.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is very moving most of the way and elicits wonder and admiration rather than excitement, especially when the action moves to less gritty locations such as an underground nightclub or a FEMA shelter.

As the ice caps melt, Hushpuppy tells us in voiceover that the world relies on its many parts fitting together just right. The narration is well-executed and effective, but the words don’t cast quite the same spell as those of characters in David Gordon Green’s films.

The film is a remarkable achievement for a first effort, and though a tighter narrative would have helped the viewer latch on more firmly to the events onscreen, this is an auspicious start to a great career in storytelling.

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

Delicacy (2011)

André Crous

La delicatesseFrance
3*

Directors:
David Foenkinos
Stéphane Foenkinos
Screenwriter:
David Foenkinos
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 108 minutes

Original title: La délicatesse

That first half-hour of Delicacy (La Délicatesse) is as gorgeous and as heart-rending as the famous kissing scene in Amélie, whose quirky Audrey Tautou also takes the lead here. It is a gamble the directors, brothers David and Stéphane Foenkinos, bet on big, but even while we are watching it we know deep down they could never keep up with the rhythm, the beauty or the emotion captured in those first few moments of the story.

If only the rest of the film were as delicate as its first 30 minutes.

The moments are all big, and few films — with the notable exception of Mike Nichols’ Closer, a film that alternated the meeting and the breakup scenes in many different relationships — have gone down this road before. The moments certainly evoke feelings of near-ecstasy in the viewer, as the acting is smooth, yet we sense a breathtaking rollercoaster in the lives of these characters we still know so little about.

The film opens at a café, where a young man is sitting alone at a table. Close by, he sees a woman entering, who takes a seat and scans the menu in front of her. He tells himself he will go and talk to her if she settles on … apricot juice. She orders coffee, then corrects herself to order apricot juice instead, and smiles in the direction of the young man. Next, we see them right outside the café as they are leaving arm in arm, celebrating the anniversary of this first encounter.

Many similar moments follow, in which time is gently elided, from first meeting and celebrating the anniversary to getting married and discussing having children, before the young man is suddenly run over by a car. All of this happens in the first 30 minutes, but luckily the rest of the film is not a dreary series of shots that highlight her loss. It is, rather, a look at the difficulty of having a new relationship while her memories continue to affect the way she behaves.

The film is based on a book by one of the directors, David Foenkinos, but the two brothers have beautifully adapted the story for the big screen with spectacular transitions early on and a very thoughtful use of the colour red, a tactic borrowed from a film explicitly featured in the background of an early scene, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

The colour red, manifested either in the clothing worn by main character Nathalie (Tautou), the strong disco lights or the interior of a restaurant she visits with her boss on a disastrous dinner date, clearly refers to love or a bleeding heart, but as time goes by the red mostly disappears, which raises all kinds of questions about the character, who certainly hasn’t forgotten her late husband François.

The directors’ vision becomes a bit muddled as the story progresses. A shy introvert called Markus (François Damiens) who works with Nathalie takes a liking to her, and though he isn’t much to look at, she finds he understands her, and they always have something to talk about. This is, however, an instance where Delicacy would have greatly benefited from those seamless time jumps so frequent at the beginning of the film, as we don’t have any idea what this relationship might look like in a few months or a few years.

One important thing the film gets right is the difficulty of moving on after a relationship, especially one that ended as unexpectedly as the one between Nathalie and François. Scenes where we can see her wondering whether she should delete his number from her phone or toss out his toothbrush are poignant and show an understanding of the underlying pain in her life that can take a very long time to heal.

Nathalie’s interaction with friends is another element that deserves praise, as the friends want the best for her without things changing too much. But that is exactly what happens when she meets Markus. He seems to be perfect for her right now, but her friends don’t agree because he is not as good-looking or as outwardly interesting as François was, and she has to find a compromise.

But the film is rather superficial in its depiction of this dilemma, and we never really get a sense she is struggling to juggle all these new developments in her life.

Delicacy is not another Amélie, but it is certainly charming, and a final scene is particularly honest about the role of memory and pain in relationships, and the place two people must find in each other’s lives in order to make things work.

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