Countries

We Have a Pope (2011)

André Crous

Habemus papamItaly
2.5*

Director:
Nanni Moretti
Screenwriters:
Nanni Moretti
Francesco Piccolo
Federica Pontremoli
Director of Photography:
Alessandro Pesci

Running time: 102 minutes

Original title: Habemus papam

The election of a pope is nothing to be flippant about. Even for non-Catholics, the brief period of time that marks the end of one papacy and encompasses the conclave — during which a successor is chosen — and the eventual appearance of the new pope on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square piques interest like few other events.

When the College of Cardinals has chosen a new pope, by secret ballot and with all the cardinals in the running, white smoke rises from the chimney on top of the Sistine Chapel. In Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope (from the Latin “Habemus papam”, the phrase spoken by the protodeacon of the College of Cardinals to announce the election of the new pope), the cardinal who is elected has a panic attack moments before he is to appear on the balcony and flees to his chambers to shun the burden the office brings.

Such anxiety is to be expected, of course, and in fact, it is normal for the elected pontiff to break down in tears upon realizing what he is about to take on, namely dominion over a billion subjects. However, in this film, the cardinal, named Melville (Michel Piccoli), is out of his depth and has such insecurity that his staff seeks out the help of a noted psychoanalyst (Moretti) to help the Holy Father through this difficult time and eventually get him to the balcony.

The rest of the film is a long wait for the big moment. While we wait, we learn very little about the mystical figure that is Cardinal Melville, though it becomes clear he would prefer to act rather than pontificate. The psychoanalyst’s hands are also tied because he cannot use the normal psychoanalytical tools in this case: Questions about Melville’s relationship with his mother, his fantasies and his sexual desires are, naturally, all strictly verboten.

When Melville loses his way in Rome and ends up on a late-night bus, mumbling to himself, we see a very human (not only vulnerable, but frail) side to him, and though he seems to be a gentle soul, the idea of him writing an encyclical is quite absurd. This man cannot be pope. He is not only emotionally and psychologically but also — and this is where the film utterly fails — intellectually ill-equipped for the papacy.

This last piece of information is problematic in light of the fact that the cardinals have spent a great deal of time with him prior to his election, but have elected him nonetheless. Whatever the viewer’s personal beliefs about the possibility of a pope elected by divine guidance, it would seem patently obvious this situation is very unlikely to occur if the cardinals had some sense of their colleague.

Unfortunately, we are not afforded any such look at the man who would be pope and cannot accurately judge whether the cardinals were mistaken or blind. Even if one believes the conclave works according to the will of God, the film remains flawed because the ultimate resolution will be deeply unsatisfactory.

The idea of being pope, of having such immense power, must leave one breathless, and thus there is ample room to empathize with dear Cardinal Melville. In a very powerful moment, during the conclave, the fear the other cardinals have that any one of them will be elected is communicated to the viewer by means of a very effective voiceover that mirrors Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane when he asks his father to let “the cup pass from [him].”

But never again do we see the future pope ask anything of God (he thanks God for even less), and though there may be speculation he has lost his faith, the film provides too little for the viewer to assume anything; on the contrary, We Have a Pope revels in its own timorousness and defies our expectations to get any closer to Melville than the cardinals or the psychoanalyst.

The humanization of the pope is a wonderful starting point, as was Nicos Kazantzakis’ treatment of Christ in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, for example, but no one simply gets dropped inside the College of Cardinals, much less elected pope, if he has not proved some leadership skills. Such leadership, alas, cannot be detected in the role played by Piccoli, and therefore the whole premise of the film is undermined.

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

In Darkness (2011)

André Crous

In Darkness, a story about Jews trapped in a sewer for more than a year during the war, is engaging but mostly offers more of the same.

In DarknessPoland
3.5*

Director:
Agnieszka Holland
Screenwriter:
David F. Shamoon
Director of Photography:
Jolanta Dylewska

Running time: 145 minutes

Original title: W ciemności

Films about the Holocaust are important because they remind us what tragedy is possible when people turn against each other in struggles of religion, power and race. Having firmly established the misery and the hardship of the events that took place, though, many filmmakers are unfortunately tempted by the subject matter to tell stories that are not very distinct from the ones that came before.

Schindler’s List is by far the best-known film about oppression during World War II, but the story about an ethnic German who saved hundreds of Jews by employing them in his factories in Moravia and not letting them be deported to the concentration camps was criticized by Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-hour documentary, Shoah, is filled with interviews of those who suffered through the events of the time.

A major criticism is that such stories of salvation can blind the viewer to the ensemble of despair that hung over the Jewish population across Europe at the time. However, while this is an important point to make, that does not mean the films themselves only have to be doom and gloom from beginning to end.

Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) was very successful in its presentation of a father who, to keep his son entertained and not expose him to the horrors of war, pretended the concentration camp was a theatre and they were all only playing parts.

On the other hand, the extraordinary Hungarian film Fateless (Sorstalanság) had as its central character a teenage boy on the verge of adulthood who doesn’t understand everything that is happening to him, his friends and his family, but for whom the experience of being sent to Buchenwald and spending his time with other prisoners was not at all terrible, despite his near-death, because the enduring support of everyone in the camp was so strong.

The Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland doesn’t bring much new to the screen with In Darkness, her telling of the real-life story of a group of Jews in Lwów in eastern Poland (what is today Lviv in Ukraine) who were saved by a sewer worker called Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) who kept them underground, away from harm, for 14 months during the war.

Holland has churned out impressive films in the past, most notable among them 1990’s Europa Europa, which focused on Nazi-occupied Poland, sometimes with evident irony, and the ordeal of a fair-haired Jewish boy who pretends he is German (or Aryan) in order to survive. She was also behind the formidable 2012 miniseries Burning Bush (Hořící keř), which examined how slowly the wheels of history turned after the 1969 self-immolation of the Czechoslovak Jan Palach in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Prague a few months earlier.

In Darkness’s presentation of a man who starts off demanding money from those he hides deep down in the sewer system, but eventually grows fond of the people and sees it as his duty to protect them from the authorities — some of whom are very good acquaintances from before the war — really doesn’t offer a fresh perspective or a new twist on Oskar Schindler’s story.

Socha is patrolling the sewers with a friend when they find a group of Jews escaping their ghetto shortly before it is razed to the ground. He accepts their bribe and helps them to a safe area inside the vast system of underground tunnels filled with rats and the smell of putrefaction.

The central premise is strong, as viewers will almost certainly ask themselves whether they would do the same thing in such a situation, but the story of people who betray their Jewish neighbours for the sake of a handout — in this film a mere 500 złoty — has been told many times before in as many countries as have made Holocaust films.

Though the viewer can easily respect this man, it remains a bit of a mystery why (despite his objections that the Jews only whine about their circumstances and do not appreciate all that he is doing to protect them) he risks his life to save them.

What Holland and screenwriter David F. Shamoon do succeed in conveying is not the grand spectacle of life under oppression, but the human dimension of people being stuck together in a small space with little food and fresh water and with no certainty about their future. In Darkness contains some beautiful moments of realization on the part of a character who understands that there can be unexpected goodness in another person, and it is these rare glimpses of unadulterated humanity that make the film engaging. There are also a number of scenes that make it clear what the characters feel and how frustrated they are by living in such close quarters with people they either despise or lust after.

This is a film that would have had more power if it had not been so similar to so many others. Shoah’s Lanzmann decried Holocaust stories that had a happy ending, and even though we see dead bodies in this film, it was made to examine the characters themselves rather than the situation above ground. In Darkness is technically accomplished, and it does have moments of real human emotion effectively communicated, but mostly it doesn’t offer any kind of fresh perspective on Jewish hardship under the Nazis, and that means that ultimately the film lacks real punch.

The Assault (2010)

André Crous

assautFrance
2*

Director:
Julien Leclercq
Screenwriters:
Simon Moutairou
Julien Leclercq
Director of Photography:
Thierry Pouget

Original title: L’assaut

Running time: 85 minutes

A very daring assault of a hijacked Air France aircraft took place Dec. 26, 1994, on runway three of Marignane Airport on the outskirts of Marseille. Broadcast live on national television, images of the successful rescue of the passengers onboard and the neutralization of the hijackers, four members of the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), made heroes of the SWAT team that carried out the operation.

It would later be determined that the gunmen wanted to redirect the airplane to Paris and send it on a collision course toward the Eiffel Tower. After the Algerian government had nullified the election victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut) in 1991, the latter’s more militant GIA wing tried for years to overthrow the government and install an Islamic State. Algeria sought the help of their former colonial power, and the GIA targeted France in order to make its displeasure known.

These events show enormous potential for either a straightforward action film with a dimension of human drama (think back to the stories of the passengers in United 93, in which the terrorists’ target eerily resembles the one in this film) or a more subtle evocation of the bickering that unfolded in the corridors of power while people’s lives hung in the balance.

Instead, The Assault opts for an awkward three-legged balancing act that, given its running time — a breezy 85 minutes — provides too little information for the viewer to be involved at any level. In fact, some of the main characters are never even introduced by name, and we get no real motivation for the actions of the fighters. The film simply wants us to infer they are bad because they are Islamic terrorists (or, in the parlance of any U.S. politician, “radical” Islamic terrorists). And yet the passengers also remain a vast mass of individuals with whom we cannot possibly relate, except to infer, once again, they are good, simply because they are not Islamic terrorists.

This lack of sophistication in the screenplay is reflected by the film’s colour palette: The images have been desaturated to the point where all we see are shades of blue, black and grey. These colours would suit a post-apocalyptic movie just fine, but in The Assault, where so much depends on the interaction of real people, all of them involved in a struggle for life and death, such cold, alienating colours drain the life from the story.

While the hijackers are waiting, first on the runway in Algiers, then on the runway in Marseille, a French special operations team is preparing to storm the plane. One of the officers is called Thierry, and we know he will have some special role because his wife is always watching the events on the television screen, seemingly in a state of permanent anguish, her face contorted to express her fears as visibly as possible, while she is either sniffing or sobbing in quiet desperation.

The ringleader of the gang of four on the plane is Yahia, though we have no idea what his plan is or whether he has a plan at all: Throughout the film, he seems oddly confused, his non-stop screaming making him appear to be a hysterical nut job driven by emotion rather than ideology.

The third main character is Carole, the always-confident aid at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, who assures things get done even though she gets none of the recognition she deserves. This political power play could have been fascinating, but sadly the film spends little time mulling over its own story.

None of the characters has a back story, and therefore no one’s actions can really be explained — nor can anyone’s demise elicit feelings of sadness or loss from the viewer. We need not sympathize with the terrorists, but some clear motive for their actions would have gone a long way toward our understanding of their mission, aside from the continual cries of “Allahu akbar” (God is great).

Films about terrorists are usually approached with much more circumspection regarding the characters involved and the political or religious driving force behind their actions, but The Assault doesn’t seem very interested in telling its story in a more than cursory way. This is a shame, since similar incidents from the past, from Munich in 1972 to Waco in 1993 and New York City in 2001, have captivated audiences around the world who watched these events unfold live on television.

But we are not captivated, because the characters are remarkably superficial. The story is inherently interesting, but very little thought has been put into its execution, and the result is this sad excuse for a “based on true events” biopic. It should have been made for television.

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

Only God Forgives (2013)

André Crous

Only God ForgivesDenmark/Thailand
2*

Director:
Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter:
Nicolas Winding Refn
Director of Photography:
Larry Smith

Running time: 90 minutes

Luis Buñuel’s 1929 short film, Un chien andalou, is well-known for one good reason: In a close-up, it shows a human eye sliced by a razor.

In Only God Forgives, cult director Nicolas Winding Refn references this image — in full colour — at the climax of a scene that sees a man lose not only his eyes but also his ears, his arms and his legs as well, all in near-silence, except for the constant, piercing scream of the victim.

Despite a torrent of violence and most scenes bathed in deep red by either blood, red neon lights or both, Refn maintains a curious and alienating distance from his characters, which means we don’t much care for these individuals who are under constant threat of execution by the sadistic blade-wielding policeman Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).

Chang is one of two enigmatic central figures responsible for the many sordid incidents of blood loss. The other is Julian, a big drug smuggler in the Bangkok underworld, played by Ryan Gosling, who also starred in Refn’s widely beloved but overhyped Drive.

At the beginning of the film, Chang is called to the scene when a 16-year-old prostitute is found dead in Bangkok. For some inexplicable reason, her killer, an American named Billy, has decided it would be a good idea to stay behind. The girl’s father seeks revenge, and Chang allows the man to beat Billy to a lifeless pulp.

But then, suddenly, Chang turns on the father and pulls a sword from behind his back (which doesn’t, however, impede his ability to chase a criminal at full speed down the road in another scene later in the film) before slicing the man’s arm clean off.

It turns out Billy is Julian’s elder brother, and when Billy dies, their ice-cold mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) flies into town to demand justice be served.

These early scenes are soaked in red light, which would seem seedy if the visual metaphor of blood wasn’t so ridiculously obvious. The stone-faced Julian, who says little and expresses even less, is unwilling to avenge his brother until his mother forces action from him through emotional manipulation wrought by a personality verging on that of a dominatrix.

The film oozes with style, and the ambience of the opening act is electric thanks to the dozens of crimson-cloaked objects highlighted by the deep shadows that envelop them. There are hints of film noir, for example, the meshwork of shadows that outline the jasmine rays of neon as light is cast through a cement barrier, but without a narrator or a serious femme fatale, the film doesn’t take advantage of the genre.

As he did with Drive, Refn dedicates Only God Forgives to Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose El Topo and The Holy Mountain were Surrealist explorations of spirituality. Refn doesn’t do much with spirituality, but the surreal brutality of his work, amped up even from the grisly acts of Drive, is clearly a point that connects the two filmmakers.

A few moments in the film do stand out as particularly impressive. One is a scene in which Julian points a gun at the man who killed his brother, who emotionally confesses to the crime but does so in complete silence, as the music on the soundtrack is the only sound we hear.

Another scene of spectacular filmmaking is the big fight between the otherwise expressionless leads, Chang and Julian, which is accompanied by a Cliff Martinez composition that mixes music produced by an organ and a synthesizer. Unfortunately, Refn’s insistence on inserting multiple push-ins on a statue of a man fighting is as annoying as the statue is irrelevant.

While the images may suggest artifice, the characters are even worse, with barely a hint of an arc between them. Julian is calm and silent (Gosling has fewer than 10 lines of dialogue in the entire film), even though he is supposed to be an important figure in the drug trade. Crystal could potentially be a source of great amusement, as she verbally decimates an unsuspecting hotel receptionist upon her arrival in Bangkok, but she ultimately doesn’t push back against the dark lord of the narrative, police officer Chang.

Chang seems to be a villain of steel, who dodges bullets and fights like a god. He is simply invincible, and despite the single scene of him and his young, tender wife, we get absolutely no sense of his thinking and have no idea what drives him.

Refn’s visual creativity is not consistent, however, as is made obvious when some menacing characters, killers for hire, arrive on the scene in slow motion — which apparently somehow should accentuate their wickedness.

Only God Forgives tries to seem artistic by composing beautiful images and an interesting soundtrack that at times calls to mind the work of Ligeti, but its story verges on being one-dimensional, and it is difficult to care about any of the characters. It seems to enjoy the scenes of its own brutality, including when a long metal spike is pushed right through someone’s eardrum, but the film has no interest in presenting a story worthy of our attention.

 

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

In the Shadow of the Horse (2012)

André Crous

Ve stinuCzech Republic
4.5*

Director:
David Ondříček
Screenwriter:
Marek Epstein
Director of Photography:
Adam Sikora

Running time: 101 minutes

Original title: Ve stínu
Alternate English title: In the Shadow

Ve stínu (In the Shadow of the Horse) is a perfectly controlled work of historical significance that is coherent and approachable even for those who know very little about the history of the present-day Czech Republic.

With the tragedy of history in the background, the film is more interested in the human dimension and takes as its centrepiece an honest policeman and his family who are all struggling under the burden of living in a society that is gradually becoming more oppressive and where the walls will soon have ears.

The policeman’s name is Captain Hakl, and, as played by Ivan Trojan, he is compassionate, especially in the moments when he lets his guard down around his wife and young son — and sensitive to the dangers they might face as a result of the government’s desire to hold on to power, even if it means stealing their own people’s money to do that.

The year is 1953, and rumours are rife the government is planning a monetary reform, which would mean that the currency loses its value overnight and the country’s citizens are left with a fraction of their former wealth.

But high-level government officials, including newly chosen President Antonín Zápotocký, deny they are considering a reform of the Czechoslovak crown, and even Captain Hakl believes he would know if such a big project were really underway. But his wife doesn’t have the same faith in the authorities as her husband and tells him they should draw all their money and invest it in art for the sake of their son.

The horse in the English title seems to be connected to a radio broadcast early in the film, in which the country’s finance minister, Jaroslav Kabeš, laughs off the implication that his office is making places to reform the currency, and states that this idea is a dead horse gossipmongers should bury instead of continuing to beat.

With whispers about monetary reform in the background, on the radio, from the newspaper vendor at the famous former tram stop on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, and most importantly, coming from Hakl’s own wife, Jitka, there is a palpable sense that the characters all know where things are headed but consider themselves unable to ask tough questions for fear of discovering they might be right.

There are many parts to this film, though it all appears to be deceptively simple. When a jewellery store is burgled in the middle of the night and a safe robbed of its contents, the police detectives track down the most likely suspect, a Jewish man called Kirsch, who Hakl soon realizes is innocent.

But innocence has no place in the machinations of the Communist Party’s police investigations and, soon enough, State Security, supported by an East German detective named Zenke (Sebastian Koch), makes it clear Kirsch is the man, even linking him with a bloody shoot-out at the post office, though here, too, Hakl has uncovered evidence that contradicts the official position.

The film is drenched from beginning to end, as director David Ondříček (perhaps best-known for his film Loners, or Samotáři, in 2000) makes it clear that in this world of gloom good men often cannot save themselves through their struggles. But, despite Ondříček’s sombre-toned images and the almost constant rainfall, the film never makes style a priority to the detriment of its story. The focus on character rather than form means this is a much more intimate take on the events surrounding the monetary reform, rather than merely a historical document.

Slowly, the real substance of the film comes into view, and what we get is a view of an honest man, a wife who feels loved but somewhat neglected and fearful, and a boy who will be his father’s age when the revolution eventually rolls around in 1989. The scenes between Hakl and his wife and son are devoid of sentiment yet deeply touching, thanks in large part to Trojan’s very measured performance as a man who knows it’s not easy to do the right thing but wants to be the father his son can be proud of, yet has to be mindful of the safety of everyone close to him. Trojan’s powerful depiction of a policeman in 1969 Czechoslovakia in the breathtaking HBO miniseries Burning Bush (Hořící keř) is very similar to his role here.

In the end, the scenes most often associated with this terrible era in Czechoslovak history — the show trials and the uprising in Plzeň — are either missing or downplayed. But instead of highlighting misery, Ondříček’s film has tender scenes with complex characters that reveal great humanity in the midst of such a thoughtful, poetic treatment of past injustices.

 

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

Holy Motors (2012)

André Crous

There is little sense to be found in the dream wrapped in a fantasy inside an illusion that is Leos Carax’s Holy Motors.

Holy MotorsFrance
3*

Director:
Leos Carax
Screenwriter:
Leos Carax
Directors of Photography:
Caroline Champetier
Yves Cape

Running time: 115 minutes

Though always entertaining, Holy Motors is almost impossible to decode at the first viewing, if at all. This is Mulholland Drive territory, and, even if you find yourself laughing at the madness or having your jaw drop at the sight of some utterly bizarre moments, in the end, the ludicrousness of the situations makes it difficult to truly absorb what you have just been exposed to.

The first scene should already give you a very good idea of where — well, in the vaguest of senses — this film is headed. A man, played by director Leos Carax himself, lies on a bed in a gaudy hotel room, a Jack Russell at his feet. He gets up, walks slowly towards the window, where an airplane is landing on the runway on the other side of the road. He walks on, to the wall, where he lifts his arm and sticks his middle finger, made from metal, into a hole, turns it and unlocks the wall. Nothing happens, so he punches through and breaks down a concealed door.

He continues down a passage to arrive at a cinema, where he and we see the backs of the viewers’ heads. He looks down, to where a big black dog is walking slowly down the middle, which now resembles a church aisle, before a fade-out. None of these characters, either human or animal, reappears, but it is difficult not to be intrigued. It is this intrigue that Carax will rely on throughout his two-hour film, though the latter has no payoff and only hints at possible interpretations, none of them ever probed.

Things seem to occur for no real reason other than to provoke extreme bafflement in the viewer, as the film’s main character — not the guy in the opening scene, however, because he disappears entirely from the film — embarks on a daylong journey of adventures, role-playing his way through the most random assortment of situations without any clear aim other than getting the job done.

The main character, simply known as Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), is picked up one morning at his fancy Art Deco residence by a white stretch limousine driven by the wonderful Céline (Édith Scob), whose voice is firm yet tinged with notes of vulnerability, and we wonder whether her relationship with Oscar is professional or personal. Céline informs him he has nine “meetings” for the day and proceeds to deliver him to the first, for which he dresses up as a decrepit old Gypsy woman with a crutch begging for money on the streets of Paris. He doesn’t meet anyone and always stays in character, even speaking Romani to himself. He is followed and perhaps minded over — here, but never again — by heavies in black suits.

Eight other meetings follow, which become progressively more violent without ever losing their capacity to shock, either by having Oscar (made up as Monsieur Merde from Carax’s contribution to the anthology film Tokyo!) bite the finger off a PR girl at a fashion shoot in the Père Lachaise cemetery before kidnapping the all-too-willing fashion model and curling up to her in his birthday suit, in a way that unmistakably calls to mind Jesus Christ, specifically Michelangelo’s Pietà, and the model taking the role of one of the two Marys, in a sewer that runs below the centuries-old tombs.

Between each meeting, Oscar returns to the limousine, where he reads through a folder prepared for him, perhaps by Céline, perhaps by someone higher up, and transforms himself during the short period of time that the car takes to navigate the streets of the city. This transformation, both physical and behavioural, inevitably raises the notion of performance, and thereby of actors playing roles. Oscar’s second meeting is at a film studio, where he writhes around on a floor with another woman in a dark room, dry humping each other as their motions are captured by sensors and used to create the images of dragons engaging in carnal knowledge.

Later in the film, in one of the only moments that seem to tell us something about this man whose real identity is a complete mystery, he says he does the work “pour la beauté du geste” (for the beauty of the act). There is no doubt this man is deeply devoted to his craft, but what the craft is exactly, what purpose it serves and who is financing all these trans-Parisian rides in a stretch limousine remain enigmatic to the bitter end, before things end on a note that is beyond weird.

That is not to say the film isn’t entertaining, but one keeps hoping for a scene or an exchange that would bring some clarity to this surreal dream of which we can only be certain there will be nine meetings. Well, maybe it’s 10, but that’s another story…

During the fashion shoot in the cemetery, the photographer, dressed up only in PT shorts, repeatedly mutters “beauty” at the sight of the model and “weird” at the sight of Oscar/Merde. Those two words sum up the film as well as anything else.

 

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

Prince Avalanche (2013)

André Crous

Prince AvalancheUSA
4.5*

Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
David Gordon Green
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr

Running time: 94 minutes

Prince Avalanche marks a triumphant return for David Gordon Green. Rumours had been making the rounds for a while that the director had all but committed artistic hara-kiri when he started making big-budget films, first with Pineapple Express (which was quite enjoyable, but already a far cry from his previous film, Snow Angels). The broad comedy of the latter was in direct contrast with his gentler approach to the human condition in his early films, especially the crown jewel of his career so far, his 2004 film Undertow.

What sets Green’s filmmaking apart from that of all of his peers, especially when he behaves like a serious filmmaker, is the quality of the writing, and in particular the beauty of his dialogue. While Green has ditched the voiceover that aligned some of his films very closely with those of Terrence Malick (who served as executive producer on Undertow), he still very clearly demonstrates his skill as a writer and a fine observer of human emotion and thinking with some beautifully wrought lines about love and loss.

In an early scene with an old woman who has lost her house to a wildfire and is digging through the white ash of her former possessions, we share road worker Alvin’s (Paul Rudd) astonishment as she says, “Sometimes, I feel like I’m digging through my own ashes.” The woman’s words are expressed with a combination of truth and sincerity, yet they also have a powerful aftertaste that we cannot ignore. This comes after she relates a story of such simplicity and pride we cannot help but well up with tears at her predicament, and yet she is by no means presented as any kind of a victim.

Prince Avalanche is a remake of the Icelandic Either Way (Á annan veg) but has fleshed out some of the characters a bit more than the original, including that of the lady mentioned above, making her more human without taking away any of the mystery she had in the earlier film.

The two main characters of the film, in whose company we spend most of the running time, Alvin and Lance (Emile Hirsch), are out in the Texas countryside in 1987 repainting the yellow traffic lines on the road that leads through a forest, devastated by a wildfire a few months earlier (there was no such fire in Texas in 1987) and now reduced to a wasteland of charcoal.

Lance, who is Alvin’s sister’s boyfriend, got Alvin the job in part because he wanted the young man to make something with his life instead of wasting away at home. Alvin is not focused much, and Lance, who himself is on prescription medication, opines that Alvin ought to be, too. Alvin spends his time reading Lance’s comic books and only half-heartedly participates in the task of repairing the road cutting through the forest. Recently out of school, he is exceptionally horny and spends his nights masturbating in his tent.

Although Green no longer has the lush backdrop of Georgia to work with, as he did in Undertow, he and his DP, fellow University of North Carolina School of the Arts graduate Tim Orr, nevertheless present us with rich visuals that radiate with the green of the fresh foliage, the sparkle of water drops, the yellow of the lines, the orange of the sunsets, the red of the pickup truck and the blue of the boys’ jumpsuits. Despite there only being two characters, the vibrant colours and equally colourful dialogue produce a broad tableau to draw us in and keep us interested.

With multiple shots showing us the forest and its smaller inhabitants, Green emphasizes the peace of the space regardless of the burned pieces of wood that never let us forget a more brutal past. We can understand both of the young men’s desire, at various points, to have the silence to think, to pick up the pieces and reassess the direction of their lives.

Prince Avalanche, whose title fits in very well with the comic-book / superhero element, heavily depends on dialogue, and the back-and-forth between Alvin and Lance is perfectly suited to the talents and facial expressions of Rudd and Hirsch. But Green also adds some excellent visual gimmicks along the way that alternate between gag and poetry. At one point, the lines painted on trees suddenly serve as a line for writing, and Green proceeds to write. It is a gorgeous and unexpected moment that seems not at all like showing off but rather affirms the courage and the skill of the filmmaker, whose Undertow also benefited from several moments of visual experimentation.

In the end, it seems like Green wants to show us dynamic life is possible even amid apparent destruction. Although he never really puts much despair onscreen, his characters certainly have their fair share of difficulties to confront, and they rise to the task — even if it means they have to chug the vodka an old truck driver has given them and dance around in slow motion like fools in the wilderness.

Green shows again why he was called one of the most promising directors of his generation when his début feature, George Washington, was released in 2000. While his worst films make us shake our heads in dismay, his finest films enrich our lives like very few others out there.

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

The Priest’s Children (2013)

André Crous

PriestCroatia
3.5*

Director:
Vinko Brešan
Screenwriter:
Mate Matišić
Director of Photography:
Mirko Pivčević

Running time: 93 minutes

Original title: Svećenikova djeca

The Priest’s Children (Svećenikova djeca) is a visual feast and a subversive narrative treat full of humor that never outstays its welcome. Directed by acclaimed Croatian filmmaker Vinko Brešan and having a subversive priest at its core, the film ploughs the fraught but fertile soil of Bosnian-Croatian relations, including its religious component, but also opens with a rolling sequence of fourth-wall breaking that demonstrates Brešan’s playfulness not only with his subject matter but also with the art of filmmaking itself. This is an unexpectedly light-hearted romp, considering the intensity and sophistication of Witnesses (Svjedoci), Brešan’s 2003 film that dealt directly with the civil war in Yugoslavia.

Brešan’s film opens with an overhead shot of a baby crying in its crib. The overhead shot, sometimes called God’s point of view, is particularly apt as the action will rely on religion for both its logic and its comedy. The Priest’s Children is one long confession — a flashback to the misdeeds of Father Florijan (Krešimir Mikić), who is also our narrator, on a tiny island in the Adriatic Sea where he has been sent to eventually replace the aging Father Jakov. The misdeeds are multiple but mostly the same: Being frustrated at Father Jakov’s lack of initiative to keep the population from dying out, Florijan begins a campaign of mass fertilization — by ensuring all the condoms sold at the tiny kiosk on the jetty and at the pharmacy are defective.

He is helped in this by the god-fearing purveyors of the little rubbers who, each for his own slightly different reasons, would prefer it if the condoms didn’t stand in the way of population growth. However, actions have reactions, and before long foreign tourists are filling their beaches in the hope they will become fertile.

Defective condoms are no laughing matter — not only because people sometimes don’t have the means to feed an extra mouth, but also because of venereal diseases — but the director maintains the humour while never dismissing these issues out of hand, as AIDS is mentioned but since the island is so small and isolated we get the sense this is an impregnable bubble separate from the rest of civilisation.

Florijan, whose profession means he is sworn to secrecy, uses his intimate knowledge of the townspeople (who, given the size of the town, know almost all of each other’s secrets anyway) and their activities to promote, in his view, God’s preferred outcome. But while God may have some plans in this regard, Florijan and the others on the island involved in this scheme of reproduction are simply not up to the task, which leads to some hilarious scenes of ineptitude along the way.

At the start, Florijan’s confession (the flashback) is presented very creatively, as he looks into the camera to tell us directly what he is/was up to. A few minutes later, there is a very surprising, Charlie Kaufman–esque moment when the young Father Šimun (Filip Križan), whom he confesses to in the present, pops up in the flashback to ask a question, momentarily conflating the past and the present. Unfortunately, Brešan doesn’t find a way to keep up this sense of dynamism and spends the rest of the film entirely in the past, telling a straightforward story of farce set to a recognizably Balkan soundtrack, except for some quaint snippets that visually represent people’s gossip, set in an anonymous location bathed in white light with no sound besides some heavy breathing and the unmistakable thuds of flesh pounding flesh.

The deliberately controversial, tongue-in-cheek title of the film very accurately suggests the tone of the production, and few will be left disappointed by the execution of this tough balancing act that takes on the Roman Catholic Church’s position on contraception and even manages to address the issue of paedophilia in a serious way, having already laid the groundwork through comedy earlier on.

The Priest’s Children has a central character with good intentions, whose frustration with the small island town leads him to some very questionable actions, as he effectively plays God with people’s personal lives. However, we come to like him because he is naïve and never succumbs to the temptation of having even greater power over his congregation. As long as we don’t ponder the consequences of his reckless behaviour too much, this is a very gratifying and highly entertaining motion picture.

 

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

Amour (2012)

André Crous

Amour, a film about death, is all about hanging on to one’s better half and reminds us what intimate cinema is capable of.

AmourFrance
4.5*

Director:
Michael Haneke
Screenwriter:
Michael Haneke
Director of Photography:
Darius Khondji

Running time: 127 minutes

For most of Amour, the viewer feels absolutely confident she is in the presence of greatness. This is what a film looks like that takes its subject seriously and tries to present it in all its complexity through small moments that all have a very human dimension to them. The human dimension is born out of an intimacy that depends on the chemistry between and very likely also the life experience of the lead actors. And yet, these moments are immediately accessible to those of us who have only had a taste of the life depicted onscreen.

Jean-Louis Trintignant basically came out of retirement to take the role of the octogenarian Georges, whose wife, Anne, played by Emmanuelle Riva, has had a stroke but refuses to be hospitalised. They are both former music teachers and live in a comfortable apartment in the middle of Paris. In one of their first conversations, after attending a music concert, they speak passionately and with erudition about the music they heard.

At first, Georges cares for her and helps her to get into her wheelchair. But gradually her condition worsens, until she has another stroke and becomes nearly incapacitated.

How does a lifelong partner deal with this sudden change? The question is made all the more urgent and unnerving by Haneke’s sudden acceleration of the timeline in unannounced fashion. There are no supertitles to indicate the passage of time: Again and again, Anne’s condition has suddenly deteriorated again, and we are shocked every single time we become aware how much farther down the slope of mortality she has slid once more, and that there is no way back up.

Haneke shoots many of his scenes in single takes and all but eschews the use of close-ups. The film’s characters are thoroughly respected, with two small exceptions. In one of the film’s first scenes, at the breakfast table in the kitchen, at the moment when we realise what will be the beginning of the end, Haneke is a little too rough in his treatment of Anne. The moment itself, the first revelation that something is wrong (we later learn something was obstructing her carotid artery, causing her to switch off for a moment), is perfectly controlled, balanced between tenderness and tension, but the scene could have done without a final pouring of the tea into the saucer rather than the cup — something that emphasises without a shadow of a doubt that things will soon go downhill very quickly.

There is also the matter of a character not properly developed, only to serve as a vessel to elicit our emotion for Anne and her plight: the second nurse who comes to take care of her. She quickly shows her true colours as an arrogant uncaring little snip; her brief appearance and a particularly hurtful exchange with Georges feels like a typical Haneke moment in which evil is revealed to be embedded in society, and he obviously enjoys pushing the knife just that little bit more into our stomachs, though frankly, this was quite unnecessary. His subject matter is already powerful enough.

But the film is magnificent. It is a restrained piece of work that is set almost entirely inside the old couple’s flat and unwinds at Haneke’s leisurely pace inside scenes but frighteningly quickly from one scene to the next. Despite a feeling the film may at times be slightly jumpy, there is no disputing that it is consistently effective.

Amour does not venture into the generalities of the care of the elderly, but it does address a number of pertinent issues, including the unspoken pity the world has for this kind of situation, a pity that Haneke himself was probably banking on while making this film.

But there is a complete lack of cheap tricks to tug at our heartstrings. Trintignant and Riva bring with them many decades of experience not only in acting but in living; their characters’ gentle interaction, their frustration with the limitations of old age and the steadfast determination to still have a say in their own lives despite the intervention of different kinds of unexpected forces on their lives make them both strong and fragile at the same time. This kind of complexity is what the cinema often lacks, and what Haneke, Trintignant and Riva have brought to the screen with care and commitment.

Only towards the end does Haneke’s evident fear of a straightforward conclusion or an easy explanation strain the experience a little, but it is a very minor flaw in an otherwise first-rate film about perseverance in love and coping with the inevitability of death

Amour is personal, intimate and, together with The White Ribbon, one of Haneke’s least intellectual and most accessible films to date.

 

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

Orders (1974)

André Crous

Les OrdresCanada
4*

Director:
Michel Brault
Screenwriter:
Michel Brault
Director of Photography:
François Protat
Michel Brault

Running time: 107 minutes

Original title: Les Ordres
Alternative English title: Orderers

It was almost as if the Canadian government had too much space in its prisons, so it rounded up people at random on a large scale to incarcerate, isolate and torture. The experience, as presented in the film, is wholly Kafkaesque: Locked in their cells and interrogated about places they’ve never been to and people they’ve never met, they are never charged or even told what they are suspected of. And yet, it is all based on events that really took place in Canada towards the end of 1970.

The “orders” in the title refer to the justification for this chaos and trampling on fundamental human rights. Though the prison guards treat their new inmates the same way they presumably treat everyone else locked up in prison, nobody can say what the reason for this treatment is, but it must be for a good reason because the orders come from high up in government.

The actual reason, which director Michel Brault only hints at during a summary at the beginning of the film, is that two political figures were kidnapped by the Quebec Liberation Front, the FLQ. Though never named here, they were British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec Province’s Labour Minister, Pierre Laporte. The government deployed the War Measures Act that led to a wave of arrests, but in the end, nobody was charged and those arrested were released.

Orders follows five individuals who were arrested by the police, without apparent reason, during this time, and the film is based on some 50 interviews conducted with those who lived through this ordeal. They are Clermont Boudreau, a union representative who works at a weaving mill; Marie Boudreau, a housewife, who is Clermont’s wife; Jean-Marie Beauchemin, a doctor in charge of a community health clinic; Richard Lavoie, who is unemployed and taking care of his young son; and Claudette Dusseault, a social worker.

The most interesting characters are the Boudreau couple and Richard Lavoie, who loses his beard when he is taken to prison in a scene that is devoid of sentiment but provokes great emotion in the viewer, especially as Lavoie is shaved against his will next to another man, who loses his very thick beard, too. The feeling of despair is palpable, and we don’t need the characters to put their objections into words.

Brault, who had a background in documentary filmmaking, here goes about blurring the lines between fiction and fact in a very clever way. When each of these five characters is introduced, they also appear in interview form: The actors introduce themselves, say whom they portray, and then immediately slip back into their role to explain what their characters do, but they do so in the first person. In this way, there is no alienation, but rather an undeniable symbiosis between the real actors and their fictional characters embroiled in historically factual events.

It is interesting to note that when Richard Lavoie is asked for his date of birth, he provides the date of birth of the actor who portrays him, Claude Gauthier.

The film has a political slant, to combat not just the injustice of the situation but also the hypocrisy of the government and the silence of a large swath of the country that didn’t resist the government’s grab for power and suppression of its own people.

The very first words the film shows us are those of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, made more than a decade before the events for which he would be responsible:

Whenever any form of authority unjustly abuses a man,
all the other men are also guilty;
for it is through their silence and consent
that they permit the authorities to commit this abuse.

These words ominously, correctly anticipate the stunning silence from the Canadian public in general when the arrests took place. At the end of the film, we learn that, while the media reported on the arrests, there was little reporting when the individuals were eventually released — some after three weeks of incarceration — without ever being charged with any crime.

Orders is mostly in black and white, although the scenes inside the prison, depicting a world away from the everyday, are presented in colour. It is unclear whether this was meant to give a documentary quality to life outside the prison whereas the incarceration is presented as something almost unbelievable, but what is certain is that the prison scenes have more artistic freedom than the scenes outside (with the exception of a final crane shot, at odds with the rest of the film).

In particular, there is a shot similar to the famous scene in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle is rejected by a girl over the phone and the camera tracks away rather than show us his heartache. Here, we see Clément Boudreau, who had been on a hunger strike because he received only “pig swill”, or cold porridge, day in and day out, finally getting some crisps and a can of Coke. He breaks down in tears as the camera pulls back to leave him his privacy. It is a breathtakingly powerful scene that respects the character and emphasises the pain he is going through in a visually striking way. A slightly more “filmic” representation of the material involves the fainting of Lavoie, shot as a slow-motion fade-out.

The film gives an intimate portrait of some of the individuals who were affected by the Canadian government’s acts during 1970’s October Crisis, and while many may criticise the film for not naming names, the focus on the people themselves shows that Brault was interested in the effect of the events on people, rather than looking for answers about their origins.