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Harakiri (1962)

André Crous

Two riveting storylines connected by Tatsuya Nakadai’s powerhouse performance turn Harakiri into a deeply affecting examination of human morality and dignity in the face of injustice and deception.

HarakiriJapan
4.5*

Director:
Masaki Kobayashi
Screenwriter: 
Shinobu Hashimoto
Director of Photography:
Yoshio Miyajima

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: 切腹
Transliterated title: Seppuku

Harakiri is not only one of the best samurai films but one of the best films in Japanese cinema. Dealing with issues ranging from loyalty, honour and family to peer pressure and hypocrisy, it advances on two tracks. The first is the present (late afternoon on 13 May 1630), in which a samurai from a former clan has been reduced to living in poverty and asks to commit suicide in the Iyi clan’s forecourt. His name is Hanshiro Tsugumo, and Tatsuya Nakadai’s assured portrayal of the character is mesmerising. The second is the story-within-a-story in which a young man named Motome Chijiwa arrived a few months earlier with the same request but met a harrowing end.

The connective tissue between these two tracks is Hanshiro. He had been best friends with Motome’s father, Jinnai, during their time serving the Fukushima clan in Hiroshima. When the clan collapsed in 1619, Jinnai committed suicide. But to prevent Hanshiro from following his example, he entrusted Motome to his care. Eventually, Motome would become his son-in-law.

Hanshiro subsequently moved to Edo and barely supported himself by making umbrellas with his daughter. Although this was not the life of a samurai, Hanshiro continued to adhere to the values he accrued during his service. That is, until he lost his entire family and realised that the samurai of the Iyi clan were laughing at the misery of the poorer classes.

Harakiri is both mentally and emotionally affecting because it questions the often undisputed moral authority of the samurai. It is no coincidence that the director’s name in the opening credits sequence quite literally impales the revered suit of armour symbolising the glory of the Iyi clan. At many turns – sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes with grave seriousness – Hanshiro speaks some truth about the disparity between the perception of the samurai and how they really behave. They are made of flesh and blood and are not gods; they are fallible, not invincible; they are men and have the same faults as all other men; and they are not monolithic: They are good and bad and can be virtuous or vile.

The fullness of this complexity is gradually laid bare as Hanshiro presents his reasoning for committing suicide. The title refers to the act of disembowelment that the Japanese sword-wielding retainers, in particular, performed for reasons associated with honour. Samurai were expected to plunge their own blades into their stomachs as their weapon is as much a part of the warrior as his soul. Notwithstanding the reason for executing it, seppuku, as the Japanese call it, is a gruesome act. In the case of Motome, however, there is a (grim and sadistic) twist to the self-execution, albeit under the pretence of tradition.

Hanshiro says that samurai honour (bushido) is nothing more than a façade. Initially, we suspect he may be taunting the Iyi clan and all the samurai assembled around him in the courtyard. But when he recounts the circumstances that led to Motome coming to them, as well as their mocking tone upon returning his corpse, we see he has very good reasons for doing so. These reasons appear all the more justified during the climax when the house’s samurai culture is decisively stripped of its veneer. Among the samurai, violence is all too often prioritised over dialogue and understanding, and group pressure can end a life.

The screenplay is the work of Shinobu Hashimoto, who wrote many an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece, including Seven Samurai and Ikiru, during his storied career. But in terms of rhythm, subversiveness and clarity, Harakiri arguably surpasses all of them. Besides the clever links between the two tracks of the narrative, we also get numerous surprises as Hanshiro makes a major revelation almost every time he opens his mouth.

This quick-paced disclosure of context and no shortage of secrets, as well as Nakadai’s perfectly modulated acting – quite the opposite of Toshiro Mifune’s exaggerated kabuki performances in Kurosawa’s films – keep us enthralled throughout the two-hour running time, half of which takes place at a single location. And yet, we have no idea where all of this is leading. The information we receive tells us everything about the present, but the developments remain unwritten. Sustained by an eerie but entrancing biwa on the soundtrack, this tension of possibility continues right to the end, when a surprising string of deaths (in flashback) culminates in an unforgettable climax.

Kageyu Saito, the senior counsellor who oversees the two harakiri ritual ceremonies, exemplifies how strength is often just weakness reinforced by the strict enforcement of rules. Saito is hesitant and uncertain, but he implements the rules he knows. When these prove to be ineffective, he panics. But with no moral foundation of his own and unwilling to get his hands dirty (he never draws his sword), he resorts to underhanded tactics. This includes besmirching a genuine samurai and rewriting history to maintain his clan’s reputation. But we, the audience, know the truth. And as our knowledge increases, our empathy grows for both Hanshiro and Motome.

Kurosawa may be the artist in samurai cinema, but Harakiri leaves no doubt that Kobayashi is the master storyteller. Every line of dialogue in the film is essential and either clearly sets the scene or drives the story forward. We can discern the gravity of the circumstances from the words alone and have no need for histrionic performances. Nakadai is serene but stands strong thanks to his character’s unassailable moral rectitude.

This is the kind of masterpiece that exposes its competitors as vacuous pretenders, regardless of their directors’ pedigree.

Mouchette (1967)

André Crous

Robert Bresson was a thoughtful theorist on how to construct a film, but his characters do not resemble flesh-and-blood human beings. The widely praised Mouchette is among the worst offenders.
Mouchette

France
2.5*

Director:
Robert Bresson
Screenwriter:
Robert Bresson
Director of Photography:
Ghislain Cloquet

Running time: 80 minutes

Sometimes, even when confronted with material that ought to bring us to tears, there is no other way to respond than with boundless laughter. This is the case with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, a terribly acted film about an innocent girl enduring one tragedy after another without any hope of salvation.

In a way, the audience should be able to sympathise with her because for them the possibility of salvation is equally elusive. Mouchette is a tragic pile-up of calamities, both in the life of its main character and in the art of filmmaking itself. Transitioning from one disaster (humiliation, death, rape) to the next is just one part of the equation, but Bresson rarely knows how to direct scenes with dialogue and is even worse when it comes to personal interaction.

(In)famous for using non-actors in his film, Bresson gives the titular role to the 16-year-old Nadine Nortier. She had never appeared in a film before and would not do so again. Her character is in a truly miserable situation. With a mother on death’s door and an alcoholic father, she has to take care of her baby brother. She has another brother her own age, but somehow he manages to be absent from most of the film. And because of her simple clothing, clog-like shoes and reserved manner, her classmates and imperious teachers relentlessly pick on her. Of course, as with many other female characters in Bresson’s films (Au hasard Balthazar immediately comes to mind), she bears it all with a brave face but no push-back.

The one glimmer of hope peeking out from among the rubble of the girl’s existence is a bumper car ride. Although the staging lacks even a modicum of creativity, we finally see Mouchette emote without looking like a wooden Bressonian model. A well-dressed young man her age repeatedly bumps into her car, which turns her melancholy into joyful laughter. However, we can’t forget that this is a tragedy with a capital T. The scenes ends almost as quickly as it begins. When she is about to speak to the boy, her drunken father suddenly appears and hits her across the face. She silently yields to his authority and accompanies him back to the bar, albeit with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Halfway through the silent agony that is her existence, Mouchette is raped by a sleazy poacher named Arsène. Fortunately, unlike her counterpart in Balthazar, she doesn’t start dating the rapist. (Although she eventually calls him her lover, her motivation for doing so is much clearer than it was for Balthazar‘s Marie.) But the scene is an absolute farce. Mouchette and Arsène move hesitantly, in slow motion and without emotion towards and away from each other. He weakly grabs at her, she weakly repels him and then silently relents. We only hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace – a shockingly unsavoury metaphor for a director renowned for his use of sound.

Another metaphor – morally less objectionable but even more ham-handed – that the film deploys involves the hunt. In one of the first scenes, we see Arsène setting traps for pheasants. And in the film’s penultimate scene, Mouchette, whose name literally means “little fly”, witnesses a rabbit hunt. The viewer would have to be blind to overlook the explicit comparison.

But what is really grating about the film is Bresson’s apparent inability to create realistic drama. When Mouchette somehow loses her shoe in the mud, she takes a seat a few feet away. Quite a while later, Arsène appears, notices that she has lost her shoe, then takes her to his cabin and leaves her there before going back to the same spot to retrieve the shoe in the middle of a rainstorm. None of this makes any sense. The director so desperately seeks to inject drama into his film that he grasps as wholly incredible straws. Despite some nifty editing, the film’s final scene is not much better.

It boggles the mind why Bresson continues to be hailed as a visionary filmmaker. He certainly benefited from the admiration of the Cahiers crowd, but frankly, he was a one-trick pony. One of his first films, A Man Escaped, released in 1956, was a minimalist but tense work of genius. But it seems like the work of an entirely different and much more capable man than the one who subsequently made Pickpocket (whose interesting visuals barely compensated for the performance of its lead actor), and then Balthazar and Mouchette, both of which contain extraordinarily inept bits of acting throughout.

Mouchette feels out of step with its time, and not in a good way. Except for the bumper cars and the two hunting scenes, there is little dynamism, and a succession of setbacks suggests there is little to hope for and disengages us from the narrative. This little fly deserves to be swatted away.

Carriage to Vienna (1966)

André Crous

With gorgeous photography and a soundtrack that has religious undertones, Carriage to Vienna reminds us that the terror of the Reich’s occupiers spilled over into horrors committed by the previously occupied Czechs.

Carriage to ViennaCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Kachyňa
Screenwriters:
Jan Procházka
Karel Kachyňa
Director of Photography:
Josef Illík

Running time: 75 minutes

Original title: Kočár do Vídně
Alternate English title: Coach to Vienna

A road movie unlike any other, Karel Kachyňa’s Carriage to Vienna is also a thriller and an absolutely devastating indictment of the Czech nation after the Second World War. Set in the forests of Moravia, close to the Czechoslovakia–Austria border, the story covers roughly 24 tumultuous hours in the life of a young widow named Krista (an enigmatic, quietly brooding Iva Janžurová).

The opening crawl informs us that an anonymous “they” had hanged Krista’s husband the previous night for stealing a few sacks of cement. It’s the first week of Mary 1945, and we can reasonably assume it was Germans who did the killing. A few hours later, as day is breaking, two soldiers (one of them suffering serious injuries) appear on her doorstep and force her to take them to the border. They say they are Austrian, not “Reichsdeutschen”, although in wartime this is a distinction without a difference. Thus begins a daylong horse-drawn carriage ride through the misty forest.

Krista doesn’t speak a word. By contrast, Hans (Jaromír Hanzlík), the young German soldier sitting beside her on the carriage, is positively giddy. He can’t stop talking or moving about. Perhaps it is because the war is at an end and he has survived the ordeal. Maybe because he is going home. Or because this quiet and mysterious but seemingly submissive girl is taking him to freedom. He shows her photos of his family and his home in Vienna.

It has to be said that Hans is portrayed as far more naïve than malicious. Unlike Krista, whose life is in immediate danger, he is high-strung to the point of nearly snapping in half. And although he had been in the service of far-right fascism, he is clearly also human. In post-war Czechoslovak cinema, this was a big shift from the previous representations of German soldiers as uniformly malevolent.

However, all is not quite as it seems. We are constantly aware of the various weapons on board: The Germans have rifles and a pistol, but Krista has an axe concealed underneath the carriage. Slowly but surely, as the second soldier, Günther, loses consciousness and Hans is easily distracted, Krista disposes of the weapons one by one.  These moments are elegantly brought to our attention when the carriage moves on and the camera stays behind to discreetly reveal the items discarded in the bushes.

Beautiful organ music played by Milan Šlechta suffuses the soundtrack as we watch the trees stretching up to the heavens contrast starkly with the fog in black and white. Over time, we come to realise that the trees themselves are, in a way, the organ pipes, and we find ourselves in a sacred space where good and evil have come to do battle. Krista spends the first half of the film in silent contemplation, and it is riveting to behold. But despite the almost ethereal audiovisual atmosphere, we can feel the tension building. Will she or won’t she use the weapons on the Germans? Will they or won’t they discover what she is doing?

Then, things take a sharp turn, and the film ends in a stunning obliteration of sympathy. We had gone most of the film on the side of the underdog, hoping that Krista would escape and perhaps even take revenge for enduring the war and losing her husband hours earlier. But with the front line drawing closer, and Hans’s head is in her lap, she does not kill him. In fact, she makes a decision that can most charitably be described as unexpected, if not downright cuckoo. And yet, while her later actions may seem erratic, the very real impact of the war on her way of life cannot be underestimated.

However, Carriage to Vienna will be best remembered for its powerful final scene, which calls to mind the brutal postwar expulsion of Czech Germans. (The same applied to Hungarians, although they did not have the added burden of their people directly supporting genocide during the war.) For reasons that are easy to guess but morally questionable, anyone who was “ethnically” German was persona non grata in the newly liberated Czechoslovakia. The country’s president, Edvard Beneš, issued decrees to the effect that such individuals, even if they had lived in the Czech lands for generations, would lose their citizenship and be deported to the countries of their forefathers.

Kachyňa’s film requires just a single, well-placed scene to drive its point home about the violent backlash after the war. Its portrayal of German soldiers as people who fought on the wrong side rather than machines of immorality is equally bold. And although the film’s first half is far superior to its second, it may be one of the best and most important works of art the country has ever produced.

The Beast (2016)

André Crous

Shaka does Shakespeare in The Beast, an excellently staged but very ambiguous, immersive yet enigmatic short film.

The BeastSouth Africa
4*

Directors:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Screenwriters:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Director of Photography:
Nicholas Turvey

Running time: 18 minutes

All the world is a stage, and we are merely watching the other players. Maybe that’s what happens in a comedy. But in a tragedy, we are also (unwitting, perhaps reluctant) players. And anyone who’s familiar with Funny Games will know that it can be frightful for the viewer to realise her implicit involvement in the spectacle.

The Beast is a short film set inside the pheZulu Safari Park, which is a real park in present-day South Africa. Here, tourists can see wildlife, walk around a “cultural village” with indigenous huts and witness traditional Zulu dances. What the (almost uniformly white) visitors find most thrilling, however, is the opportunity to see Shaka, the famous Zulu warrior who never lost a battle. Of course, it’s not the real Shaka, who died nearly 200 years ago. The imposing young man playing him (Khulani Maseko) is an actor who dreams of leaving this life behind and performing in a Shakespeare play at the National Theatre. Or does he?

Writing-directing duo Samantha Nell and Michael Wahrmann make the very clever decision to shoot most of their film in long, unbroken takes, which tends to imply a unity of space and time similar to what we experience in real life. The camera rarely makes itself known. Instead, it lets the action play out in wide shots that allow us to take in the actors and their surroundings. Among others, we get to know the aspirations of “Shaka”, who says he wants more than just to play the Bard’s famous dark-skinned Moor, Othello. Even though everyone we see is dressed up in costumes and moving around inside this Disney-like village, we are led to believe that these are intimate, “real” conversations between the actors.

But then, without warning, the film shatters all our illusions. And no review can do justice to the film without unpacking this multi-layered twist. The performers line up to dance and perform, presumably a traditional Zulu song. Shaka slowly separates from the group and takes up position between them and the audience. When he starts to speak, he speaks in Zulu. But the words that come out of his mouth are those of Shakespeare. More to the point, they belong to Shylock, the Jew, in The Merchant of Venice. 

We don’t see the audience for this performance, but it is because we are the audience. As a drum starts to beat offscreen, the drama increases, and Shaka switches to English to deliver the best-known and most aggressive portion of the monologue.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you offend us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that.
If a Jew offends a Christian, what is his answer? Revenge.
If a Christian offends a Jew, what should his punishment be by Christian example? Revenge.

By this stage, the rest of the group of Zulu performers have joined in, and as they reach the camera, their heads fill the frame. Just like Shaka’s famous bull’s head formation, the viewer is surrounded. Dead centre is Shaka, who now turns to look straight at us before delivering the final blow: “The evil you teach me will be difficult to execute, but in the end, I will better my instructor.”

At long last, we get a reverse shot of the tourists. Their jaws are on the floor. As a destabilisation of the expected boundaries between the spectator and the performers, this staging is very clever. It now seems clear that everything we have been watching – all the “private” conversations we were privy to, all the “behind-the-scenes” activity that we witnessed – was staged for us. We are the tourists visiting the film. Every moment and every action was merely part of a show, and we have not learnt anything about the individuals themselves. Perhaps we should have known better since “Shaka” is always in costume and is never called by any other name.

Unfortunately, those final words, which seem to create fear and provoke total confusion among the tourists clutching their phones like a security blanket, are too disconnected from the story to get a clear sense of what the actor is talking about. We can kind of grasp the metaphor of a struggle for equality. Jew–Christian can be replaced by black–white or indigenous–coloniser, but is this “evil” in the final line? Is the film really implying the possibility of another apartheid – one in reverse, in which blacks will dominate and enslave the whites? Is this merely a historical reminder that Shaka’s tribe, the Zulus, would ultimately take back power over this land? Or does it dovetail with Shaka’s desire to play “deep, ambiguous” characters?

With its series of impressively staged single takes and a powerful but puzzling ending, The Beast certainly stands out from the pack. The four scenes don’t fit neatly together, but with a powerhouse performance by lead actor Khulani Maseko, it almost doesn’t matter. This is Shaka’s show, and he hits the bull’s eye.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2014)

André Crous

The last instalment of popular Hunger Games series ends on a high note but struggles to arrive at the finish line.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Peter Craig
Danny Strong
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 135 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

Katniss is tired, and so are we. The climax has been awaited far too long, mostly because Suzanne Collins’s three novels have been stretched across four films totalling more than nine hours. Jennifer Lawrence has cemented her status as the archer par excellence whose face, three-finger salute and flaming mockingjay pin became the symbols of a revolution against the smiling but devious President Snow (Donald Sutherland).

The first film’s Hunger Games, an annual reality-show event in which two dozen boys and girls from the dystopian country’s 12 districts participate and slowly get killed off until one survives, showed us the rise of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). She had taken part in order to save her younger sister, Prim, from being forced to compete. She befriended Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a fellow competitor and boy from the same district as her, and the two of them undermined the rules, causing President Snow to lose face. This small act of defiance eventually sparked a wider rebellion, whose progress was marked by the subsequent three films in the series.

In terms of atmosphere, this final instalment is spot-on, but dramatically it feels like we have run a marathon only to arrive at the finish line inside the arena and looking around to see no one in the stands. The climactic siege occurs, would you believe it, during an ellipsis marked by a black screen. This is a deeply unsettling move on the part of the filmmakers but is sadly representative of the many missing sections in a film that otherwise has very little plot.

At its core, the narrative comprises only the penetration of the Capitol, the upper-class zone with its style-conscious inhabitants who look down upon the riff-raff, namely those who make up the districts. This is followed by a surprise public spectacle and the requisite “happy ever after” epilogue that is all too reminiscent of the never-ending final moments of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Katniss, Peeta and about a dozen fighters make their way by land and by underground sewer system to advance ever so steadily towards the palace. Inevitably, some of them die, including quite a few we never got to know at all and, thus, to whom we had absolutely no attachment. It goes without saying that all the major players survive until the very end, making the film (even for those who have not read the novels) a tad too predictable. They also confront some slimy monsters (“mutts”) the likes of which we could not have imagined in a world that, in many respects, is similar to ours. But the battle with these creatures is drawn-out and made silly by an overbearing score, causing the viewer to switch off, particularly because we know (ignoring any glimmer of realism) that almost everyone is likely to survive.

The film’s logic is not always on point, however. In one scene, the team escapes from one side of the building, cross a courtyard and enter another side of the building before the previous hideout is blasted into oblivion. On television, President Snow broadcasts the beginning and the end but somehow manages to miss their escape in broad daylight. It is also way too easy for the team to have access to a “Holo”, a machine that points out exactly where in the Capitol hundreds of booby traps, or “pods”, have been placed and allows them a way to circumvent these traps without mass casualties.

The story’s most exciting developments are saved for late in the film, once there is a false sense of calm. While it has been clear from the outset that the rebel leader, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), is slowly becoming used to being in charge, this final film includes a handful of moments that increase our suspicions about her real intentions. To the screenwriters’ credit, her ambitions remain more or less ambiguous. At the same time, it becomes obvious that Snow was not the mastermind of a corrupt system as much as he was its logical extension.

The final moments, before the atrocious coda, are by far the most interesting, as they allow Katniss to reflect on her actions and the changes that have occurred since she first stepped forward to enter the ring in the first film. Katniss’s determination to make the right decision despite the ambiguity of the facts (“real or not real?” is a game she and Peeta plays throughout the film, and for good reason) signals her as an adult capable of critical reflection and aware of the consequences of her actions. At the end of a revolution, that is exactly what we want, even if the road to get there has been long and taxing.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, director openly mocks the audience with a flat, unresolved storyline, because apparently buying two tickets is better than buying one.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Danny Strong
Peter Craig
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 120 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Besides having a title that is a mouthful, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I will also make very little sense to those unfamiliar with the world of Katniss Everdeen. We start in medias res and have to fill in much of the story for ourselves if we never read the books or saw the two previous instalments of the series.

This hurdle may have been easy to clear if the film itself wasn’t also stretched and contorted to tell a story whose central action only takes place in Part 2. The tactic of splitting the last book of a series into two final films, the first obviously ending on a cliffhanger, is one that was also deployed by Harry Potter and Twilight. If Peter Jackson had made his Lord of the Rings trilogy 10 years later, we likely would have been saddled with a four-parter, too.

A quick recap is in order: Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), co-winner of the annual Hunger Games two films ago, and her mockingjay pin have become the symbols of a brewing revolution against the upper-class bubble, the Capitol, which controls territory as far as the eye can see in a post-apocalyptic world. This fight-to-the-death contest provides entertainment to the masses, and the victor gets lifetime compensation, although this often comes at some cost to their mental health. In the previous two films, Katniss became a warrior and beacon of hope for the downtrodden masses not only of her own district but also of the others. When she caused havoc inside the game world at the end of an evidently rigged game in Catching Fire (she shot a lightning-charged arrow into the arena’s force field), the wrath of the Capitol was brought down on her. She managed to escape, but her Hunger Games partner, Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson), was captured.

The forces of the revolution, comprising generations of marginalised individuals living from hand to mouth outside the Capitol, are slowly gathering on the outskirts of the “heart” of Panem, roughly the dystopian future version of the United States. All the while, however, despite her recent rebelliousness, Katniss remains a reluctant warrior and leader of the obviously imminent uprising. Were it not that Peeta, her fellow competitor and budding romantic interest, had been captured by the government at the end of Catching Fire and her home district razed to the ground, she probably would not have shown much interest in leading the charge against the odious President Snow.

This entire film is just buildup to the inevitable showdown of which we sadly don’t even catch a glimpse. All will be revealed in Part 2. For now, we have to be content with the very slow process of Katniss gathering her inner strength, getting Peeta back into her life and planning the attack on Snow and his power-hungry constituency.

But unlike the first two films, both of which centred on an iteration of the Hunger Games contest, this instalment has no focal event. The narrative is left with little oxygen and has to rely mostly on Jennifer Lawrence’s charisma, albeit undeniable. One particularly bad aspect of the film is the young “director” Cressida (Natalie Dormer), who is supposed to be an up-and-coming filmmaker from the Capitol who has joined the rebellion, but her approach to her craft is laughable and beyond irritating, as it seems she has never worked with actors before and grew up on a staple of propaganda films with transparent metaphors: When she notices Katniss standing in front of the ruins of her district’s Justice Building, she proudly turns to her cameraman and says, “There’s your first shot.” This group of terrible filmmakers who follow Katniss around like puppies often undermines our suspension of disbelief because we ask ourselves whether Katniss’s emotions and speeches are real or put on for show in front of the camera, which we never would have contemplated in the previous films.

Speaking of emotions, the biggest problem resulting from this instalment’s negligible sketching of past events is the character of Katniss’s friend, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), who was clearly pining for her while she was spending so much time with Peeta. Now that Peeta is in the hands of the enemy and Katniss only thinks of him, Gale is a strong but silent mess who only hints at being hurt but never stands up to fight for her. Hemsworth manages not to make Gale seem like too much of a victim, but instead of having the storyline plod along by having no one speak their mind, director Francis Lawrence could have revealed a bit more about this important character’s disposition.

Perhaps The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 will eventually be absolutely riveting when it forms a coherent unit with Part 2. However, because it lacks a major action scene or any kind of story arc that would show development and proper resolution during this particular film, it feels like more of a footnote than a proper page, never mind half a novel. We can usually forgive a film for a slow beginning if the last part takes our breath away, but if that first section suddenly vaults to prominence as its own thing, we have to call a spade a spade.

Lawrence, Hemsworth, Hutchinson and especially Woody Harrelson, who absolutely steals the show, all do excellent work in this film and keep the audience relatively interested, but the story just doesn’t get us worked up the way a film about injustice and revolution ought to.

There had to be a worst one in the Hunger Games tetralogy, and by the looks of it, that dubious title belongs to Mockingjay – Part 1.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

André Crous

A change in the director’s chair ensures that the second instalment of popular Hunger Games franchise is just as entertaining as the first.

The Hunger Games: Catching FireUSA
4*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Simon Beaufoy
Michael deBruyn
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 145 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

When The Hunger Games was released in 2012, everyone knew it was going to shatter a few records. Based on the novel series by Suzanne Collins, the film eventually went on to make more than $680 million at the box office. The only other films with greater earnings that year were The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers, both of which had budgets nearly three times as big as that of The Hunger Games.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the second in a four-film series based on Collins’s trilogy – as was the case with the film adaptation of the Harry Potter series, the final Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay, would ultimately be split into two films, released over two years.

Drawing heavily on the influence of reality television on our lives, which pretends to epitomise the evolutionary race to the top with programmes named Survivor or The Apprentice, the first film centred on the titular life-and-death competition. The Hunger Games is a contest in which 24 individuals, “tributes”, from the world’s less-fortunate districts take part for the benefit of those living in the decadent Capitol. For them, this game in which people kill each other off until only one remains is the television event of the year.

In the first film, the teenage Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the impoverished District 12 volunteered to take the place of her younger sister whose name had been selected. She participated in the gory activities alongside Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who may just be the nicest guy you’ve ever met. Sooner or later, they realised they have to form an alliance and perhaps even a fake relationship to garner the support from the audience, which would give them a better shot at staying on the show because they provide entertainment.

At the end of the first film, the creators changed the rules of the game and decided that only one (instead of two) would be crowned victor. In rebellion, Katniss and Peeta, the two remaining contestants, made up their minds to swallow poisonous berries and thereby forfeit the game. The pressure on Gamemaker Seneca Crane resulted in them both crowned winners.

Catching Fire has a few very strong themes that may not fit together as well as in the first film, but it is a marvellous, informative piece of entertainment that does its best to do the duty of telling only the second act of the overarching tale.

First off, the tension between reality and illusion is foregrounded again, as we see Katniss agreeing under duress to play up her relationship with Peeta for the sake of entertainment and to convince the viewers (and more importantly, those in the districts) that this is pure love rather than a streak of rebellion that could destabilise the entire country of Panem. Because Katniss is not exactly an open book, it is not always easy to see where her acting ends and her true feelings for Peeta, whom we like very much, may begin, and this uncertainty is naturally a magnet for attention.

The other very evident theme is that of standing up against oppression. Small but powerful moments include the scenes in which the granddaughter of President Snow suggests an admiration for Katniss, as well as the many showings of a three-finger salute by the people of the districts, indicating their resistance to the rule of the Capitol.

The first half of Catching Fire shows the brewing unrest and Katniss’s and Peeta’s desire to quell the resistance even as they want things to change. The second half is the 75th Hunger Games, known as the third Quarter Quell, in which past winners of the games take part – like an All-Stars edition – to remind the districts of their past transgressions and the transience of life.

Although this happens every 25 years, and 75 is neatly divisible by 25, this comes as a great shock to everyone, and in this respect, the film makes little sense. But we have confidence in Katniss and Peeta because they are the most recent victors and are at a slight advantage over their opponents. It is too bad that the opponents, for the most part, are rather simplistically drawn as either good or bad (or what is supposed to be a grey middle ground of “provocative”, as in the case of Johanna) and don’t surprise us until, perhaps, the very end.

Another bit of plot that seems odd is the relationship between Katniss and Gale, her best friend and obviously a bit more than that. Despite the rest of the world thinking Katniss and Peeta are in love and would rather die together than have only one of them survive, that is obviously not the case in their home district, and everyone can see that. And yet, there is no uprising as a result.

The Hunger Games series changed hands with this instalment from Gary Ross to Francis Lawrence, whose approach to the material is much more obviously Hollywood than that of Ross, who memorably used a Steve Reich composition at a key moment in the first film. However, “more Hollywood” does have its pluses, as the special effects this time around are noticeably better, particularly during the scenes involving fire.

There are many problems with Catching Fire, but it remains an excellent piece of entertainment (Stanley Tucci’s turn as talk-show host Caesar Flickerman, tanned here to give him a John Boehner–like orange complexion, is as wildly amusing as in the past) that stacks up well enough against its predecessor and makes us impatient to see what happens next.

The Hunger Games (2012)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games, Gary Ross takes reality television shows to the extreme (within the family-friendly limitations of Hollywood entertainment).

The Hunger GamesUSA
4*

Director:
Gary Ross
Screenwriters:
Suzanne Collins
Gary Ross
Billy Ray
Director of Photography:
Tom Stern

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

The Hunger Games, a film based on the eponymous novel by Suzanne Collins, shares a premise with the notorious Japanese film Battle Royale: A group of teenagers, called “tributes”, are sent to an isolated area where they not only have to survive the elements but survive each other over the course of a severe couple of days. Whoever comes out of the ordeal alive wins the grand prize.

The story is set at some point in the future, and anyone who has not read the book might struggle to figure out exactly why these games take place at all. There are mentions of an uprising in the past that caused the world or the country to be divided into 12 districts, from each of which two children get chosen in an annual gathering called “the reaping”.

The 24 tributes, some with special skills, but most of them with nothing but their innate sense of survival, are shown on television for the duration of the games, and an easy parallel can be drawn to the ubiquitous reality shows we have become so used to. Indeed, the question of whether celebrity is worth the loss of privacy is addressed head-on.

Although only the barest details are given about the historical context of the ferocious spectacle, the viewer quickly enters this world with the help of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), two teenagers who are unwillingly thrust into the limelight and thrown into the lion’s den.

Even before their names are chosen, there is unease in the air. The people from Katniss’s and Peeta’s district live off the land and profit little from the glitz, glamour and riches of the Capitol – a city filled with wealthy people who have brightly coloured hair and wear gaudy outfits. The tension between the two groups of citizens is evident.

Insofar as its depiction of violence is concerned, The Hunger Games is far more Hollywood than Battle Royale. Going for a wide audience, instances of violence are kept to a minimum, and even the few action-packed moments that remain are composed mostly of blurred shots in which it seems the camera – rather than the characters – is under attack. The film’s use of rear projection, during some spectacular scenes in which the tributes are paraded on arrival in the city, is also very poorly executed.

But director Gary Ross, whose Pleasantville transported audiences to a time of nostalgia that was both playful and insightfully critical, here tackles some very timely questions about the nature of celebrity and reality TV. He also stealthily draws contemporary resistance movements (Occupy Wall Street, in particular) into the equation as a way of saying the majority does not have to be victimised by the ruling minority.

The director’s use of the handheld camera, to put us closer to the events, has mixed results, although our uncomfortable closeness to Katniss’ face when she is onstage during an interview with blue-haired talk-show host Caesar Flickerman renders some impressive results. As played by Stanley Tucci, Flickerman has exquisite timing, and his act, close to slapstick, is pushed to its limits. But Tucci never makes the character a joke by going overboard. And this observation is applicable to nearly all the actors in the cast, who are made to be much more human than one would expect.

Even Haymitch Abernathy, who is assigned to mentor Katniss and Peeta, and is a former winner of the Hunger Games, is portrayed as more than a drunk loser who used to be great. In his portrayal, Woody Harrelson credibly conveys the conflicting emotions of hope and hopelessness that can easily crush the spirit of all the contestants.

Another example of the film’s surprising departure from the average fare is the first scene inside this enclosed area in which the tributes will compete: When they all rush toward their gear before heading off into the woods, the music that accompanies this moment is not a glorious orchestral number but a minimalist composition by Steve Reich. Of everything that happens in the film, this combination of audio and visuals is perhaps the most telling of Ross’s desire to make a film that is different from the clusters of forgettable fantasy films we get every year.

The Hunger Games is a cautionary tale about reality television, and it effortlessly mixes in contemporary politics to produce a very intelligent film that never seems like it is trying too hard to be relevant. The focus on the characters inside the world of the game is tight, and the pacing is superb, and few other similar films of this length (142 minutes) go by so quickly.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

André Crous

Despite the two big names with top billing and some good ideas, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a fragmented mess of a film whose literal golden glow cannot save it from mediocrity.

Reflections in a Golden EyeUSA
3*

Director:
John Huston
Screenwriters:
Gladys Hill
Chapman Mortimer
Director of Photography:
Aldo Tonti

Running time: 105 minutes

Everything that is golden isn’t gold. The visuals of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, which not only has two major stars as a dysfunctional couple in the South but also deals with issues of intensely repressed sexuality, are tinted gold. Every now and again, a pink dress or red streak of blood break through, but the rest is a lifeless olive-gold that is perfectly in tune with the beige of the ubiquitous military uniforms.

The film is a very muddled assortment of lust and betrayal. Everything is tenuously held together by identical bookend quotations from the original novel by Carson McCullers, which read: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” Alright, so there will be a murder, but the film’s six characters show so little development that any one of them could be shot and we’d barely even notice.

Marlon Brando plays Major Penderton, who teaches courses on leadership at the local military post. With one or two notable exceptions, he is expressionless, a block of ice completely resistant to the Southern heat. His wife is Leonora, whom Elizabeth Taylor portrays with the same kind of drunken, free-spirited and emotional callousness as she did in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We never learn what the backstory is to this unlikeliest of couples. We meet them when the marriage is already long over, and Leonora is having daily dalliances with their next-door neighbour, Lieutenant Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith).

Langdon’s wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is still traumatised after losing her baby three years ago but is lucid enough to recognise that her husband is having an affair. However, being the polar opposite of extrovert Leonora, she deliberately ignores the obvious signs. She spends her days mostly in the company of the family’s effeminate Filipino “houseboy”, Anacleto, a dreadful bit of acting by Zorro David. The character has one brilliant scene in which he throws a drink at a group of gossiping officers before fading into the wallpaper again. And then there is the taciturn private Williams (Robert Forster), who notices Leonora walking naked through the house and subsequently returns every night to look at her up close and smell her underwear.

For obvious reasons, Major Penderton has the most potential. After Williams does some work in his garden, Penderton spots him on horseback in his birthday suit. Soon, the staring begins, as Penderton simply cannot control himself in public whenever he spots the young private. But these feelings of confusion and anguish are not developed in any serious way. They merely sketch out some vague explanation for the expected murder. At one lecture, Penderton’s mind seems to wonder when he asks the students, “Is leadership learned, is it taught, [or] is man born with it?” At another point, he waxes lyrical about the military life, which is “immaculate in its hard, young fitness”. But he seems to be stuck for good.

Brando’s best moments come either when he is on his own or when he demolishes his character’s icy exterior. When he is on his own, he gallantly but rather pathetically tries to lift weights, he stares into a mirror to rehearse his witty lines and facial expressions for a social event at his own home. Or he spreads a handful of rejuvenating cream over his face, not unlike a clown before a show. These are sad but intimate moments that allow us a glimpse of Penderton’s melancholy existence as an act that might allow him to blend in. But the scenes in which his well-kept façade disintegrates are equally powerful. The way his face contorts when Leonore taunts him, or when his horse refuses to listen to him, makes for very compelling cinema.

The scene with the horse is absolutely astonishing. When Penderton had earlier gone riding with his wife and her lover, he fell off the horse. Now he takes his wife’s prize stallion, Thunderbird, but when he kicks in the side, it bolts into the forest. The thick foliage scratches and scrapes his face. He holds on for dear life. And Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score kicks into high gear. But it is the low-angle, titled camerawork and the rapid editing, in particular, that draw attention. The confused, all-too-human look of utter desperation on Brando’s face and his violent but futile response are pitiful but make him the most interesting character of all.

The title ostensibly refers to a drawing by Anacleto of a peacock, which has a “tiny and grotesque” golden eye. But as with so much else in the film, this inference also goes nowhere. While some moments are reflected (in gold) in Williams’s left eye, especially when he is leering at Leonore from afar, the metaphor is impenetrable.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a terribly uneven film that unspools in fits and starts. It has enough characters with promising storylines to fit three feature-length films, but it doesn’t dig into any of them. The tensest scenes are the ones between Taylor and Brando, but they are few and far between. The plot ultimately explodes with an unintentionally hilarious final shot (multiple whip pans between murderer and murdered, with a startled bystander sandwiched in between). The film has the makings of a fascinating social study, but its fragments never cohere into anything resembling a whole.

Red River (1948)

André Crous

Thanks to Montgomery Clift, here appearing in his first-ever role on film, Howard Hawks’s classic Red River has more than its fair share of male bonding on the plains.

Red RiverUSA
3.5*

Director:
Howard Hawks
Screenwriters:
Borden Chase
Charles Schnee
Director of Photography:
Russell Harlan

Running time: 130 minutes

Almost everyone has seen that scene where a 25-year-old Montgomery Clift, in his film début, and John Ireland stroke each other’s pistols. “There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun”, the latter tells Clift, “a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.” Clearly aware that Clift’s character has never had a woman, he simply asks, “You ever had a good Swiss watch?” Within seconds, they start shooting their guns to confirm that they do things the same way. It is a moment so playful, friendly and gay (happy) that one can’t help but see it as an example of very intimate male bonding bordering on a sexual metaphor.

At their meeting in the previous scene, Ireland already couldn’t keep his eyes off Clift. But the gunplay, in particular, has been cited countless times as an example of underlying homoeroticism between men in Westerns – and not only because, in fact, one of these actors was gay. But this is far from the only intimate moment between men in Howard Hawks’s classic Red River.

The film’s central relationship – and source of conflict – involves Clift’s character, Matt Garth, and the much older Thomas Dunson, played by John Wayne with his trademark velvet voice but lack of emotion or acting talent. Dunson is like a father to Garth, whom he basically adopts as his own after the latter loses his family in a raid by the Indians. The year is 1851, and white expansion out West is in full swing. In the process, Dunson also loses Fen, the only woman he ever loved, to unnamed and unseen Indians. The only trace of their misdeeds is the plumes of black smoke wafting over the prairie.

Dunson lays his eyes on a beautiful piece of land in Texas, which he colonisingly proclaims as his own, and within 14 years, he has established a ranch boasting thousands of head of cattle. But 14 years after 1851 is 1865, and with the Civil War having just wrapped up, the South is in ruins, so Dunson’s beef needs to travel elsewhere for profit. Thus begins a cattle drive over hundreds of miles to the middle of Missouri. John Ireland’s character, Cherry Valance, accompanies Dunson and Garth and eventually leads to a brutal split in their relationship just as Dunson grows more and more domineering on the journey.

The film delivers spectacular images not only of wide-open vistas and a cowherd stretching as far as the eye can see but also from the position of the covered wagons as they cross a river. Although the shots are strikingly similar to John Ford’s Stagecoach, this perspective is thrilling for the viewer, who is suddenly in the middle of the action.

Not unlike the Mutiny on the Bounty, the protégé takes the side of the crew when their leader’s authoritarian streak becomes unbearable. Together they rebel against the seemingly callous Dunson and leave him behind while they plough on. Red River hints at how exhausting it can be to be a leader, but it chickens out by preserving Garth as a stand-up citizen whose tiredness never interferes with his judgment or social tact. Where parallels are drawn, however, is with the women.

In the opening scene, Dunson leaves his sweetheart behind but tells her that he will send for her. Within hours, the Indians kill her. At the beginning of the third act, Garth meets Tess and immediately saves her from an Indian arrow. The moment she sees him, she falls in love. We can’t blame her, but Garth’s reaction is curious, as he seems to fall for her because he knows that Valance (whose pistol he held so firmly earlier in the film) had his eye on her, too. When he sucks the poison out of her neck or when he kisses her, it is hard not to think of her as a substitute for Valance.

The world of the film is almost entirely devoid of female characters. The two that do feature – Tess and Dunson’s girlfriend, Fen – are either weepy or can’t stop talking or both. Tess could easily have been a strong character, but from the very first moment she spends with Garth, she is overcome with emotion and practically talks herself into a stupor. Meanwhile, for a large part of the film, Garth wears a particular bracelet that Dunson had once given Fen. And then I haven’t even mentioned the love fest that is the long-anticipated climactic shootout between Dunson and Garth… These are small details, but they create very fertile ground for anyone looking to study the bonding between cowboys in the hypermasculine worlds of American Westerns.

The film was shot in 1946 but only released two years later because Hawks initially had issues with the editing job. In addition, Howard Hughes sued Hawks because he claimed the final scene was too similar to one from The Outlaw, which Hughes had directed a few years earlier with assistance from Hawks.

Although Red River lags when Dunson temporarily disappears from the narrative, Montgomery Clift’s soft-spoken performance as a cowboy who is every bit as skilled as the previous generation is mesmerising. Garth is accused of having a soft heart because he treats people with dignity, and his eyes shine so brightly they sparkle with colour despite the black and white of the image. We are always on his side, even though he is a very different kind of cowboy to the ones we know from other films. And this balance between the new and the old, as well as the ultimate compromise in the final scene, is why Red River is one of the most important works in the pantheon of Westerns.