Countries

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

André Crous

Martha Marcy May MarleneUSA
3.5*

Director:
Sean Durkin
Screenwriter:
Sean Durkin
Director of Photography:
Jody Lee Lipes

Running time: 101 minutes

Martha Marcy May Marlene doesn’t do anything wrong, but there is just not enough to hold on to for the film to become beloved. Its main character, Marcy May, real name Martha and telephone name Marlene, has just escaped from a cult on a farm in upstate New York where she has spent quite a bit of time being “purified”, what many in the audience will call “brainwashed”.

The girl has become a young woman who feels comfortable in her own skin but is now faced with a number of problems that need to be resolved for her to integrate into normal society again. The first is the people she left behind, people who seem to be folk of the land, working on the farm to sustain themselves, but whose rare interactions with the rest of society are cold and haunting.

In one of the film’s very first scenes, we see a group of men eating dinner. In the meantime, the women of the house sit and wait patiently on the steps, only making their way to the dinner table once the men, led by Patrick, have finished and left the dining room. Everything is done without question, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.

We struggle to understand the dynamic here. The film offers very little to explain the relationship between Patrick and his men, though it is clear the women are all damaged in some way. However, the main focus is Marcy May, who takes this name when Patrick tells her she doesn’t look like her actual name, Martha. Especially at the beginning, she is the only person on whom the shots focus, even when other people are in the room with her. And yet, we know nothing about her life before she joined.

Most of the film is spent in the company of Marcy May’s sister, Lucy, and her husband of only a few months, Ted. Their beautiful, spacious home next to a lake in Connecticut would seem to be the perfect refuge for the girl they know as Martha to recuperate after her ordeal, but she is haunted by memories of the events on the farm, and her behaviour often veers from the merely awkward to close to the sociopathic. One can laugh when she takes off her clothes to go and swim in the lake, but it becomes a bit disturbing when she can’t sleep and therefore decides to curl up in bed next to Lucy and Ted while they are having sex.

We realise over time how her words are mere copies of what she has been told by the cult’s psychologically affecting Patrick, who also took her virginity while she was drugged — an act, she is told by the other women, in which she should rejoice, because Patrick is such a great guy who purifies her. 

If the film had dug a little deeper, we could easily have been disgusted at the underlying goings-on. At one point we realise Patrick has fathered only boys with the girls, and the question remains open what happened to the women who were pregnant with girls. But the film has its eye on other things, like the visual motif of the empty room in which Marcy May is consoled after losing her virginity, and the same empty room, later on, in which she tries to console, drugged drink in hand, a girl before she goes to meet Patrick one dark night. In this way, the full story is revealed from many different angles while being visibly, securely grounded and connected by the visuals.

This is the first film of director Sean Durkin, and he treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, with the exception of one particularly grating outburst of Marcy May during some celebration at Lucy and Ted’s, when the dramatic music takes over the scene completely.

But Marcy May’s past haunts her less than it haunts her sister, who is the real victim here. Having worried for years about her, she now wants to patch things up, but Marcy May won’t let her. Instead, although she is already imposing on her by staying comfortably at her house, she also makes some rude comments about her to Ted and laughs out loud when he tells her they are trying to have a baby.

“If you’re going to live here, you need to be a part of things,” are words of wisdom Patrick had told her that she could have kept in mind, but her lifeless eyes reveal her as being lost and confused. Yet it is frustrating to see Lucy also being too afraid to ask her why she is the way she is, and what had happened to her during all that time they didn’t see each other.

Viewers will talk about the ending, and it is one that isn’t entirely clear. Little of substance happens, but that is a general observation about the film itself, whose events can be read as an ineluctable journey towards tragedy, or merely small coincidences that Marcy May hysterically, but not without reason, interprets out of proportion.

It is possible she is merely hallucinating everything from before she arrived at Lucy’s place, though such an interpretation is itself perhaps a little far-fetched. The many L-cuts (sound that starts in one shot but is actually connected to the shot that starts, in a different time and place, a few seconds later) suggest this might be the case, but you can judge for yourself. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a very competently directed, but not entirely solid story that is nonetheless a powerful, memorable film.

Czech Dream (2004)

André Crous

Cesky senCzech Republic
3.5*

Directors:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda
Screenwriters:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda
Directors of Photography:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda

Original title: Český sen

Running time: 90 minutes

Vít and Filip are documentary filmmakers from the prestigious Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), who will use their documentary skills over the course of the film to examine the gullibility of the average Czech citizen in 2003 by using an approach with a wholly unreal central object.

In the run-up to the Czech Republic’s decision to join the European Union, the country was inundated by a very well-funded government campaign to nudge (or push) Czechs in the direction of voting “yes” in the referendum. The glossy campaign led Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, final-year film students, to consider the impact such marketing has on a population, especially when the goal (joining the European Union) is more or less intangible.

They decided to use money from the Ministry of Culture to fund a project that would see them advertise a new hypermarket in Prague. The hypermarket would be called “Český sen” (Czech Dream) and the prices would be a small fraction of those paid in other hypermarkets. This happened around the time the country was first introduced to big shopping malls and chain supermarkets with reduced prices where customers could buy everyday groceries in bulk and find everything they looked for in one store, under one roof.

Using one of the top advertising agencies in the capital, the filmmaking duo proceed as if the hypermarket is real, even constructing an enormous scaffold on an open field outside the city. For the duration of the campaign, the location of the shop is kept a secret, and the marketing approach is playful and unconventional, touting a big surprise for everyone who comes on the opening day and telling potential shoppers everywhere not to spend, not to come, not to bother. So, reverse psychology. 

But the approach is surprisingly effective, and the whole city goes into quite a frenzy about the ridiculously low prices on the advertising pamphlets, including an offer of a colour television set for $25. If things are too good to be true, they usually are, but it’s difficult to kill a dream before reality hits you in the face. The hypermarket also has television spots and even an official jingle, complete with violins and a children’s choir.

We know this can’t end well, with people necessarily being disappointed, but the film’s interviews with a wide range of people, all of whom pitched up one sunny May 31 to witness the opening of, well, not a shopping mall, shows the expected mixture of anger and disillusionment. Walking from the holding area across a large open field to the scaffolding behind which the new mall supposedly lies, one individual already questions whether this is what the country’s future looks like if it joins the European Union, with malls like these, in the middle of nowhere, sprouting up.

Introduced by the filmmakers on the empty space in the suburb of Letňany that would be the location of their prank, we are in on the joke from the beginning, but as we spend very little time with them when they are portraying themselves (rather than acting the parts of the managers of the new mega shop), it is difficult to judge their attitude towards the people they are duping. Do they consider themselves superior? Do they think they are smart and the average Czech is a stupid fool? Or do they ever realise that their marketing campaign was good enough to pique the interest of even the most sceptical potential shopper?

We don’t know, but the opening shot showing Czechoslovaks in 1972 queuing for groceries, which eerily resembles the hordes rushing towards the scaffolding on May 31, 2003, is an indication that the filmmakers themselves don’t think much has changed, although that would be a terrible simplification of the situation.

The film is funny and certainly succeeds in pushing the envelope while it peeks behind the scenes of the advertising business (with those working in the industry memorably claiming that they never lie, and have terrible moral qualms with the filmmakers’ empty promises). Their fellow cameramen are determined to get answers from their interviewees and deserve a lot of credit for their persistence, though ultimately we don’t learn much from this material.

Czech Dream is a film that made a big splash upon its release, because it changed reality in order to be filmed, which can be risky terrain for a filmmaker, and the film’s directors fail by not being more visible in their own work or explaining their motivations. During a final question-and-answer session with furious would-be shoppers, they try to justify their actions, but we are not convinced. The film is based on a clever idea with some nifty details that may be inspired by the production of a fake war in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog but suffers greatly from the under-involvement of its central characters. At one point, a mother in a parking lot sings “Hey, ho, nobody home”, a very serendipitous moment caught on film by Klusák and Remunda, and one that is bound to stick in your head as you watch both the crowds walking across an empty field and the filmmakers speaking to the angry mob.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

André Crous

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Czechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Zeman
Screenwriters:
Karel Zeman
Josef Antonín Novotný
Directors of Photography:
Václav Pazderník
Antonín Horák

Running time: 84 minutes

Original title: Cesta do pravěku

The fossils of prehistoric creatures housed at the National Museum are just a collection of bones, either spread out or assembled in a skeletal structure or set in stone as a result of petrification over millennia. They are not alive, and they only hint at the original. Sometimes, a museum may have an exhibit that is a representation of what one of these animals from long, long ago looked like. Usually, it’s a mammoth.

What the luminary Czechoslovak special effects director Karel Zeman realised, was exactly the same motivating force that must have compelled Steven Spielberg to shoot Jurassic Park in the early 1990s: The ability of the cinema, and of skilled filmmakers, to bring to life what until now we could only imagine and to make the past almost physically present.

Journey to the Beginning of Time was released in 1955, but as the country was isolated internationally at the time and would only open up a few months after Zeman’s death in 1989, his fame and magic were confined to the borders of the landlocked country in Eastern Europe.

What we realise more and more, however, is how far ahead of his time Zeman was. Inspired by Georges Méliès and explicitly referencing Jules Verne, whose work is the obvious forebear of both these artists, Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time is a beloved classic in the Czech Republic and deserves widespread recognition, even though its visual effects have by now, more than half a century later, been surpassed by computer-generated effects.

Three teenagers, Petr, Jenda and Toník, and a younger boy named Jirka set off on a journey through the ages. Having read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, they consider themselves explorers and set off on a canoe upstream from the present day all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, where the fossil of a trilobite that Jirka found in stone will be seen for real.

It is a journey that obviously boggles the mind, and we are left wanting for an explanation of how the children go about skipping from one time period to the other (the film does employ some mist to cover the transitions, though), but what is obvious is that these machinations of the fiction are not what we should be focused on. The real reason we watch the film is to see the prehistoric animals come to life, and do so in the presence (and in the same frame!) as the children.

Petr, the de facto leader of the group, obliquely speaks for the viewer, too, when he observes:

We haven’t made this journey just for fun; we came to study what prehistoric life really looked like. We are so lucky to have the opportunity to do just that, to see everything with our own eyes.

Indeed, this is a privilege, and as the children travel back from the time of the cavemen to the time of the dinosaurs and beyond, we find ourselves constantly aware of the fact that while the events are about as possible as time travel, the thrill of seeing creatures from these two very different times in one place is extraordinary, and Zeman assembles and stages the actions with a very firm and steady hand.

While the special effects are not on the more or less seamless technical level of Jurassic Park, they are breathtaking considering the film was made in the early 1950s, in a country that had a few months earlier been racked by its infamous currency reform that cut the worth of everyone’s money by 90% while prices remained the same (a tale told in great detail by the remarkable 2012 film, Ve stínu). Often, the stop-motion animal movements would seem to be too fast or too slow, or when the mammoth stands still but raises its trunk, the bushes around it move without reason with jerky movements.

But Zeman achieves some impressive results during the staging of a nighttime fight between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while many animals don’t have a reflection in the water because they were not shot next to the river, but separately, the Brontosaurus’s appearance in the river, reflection included, is gorgeous.

At another point, the camera follows the enormous dragonflies called Meganeura as they fly between the trees, the camera apparently tracking down below while looking up at them. The effect is powerful and this technically ambitious sequence is very rewarding.

In some ways, the film can be called superficial, but covering the various life forms of 5 billion years in 80 minutes is no small feat. From time to time, mention is made of life in the present, and the juxtaposition is worthwhile, for example when club mosses were the size of trees, their eventual stratification would give rise to coal mining in the 20th century.

The four boys, with the exception of the inquisitive Jirka, don’t get up to much trouble and have a surprisingly easy time of all this travelling through the ages, so we ultimately learn little about them, but their awe at being able to see all these creatures is something the viewer understands all too well, as Zeman’s film awakens a curiosity in us for the life of things we may never really have considered beyond the bare bones of a museum exhibit.

Dante’s Inferno (1911)

André Crous

Italy
4*

Director:
Giuseppe de Liguoro
Screenwriter:
Dante Alighieri
Director of Photography:
Emilio Roncarolo

Running time: 68 minutes

Original title: L’Inferno

Though creaking a bit with a load of peripheral characters that appear for a mere handful of seconds, as they are usually physically constricted from moving around, this very first filmic depiction of the “Inferno” part of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a remarkable visualisation of the story in a way that the cinema had not really taken advantage of before.

The one striking exception is the director whose style certainly influenced director Giuseppe de Liguoro: Georges Méliès, whose formative tendency (films whose meaning was enriched, even informed, by their visual style, in contrast with the Lumière brothers’ documentary-like films that strove to capture the world as it is without demonstrating any real creativity from the filmmakers, except for their placement of the camera) is on full display in this film that takes place in the underworld.

The film’s opening montage already gives us a peek into the underworld, presenting us with fragments of despair whose characters or settings we do not know yet (they will all be revealed over the course of the film), but the writhing bodies present a world undeniably abhorrent that rapidly comes into view.

Dante’s Inferno is very text-heavy as a screen full of words precedes nearly every scene, and this screen tells us what we are about to see and especially who the diverse assortment of characters are that Dante and his guide, the poet Virgil, meet on their way through he underworld. The problem is that the film’s one-hour length means the entire journey has to be condensed and all of the duo’s interactions with the condemned last a very short amount of time.

Sometimes, the names of the characters are onscreen for a longer period of time than the physical individuals themselves. But Dante carries on, carried – as are we, the viewers – by the trance-like music that accompanies the film’s most recent release, of the German electronic band Tangerine Dream.

There are many noteworthy special effects in the film, and the moments when Dante or Virgil or Dante’s muse, the young Beatrice who has an impressive spinning halo above her head, lift off to float away or fly off are very effective and do not seem as rudimentary as one might have expected. It’s pure Méliès for the contemporary viewer: at once fantastical and uncanny because of the slight awkwardness of the movements or the stammering nature of such an old film of which not all the frames were in perfect condition.

Sometimes, the use of superimposition and even of forced perspective (see, for example, Dante and Virgil meeting the giant Antaeus) is equally splendid. At another point, a headless man appears holding his own head – it is very easy to guess how this was done, but the effect is rather good.

Famously, Dante is reminded to “Abandon all hope [ye who enter here]” and the images we get certainly fit very well with this notion. Those trapped down below have been sentenced to suffer for their sins for all eternity and the variety of ways in which they have to pay for their time spent on earth can make for rather uncomfortable viewing, from the Summonists (those who have cheated the Church) trapped with their heads buried in the sand, and the spendthrifts who have to roll bags of gold around their circle, to the hypocrites wearing cloaks of gold on the outside but filled with lead on the inside.

Dante is a bit of a wuss, as he faints or screams all the way through Hell, once even pulling a tuft of hair from a head sticking out of the ground, but on the other hand the majestic Virgil, wearing a white sheet and wearing an olive wreath on his head in the style of an Olympic Games winner, and gesticulating hither and thither in extremely melodramatic fashion, doesn’t make any better an impression.

It is a frightening moment when Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucanus appear and give the travelling duo the Roman salute, as within a few years of the film’s release, it would be co-opted by the fascists in Italy and Germany and become the Hitler salute.

This world where steam seems to be everywhere is a place where no one wants to end up. It is a place of endless misery, and the film presents a thorough catalogue of the pain and suffering that awaits those who choose to live according to their own vices and desires. It is sometimes rather obvious that the story was conceived on the first level to warn Dante’s fellow Florentines of their reckless behaviour, but the rundown of the levels of Hell makes for a powerful visual argument against immorality.

The film is unfortunately very episodic, and even the relationship between the two main characters, Dante and Virgil, is not allowed to develop. But as a purely visual experience, this film is a feast.

Olympic Garage (1999)

André Crous

Argentina
3.5*

Director:
Marco Bechis
Screenwriters:
Marco Bechis
Lara Fremder
Director of Photography:
Ramiro Civita

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Garage Olimpo

Although this makes it all the more frightening, it is refreshing to see a conflict not based on race or religion, but on ideology. The reason this should inspire fear in viewer and character alike is that this kind of setup makes it much more difficult to distinguish a friend from an enemy.

Olympic Garage is set during Argentina’s Dirty War of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which many Argentines were rounded up, because they’d been denounced by someone as a traitor to the system or an anarchist or a subversive, and tortured before simply disappearing. The mass disappearances of the country’s citizens led to a commission established after this time of military rule called the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons to look into the vast scope of the government’s actions to silence the general population.

What the film manages to convey better than anything else — and there are many scenes of torture and calculated moments of sudden, cold-blooded violence to demonstrate how power-hungry and callous some of the policemen were who enjoyed this civil war against the people they are meant to protect — is that shocking, government-sanctioned acts can take place in the middle of a city without anyone knowing about it.

A great deal of the film takes place underground, in a parking garage in downtown Buenos Aires, and we regularly see people (often, the same people, going about their daily life) walking lazily past the entrance to this parking garage, ignorant of the abhorrent acts being committed inside. In the same vein, there are multiple shots taken from a helicopter that might signal the constant surveillance of the citizenry, but as the sound is cut completely, all we get is a feeling of cars flowing over highways and people walking on sidewalks, unaware of the things their fellow citizens are suffering.

These scenes in the parking garage focus on Maria Fabiani, a girl whose French mother living in Buenos Aires doesn’t know where her daughter is, only that the police came to take her from their home and that she will be at Police Station 23, but she is nowhere to be found, like so many others. Over the course of the film, Maria slowly loses her mind (who wouldn’t?), but actress Antonella Costa isn’t always convincing.

However, her boyfriend Felix, played by Carlos Echevarría, is a study in how to effectively communicate conflicting emotion and convey complexity with few words. While he is her boyfriend in an on-again-off-again kind of way, he never told her that he tortures people for a living in a parking garage (luckily the torture sounds are mostly obscured by a portable radio outside the room whose volume is turned up whenever the pain is about to start), but when she shows up as a suspect he has to fulfil his duty while not alienating or hurting her. It is a delicate balance that Echevarría, in his début feature film, pulls off admirably.

The film has a nice bookend structure involving a man in whose home a bomb is planted right at the beginning of the film, though the woman with the bomb, called Ana — a friend of his daughter’s — is not given any back story nor integrated into the rest of the film, which is a real shame.

There are some nice little details, in particular the relationship (or the beginnings of a relationship) cultivated between Maria and a fellow inmate, a mechanic called Nene, as well as the hints of feelings that Maria inspired in another fellow anti-government activist Francisco, and the observation of how Felix tries to assert power over Maria, but the film is not very strong on story. 

Toward the end, the film becomes very political as the church is implicated in oppressive regime’s horrible deeds and a final title card informs us that many of these people responsible for the disappearance of thousands of innocent civilians today walk the streets freely.

Olympic Garage offers a glimpse of the hardship endured by those fighting for a better life but who were tortured and ultimately ended up dead as a result of their desire to fight, or just resist. The film is not entirely engrossing but it has many points of entry for anyone wanting to know what kinds of things went on underground during Argentina’s Dirty War.

How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate (1997)

André Crous

Ireland
4*

Director:
Graham Jones
Screenwriters:
Graham Jones
Aislinn O’Loughlin
Tadhg O’Higgins
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 77 minutes

First things first: This was the début feature of a 22-year-old, and yet neither the usual first-time desire to show off nor the flaws of not knowing how to direct actors are on show here. The film has fast pacing but slows down at very significant points to focus on effecting smooth transitions through credible though very well-written dialogue; it is also great fun.

Shot during the summer of 1996 and showing the last school year (culminating in the middle of 1997) at James Joyce College in Dublin, the film quickly assembles a group of characters who want to beat the system by cheating on the big school-leaving exam called the leaving certificate or just “leaving cert”.

The film exploits the creativity and ingenuity (and, perhaps, blind optimism) of school children to make us believe they can put their heads together and best the security of the establishment, i.e. the Department of Education. But they, and the filmmaker, present the case in almost meticulous fashion to make us believe this can be done, even by complete amateurs.

Now, as the narrator reminds us, “cheating in the exam properly isn’t easy”, and it takes the group of students, almost all of them intelligent in ways that are different to the one tested by the school-leaving exam, a full year to put together a plan that would work.

They have few real obstacles, but while there are one or two tense moments, including a classically staged but very effective sequence of cross-cutting that brings to mind the famous tennis sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, the goal of How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate is to be more like a manual than a dramatic tale.

The idea of a manual is supported by delicious, informal but very informative narration provided by Nial O’Driscoll, who sets out all the information one would need to successfully pull off the act of stealing the papers from the Department of Education’s high-security warehouse in the rural Irish town of Athlone.

The narrator also continuously reminds us of how important the exam is, and we often go back to the teachers who try to explain to their students how they should divide up their time to study for this once in a lifetime opportunity to make it big in the world and go to university. “Failure in the leaving certificate means failure for the rest of your lives!” a teacher bellows ominously in the opening scene.

The main actor in all this is Fionn (Garret Baker), a pupil whose friend Cian committed suicide when he was found cheating in his exams. Fionn is a lonely boy but he is committed to making a point by cheating and then coming out afterwards to show that his skill at staging such a heist apparently means nothing because it is not the kind of skill tested by the leaving certificate exam.

The logic is a bit flawed, but his quiet determination to prove to himself and to those around him the Department of Education is not as intelligent as they would like to think is certainly admirable and keeps the viewer glued to the screen.

The generally light-hearted approach of director Graham Jones to his material, especially in the form of the pleasure of listening to the narrator explain in great detail (at one point he even laughs at the naïveté of the characters, immediately endearing himself to us), goes a long way towards gaining our confidence that this is a film to be enjoyed fully.

And yet, with Cian’s suicide in the background and the sad face of Fionn claiming our attention in many scenes, it is also clear that this entertaining film is tinged with sadness that adds unexpected depth to the characters.

It is a great joy to watch this film, which shares the same kind of wit as The History Boys but is far more straightforward in its intentions and its emotions, perhaps unfortunately eschewing the complexity of the latter. The title tells us that everything will be fine, and the moments of dramatic tension because of the uncertainty about what is going to happen are very rare. The writing is superior to the film itself, although there is the odd well-chosen visual flourish, and it would have been good to see Graham Jones contribute to more screenplays, which unfortunately has not really been the case since the release of this film.

From Beginning to End (2009)

André Crous

 Brazil
4*

Director:
Aluizio Abranches
Screenwriter:
Aluizio Abranches
Director of Photography:
Ueli Steiger

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: Do Começo ao Fim

From Beginning to End is a brave film from Brazil that handles not only the issue of incest, but of same-sex incest, with unbelievable grace and beauty, and were it not for some awkward moments of acting and an overuse of its poetic approach, this could have been a truly breathtaking film.

At times, the events as presented are depicted with such love and tenderness it is difficult not to be moved to tears, despite any misgivings one might have about the makeup of the relationship at the core.

The film, narrated by an adult Thomás, tells of the first few weeks after his birth, during which he didn’t open his eyes until he felt ready. That moment when he decides it is time coincides with a visit by his slightly older half-brother, Francisco, to the hospital, and when Thomás opens his eyes, he looks straight at Francisco.

Six years later, the young boys show a remarkable bond. Although they are stepbrothers and live in Rio de Janeiro with their radiant mother and the younger Thomás’s youthful father, Alexandre, everyone gets along very well, and there is great friendliness between these two parents and Francisco’s father, Pedro, who lives in Buenos Aires.

Luckily for them, such an open and friendly environment does not reject or question their intimate relationship, despite the parents’ suspicions that their sons’ behaviour is not something they are used to seeing. But it has to be said that this behaviour is heartrendingly beautiful.

Francisco takes on the role not only of older brother but of caretaker to his brother, whom he showers with love and attention. As Thomás admits on the voice-over, his brother always made sure he was happy, as we can see in a scene where Francisco receives a present and then asks his father whether he brought Thomás a present as well.

We never see the two of them fight and they seem to share not only a bond but a heart and a soul. There is a scene where the 11-year-old Francisco falls asleep on his bed holding the 6-year-old Thomás in his arms that has more emotional resonance than most films about love and intimacy.

The film’s opening shots are long, unedited tracking shots and Aluizio Abranches should be highly commended for his direction of the two boys’ movements in these scenes, as they run through the house playing, being followed by the Steadicam. It’s an approach that is also very effectively repeated during a trip to Buenos Aires during adulthood.

While it is no surprise that the relationship between the two brothers turns physical when they become young men, this physical attraction isn’t always presented on-screen with the same careful approach as during the earlier scenes, and we get some awkward images that resemble soft-core porn and a transition from childhood to adulthood that is anything but smooth. However, this awkwardness is redeemed by numerous moments of endearing delicacy that join Thomás and Francisco over time, and we realise that there lies beauty in a relationship not born out of sex but born out love built up over a lifetime of shared memories.

When two partners are the same age and engage in acts that are pure and consensual, anyone with the faintest of libertarian streaks would agree that there is nothing wrong with them continuing their committed relationship with each other. Incest too often calls up the abhorrent crudeness of young girls and boys raped by their own father, which is something light years removed from the feelings of mutual love, respect and responsibility made evident in From Beginning to End.

Abranches acknowledges that his characters live in a kind of bubble, removed from the rest of the world, by having them mostly interact with each other whenever they are not speaking to their parents, and we start to wonder whether they have any other friends. In a particularly striking scene, when the bubble is about to break, they sit on a rocky wall high up on a hilltop with the Carioca coastline behind them, but it seems like the world behind them is cold, completely blue, filtered off from the contours of their immediate setting.

It is unheard of for a film of this nature to deal with its problematic central issue in this way, and while it steers clear of confronting some of the larger problems this relationship is likely to generate if more people became aware of it, its decision to immerse the viewer in a world of acceptance and understanding is understandable as it succeeds in communicating the strength of the feelings at play and the depth of emotion these characters share.

Ausente (2011)

André Crous

Argentina
3*

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

Running time: 87 minutes

It’s appropriate that a film about a swimming teacher at a high school and one of his students should dive right into the action. Right at the start, 16-year-old Martin Blanco (Javier De Pietro) complains to his teacher of having something in his eye. They go to the emergency room together, but nothing is found. When they return, Martin realises his bag and cell phone are still with his friend, at whose house he was going to spend the night. After going back and forth between many places, it seems there is no other way but for the boy to spend the night at the teacher’s flat. Nothing happens between the two of them, but there is a lot of tension.

The problem is that the tension is mostly from the side of the viewer, and the soundtrack also does its part to convey to us the fact that something ominous is hiding in the shadows. However, neither the teacher, Sebastián Armas (Carlos Echevarría), nor Martin shows any kind of anxiety, despite the admittedly awkward situation of a student spending the night at his teacher’s flat. They don’t really speak to each other, and before long, Martin passes out on the couch.

One of the first scenes shows Martin looking at fellow teammates. He is a bit of a starer – you know the type: says he is straight, but all too often he is caught blatantly staring at another guy – but the problem with the film is that he is too ill-defined: He is neither aggressively pursuing the teacher, nor is he awkward because of some sexual insecurity. Given the fact we dive right in, there is no initial setup, which means Martin is not given much context. Neither is Sebastián, really, but that matters less because the presence of Echevarría makes up for it. In fact, Echevarría’s face, almost entirely expressionless, works extremely well in the way of a Bressonian model, as we project our fears onto him.

There is great potential for Martin’s character to involve us. This is a high-school boy – obviously not openly homosexual – who either has a crush on his teacher or is on a power trip to explore what might happen, but we don’t know how confident he is, or even what his own agenda is. He seems self-assured (though quite naïve when it comes to a certain girl’s interest in him), but when he apologises for his behaviour, can he be trusted? Perhaps director Marco Berger (who made another poignant drama about two straight men slowly discovering their interest in each other, Plan B) wanted to keep us in the dark, but then why isn’t more of the film shot from the teacher’s point of view? The constant shifting of perspective from one character to the other only gives the illusion of balance, while it clearly isn’t interested in illuminating us.

Sebastián is dating a very annoying woman, Mariana, who wants to spend time with him but doesn’t want them to discuss any of their problems. In one scene where we think there might be a way for Sebastián to open up and share some of his fears, she quickly tells him to shoosh and him not standing up to her not only makes the drama more tense (a good thing) but also makes him a character with fewer options for action and self-actualisation (a bad thing).

Some more details on Martin’s life at home (we don’t see his parents, except for his mother once in a hallway from the waist down) would have helped us get inside his head, as this side of his life – at least, if he is to be believed – played an important role in his spending the night at his teacher’s place. We see a James Dean poster on his wall, and the already mentioned peek at his swimming mates in one of the film’s opening scenes immediately positions him as closeted or questioning, but there is little else to develop this impression.

Berger is more of a storyteller than a flamboyant director, but one scene at the heart of the film is staged particularly impressively. It has to do with Sebastián’s recognition of Martin’s perhaps not entirely truthful behaviour, as he listens to one side while some of his colleagues discuss the revelation that Martin’s parents arrived at school looking for him the day after the night before. The scene is shot in a single take, now focusing on the teacher telling the story, then focusing on Sebastián who tries not to look too interested in the story, though it concerns him directly. It is a wonderful shot, timed just right without ever seeming contrived or stylised. On the other hand, the film suffers, especially at the beginning, of a soundtrack that is overly dramatic and overpowers the events it seeks to portray as suspenseful.

What we end up with is a film with good intentions, very cleverly devised (especially with Carlos Echevarría in the lead) and boasting a very unexpected but wonderfully touching conclusion. However, Berger could have delved deeper into the characters, in particular the character of Martin, to shape and inform our perspective of events. In a bit of commentary by the filmmaker, perhaps, we see Sebastián reading Kundera’s Laughable Loves, and that title might have served the film itself equally well. It wants to be a psychological thriller but ends up being a film you have a crush on for a few days before you move on to something more substantial.

The Adopted Son (1998)

André Crous

Kyrgyzstan
3.5*

Director:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Screenwriters:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Avtandil Adikulov
Marat Sarulu
Director of Photography:
Khassan Kydyraliev

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: Бешкемпир
Transliterated title: Beshkempir

The films of the countries that used to form a part of the Soviet Union are not very well-known, primarily because there are so few of them and the nascent film industries in those countries in general have neither the money nor the experience to make films that can be marketed to a larger audience outside the country. From time to time, filmmakers from elsewhere come to take advantage of these foreign lands and the vistas that viewers around the world might never have seen on film before and thereby produce small but interesting films, for example, the French production Moi Ivan, Toi Abraham, made in 1993 in Belarus; Tengri, made in Kazakhstan by a French production team that used Kyrgyz actors; or notable films out of Tajikistan thanks to director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov in the 1990s, before he started making films in Russia.

Kyrgyz director Aktan Abdykalykov, who also goes by the name of Aktan Arym Kubat, is a Kyrgyzstan native who worked as a production designer on some of the films made by the former Soviet Union’s local Kirgizfilm, the films almost always — with a few rare exceptions, mostly in the 1980s — in Russian. The country’s independence at the end of 1991 also heralded the coming of the Kyrgyz-language film industry. The films of Abdykalykov (and more recently, of Ernest Abdyjaparov and the young Nurbek Egen, as well) have been some of the lone cinematic voices in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Like all the other films made in the country since the fall of the Iron Curtain, The Adopted Son is set in rural Kyrgyzstan. The film stars the director’s son, Mirlan, in the role of the young teenage boy Beshkempir, whose life is about to “go berserk”, as his grandmother puts is. But this is not his grandmother: The opening scene, 12 years earlier, shown to us in warm colours, already established that he was adopted at birth, and this fact is about to turn his life upside down.

Cut to the present in black and white, when Beshkempir’s hair is cut and the sound of clippers is suddenly replaced by garden scissors cutting a small branch from a tree. Things obviously do not look good for the boy’s future, and the rest of the film is in black and white, with the exception of some slightly more optimistic shots (rather than scenes) briefly presented to us in colour, almost all of them unfortunately disconnected from the storyline, bringing atmosphere rather than substance.

The other children play with him and he is not socially isolated, but at this age, children have started to show their true colours, and we can see them whispering in each other’s ears, clearly spreading a story about him: the story about his origins that, soon enough, he will discover for himself.

The other strong thread in the film has to do with the sexual coming-of-age of the boys, and as Beshkempir sees another boy, who already has a job as a projectionist at the open-air cinema where they screen Indian musicals from the 1960s, picking up a girl on his bicycle, and he wants to eventually do the same with the girl he has his eye on, Aynura.

But in the meantime, he is frustrated, as first a woman the boys make out of dirt, for them to have their way with, is trampled by a heard of bulls, and then when he lies in bed one morning and his hand slips down to his grown, a bird flies into the room (a hoopoe, whose sound permeates the soundtrack of the film).

Beshkempir tries very hard to be poetic, and while there are numerous important incidents that should energise the narrative, they are all presented as fragments with little or no transition between them, and furthermore the addition of colour, often completely unexpectedly, draws more attention to itself than is required for this particular film. So does the racking of focus from Beshkempir and his father, a bitter man whom we don’t get to know or understand, to water dropping from a makeshift tap in the foreground during an altercation.

The dialogue is post-synchronised, but even so, one of the central scenes, in which Beshkempir is most seriously stabbed in the back by one of his best friends, features a boy whose words are, even in Kyrgyz, delivered very poorly, which makes our empathy with Beshkempir and our interest in the events more difficult.

While the film shows some technical creativity, the narrative is more opaque than necessary, as it leaves many questions unanswered and sometimes even unasked, though the viewer needs more information to know who these people are (most of the characters are never introduced by name) and why they are behaving the way they do. However, despite its shortcomings, Beshkempir is a more-than-adequate contribution to world cinema.

Noy (2010)

André Crous

The Philippines
2*

Directors:
Dondon Santos
Coco Martin
Screenwriter:
Shugo Praico
Director of Photography:
Tim Jimenez

Running time: 105 minutes

Noy sounds like an interesting film, made under circumstances that are tough, and in some ways, it might even bring back memories of Medium Cool, that Haskell Wexler film of which some parts were staged during the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This Filipino film was shot during the 2010 presidential campaign, with Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino at the centre of all the attention, and he even generously (and politically, this was a clever call, bringing to mind the work done by Robert Drew on Primary) participated in the production, always available for questions and answers with the average Filipino.

All of that sounds like a good idea in theory. But the film is filled to the hilt with a directionless narrative that only moves when the worst possible situations are thrust onto the characters, done in the worst possible way. Noy even contains a wholly gratuitous sex scene, shot in a way that may easily be shown to a toddler, so devoid it is of any kind of sexual energy, and after all, the use of slow motion and soft focus has never enhanced these kinds of scenes; on the contrary, it only makes them look more toned down.

The young Manolo “Noy” Agapito wants to improve his life. He lives with his mother, younger sister and cripple older brother in a Manileño house on the water that can only be reached by raft. I hadn’t known about these kinds of living conditions in Filipino society, and this window onto the daily lives of the country’s inhabitants was very informative.

Noy has faked going to university, but his friends have managed to put together a fake demo CD of his supposed work and a certificate to match. In this way, he joined a television network and is immediately put in charge of directing a documentary on presidential candidate Noynoy, whose name he nearly shares. If this quick climb up the ladder surprises you, wait until you hear what’s coming next.

Noy starts filming and the footage is obviously junk. He doesn’t ask questions, or he asks questions irrelevant to the campaign, but somehow his editor and producer have faith that he will find his voice. The scenes with the editor Caloy, played by Baron Geisler, are some of the more interesting ones, but every time we see footage of the campaign events edited together at a pace of sometimes two or three shots per second, everything feels rushed, disconnected and chaotic. It doesn’t help the film that the opening credits sequence consists of this material, as it immediately reveals the film as an amateur project. Actor Coco Martin, who stars as the lead character Noy, was in charge of this documentary unit of the film but should have remained in front of the camera, where he looks good and acts equally well.

There are many moments in the film that seem fake, in particular an ending that doesn’t just push the characters into the worst possible circumstances, a bit like an Alejandro González Iñárritu film, but pushes the knife in firmly (in slow motion, again, and with constant cuts back and forth between an action and a reaction shot) before suddenly wrapping up the film in almost utopian fashion. This paradise at the end cannot be interpreted as anything other than the work of that politician who is followed throughout and who ended up winning the presidency: “Noy” Aquino.

Though Aquino clearly has the common touch, easily conversing with people wherever he goes and easily generating excitement, he is shown in a positive light from beginning to end. One single remark about the Aquino family’s responsibility for the deaths of workers on their Hacienda Luisita sugar plantation in 2004 is not pursued and this moment stands alone amid the sunshine presentation of the candidate, whose opponents are never even mentioned. Were it not for a few posters here and there, we could be forgiven for thinking he is running for the presidency unopposed.

As is often the case in foreign-language films, the casting of the English-language actors falls short, and here too an American who is on the prowl for Filipino prostitutes and mistakes Noy’s mother for one (though Noy himself doesn’t mind the misunderstanding — a rather shocking detail that is all but ignored by the screenwriter), is absolutely terrible in his representation of this shady figure. The actor simply doesn’t deliver his lines in a way that is credible by any stretch of the imagination.

While serving as pro-Aquino propaganda, without a doubt, Noy doesn’t link the poverty and the struggles of the lower class with the campaign and fails to deliver a coherent film that would illuminate the future of the nation — something one would obviously expect from this kind of film.

Its use of documentary footage, the involvement of Aquino and the acting talent of Coco Martin notwithstanding, this film’s amateurish use of material, its ghastly editing and its lack of a clear direction all make this a great disappointment. Considering how far the Aquino family has come and what its significance in the country is, it is sad to see how little insight the film offers into the life or ambitions of the man, and his link with the title character is tenuous at best.