Countries

Hunger (2008)

André Crous

UK
5*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriters: 
Enda Welsh
Steve McQueen
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 90 minutes

There is greatness behind every shot in Steve McQueen’s Hunger. This film marks the début of a remarkable talent that does not come round very often and demonstrates what is still possible within the realm of so-called alternative cinema. All the conventional tricks have been avoided, and they have been replaced by new approaches to representation and produced a work that is poetic yet immediate, at times subjective yet never silly, has gritty realism yet shines with an amazingly distinct visual style and is never drab. And despite its minimal use of the spoken word, it rolls along fluidly.

At the end of 1980, after more than four years of a “blanket protest”, during which prisoners refused to don the prison uniforms, since they considered themselves a different kind of prisoner (i.e. a political prisoner), and a “no-wash protest”, which is self-explanatory, an Irish republican named Bobby Sands decided to go on hunger strike in protest against the British government.

Bobby Sands is played here by Michael Fassbender, and his performance strips him down to the bone, both physically and emotionally. The word that jumps to mind is “visceral”, and it covers much of the film, which contains many scenes of prisoners being beaten with many different kinds of weapons – hands and handheld.

In the film’s first 15 minutes, barely a word is spoken, as we follow a prison guard, whose knuckles always seem to be raw, from his home where he looks under his car before puling out of the driveway every morning to the prison where he works. A new boy has just been admitted, and immediately upon arrival, he sides with the rest of the prisoners at the prison (it is Maze prison, which used to be located just south-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland) in refusing to wear the prison uniform. He is taken to his cell, where the walls are covered in faeces and food.

In one scene, urine streams down a corridor, cascading from mashed potato embankments inside the cells. In another, maggots crawl next to a sleeping inmate inside his cell. To this scene, shot with from a stationary viewpoint, McQueen brings the same beauty as when the prison guard smokes outside in the snow and a close-up of his hands (often repeated throughout the film) shows a snowflake melting on his reddened knuckles.

McQueen fully engages both image and sound, and he stages his action in a way that pushes his film towards a kind of transcendentalism. In another scene, the prisoners are subjected to a cavity search. Scores of guards, in riot gear, line a corridor while a naked prisoner faces the onslaught of batons, fists and feet, until he reaches a central area and is rectally searched in the most violent manner possible. The camera swerves to mirror the energy of the moment, and yet the effect is not confusion but rather inspirational empathy with the prisoners. Then, towards the end of the scene, we realise, with great surprise, that one of the prison guards has been reduced to tears and is standing behind a wall, sobbing.

This brief moment, perhaps more than the technical and visual dexterity of the director, shows his compassion for the whole spectrum of characters in his film and made me think of those few seconds, at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, when the vicious monster that was unleashed on Luke is destroyed and this monster’s keeper is similarly heartbroken. So few film makers realise that it is always more interesting to have characters do the unexpected than the expected actions of their narrative peers.

But it is the film’s much-commented scene at its midpoint, an unbroken take 16½ minutes in length featuring Sands and a priest, that pushes it into the upper echelons of film making and underscores the genius of the filmmaker. Though very different in tone from the aforementioned scene of the full cavity search and some truly violent interactions between the prisoners and their guards, our attention is kept rapt thanks to both the performances and the courage of McQueen, which deliver a breathtaking moment of stasis at the centre of physical chaos.

Even as the film turns towards a more spiritual perspective, while Sands is suffering from the physical effects of being on a hunger strike, the film elegantly switches between direct point of view and oblique point of view, which affects the camera’s movement while still regarding him from the outside. The addition of superimposed birds swarming over his face while the camera hovers menacingly over his hospital bed is no simple-minded Gus van Sant-inspired gimmick but a perfectly distilled, truly magnificent expression of a state of mind.

One minor flaw is the introduction of Bobby Sands’s character – he simply appears, as if from nowhere, to take centre stage. The characters we meet in the faeces-covered cell give a human perspective to the material, and when they are replaced by Bobby’s plot thread, the connection to the story is retained despite the lack of a back story for Sands. So, while McQueen handles this transition very well, the balancing act does not completely make up for the fact that an important part of the story is missing. Perhaps McQueen assumed we would forgive him this oversight since Sands has some messianic status, an argument underlined by a moment in which he is carried, Pieta-like (or Marat-like?), from a bathtub back to his bed.

The Best Man (1964)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director:
Franklin J. Schaffner
Screenwriter:
Gore Vidal
Director of Photography:
Haskell Wexler

Running time: 95 minutes

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, which dates back nearly half a century, is as relevant to our understanding of the American political system as ever. As of this writing, the 2012 GOP candidates have not been narrowed down to a single front-runner yet; since many have speculated about the likelihood of a brokered convention, I thought a film that deals with this term might be rather apropos.

What is a brokered convention?

A convention is the party in the big tent with all the delegates (and, if it is the Democratic Party today, all the superdelegates as well), usually held in August or September in a big ol’ sports arena or convention centre, where the candidate who has survived six months of primaries and caucuses formally accepts his party’s nomination as candidate for the presidency and the election in November.

A brokered convention occurs when no such candidate has obtained a majority of the votes and has to undergo the added stress of being put on a ballot during the convention and surviving round after round, with candidates dropping out one by one, until one candidate remains. The delegates of candidates that drop out have to realign themselves with the remaining candidates; thus, a lot of dealing inside back rooms goes on in the process.

In The Best Man, there are two clear front-runners for the presidency: A former Secretary of State, William Russell is a careful politician who seems to overthink every problem before making a wholly informed decision and therefore is perceived to be passive, even weak. Think Obama without the charisma. The other candidate is Joe Cantwell, an anti-communist anti-mafia, religious activist whose rhetoric is enough to hordes of screaming fans who mistake fundamentalist zeal for patriotism.

In the film’s first minutes, we learn that the former president, still a major force in this political party, which is never named and whose platform is never stated, is about to endorse either Russell or Cantwell, and obviously both candidates are courting his approval.

It is also made quite clear that Russell has been a very unfaithful husband, though his wife is prepared to become first lady and therefore go along with Russell’s bid for the White House for the time being. Cantwell has also discovered some unsavoury records of Russell’s mental state (think Thomas Eagleton), which he is ready to release if it would be politically expedient.

Despite Russell’s philandering, his questionable mental stability and his atheism (oh, yes, a big negative for a presidential candidate in the 1960s and arguably even worse today), he is a likeable character who seems to want to lift the country up, not just himself. It certainly helps that the character is played by Henry Fonda.

Eagleton, Clinton, Obama and the 2012 Republican candidates for the presidency are just some of the real-life political figures I had in mind while I was watching the film. The succession of 36 faces during the opening credits, from Washington to Johnson, all leading up to a full-screen shot of the White House, always impresses the historical scale of the office on the viewer, and in this case we are reminded again there are no perfect candidates: only candidates who will be more preferable or less embarrassing holders of the office.

The film’s background is peppered with catchy slogans (“Hustle with Russell”, “MerWIN to WIN”) and the action is set over a very short period of time: less than 48 hours. The characters and the party they belong to are vague, but being politicians this quality makes them specific enough to be entirely credible and representative of all kinds of recognizable political personas.

With a screenplay written by Gore Vidal, based on his play, this film has an ear for great dialogue and a very vivid sense of reality. One excellent moment among many others belongs to the former president, Art Hockstader, who, upon learning of Cantwell’s devious plans, gives him a look full of hate and proclaims: “It’s not that I object to you being a bastard… It’s your being such a stupid bastard that I object to!”

This film is better than the other well-known political films from the early sixties, such as The Manchurian Candidate or Seven Days in May, because it comes to the point very quickly, is filled with people and events that we recognize, even today, and the story contains a big conundrum that the characters need to resolve before a satisfactory conclusion can be reached — and this is exactly what the film pulls off, with significant consequences. There are few scenes between the candidates and their wives, but what we see is to the point and reveals a great deal about the domestic politics of the presidency.

The mudslinging and the possibility that a ludicrous attack just might stick also hit close to home, as the recent (2012) GOP primaries have shown. In one comment, a character mentions that once, in the South, “a candidate […] got elected for claiming his opponent’s wife was a thespian.” This comes on the heels of a discussion about the alleged homosexuality of one of the candidates for the presidency, and Vidal’s use of this theme shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — it is handled well, discreetly, but the scenes with a, erm, whistleblower, a guy called Sheldon Bascomb, are excruciatingly uncomfortable and make the film drag at the only point during its 95-minute running time.

Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson are both excellent in the main roles, but it is charming former president played by Lee Tracy who really makes an impression as someone who is playing the system with a good political head, even as he loses faith in the system because he knows what corruption is possible (and permissible). Fonda’s character has some of the same insights, though he is slow to react and it is very sensible on the part of Vidal to make us wonder whether we should support him despite our misgivings — a timeless question.

The War Room (1993)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors:
Chris Hegedus
D.A. Pennebaker
Directors of Photography:
Nick Doob
D.A. Pennebaker
Kevin Rafferty

Running time: 96 minutes

D.A. Pennebaker knows how to pick the right candidate – a political candidate who is not the favourite to win but who brings with him a sense that things are about to change big time.  He became the father of political American “Direct Cinema” in 1960 when he filmed John F. Kennedy’s campaign in New Hampshire, which ended in a win, propelling him forward and enabled him to capture the nomination of the Democratic Party. The film was called Primary and it changed the face of the documentary film.

The War Room starts in New Hampshire in January 1992, where William J. Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, is preparing to win the state, but he loses to Paul Tsongas from neighbouring Massachusetts. It is curious to see all of the names of the candidates who participated in this primary back on screen. I was too young at the time to be caught up in the minutiae of the process, but it is wonderful, as we approach another election cycle, to look back at this field and their obstacles and be reminded of the repetition that is nonetheless always exciting because the participants bring new baggage every time.

The film opens with the accusations made by Jennifer Flowers against Governor Clinton, complete with the tape recordings to prove it; she alleged that Clinton had had an affair with her reaching back many years. Of course, we now know today that she should not have been ignored as quickly as she was, and it does appear rather odd that his own campaign never questions their own candidate, but I guess that is normal for presidential candidates’ campaign staff. It is made obvious, and his senior adviser James Carville acknowledges as much, that everybody thinks Bill Clinton is the perfect candidate, the only one they would spend their time and their energy on to promote, and they believe in him so completely that they prefer not to get involved in any negativity about him.

Perhaps he never would have been elected if they had questioned him, and the country would have been worse off as a result.

Besides Carville, who is the main attack dog and chief strategist for the campaign, there is the young George Stephanopoulos, his communications director, who would later act briefly as Clinton’s press secretary in the White House. These two guys have total confidence in Clinton’s abilities and inspire us with their attitude of getting the message out that (George H.W.) Bush has been a failure as a president, despite his skills as a politician.

The film follows the campaign from New Hampshire through the primary process to the eventual nomination at the Democratic Convention and ultimately ending on November 3 with the general election. A lot of material has to be squeezed into this film and obviously, when the film was released in 1993, many things could be left unsaid. Today, that is a problem because we are left with questions that go unanswered and expectations that are often unfulfilled. We don’t know what the pay-off was, because we are looking at a kind of shorthand that is difficult to decipher after nearly twenty years have passed.

For example, while much is made of the upcoming appearance of his Democratic competitor Jerry Brown at the convention (he was going to make like Ted Kennedy in 1980 and ruffle feathers because he had not collected the most delegates), we never see his speech. We also learn that Perot withdraws from the race only to re-enter a few weeks later, without much fanfare either in the media or in Clinton’s campaign headquarters. Bush is like a barking dog in the background: we are aware of him but we don’t see him all that much. We know he seems hesitant to debate Clinton (citing issues with the format of the debate), but there too the film puts very little information on the screen.

The most important thing to remember while we watch this film is that it is about the “war room”, in other words, it is about Carville and Stephanopoulos and their tactics, and not really about Bill Clinton. It is fascinating to watch Carville come up with a political barnburner on the spot, the product of his passion for the moment, his enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy and his political savvy.

The camera’s mobility is a great advantage for putting us in the “present” with the events – in particular, when we run through the corridors backstage with George Stephanopoulos after the presidential debate, when he has to make his way to the media gaggle as soon as possible to comment on the evening’s proceedings.

For anyone who follows politics, it is also nice to see much younger faces of those who are still ubiquitous on television. People like Paul Begala and John King.

Finally, on the election night, the film comes to an end. And while we all know how the story ends, it is the team behind the scenes that make this a story to really appreciate. The emotion of team Carville-Stephanopoulos at the last war room meeting is beautiful and pure and the film should be studied by every political campaign against an incumbent. For the rest of us, it offers a moment of reflection. Are all these fights important? Would it have made a difference? And how is it possible that Roger Ailes still peddles so much influence?

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

André Crous

France
5*

Director:
Georges Méliès
Screenwriters:
Georges Méliès
Gaston Méliès
Directors of Photography:
Michaut
Lucien Tainguy

Running time: 11 minutes (at 20fps)

Original title: Le Voyage dans la lune

Méliès was the magician of early cinema. He didn’t only lift the seventh art form to new heights by using it to depict fantastical stories, but in the process, he evoked a sense of wonder in his audience that would colour and enrich many different kinds of films and inspire most of the filmmakers that came after him. He was the first who dared detach the medium of film from its realistic basis – the Lumière brothers had filmed real trains arriving, real human beings leaving a real factory, and real water spewing from a real garden hose to water real flowers. But Méliès had other plans. He had stars in his eyes and his desire to make the impossible visible, even with very rudimentary means, led to this masterpiece called A Trip to the Moon.

Jules Verne, if not an inspiration for the film, was certainly an influence, or at least a kindred spirit. The film opens in a grand hall where astronomers with big pointy hats have gathered to listen to their astronomer-in-chief, Barbenfouillis, who gesticulates very animatedly and makes a drawing on the blackboard indicating his intention to send a spaceship (though it rather resembles a missile) to the moon. Five astronomers are chosen to accompany him on this mission: Nostradamus, Alcofribas, Omega, Micromégas and Parafaragaramus (yes, the spelling is correct).

The names of theses characters have both real and fictional origins, and the combination is quite appropriate to the kind of film that Méliès was producing. Nostradamus, of course, is the renowned 16th-century clairvoyant. Alcofribas is the name used by the novelist Rabelais, whose works incorporated the grotesque and is best known for his novel about two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Micromégas was the title of, and the name of the main character in, a short story by Voltaire. Said Micromégas was an alien visitor who lands on the earth and observes the strange customs of humans. Besides the Greek root of Omega (the word refers to the last letter of the Greek alphabet), I know nothing about it, nor does Parafaragaramus mean anything to me, though it conjures up images of characters in the world of Goscinny & Uderzo’s “Asterix & Obelix”.

After surviving a fall into a bucket of nitric acid, Micromégas joins the other astronomers aboard the spaceship, which is shot from a cannon into space. The décor throughout is theatrical but never expressionist, and though many of the sets are clearly painted pieces of cardboard, the effect of having these characters move over the painted roofs into a spaceship gains a lot of its energy from the adventure inherent in the imminent exploration of outer space.

Exactly halfway through the film, the spaceship hits the moon, in one of the most famous shots of silent cinema. It is a moving human face, and this man-moon fits perfectly with the slightly strange atmosphere of the film that is about to become even more peculiar. Once the astronomers land on the moon, and their presence is seen as an intrusion, they are punished by Phoebus, who covers them with snow. They hide in a crater, filled with lunar flora, where a planted umbrella takes root and grows to become a giant mushroom. The surreal image is wonderful to behold because of the continuous growth of the “plant”, its movement, inside the frame without any cuts.

With this film, Méliès, the first master of cinematic magic, showed how to dazzle an audience, and he deserves all the recognition of being the first dreamer of the cinema and for engaging our fantasies in a way that demonstrated the far-reaching possibilities of filmmaking.

Quartet for the End of Time (1983)

André Crous

Mexico
2*

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriter:
Alfonso Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Ariel Velázquez

Running time: 27 minutes

Original title: Cuarteto para el Fin del Tiempo

Alfonso Cuarón handles comedy much better than drama but, as he would show with many of his greatest achievements, he is in total control when he has free reign to do both. Unfortunately, his student film, Quartet for the End of Time, about a guy who lives alone in an apartment and never speaks to anyone, provides no entertainment and left me as bored as the tortoise that serves as the only thing the main character speaks to.

“Quartet for the End of Time” is the title of a famous composition by the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen, and indeed the main character plays a few chords from the piece’s third movement, “Abyss of the Birds”, on his clarinet. According to Messiaen: “The Abyss is Time, with all its sadness, its weariness. Birds are the opposite of time; it’s our desire for light, stars, rainbows and jubilant vocals.” Such sadness and weariness are certainly well conveyed by this particular short film, but beyond an expression of such dismal tedium, there is little else of note.

The cinematography is also a let-down. Besides the very few tracking shots, all of which reveal some bit of information, the staging is quite simple and the visuals simply lack imagination.

The very first scene shows some promise: lying in the bathtub, while a very small pet tortoise, hidden in its shell, balances on the edge, the main character reads out loud about tortoises. The protection that the shell offers to the little animal is not an uninteresting point, and its potential for meaning is hinted at by the subsequent dedication in the opening credits: Mariana and her belly. At the time, director Alfonso Cuarón (here billed as Alfonso Cuarón Orozco) was married to Mariana Elizondo, whose belly, we can surmise, was the protective shell to their child, Jonás, born in 1981. But the film does nothing to develop this idea in any shape or form.

Instead, we get a loose assortment of scenes, mostly taking place inside the apartment. Fortunately, with one or two exceptions, we are spared the prospect of listening to explanatory interior monologues, but watching the main character sit at his window (with a sticker for the “Paiste 2002” brand of cymbals) is far from exciting, nor does it substantially contribute to our impression of him as someone completely isolated – what the reasons for this isolations are, however, remain a mystery.

The apartment is clearly his shell, the space in which he feels comfortable and protected, and when he does leave the apartment – even though some of these excursions seem to be illusory – we can breathe a momentary sigh of relief. When a film takes place in one setting, our attention needs to be focused, as the Cuarón-produced Duck Season so admirably managed to accomplish.

At the time he made the film, Cuarón had little filmmaking experience and this lack of understanding the form shows very well in his failure to properly direct his main actor (we get a comically amateurish scene in which this character fries a sausage in ten seconds) and the sound effects are completely atrocious. I could easily have ignored these points, were it not for the film’s unwillingness to provide some kind of plot. Granted, we see some transformation from beginning to end, but the reasons for this transformation are never even suggested. A mass of balloons that the character releases from his window might have something to do with it, but such symbolism obscures the plot even more.

It would take Cuarón eight years, and some experience in the field of television, before he undertook another film project, the delightful Love in the Time of Hysteria, and he needed that time to mature, for this student film is an uninteresting, tiresome disgrace that doesn’t even look good.

Z (1969)

André Crous

France
4.5*

Director: 
Costa-Gavras
Screenwriters:
Jorge Semprún
Costa-Gavras
Director of Photography: 
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 127 minutes

It might be dialogue-heavy and overtly ideological in its unashamedly anti-establishment approach to historical events, but director Costa-Gavras’s Z is passionate, personal, and pushes the envelope the way very few films dare to. Based on events in the director’s native Greece  in the early 1960s, where freedom of expression was threatened, and democracy ultimately supplanted by dictatorship, the film is a direct depiction of the assassination of a Greek political figure in 1963 and the subsequent investigation that shook the government. The title, which stands for “ZEI”, meaning “He lives”, refers to the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, who was assassinated under circumstances almost identical to those shown in this film.

The opening credits make clear that the film is not in the business of subtle allegories: “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons dead or alive, is no coincidence — it is deliberate.” One doesn’t have to dig very deep to notice the parallels between the historic events in Greece in 1963 and the blood-curdling hunger for control and suppression of a pacifist opposition that Costa-Gavras puts up on the screen.

Yves Montand appears as the anonymous “Doctor”, probably a reference to Lambrakis’s profession as a physician, a calm but determined man who is set to deliver a major speech against the bomb – he obviously has some influence in the public sphere, because the government puts every possible obstacle in his way to ensure that the venue for his speech can accommodate as few people as possible. He has a small group of very loyal supporters around him, including Manuel (Charles Denner) and Georges (Jean Bouise).

Though the film is set in an unnamed city where all the characters speak French, the Greek music on the soundtrack, by left-wing exile Mikis Theodorakis, leaves no doubt about the film’s real-world underpinnings. Costa-Gavras also cast the famous Irene Papas as the Doctor’s wife – a casting decision that has theoretical soundness but since she is barely given any dialogue, her performance becomes a bit schmaltzy and seems out of place given the aggressive nature of the story.

The two characters at the centre of physical violence in the film are named Vago and Yago, and the former is portrayed as a real creepy fellow with suggestions of homosexual paedophilia. At the same time, the police force is not only heavily anti-communist (though they have no objection to anybody attending the Bolshoï ballet), but anti-semite and anti-Chinese. The man at the top is the Chief of Police (Pierre Dux), whose disgust for the peaceful opposition protesters is equalled by the violence with which he attempts to suppress them. Comparing their “ideological illness” to mildew, he states in the opening scene that the “treatment of men with appropriate solutions is indispensable”, and thereby pre-emptively washes his hands of all wrongdoing.

The person tasked with establishing the truth is the inquest judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who learns both sides of the story and needs to weigh his own sense of justice against the possibility of prosecuting persons at the highest levels of government. Working separately but with the same goal of finding the truth is the photojournalist played by a very youthful Jacques Perrin (here he reminded me of Diego Luna).

This highly ideological film is certainly much more willing to take sides than a film such as Oliver Stone’s JFK (about another assassination in 1963), and yet it easily ropes us into the political malevolence and sinister conspiracy taking place in a foreign country. Director of Photography Raoul Coutard, known for his work with a filmmaker who would like to see himself as politically savvy yet producing films of cerebral rather than entertainment value, Jean-Luc Godard, records the events with a sense of intimacy that produces images both informative and deliciously suggestive. Two significant examples are the arrival of Papas at the hospital, when past and present alternate in fragments (the result of a certain kind of jump cuts called “faux raccords”), making her own confusion very visible and teasing us with moments from her life with Montand, and the final sequence of close-ups on uniform medals and ribbons that build to a very satisfying conclusion.

It is refreshing to see a director who goes big, both ideologically and cinematically, and Costa-Gavras succeeds in capturing our attention on both counts. Z is a spectacular film that provides a window on events in Europe in the 1960s (don’t forget that the film was made around the time the student riots shook Paris in May 1968) and reminds us, as did Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, that authoritarian regimes find imagination suspect, for it signals a lack of control on their part.

North (2008)

André Crous

Norway
4*

Director:
Rune Denstad Langlo
Screenwriter:
Erlend Loe
Director of Photography:
Philip Øgaard

Running time: 78 minutes

Original title: Nord

Jomar Henriksen is feeling blue, but he has decided to strike while the iron is hot – the iron being the gas stove in the little wooden structure, somewhere close to Trondheim, that functions as living quarters for this 30-year old who has been depressed since his wife and young son abandoned him following an accident he had on the slopes. He has panic attacks, spends most days lying in bed, popping pills and drinking spirits (often at the same time), and watching the National Geographic Channel on television, which is currently focused on tunnel disasters.

But an unexpected visit by Lars, the man his wife left him for, makes Jomar reconsider the static trajectory of his existence, and so he goes on a trip up north (passing through a tunnel when he takes this decision), to bridge the abyss of the accident and stretch back into the past to reconnect with his family, and with other members of society.

This is a Scandinavian film, so you should expect a fair amount of deadpan behaviour from the characters, though the film seems positively action-packed compared to other well-known ventures such as the Norwegian The Bothersome Man, or the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, not to mention the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. The fine observation of Jomar’s awkward road-trip and his gradual recognition that he must (and can) regain some sense of existence are made possible, in large part, by the very perceptive screenplay written by acclaimed author Erlend Loe.

Nord has a very small cast: scenes rarely, if ever, consist of more than three characters. Norway’s desolate, snowswept, winter landscape is beautiful and as it becomes ever more prominent towards the end of the film – including the gorgeous shots of either a snowmobile or a skier on the clean, white mountainsides – the film finds direct influences or indirect commentary on the events on the ground. A particularly striking moment occurs when the northern lights appear above a lonely shack in the snow while Jomar recounts the day of his skiing accident.

These characters that Jomar encounters on his journey up north prepare him, in subtle ways, to face the rest of the journey and also demonstrates that he has a good heart that has been numbed but not broken by recent experiences. He meets a teenage girl, Lotte, who is slightly abrasive in the way that most teenage girls are, but never annoying; she has her own problems of isolation. When Jomar’s snowmobile breaks down he is saved by Ulrik, barely out of his teens, who is always suspicious that Jomar might be gay – a sign that Ulrik might be a little confused about himself. And finally, close to his destination of the Tamok Valley, he finds an old Sami man who spends his days in a big tent, having chained himself to his snowmobile.

The film consistently ensures that the viewers have a smile on their faces, and the cinematography does an admirable job of capturing the beauty of Norway. I was somewhat disappointed that the meeting between Jomar and Lotte, the teenage girl, was omitted, and we do not share much of Jomar’s perspective on the bleak wilderness around him, but the sad music (mostly strings, though one memorable moment is provided thanks to the Norwegian band “Kaizers Orchestra”) sets exactly the right tone for the story.

Niagara (1953)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Henry Hathaway
Screenwriters:
Charles Brackett
Walter Reisch
Richard L. Breen
Director of Photography:
Joseph MacDonald

Running time: 85 minutes

Niagara is all about Marilyn Monroe — everything happens as a result of her, and the effect of this blond goddess on the people around her is blood-curdling. This film proved that film noir was not limited to colour, nor was star-studded suspense limited to Hitchcock.

Shot mostly on location in gorgeous Technicolor, Henry Hathaway’s Niagara demonstrates the talent of a young Ms Monroe (she was 26 years old during production of this film) and her ability to play — but never overplay — the role of the wily femme fatale: Rose Loomis.

And while Joseph Cotten, whose portrayal of Leland in Citizen Kane arguably engages us as much as Charles Foster Kane, stars as her husband, George Loomis, he is not nearly as memorable as Monroe. There is another couple, the Cutlers, who arrive at the Niagara Falls just as things start to fall apart for the Loomises, but they serve more as a sideshow to the fun than anything else — the viewer’s companions, compared with the shining stars of Monroe and Cotten.

This couple, Ray and Polly Cutler, is spending a few days in a luxury resort opposite Niagara Falls. They are on a delayed honeymoon, having just moved here in order for Ray to start working at a Shredded Wheat Company plant. But on their arrival, making the acquaintance of Mr and Mrs Loomis, they soon discover that all is not well – Mrs Loomis, for one, leaves her husband, who seems to be mentally ill, at home, while she flirts her way into another man’s arms at the Falls.

The Falls, shown so often from up close, and appearing in the background on many occasions, serve both as a nice backdrop to the story and as a very ominous reminder of the destructive power of beauty. In one very frank conversation between Ray Loomis and Polly Cutler, he anticipates the story’ developments:

Let me tell you something. You’re young, you’re in love. Well, I’ll give you a warning. Don’t let it get out of hand like those falls out there. Up above… d’you ever see the river up above the falls? It’s calm and easy, and you throw in a log, it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and it gets going faster, hits some rocks, and… in a minute it’s in the lower rapids, and… nothing in the world — including God himself, I suppose — can keep it from going over the edge. It just… goes.

Niagara does a neat job of combining both suspense and surprise, and in one of the film’s key moments, the suspense is accomplished by a deafening silence – one that would have made Hitchcock proud. In another moment of audiovisual ingenuity, reminiscent of the famous scene in North by Northwest when a conversation is obscured by an airplane engine, the sound of the Falls drowns out an important bit of dialogue between George Loomis and Polly Cutler.

The Cutlers are in way over their heads: Polly, though a goody-two-shoes, is still bearable, but her husband, Roy, has a constant smile on his face that shows there is nothing going on upstairs. The two make a quaint couple, far removed from the emotional turmoil in the relationship (and the characters) of George and Rose, and at times this disparity between the two couples is a little too much to take. But the film sketches the situations and the motivations well enough and Hathaway’s direction is exactly what is needed to tell this story coherently and effectively. I was also impressed by the very good quality of the scenes that use rear projection — coming only two years after The African Queen, whose green screen made for some terrible pictures on the rapids, Niagara is brilliantly staged and photographed to create the impression that all of these scenes on the roaring waters are taking place outside a studio.

Why Competitions (2011)

André Crous

Poland/Germany
4.5*

Director:
Christine Jezior
Screenwriters:
Christine Jezior
Oskar Jezior
Directors of Photography:
Phillip Kaminiak
Theo Solnik

Running time: 78 minutes

Original title: Dlaczego konkurs

Ivo Pogorelić thinks a lot of himself. In 1980, after an unconventionally spirited performance at the revered International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, this young Yugoslavian pianist was eliminated from the contest – upon this announcement, members of the jury, including world-renowned pianist and former winner of the competition, Martha Argerich, resigned in protest. He became a sensation overnight and achieved much greater fame than the eventual winner of the competition that year, Đặng Thái Sơn.

The title asks (though without the question mark — Robert Zemeckis once remarked that no film ending in a question mark has ever done well at the box office, and therefore his own, very successful, Who Framed Roger Rabbit omitted this punctuation mark) what purpose these kinds of music competitions serve and the experts that are interviewed have very different opinions. Most of them agree, and point to Pogorelić’s subsequent career, that competitions do not ensure success for the winner. Of course, his case is a little different from the context of the other performers every year, and the film also looks at a range of other pianists to examine the validity of the experts’ statements.

Why Competitions is an insightful document of the world of competitive piano playing: using the quinquennial Chopin competition in Warsaw as a starting point, the filmmaker interviews all the major players, including many jurors past and present, and tries to piece together the varying opinions about and reactions to the jury’s decision in 1980. The film also looks at the decision in 1975 to award the first prize to the young Pole, Krystian Zimerman, instead of the Russian players who would receive the second, third and fourth prizes.

From these conversations with the different pianists, a range of political issues arises, for example we learn that Russian players, whatever their accomplishments at the competition, would not be allowed to perform outside the USSR afterwards. In the meantime, another player from outside the country – even Poland’s Zimerman – would have the opportunity to play around the world and establish a great career.

The human dimension of the jurors is also underlined and pianist Jeffrey Swann makes a very valid point when he states that the current system of points allows jurors to punish more than it rewards: A maximum of 25 points may be awarded, and often the jurors would give 16 or 17, but if they want to make a point by punishing a player because of style of appearance or whatever, they could give 0 (as happened with Pogorelić and many others), effectively ending that individual’s chances of going through to the next round. Lidia Grychtołówna, who is both a pianist and a juror, makes a similar point when she acknowledges: “At competitions, both candidates and jurors make mistakes. The difference is that jurors go unpunished.”

The more general question of the need for juries and competitions is also treated to some screen time, and Jeffrey Swann is particularly amused by the fact that he received 25 from one judge, while another gave him 0. The possible political motivations behind such decisions are cited, but one juror, Kazimierz Kord, warns us not to read too much into the disconnect between the audience’s reaction and the judges’ reaction to a piece: “Sometimes the public will applaud a performance anyway, even if they don’t understand the requirements [for interpreting Chopin].” I found this statement a little condescending, though perhaps well-intentioned.

But time and again the film comes back to the very vain, pouting Pogorelić, stroking a small dog on his lap, who claims that people are envious of his beauty and his talent, and while some might debate the latter, his claim that he is beautiful (or rather, “well-preserved […] Look: no wrinkles!”) will certainly generate some laughter. The only slightly frustrating part of the film was the otherwise agreeable Kevin Kenner who speaks for a long time in very American-inflected German before finally switching to his more natural mother tongue of English. I also would have preferred to see more of Martha Argerich, who contributes a single sentence to the discussion, or Krystian Zimerman, who is completely absent from the film.

Why Competitions manages to cram a lot of political, social and historical commentary into its 85 minutes and does so with a sense of rhythm and storytelling that is truly breathtaking, and without ever using a voice-over or explanatory text. It is a film whose theme is universal and whose specifics are always interesting.

A must-see.

Viewed at the Jihlava International Film Festival 2011.

Videocracy (2009)

André Crous

Italy/Sweden
3*

Director:
Erik Gandini
Screenwriter:
Erik Gandini
Directors of Photography:
Manuel Claro
Lukas Eisenhauer

Running time: 85 minutes

Videocracy, a documentary by the Italian-born filmmaker Erik Gandini, looks at the extent to which Italian television culture has become Italian culture tout court: it is a culture based on the most extreme kind of artifice and ignores the strides women around the world have made for their rights in the past century. In short, the current Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has shaped a culture that applauds the debasement of women – relegating them to the kitchen and rendering them mute and big-breasted – and he has used his many television stations to promote this idea over the past few decades.

Of course, this is not the first time Berlusconi serves as inspiration for a film (in 2006, Nanni Moretti memorably depicted him in Il Caimano), but Videocracy uses people close to Berlusconi, such as talent scout Lele Mora and celebrity Fabrizio Corona, to present us with a very good idea of the vast media empire that Berlusconi controls, and the power he exerts – not only politically, but ideologically and even culturally.

Italian television systematically presents women as objects of desire – no more, no less. Young Italian women want to conform to this figure of the silent mannequin, so that they might become objects of desire and (the dream!) marry a footballer. The apex of such stardom is the figure of the “Velina”: the silent blonde, who appears onstage during a talk show or a game show always hosted by a male presenter. From time to time she might break out into a 30-second dance routine called a “Staccheto”, before returning to her pose. The film paints a very tragic picture of the extremes of a heteronormative society in which there is no gender equality.

Director Erik Gandini has collected a great deal of material to show us this artifice in all its gaudy glory, but he does not dig much deeper. For example, the character of Lele Mora, an old talent scout who invites young male celebrities to his house so that they can lounge around the pool and he can spy on them from his bedroom window, had great potential as a counterbalance (or at least a contradiction) to the very explicitly heterosexual foundations of Italian society. The fact that such an influential figure has what amounts to a harem at his house in Sardinia presented a wonderful opportunity to Erik Gandini, but rather than pursue this avenue, Gandini gives us Mora’s comparison of Berlusconi with Mora’s own idol, Mussolini.

It is a silly moment that lasts much longer than it should (Mora has a Mussolini ring tone on his mobile phone), but Gandini picks up this train of thought again later in the film during a scene of a military parade, with the expected close-ups of boots marching and Berlusconi looking on as the artillery passes in slow motion.

Neither does Gandini succeed in tying his different threads together. Berlusconi is certainly at the centre of events, but in this 85-minute film we get a story of sad idealism in this society, where a 25-year-old mechanic named Ricky wants to impress the girls by singing Ricky Martin songs while performing karate, but he fails (because of Berlusconi’s television society, the film would have us believe, but it’s actually because he is bad at what he does). He has a firm belief that television ensures “that you’ll be remembered forever” and that an appearance on television puts you “10 steps above everyone else”, making it possible for you to compete with the football players for the hearts and bodies of those sought-after Italian women, i.e. the Veline.

We also get a glimpse of the sad life of Fabrizio Corona, an oversexed narcissist whose business dealing with the powerful elite in Italy is the stuff of gangster films. He memorably refers to himself as a modern-day Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself, but the storylines of Corona, Ricky, Lele Mora and Berlusconi are never really properly tied together.

Gandini also provides a very awkward voice-over that is annoying because Gandini speaks in English, which is not his native language, and there is no apparent reason why a better trained English speaker could not have delivered the narration.

The film lacks a tight focus on its subject and is happy to make us laugh at the madness of this television society, whenever the film is not relying on our admiration of its access to a forbidden world. One moment that does stand out is Berlusconi’s campaign video, a karaoke song about the excellence – nay, godliness – of this man who calls himself President (a label perpetuated by Gandini himself, who never calls the man “Prime Minister”).

Viewed at the Jihlava International Film Festival 2011.