Countries

Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)

André Crous

Mexico
4.5*

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriter:
Carlos Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Emmanuel Lubezki

Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Sólo Con Tu Pareja

In 2001, Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, would open with a shot that is almost an exact replica of the first shot in his first feature film: a young man and woman are having sex on a mattress while the camera slowly tracks towards them amidst their passionate shrieks of pleasure. Cuarón has a penchant for mixing comedy with much more serious reflections on human nature, and his first film, though much more broadly comical than any of his other projects, gives the viewer a taste of things to come.

Love in the Time of Hysteria shares a great deal with a 1980s Almodóvar classic such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and at many points, the film had me in stitches. If you remember the running joke about the Shi’ite terrorists in Almodóvar’s film, you will love Cuarón’s recurring references to a gringa who put her French poodle in a microwave.

A young playboy called Tomás Tomás works in the advertising industry and has stuck it in so many places he has all but lost count of his conquests. When some white spots appear in his throat, he goes to see his friend, Mateo de Mateos, who is a doctor. Silvia, Mateo’s nurse, falls for Tomás and in the blink of an eye, they have arranged to meet at Tomás’s flat that evening. The only problem is that Tomás’s boss and part-time lover, Gloria, is on her way over to discuss the latest ad campaign. When the two women arrive, Tomás has his hands full to ensure that they are both satisfied without finding out about each other.

Unfortunately, a third woman piques his interest: a young flight attendant named Clarisa, who has just moved in next door. And so, Tomás loses track of time and poor Silvia leaves in a huff the next morning. In fact, she is so beside herself with frustration that she decides to play a trick on Tomás: we have already established that she is a lascivious little sadist, but now she informs him that his HIV test has come back positive.

But while this turn of events in Tomás’s life could potentially have terrible consequences, all of which Tomás seems to consider very seriously, Cuarón’s use of the colour green – as in so many of his other films, most visibly in Great Expectations – hints at the victory of life over death, whatever the red arrows of Cupid (that serve as accents on the green text of the opening credits) might otherwise indicate.

This is a film full of incidents of varying hilarity, staged with a magnificent sense of direction and energy, and while one could easily fault the film for a lack of real substance, it certainly holds the viewer’s attention, because the chaos does not overwhelm the storylines. Also, Cuarón’s use of mostly classical music on the soundtrack (which often consists of Mozart – predictably, the “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” aria from Don Giovanni) gives a slightly heavier, though perhaps only ironically, gloss to the events we witness.

Love in the Time of Hysteria doesn’t take itself too seriously – exhibit one is the opening quotation of the film, from e.e. cummings, which states that “mike likes all the girls […] all the girls except the green ones”, but these quotes ranges from such nonsense to Newton’s Third Law; its characters usually have the same first and last names, and Tomás’s friend Mateo uses cliché Latin sayings in most of his sentences.

Nonetheless, the film certainly entertains and while the characters of the two Japanese businessmen have no real place in the story, this film showed the great promise on which Alfonso Cuarón would soon deliver. His cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki, would continue to work with him on most of his subsequent projects, as well as the films of Terrence Malick, while his other cameraman, Rodrigo Prieto, would work with the other great Mexican director of the last decade, Alejandro González Iñárritu.

The Wedding Banquet (1993)

André Crous

Taiwan
4.5*

Director:
Ang Lee
Screenwriters:
Ang Lee
Neil Peng
James Schamus
Director of Photography:
Jong Lin

Running time: 106 minutes

Original title: 喜宴
Transliterated title: Xǐ yàn

The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee’s second feature film, was released in 1993, right in the middle of a movement in American filmmaking that would come to be known as New Queer Cinema, consisting of films with gay themes, treated openly, mainly produced by gay filmmakers such as Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki. The Wedding Banquet is quite different from the rest of the films of the time in that it is infinitely more accessible to a mainstream audience and was not made by a gay director.

However, as Ang Lee would prove more than a decade later with his elegant adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain, he is perfectly attuned to the human complexity of his films’ gay characters and seeks to portray them as ostracised despite their similarity to the average straight viewer, rather than pretending that they are different in any particular way. Another point that is noteworthy, given the film’s release in 1993, is the lack of any reference to AIDS – instead, the filmmakers have decided to make a film about secrets and the unnecessary tension (indeed, chaos) that develops when someone is more ashamed of themselves than they are afraid of their parents’ potential reaction to the news that their son or daughter is gay.

In New York, Wai Tong is a Taiwanese American who’s been with his American boyfriend, Simon, for the past five years. Wai Tong has not told his parents, who are living in Taiwan, that he is gay, but since they want a grandchild, they constantly sign him up for singles’ clubs, and forward the questionnaires, which he dutifully fills out, albeit with criteria that seem impossible to meet.

The film does not concentrate on the issue of sexuality as much as it draws our attention to the ubiquitous – and unnecessary – secrecy, from all sides. Everybody has secrets and yet they all refuse to share these secrets for fear that they will be rejected as a result of their honesty. Naturally, when Wai Tong and his tenant Wei Wei decide to get married – he so that his parents can see their son married, she so that she can get a green card – and his parents turn up for the big day, this secrecy eventually leads to tension between him Simon, who only wants to impress his boyfriend’s parents, even though they have no idea what role he plays in their son’s life.

“It’s kind of stupid – all these lies. But I’m used to it,” admits Wai Tong to Simon, but once his parents arrive the situation quickly spins out of control and he becomes entangled in his own web of lies. Luckily, most of these scenes are in Taiwanese, for actor Winston Chao is very unconvincing in English, having a painful elocution of simple words that have no emotional resonance coming from him. But while the acting might be sub-par, Ang Lee’s direction is flawless, as shown by his masterful handling of giant groups of extras during the scenes at the wedding banquet, as well as his decision to film many important dialogues (between Wai Tong’s mother and Wai Wai; between Wai Tong and his mother; and between Wai Tong’s father and Simon) in single takes.

What makes the film so special is the care it takes with its characters – and not just Wai Tong’s parents. The small gestures that Simon makes, sometimes in the background, barely visible to the camera, are striking when seen within the context of his place in the film. He has been marginalised by his boyfriend, for the sake of pretending that all is well even though the whole narrative that develops – including his presence at his boyfriend’s wedding to a girl – is close to farcical, but he keeps a straight face and always wants to make sure that Wai Tong is feeling as comfortable as possible, that he is taken care of. The interaction is beautiful and the fact that Ang Lee focuses on such details is impressive and enriches the human dimension of a film that could easily have been filled with comical caricatures.

It’s not always easy to empathise with Wai Tong’s self-pity, but Ang Lee’s story is full of twists and turns, and even the smallest scenes have either narrative of physical energy. It is a film that anticipates the director’s subsequent work on the plains of Wyoming and while it might not confront LGBT issues as aggressively as other filmmakers from the early nineties, it makes gay characters seem more human than they do in the films of these other militant filmmakers.

Elite Squad (2007)

André Crous

Brazil
4*

Director:
José Padilha
Screenwriters:
José Padilha
Rodrigo Pimentel
Bráulio Mantovani
Director of Photography:
Lula Carvalho

Running time: 113 minutes

Original title: Tropa de elite

In a city like Rio de Janeiro, whose police force “protects the corrupt”, especially when the corrupt is one of their own, an incorruptible force of guardians is essential: in this case, such individuals have formed an elite group, trained more aggressively than the Israeli army, that performs the function of watchmen, and it is no coincidence that Foucault is discussed in a sociology class attended by Matias, a talented policeman who will be trained as a member of this “Elite Squad”, or BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais).

In the first scene, Matias and Neto – another policeman and a friend since childhood – are singled out as possible replacements for Captain Nascimento, a member of BOPE whose life has been turned upside down by his continued involvement in their operations; his personal life (he is about to become a father) is straining under the pressure of his life as a special forces policeman and he needs to get out.

BOPE is hardcore and they are physically and mentally as tough as they come, but while these guys can track down and punish the most devious of slum lords, they are clearly filled with rage and the film hints at some of the reasons. There is frustration amongst the most law-abiding policemen that everybody is not fully held accountable, that it is too slow or that it is not strict enough. Some of the policemen see their colleagues turn their job into a way to earn extra money by using their position as a way to extort ordinary individuals – by promising them special protections, for example – and this game with the law has ominous potential: “Those who get paid to uphold the law can also get paid to cut it loose.”

At the centre of developments is an upcoming visit by Pope John Paul II (the film is set in 1997) to Rio de Janeiro: His Holiness decided to stay at the favela of Turano, a notorious slum, so that he can be closer to the poor and destitute, and it is up to the BOPE to ensure that the Holy Father will lose no sleep over his safety in such a poor, crime-ridden area of the city. But the preparations for the visit take a backseat to the stories of Matias and Neto, respectively the brains and the heart necessary to make a good BOPE agent, and the challenge Nascimento faces in deciding who would replace him.

Some of the film’s action scenes are quite shocking – not because of the brutal violence they depict, but because the characters committing these acts are often policemen themselves, who are supposed to uphold the law. In one sequence of events, the endemic corruption on the force is treated with some comedy, as heads butt and we see how quickly chaos can erupt in an environment where bribery is a normal part of the job of being a policeman. But the rest of Elite Squad shows a much darker side of the Rio police: portrayed as a bunch of reckless hooligans, more or less kept in check by the cream that is the BOPE, the latter can also act like barbarians in the name of keeping order – at one point they prepare to torture an informant by raping him with a broom.

One should be able to get a clearer picture of the two sides that provide the Rio crime scene with such tension. We are informed that peace in Rio “depends on a delicate balance between the ammunition of the scum and the corruption of the cops,” but the film tries its darndest to show that the police’s brutal tactics may be mitigated by the fact that they are ultimately making the city a better place. However, the film doesn’t come close to equalling Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, a film that still ranks as one of the best favela pictures ever made. It always seems like we get an outsider’s point of view of the slums.

Elite Squad is well-made, and both Matias and Nascimento have stories that the viewer wants to follow through with, but the constant voice-over becomes boring, despite its overload of well-formulated bits of information and the apparent (though strictly illogical) omnipresence of its narrator. Followed by Elite Squad: The Enemy Within.

Cairo Station (1958)

André Crous

Egypt
4.5*

Director:
Youssef Chahine
Screenwriters:
Abdel Hay Adib
Mohamed Abu Youssef
Director of Photography:
Alevise Orfanelli

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: باب الحديد
Transliterated title: Bab al-Hadid
Alternate title: The Iron Gate

The acting could be much better, and the climax requires an enormous suspension of disbelief, but Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station is compact and those parts that might seem random at first all fit together in the end, underlining Chahine’s skill as a storyteller and a craftsman.

Chahine stars as the main character Qinawi, a young man who lives at Cairo’s main railway station and whose limp either scares other people or makes him the object of their ridicule. He sells newspapers and has his eye on Hanouma, a woman who doesn’t let herself be ordered about, but she seems destined to be married to Abu-Serih, who wants the workers at the station to form a union and stand up against their boss, Mansour, in whose employment they struggle to make ends meet.

The film is very frank about Qinawi’s sexual frustration, and the first time we see the inside of his little home, it is plastered with magazine cut-outs of scantily clad women in braziers. Referring to Qinawi, the voice-over ominously asks us “How could anyone have foreseen his end?”

While Qinawi is infatuated with the feisty Hanouma and sometimes leers at her obscenely, a gesture she does not take very seriously, two others stories, seemingly insignificant, are taking place in the background. In the first one, a young girl’s boyfriend is about to leave for four years and the small part of their story that we are privy to seems sincere and romantic. The second story, of which we learn indirectly whenever the main news vendor, Madbouli, talks about it, is a grizzly tale of murder: a woman was discovered in a trunk, her head and arms chopped off, and her killer unknown. These two stories will slowly come into focus towards the end of the film and tie in with Qinawi’s obsessive idea of romance.

The film doesn’t have many surprises – we can spot the dénouement from a mile away – but the final reel does contain a nail-biting sequence of events that is breathtaking to behold and even if you know what you are in for, the full cinematic experience is truly amazing. In many respects, this final part of the film is the culmination of the art of the filmmaker, whose film starts off on some shaky ground. Another scene that is a stand-out takes place on a stationary train at the station, where Hanouma starts dancing along to the music being played by the passengers. It is a raucous affair, upsetting some of the more conservative onlookers, and at the end of the number, Hanouma turns to the camera and winks at us, signalling our complicity in this unconventional bit of fun.

Some of the direction is magnificent, including a moment when a boy is saved from an oncoming train and narrowly escapes when Hanouma pulls him from the tracks. The film sometimes struggles with the post-production studio dubbing and it is particularly audible whenever Abu-Serih speaks and produces a very loud echo even when he is outside. One brief shot caught my attention: when Hanouma and Qinawi are sitting next to the fountain, one quick image shows them clearly defined in the foreground, separated from an indistinct background by the haze of the fountain. It is beautiful – much shorter, unfortunately, than the strange long take that precedes it, which shows these two characters speaking at length without looking at each other.

Chahine’s film is short and creates tension by means of a play between light and darkness, and a quickening pace at the end that will leave you breathless. Its climax relies on us to believe that Qinawi is literally blinded by obsession, but the rest of the film makes up for this bit of extreme simplicity and succeeds in presenting a story that is truly riveting.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

André Crous

France
4*

Director:
Agnès Varda
Screenwriter:
Agnès Varda
Directors of Photography:
Jean Rabier
Alain Levent

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Cléo de 5 à 7

A morbid sense of impending doom hangs over this seemingly lighthearted frolic in the Parisian sunshine. Cléo is a young woman who is expecting the results of a medical examination, which a fortune-teller leads her to believe might be catastrophic and certainly involves the prospect of death. We follow her as she passes the time buying a hat, driving in a taxi, meeting friends and trying to relax in the Parc de Montsouris.

Cléo from 5 to 7 takes place in real-time, though director Agnès Varda crams much more into her 90 minutes (the film is really Cléo from 5 to 6.30, but the title wouldn’t have had the same zap) than is actually possible, but never mind – the effect of watching everything unfold in apparent real-time is exhilarating. The audience shares the ups and downs of the main character, Florence Victoire, nicknamed Cléo – for Cleopatra – by her friends, though admittedly her melodramatic nature (a point made over and over again) does make her appear wholly unstable at times.

Varda as a director is very active in this film, which seems deceptively improvised, but contains many moments that visibly enrich the thematic texture of the film. Starting with the tarot card of death in the opening scene, the only part of the film that is in colour, Cléo from 5 to 7 has a whole array of very brief shots – either from Cléo’s point of view or from the camera’s point of view, though the camera often identifies with the main character and we get many looks on the street directed at the camera. Besides a broken mirror and a scene at the aftermath of a gunshot, we also see funeral homes, a café called “Bonne Santé” (Good Health), a street performer piercing his biceps in a scene of real body horror, and we hear a radio report of Edith Piaf’s latest operation. Another very well-crafted moment occurs in the darkness of a tunnel when Cléo tells her friend Dorothée that she might be seriously ill.

At the time of the film’s release, the spectre of colonial war, the conflict in Algeria, was pervasive but also serves an important function in this film – a function that only becomes clear towards the end of the story, in the calm setting of the 14th arrondissement’s Parc de Montsouris.

While Cléo from 5 to 7 was not Varda’s first feature-length fiction film (her 1955 film, La Pointe courte, had already established her as a force to be reckoned with, or rather one to be inspired by, and anticipated the revitalisation of the French film industry at the end of the 1950s that would be called the Nouvelle Vague), it has the same kind of playful humanity that made Godard’s À Bout de souffle such a charm, and the play with form is best appreciated in a short silent film which the boyfriend of Cléo’s friend Dorothée, a projectionist at a cinema, screens for them. The film shows two different kinds of realities, one seen through darkness (or sunglasses), the other without them, and perhaps the only other silent-film-within-a-film that I have seen which has amused me as much was Almodóvar’s Shrinking Man in Talk to Her.

The film constantly reminds the viewer how much time has passed, and how much time is left, by means of text on the screen that informs us of the current time as well as the main protagonist for the next part. A little tongue-in-cheek, the different “chapters” go up to number 13, clearly linking with the numerous mentions of superstition throughout the film; it is an unexpectedly beautiful and emotional moment when we realise who the protagonist(s) of the final chapter are.

Cléo from 5 to 7 has a ditzy central character who is waiting for some news that might change her life, or maybe her life will be changed in the process of waiting. The film is simple and consists of small conversations from daily life that do not seem staged for the benefit of a fiction film, but rather evoke a certain feeling of humanity that is so important in a film that wants both the dread and the sunshine.

Metropolitan (1989)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Whit Stillman
Screenwriter:
Whit Stillman
Director of Photography:
John Thomas
Running time: 98 minutes

Tom Townsend is not very likeable. He pretends to have very firm ideas about literature and social structures, but prefers literary criticism to actual novels, citing his displeasure at the inherent inventedness of fiction. He reminds me a lot of Jesse Eisenberg’s character in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, albeit with fewer father issues.

Tom lives on New York’s West Side and attends Princeton, but when we meet him during the cold winter holidays, wearing a raincoat over his dinner jacket, instead of a proper overcoat, we recognise that he does not share the wealthy lifestyle of the group of friends who, on the spur of the moment, invite him to attend a deb (débutante) party with them. Usually, he would avoid these kinds of events, but since he has little else to do, and he is virtually coerced by the most vocal and self-assured of the pack, Nick, into joining them, he goes along and intrigues the others – all of them in their early twenties.

We know next to nothing about Nick, and over the course of the film, we get to learn very little, except that he has convinced himself that he has a good relationship with his absent father, though we can see he is deluding himself. His lack of expressiveness and straightforward attitude about the things he believes in and those he opposes are refreshing for one timid girl, Audrey, who quickly gravitates towards him. But Nick is blind to her attention and is still hooked on Serena Slocum, a girl who apparently, according to the gossip in the group, was dating as many as twenty boys at the same time.

At first, the group (designated as the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack”, or S.F.R.P.) seems completely isolated from the rest of society, an upper-class enclave that functions on its own, removed from the vast mass of people around them that populate Manhattan, and it is comical, reminiscent of Maggie Smith’s character in Gosford Park, when one girl declares that she “can’t stand snobbery or snobbish acts of any kind”, while someone outside the group is easily labelled as “riff-raff”. But gradually, largely thanks to the character of Audrey, who is the most vulnerable, the group shows signs of humanity, the kind of social interaction that we can relate to, and thaws the very cold façade with which we are initially presented.

The film is mostly a kind of chamber film, consisting of dialogue-heavy scenes that involve only a handful of characters, discussing social interaction and gossiping about others. Very few laughs are to be had, and the most uproarious moment occurs when they decide to dance the cha-cha-cha. But the writing is very good and writer-director Stillman delivers many insightful gems that distil and persuasively relate social wisdom.

Metropolitan provides a nice snapshot of this segment of New York society and the decline and ultimate disintegration of the group is fascinating to watch, made all the more captivating by our realisation that it all takes place over the course of the winter holidays. “You go to a party, you meet a group of people, you think ‘These people are gonna be my friends for the rest of my life.’ Then you never see them again. Where do they go?”, asks an adult, a former Princeton man, towards the end of the film.

The film takes great care not to alienate the audience from the characters but doesn’t do so to the detriment of the characters themselves, who remain complicated despite their failure to recognise their own faults. The actors, most of them amateur players, are very competent and deliver the lines with admirable self-assurance, though Charlie (Taylor Nichols) has some of the most cerebral lines and does not always come across as entirely convincing. Metropolitan strikes a more sombre tone than The Squid and the Whale, but its approach is perhaps more deliberately realistic and certainly worth a look.

Attack the Gas Station! (1999)

André Crous

South Korea
4*

Director:
Kim Sang-Jin
Screenwriter:
Park Jeong-woo
Director of Photography:
Jung Woo Choi

Running time: 113 minutes

Original title: 주유소 습격 사건
Transliterated title: Juyuso seubgyuksageun

This film is a gas! (I know, I know…) With the same kind of adrenaline in its visuals that reminded me of Run, Lola, Run, this  South Korean film is simple-minded but dedicated to its goal of providing sheer rip-roaring entertainment. In the opening scene, the film’s four main characters, a group of guys fresh out of high school, rob a gas station and proceed to destroy the entire property in a rampage of destruction. In the following scene, which takes place a few days later, the guys are back to rob the same station again, but this time they have spent their money on clothes that make them seem a little more respectable.

The problem is that the manager of the gas station has taken precautions and tells them that his wife has taken the day’s profits with her and now she can’t be reached. The director, however, decides to show us early on that the manager is lying and has hidden the money somewhere in the office. As a result, the four would-be robbers look like even greater buffoons since they fail to search the office. But more on their stupidity later.

The action-packed first scene of Attack the Gas Station! raises the question how the film could possibly sustain its rhythm. Of course, it can’t, but we are provided with some very cool visuals, from upside-down shots and shots taken from very low angles to shots in which the camera is pointed vertically upward, or tilted, with wide-angle lenses, or taking the place of a character being kicked in the face by a boot heel that comes straight at us. There are also some rather silly uses of the slow motion, but all in all the film has a great time testing out some visual tricks and doesn’t bore us with repetition.

The story is not complicated. The four guys take the manager of the gas station and his three employees hostage, and when anybody pulls up to have gas put in their car, the robbers take the money for themselves, while they are waiting for the manager’s wife to return home and deliver the money to them. Random scenes of chaos erupt when customers are rude or when a local gang comes to collect money from a high school boy who works at the station. But whatever happens, the leader of the four robbers has a very serene quality about him and even though the four of them might not have a clue how to handle the situation, they make it clear that they are in control – and, somehow, they usually are.

The characters they come up against are hardly the rough underworld types, although there is initially much talk about the gang leader, Yongari, but he turns out to be a complete whimp. One of the guys, Bulldozer, keeps watch over the steadily growing group of hostages, but he behaves like a bad imitation of a Toshiro Mifune character, baring his teeth, pulling faces and forcing people to crush their skulls into the floor.

But the film has some wonderful moments, and they usually involve music. Halfway through the film, a big fight scene is accompanied by a techno version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons (Spring)”, and later on, when the hi-fi breaks down, the Yongari gang performs in the background, and this musical number stands as the highlight of the entire film, for it is unexpected, well-executed and highly entertaining.

The film doesn’t quite know how to keep itself busy in the second half, but when all the different factions come together during the climax, and the four main characters’ backstories have been established, we get a wonderful combination of form and content that makes for a very appropriate ending to a film that never takes itself too seriously.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Edwin S. Porter
Screenwriters:
Edwin S. Porter
Scott Marble
Directors of Photography:
Blair Smith
Edwin S. Porter

Running time: 12 minutes

Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film, produced in the first decade of the motion picture industry, was not the first film to present the viewer with a narrative, but it must have been one of the most exhilarating films of its time, with action scenes that would clearly serve as the blueprint for similar scenes in tens of thousands of subsequent films. As a 12-minute film, The Great Train Robbery moves along briskly to show us the beginning, the middle, and the end of the train heist, focusing almost completely on the action while being indifferent to its perpetrators (the film is much more interested in the victims).

The film consists of a mere sequence of 14 shots, but unlike many contemporary films that have a similar average shot length (in this case, around 50 seconds), no shot feels too long, for the pace is quick throughout as we rush from one action to the next. The actions, as the title makes clear, all revolve around a train robbery and involve gunfights in the forest, fistfights on top of a moving train and chases on horseback. The shots are mostly static, but the action inside the frame will keep your attention.

As I mentioned above, the filmmaker focuses our attention on the very human individuals caught up in the action – for example, the telegraph operator at the train station, who is tied up, unable to alert the authorities of the bandits’ plans to rob the train, or the passenger shot in the back when he tries to escape. In the last instance, the passengers all have to line up to empty their pockets and give up their jewellery, when one man tries to run away. He is shot, but the bandits proceed to rifle through all the other passengers’ belongings; when they finally leave, the camera stays with this passenger, who has been lying motionlessly in the foreground.

Meanwhile, we never learn who the bandits or what their motives for this robbery are. It was not the film’s intention to educate its viewers but rather to entertain them, and it certainly succeeds in doing that, even though its rudimentary editing might seem laughable to a viewer today: in one scene, there is a very visible cut before a man is thrown off the train – what was a very lively individual before the cut suddenly turns into a lifeless dummy after the cut…

The most famous shot in the film is completely gratuitous and contains a close-up of a bandit who looks directly into the camera, points his pistol at us, and fires six shots. The shot comes after the narrative proper, as a kind of epilogue, or coda, and is clearly used for effect rather than serving as a continuation of the narrative. All the bandits having been killed by the end of the film, one could argue that the breaking of the fourth wall is warranted and so is the use of the close-up, which the director had avoided in the rest of the film.

The Great Train Robbery does not outstay its welcome; it is undoubtedly an important historical document that presents us with the origins of the action film, but while one can forgive the film for its technical shortcomings, the narrative still feels too rough around the edges and I would have appreciated a better sense of context and characters. However, as one of the first narrative films, it is remarkably coherent and worth a look, just to see where it all started.

Summer Hours (2008)

André Crous

France
4*

Director:
Olivier Assayas
Screenwriter:
Olivier Assayas
Director of Photography:
Éric Gautier

Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: l’Heure d’été

Trees and children are reminders of the passage of time. In the first scene of Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, the grandchildren of the oldest surviving member of the family, Hélène, who is celebrating her 75th birthday with her family, are playfully running around her garden in search of treasure. Hélène lives alone in a big house outside Paris, in the upper-class suburb of Valmondois. The house is filled with works of art, either bought or made by Hélène’s late uncle, the painter Paul Berthier.

Berthier’s name is central to the first thirty minutes, during which Hélène’s conversations with her children mostly serve to gauge their readiness to deal with the house and its memories after her death. Of course, the subject is more or less taboo, and they don’t like the idea of discussing things that have not yet come to pass. Her eldest son, Frédéric, seems especially determined to reassure her that nothing will change and that the family will still spend their holidays at the house that they will maintain as well as she has done.

But Hélène wasn’t born yesterday and has no qualms about her children selling off her collection after her death: “No need to become keepers of the tomb”, she tells her son. She realises that her other two children, Jérémie and Adrienne, have their lives abroad – in Shanghai and New York, respectively – and that it would become more and more difficult for them to call her house home. Memories may last forever, but the development of the present shouldn’t be stunted for the sake of physically preserving the past. As the child who has spent the most amount of time in the house, Frédéric is naturally more attached to the place, and the events of the past strongly echo in the present, for example, the plastic bag from Leclerc containing loose pieces of plaster from a sculpture by Edgar Degas that Frédéric and Jérémie had broken decades earlier.

Somewhat reminiscent of the famously sudden demise of Mrs Ramsay in brackets, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, we learn that Hélène has passed away, but it takes some time before we realise that weeks, if not months, have elapsed since the family reunion at her home. And Assayas uses the medium of film to elide the jumps in time almost imperceptibly, the content making clear that important events can quickly become mere memories.

Besides all these memories and the different weight that objects have in the eyes of the beholder, the film provides a very refreshing look at the social complexity of inheritance, without ever stooping to the level of melodramatic backstabbing. While Frédéric had counted on his brother and sister to help out with the upkeep of the house because he assumed that the house and its objects are as important to them as it is to him, Jérémie and Adrienne have their lives elsewhere and have not only lost touch with the house but even with the culture and with their country. They have no wish to disillusion their brother, nor to seem like they are acting as a united front against him and shattering his wishes, but the fact of the matter is that the memories of the past cannot extend into the future, because they are no longer the people they were when they were young.

All three siblings are warm, engaging people who like to laugh and don’t have a malicious bone in their body, but want to get to the business of making their own memories. The actors (Charles Berling; Jérémie Renier, looking more mature than ever before; and Juliette Binoche), despite their pedigree, are kept in check by Assayas, who ensures that a character always trumps the actor playing the part.

The issues of time and memory are embedded in the film without ever taking on the air of abstract philosophy, and the filmmaker takes care to follow the characters, instead of leading them to contrived situations of high drama. The end does lose the plot a little, when Frédéric has to pick up his daughter at the police station, but eventually, her own role in the story is made clear, as the final scene demonstrates the possibility of making new memories even though a longtime dream may never be realised.

It is interesting to note that this film was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, an institution that features prominently towards the end of the film, because when Frédéric and his wife look at a piece in the museum that used to be in Hélène’s study and agree that it “is nicely displayed”, it is clear that a museum is not a home but merely an exhibit: pieces without any real context, pretty vases without flowers.

The Fourth Reich (1990)

André Crous

The Fourth ReichSouth Africa
3.5*

Director:
Manie van Rensburg
Screenwriter:
Malcolm Kohll
Director of Photography:
Dewald Aukema

Running time: 183 minutes

South Africa’s most expensive film to date brought together the cream of the country’s film industry to tell the real-life story of Robey Leibbrandt, an Afrikaans boxer turned revolutionary, who was planning to assassinate the country’s pro-British prime minister, General Jan Smuts, shortly after the Second World War broke out.

Originally shot as a television series before being edited down and screened across the country to tepid public interest, the film ultimately wound up, two years later, on the country’s television screens. The Fourth Reich had an estimated budget of R16 million ($6 million at the time, around $10.5 million today, which is an enormous figure for a South African film; by contrast, the 2005 Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi, was made for $3 million). It is evident that a large amount of the budget was spent on set design and costumes, but the film also benefits from being shot on location very often, and the South African countryside, with its wide-open spaces and pre-war dirt roads, is well represented in this film.

The film opens in Berlin during the Olympic Games of 1936, where South African boxer Robey Leibbrandt is recruited by the German government when they learn of his affection for the National Socialist Party’s ideology and his admiration of their leader. “The Führer has created a miracle. That’s exactly what we need to happen in South Africa.” He spends the next few years training in Germany, until Germany invades Poland and Britain declares war.

In South Africa, the people’s state of mind at this time must be framed within the context of events at the turn of the century: South Africans had fought and lost against the British in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and even after becoming the Union of South Africa in 1910, a British colony, many South Africans still had little affection for the Crown. Shortly before WWII, the “Ossewabrandwag” (literally, the Ox-wagon sentinel), an ultra-nationalist organisation, was formed to resist cooperation with the British. However, General Jan Smuts, who was the country’s deputy prime minister at the time, opposed Prime Minister J.B.M. Hertzog (who advocated neutrality towards Germany), stating that, “in war, you are either friend or enemy”.

After Smuts defeated Hertzog in this matter, he was appointed Prime Minister and became an instant target for the Ossewabrandwag, who disliked the British as much as they idolised the German ideologies of nationalism and antisemitism.

The Fourth Reich focuses on Robey Leibbrandt’s preparations for the assassination of Jan Smuts (Louis van Niekerk, made up to look exactly like the general), and on the policeman whose assignment is to track down Leibbrandt before he can carry out his mission: Jan Taillard. In the first hour of the film, these two men’s journeys (and in particular, their gestures) are intercut in a way that binds them together. Ultimately, however, it is a German woman, Erna Dorfman (very often accompanied by the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2), whom they both encounter, who will introduce them to each other and play an important role in the development of the narrative.

Taillard is a very competent but badly mannered policeman; when he is called to Pretoria from his home in Queenstown, his wife kindly advises him: “Try and follow orders this time…” The mission, which he chooses to accept, requires him to locate whoever is planning to assassinate Prime Minister Smuts, without breathing a word to anybody, including his dutiful wife, Romy (played by Elize Cawood, whose voice is both golden and vulnerable). In the meantime, Leibbrandt sneaks into South Africa via South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) and seeks to incite members of the Ossewabrandwag to join him in overthrowing the government by committing acts of sabotage on power and railway lines. The faithful are asked to swear a blood oath with the following words, by Henri de la Rochejaquelein.

If I advance, follow me
If I retreat, shoot me
If I die, avenge me.

Ironically, de la Rochejaquelein had been a Royalist in eighteenth-century France, allied with the British to fight against the post-Revolutionary republican government with the aim of restoring the monarchy.

Ryno Hattingh’s performance as Robey Leibbrandt is commendable, but he is given too little to do. The man has to be charismatic, and while the character tries to emulate Adolf Hitler’s elocution when he makes important speeches, the result is not very moving; often he is presented as arrogant and the film does not seek to delve much deeper into his character. On the other hand, as Jan Taillard, Marius Weyers brings a quiet self-confidence to a very human character whose secret mission to defend the prime minister destabilises his life and alienates him from his family.

The film was clearly meant for television, as people usually speak in close-up and storylines that should have been left out completely in the theatrical version show up as unsatisfactory snippets, for example, Leibbrandt’s arrival in the Sperrgebiet of South-West Africa, of which a single scene survives, with actress Wilma Stockenström, that doesn’t lead anywhere. Another very bad moment comes early in the film when Frau Dorfman has a passionate encounter with Leibbrandt: While they make out in slow-motion, actress Grethe Fox’s otherwise stone-cold face is contorted and it seems like she is in agony, and yet the foreplay continues.

It is regrettable that director Manie van Rensburg chose to make a film in English, spoken by a cast of mostly Afrikaans players who all have a very recognisably Afrikaans accent. While an anti-British South African identity does not necessarily imply that the speakers be Afrikaans, it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief when English is used as the lingua franca between members of a very Afrikaans movement such as the Ossewabrandwag.

In the closing credits, the filmmaker seems to acknowledge that the film was made to rehabilitate the reputation of Jan Taillard, whose hard work to protect General Smuts was disregarded by the post-war Nationalist government. The film itself is a very good depiction of life in South Africa in the early 1940s, including the influence of Nazi politics on South Africa during this time, and it is always a pleasure to see individuals such as Smuts brought to life on-screen. The Fourth Reich was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by a South African director in his own country and while the film struggles to overcome its television origins, it is a marvellous reminder of the beauty of the South African landscape and the narrative possibilities that the country’s history offers to filmmakers.