Countries

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
John Frankenheimer
Screenwriter:
George Axelrod
Director of Photography:
Lionel Lindon

Running time: 126 minutes

The Manchurian Candidate leaves the viewer with a lasting impression of conspiracy and treason at the highest levels of government, and is filled with magnificent set pieces, from the brilliantly staged nightmare sequences that frighten us because horrific acts are perpetrated with poker-face serenity and a willingness to carry out the orders given, to the film’s thrilling climax at a political party’s National Convention.

In light of the film’s premise, that evil forces are at work and will stop at nothing to infiltrate the government and take over the country on a wave of anti-communist nationalism, the film slowly picks up speed before charging towards its suspenseful resolution. These final moments are enormously rewarding, for despite having received confirmation of all the characters’ intentions and desires, we are still left with lingering doubts about the plot, which soon clear up once the tension reaches breaking point.

The film is about brainwashing and about communism; however, in a reversal of the usual approach, the former is treated very seriously while the latter is used for the sake of humour, though it has some darker implications. In 1952, a soldier and his platoon are captured in Korea, but on their arrival back in the United States, some time later, this soldier, Raymond Shaw, is awarded the Medal of Honor for having saved the lives of his fellow soldiers, who – each and every one of them – describe him as “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Shaw is the stepson of Senator Joseph Iselin, a buffoon who is about to be re-elected, the campaign run by his devious, ambitious wife – Shaw’s mother, Eleanor (Angela Lansbury). Shaw clearly has some mother issues, but these will only come into focus in the second half of the film. For the time being, we are treated to Shaw’s former captain, Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), who struggles with the same hellish nightmare over and over every night, in which he sees the decorated Shaw forced to murder two soldiers of the platoon – the exact same soldiers who were supposed to have “died” in Korea.

It is revealed that Shaw has been brainwashed to respond to certain cues – phrases or images – that make him susceptible to suggestion, and these are directly linked to his relationship with his mother, a diabolical woman who will stop at nothing to quench her lust for power and her unspoken lust for her own son. In case you were wondering: yes, Freud is mentioned explicitly, though not within the context of Raymond and Eleanor. In flashback, Raymond’s first love, Jocelyn, mentions Freud when she tells him of her father’s fear of snakes.

The film does have its handful of flaws, most important of which is the development of Janet Leigh’s character, Eugenie, who meets a tired Marco on the train, speaks to him in what seems like coded language, and proceeds to fall head over heels in love with him. Perhaps this part of the story was included to counterbalance the tragic relationship of Raymond and Jocelyn, but Eugenie brings very little to the plot and could have been ditched completely. The role of a Korean interpreter, Chunjin, who comes to America and takes a job as Raymond’s valet, is also left too vague, and by the end of the film we have no idea whether his intentions were pure or not.

As a cautionary tale, released around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis at the height of the Cold War, shortly after the McCarthy years and one year before the assassination of JFK, the film was relevant to the point of being clairvoyant. It contains some unforgettable scenes, including a tense scene with the Star-Spangled Banner, though the music at other points in the film can be quite heavy-handed. The idea of a communist acting as a publicly anti-communist crusader is also still very relevant today, as can be seen in the American Congress, where quite a few closeted gay men are, in public, vehemently opposed to homosexuality. Today, watching Eleanor mention the kinds of emergency powers she intends to secure for her husband, saying that they would “make martial law seem like anarchy”, one immediately thinks of the Patriot Act, which just goes to show that politics change very little over time. It’s not entirely clear to what extent Senator Iselin is aware of his wife’s grand design, but the fact that he dresses up as Abraham Lincoln during a dinner party (and is reflected in a portrait of the president in another scene) provides interesting clues to his awareness of what everything is leading up to.

Frankenheimer, who would go on to direct another political thriller, Seven Days in May, slowly reveals the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and in the end, we do get the whole picture, but some pieces seem to belong to a different puzzle.

The Fall (2006)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Tarsem Singh
Screenwriters:
Dan Gilroy
Nico Soultanakis
Tarsem Singh
Director of Photography: 
Colin Watkinson

Running time: 117 minutes

The abilities of Tarsem Singh (or just “Tarsem”, as the credits refer to him) as storyteller have not improved since he gave us his début feature The Cell in 2000, but he has continued his fascination with the representation of images in the mind, and The Fall is filled with breathtaking visuals that will send a shiver down your spine.

It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few would argue with the view that The Fall contains some of the most spectacular locations ever put on film. The Pyramids, Charles Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Blue City of Jodhpur, and many others are scattered throughout the film and compose a unique world in which the mythical story-within-a-story is set.

This particular story is told by Roy — a stuntman who is lying in his hospital bed in Los Angeles after a stunt in which he was supposed to jump from a bridge onto a horse — to a gap-toothed young Romanian girl named Alexandria, who is recovering after her family’s house was burnt to the ground. The story he tells her is “epic” in nature and concerns the adventures of five men who, having been banished by the evil Governor Odious, decide to track him down. They are a mixed bunch of fellows, from Charles Darwin who struts around in what seems to be a peacock fur coat (!) to a burly Italian explosives expert, Luigi, who wears a long, bright yellow coat.

The filmmaker’s only interesting tactic in terms of telling his story is the slow integration of elements from Roy’s own life in the development and composition of the story he tells. However, this tactic would have had much more impact if it had not been present from the very beginning. The transition between the world of the story and the world of the hospital is very often made by allowing the words of the characters of both worlds to overlap.

The film is also quite unclear about the point of view from which the story is told, and individuals from either Roy’s or Alexandria’s life feature as characters at various stages. It is fun to recognise other entities in both worlds, but we get spectacle instead of functionality. When Alexandria says that she likes elephants, Tarsem gives us a scene with an elephant swimming in tropical waters, and no more.

The Fall has been criticised for its total focus on the visual aspect while completely neglecting its content and I tend to agree. The film is rather shallow, and while the beautiful images do keep our attention, most of the time, the filmmakers have paid very little attention to the film’s narrative and music. The only piece of music that is well-chosen is the second movement from Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony”. In terms of acting, little is expected of the adventure story’s characters, since their world plays as a fragmentary, wholly imagined realm of imagined adventures, but unfortunately a great deal of the film is devoted to this story.

That being said, the story that takes place “in the present”, that is at some point during the early days of the motion picture industry, probably around the time of World War I, is not uninteresting. Alexandria is not irritating, and Roy, played by Lee Pace, is accommodating, generous, friendly and thoroughly likeable. I had some difficulty believing him as a man tortured by love, because his face is happy even when it is sad, but this was a minimal objection to his performance.

The film has a satisfactory resolution, though hardly the kind of ending we were looking for in a story that ought to be “epic”. Many images will stick with the viewer, in particular one moment when a keyhole serves as a pinhole camera and draws the shadow of a moving horse upside-down on the wall opposite. However, given the lack of substance, and despite the pleasant interaction between Lee Pace and first-time actress Catinca Untaru, the film itself has very little purpose except as a kind of travelogue about the country of India.

Taxidermia (2006)

André Crous

Hungary
2.5*

Director:
György Pálfi
Screenwriters:
Zsófia Ruttkay,
György Pálfi
Director of Photography:
Gergely Pohárnok

Running time: 91 minutes

How seriously can we take a film in whose first scene a character makes love to a candle and shoots fire out of his penis?

Director György Pálfi has produced a film that doesn’t look half bad but he has put all his eggs in one basket and forgot to fashion a proper story. There are many random episodes of obscenity and downright senselessness, but the film also contains moments that bring to mind a director with visual flair such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Taxidermia is a word that doesn’t mean anything in English, nor in Hungarian, except to suggest the job of one of the film’s characters, Lajoska Balatony, who is a taxidermist. By the end of the film, the viewer will have realised that the title is actually the name of an artwork, the production of which brings the film to a very gruesome climax.

Basically, the film can be separated into three stories that centre on three different characters. Besides the terribly gaunt Lajoska, who is in the last story, we also see his father, Kálmán, a champion speed eater, and Kálmán’s harelipped father (Lajoska’s grandfather), Morosgoványi, who is a soldier by day and pleasures himself at night so that his hard member can either breathe fire or shoot its seed all the way to the stars.

While the first act is all about sex, and ends with a very ambiguous scene in which Morosgoványi seems to fantasise having sex with his lieutenant’s wife before waking up and finding that he has committed an act of bestiality with a dead pig, the second act is about food, and lots of it. Kálmán, who was somehow conceived during his father’s fantasy encounter, was in fact born of a woman but with a pig’s tail. His stepfather, the lieutenant, clips his tail shortly after birth, but then the story skips forward a few decades to a speed-eating championship in Communist-era Hungary, where the event itself is as interesting (and as grotesque) as the post-match purging behind the curtains.

Don’t watch this film if you have an upset stomach.

The main interest of the film lies in its unconventional subject matter and the beauty with which such obscenity can be represented. But for all its interesting little incidents, the film lacks a narrative thread and, most importantly, fails to link the three main characters in any significant way. It is an easy comparison to make, but the taxidermist’s job of removing an animal’s hide, and using it without the original meat that it used to cover, mirrors the film’s hollow innards.

Taxidermia is fond of its extreme close-ups, but very often we cannot easily figure out what is going on because the camera refuses to reveal the bigger picture. However, the special visual sequences, such as a spinning bathtub at the beginning of the film, are dazzling and gorgeous to look at, until we realise that they serve no real purpose beyond the immediate jolt of visual stimulation. I also would have appreciated fewer shots of baby genitals.

The film would have benefited from a more tightly controlled screenplay since there are numerous possibilities to explore, but none is really given the opportunity to develop, until the last act when the film seems to finally settle down and focus on the story and the characters at hand. I applaud this film for coming up with a character even more obese than Gilbert Grape’s mother, and for that character (Kálmán) to deliver the most memorable line of the film: “I had a vomiting technique named after me!” – a source of great pride for the speaker. The instances of body horror are also enough to give Machete a run for its money. However, the film’s final scene, in which a sculpture that looks like a monstrous combination of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David is offered as a work of art, is dangerously close to pretension.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

André Crous

Make Way for TomorrowUSA
4*

Director:
Leo McCarey
Screenwriter: 
Viña Delmar
Director of Photography:
William C. Mellor

Running time: 91 minutes

Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow will forever be known as the American film that anticipated Yasujiro Ozu’s celebrated Tokyo Story by more than a decade. It is the story of an elderly couple who have lost their home during the Great Depression and need the support of their five children, all of whom are unwilling to put a roof over both their parents’ heads because of the disruption it would create in their own lives. So, their father and mother spend most of the film separated from each other, waiting for a letter or a phone call that would offer reassurance about each other’s health and good spirits.

The film is affectionate towards its two main characters without being sentimental or schmaltzy, and the director’s very simple presentation of the material makes for an unassuming visual quality that does not seek to highlight any part of its content; the impact of the film on the viewer is the result of many small incidents that we fear might tear at the relationship of a couple who has been married for fifty years.

Barkley and Lucy Cooper are in their late sixties or early seventies and the bank has recently foreclosed on their home, because Barkley hasn’t worked in four years, and is visibly affected by his age. They have gathered together their children to explain the situation, but their children seem to think it would be a terrible bother; not one of them is keen on putting up both the parents, so Barkley and Lucy go their own ways to spend time with their children for what is supposed to be a temporary arrangement. It does turn out to be very temporary, and in the process the generation gap quickly becomes evident and unbearable. The film itself starts with a title card that implies the natural difficulty of communication across the generations: “…there is no magic that will draw together in perfect understanding the aged and the young. There is a canyon between us, and the painful gap is only bridged by the ancient words of a very wise man — ‘Honor thy father and thy mother’.”

We spend most of the film in the company of Lucy, the mother, who is staying with her son George, his wife and their daughter. We quickly realise that Lucy is not as out of touch with reality as her family thinks she is, and while she doesn’t want to impose, her daughter-in-law, who teaches bridge at home in the evening, makes no bones about the fact that her stay is interfering with the established rhythm of the family. In the meantime, her own son has made contact with a restroom for elderly women. I found, however, that certain scenes were a bit overdramatic in the sense that Lucy did meddle with the guests – being the only person standing up, while the others are seated at the tables, she goes around looking at people’s cards and making comments about their hands.

Lucy’s husband, Barkley, is spending time with his daughter Cora, a woman whose pride blinds her to the generosity of others and whose stinginess makes her appear to be completely heartless. As opposed to the events of Tokyo Story, the children in this film, while arguably even worse than the children in Ozu’s film, do realise, in the end, that they have not lived up to their parents’ expectations. The emotional shock that George’s wife gets when she becomes aware that there is also a communication gap between her and her daughter is a significant development, for it becomes a mirror held up to the adults and reflects their relationship with their parents.

The film contains beautiful moments of reminiscence between Barkley and Lucy that may be compared to the beginning of Up, and by the time Lucy recites a poem she memorised as a young girl, half the audience will have teared up. Make Way for Tomorrow is not a life lesson as much as it is a look at a couple whose relationship has lasted 50 years, and can even withstand the condescension of their own children, though we might not always believe what they are capable of.

The poem that Lucy recites is the following:

A man and a maid stand hand in hand,
Down by a wedding band.
Before them lay uncertain years,
Promised joy, maybe tears.
‘Is she afraid?’ thought the man of the maid.
‘Darling,’ he says, in a tender voice,
‘Do you regret your choice?’
‘We know not where the road will wind,
Or what strange byways we may find.
Are you afraid?’ says the man, to the maid.

She raised her eyes, and spoke at last.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘the die have been cast,
The vows have been spoken,
The rice has been thrown,
Into the future we travel alone.’
‘With you,’ said the maid, ‘I’m not afraid.’

Ajami (2009)

André Crous

Israel
4.5*

Directors:
Scandar Copti
Yaron Shani
Screenwriters:
Scandar Copti
Yaron Shani
Director of Photography:
Boaz Yehonatan Yaacov

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title (Hebrew): עג’מי‎
Original title (Arabic): عجمي

The film opens with a senseless act of violence: a completely innocent teenage boy, repairing a car, is shot dead by someone who passes behind him on a motorcycle. This boy wasn’t the target of the assassins, but even the actual target had not done anything wrong except for belonging to a certain family.

Ajami, which takes its name from a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, is a film that focuses on the tension between many different characters, all somehow connected by blood, circumstance or location. The film takes its cue, in content and structure, from many other films, including Crash and City of God (Cidade de Deus), but the most illuminating parallel can be drawn with Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 drama set in the low-income residential areas (banlieues) of Paris, La haine – a film whose ending has the same emotional resonance as the resolution of Ajami.

The film was developed and directed by two Israelis – one a Christian Arab, the other a Jew – and the collaboration has born fruit that make for dynamic and balanced storytelling that is never contrived for the sake of pandering to a specific ideology or religious group. A comparison with a film such as Julian Schnabel’s Miral makes the raw realism and the real-life significance of Ajami very apparent.

In terms of structure, the film is divided into a prologue and four chapters that deal with different aspects of the narrative, either chronologically or geographically distinct from each other. These time shifts initially make for a slightly jarring experience and the necessity of this reorganisation of the timeline may be debatable, as characters whose deaths we have witnessed suddenly reappear on-screen à la Travolta in Pulp Fiction, but the film’s particular strategy manages to create expectations along the way. In this way, the film may also be compared to the collaborations between the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, especially 21 Grams.

At various points throughout the film, the voice of a young boy called Nasri, introduced by means of a meaningful close-up early in the film, contextualises some of the events we see unfold, and for once, a film uses the voice-over the way it should be used: he says enough so that we can understand the situation better and everything he says is immediately relevant, and the filmmakers only use his voice to communicate summaries rather than long-winded reflections, as is so often the case in the cinema.

After the shocking opening scene, it takes Nasri a mere sixty seconds to summarise the build-up to the event, which makes it appear that revenge is alive and well in the world of the film and one death is not avenged by another death. Rather, there will be blood to spill for years to come as an entire family might see its members taken out as revenge. All of this information is presented to us by means of a very effective fast-paced sequence of events that borrows from Fernando Meirelles’s City of God.

The film is about money and the lengths individuals will go to in order to ensure their safety and survival, and the film’s intelligent screenplay gradually reveals the extensive network of characters who all create a kind of butterfly effect in the neighbourhood of Ajami: the actions of one character could have far-reaching consequences for many other people. In this film, a boy is shot by Nasri’s father. Nasri’s father is shot in return, but not killed. Nasri’s brother, Omar, becomes the next target of this revenge killing, but when a local judge decrees that Omar pay 38,000 Jordanian dinars (about $53,000) in damages within 45 days, he realises that he will have to get hold of the money in a way that cannot be legal.

His need to get hold of a large sum of money is shared by another young man, Malek, who is from the Palestinian territories and works illegally in the restaurant of a man called Abu Elias. Malek’s mother needs a bone marrow transplant and he takes it upon himself to find the money needed to take care of her.

In the meantime, Omar has fallen in love with Hadir, the daughter of Abu Elias, but since Omar is Muslim and Hadir is a Christian, their relationship has to be a secret.

These details all create a very rich tapestry of characters and intentions, and it is remarkable to see how we change our minds about events as the focus slowly shifts from one group of characters to another. The characters are acting according to their needs and while they try to maintain a level head in the process, coincidence, love, and many other factors play a role, as they do in life, to complicate an already chaotic state of affairs.

Directors Copti and Shani have succeeded in producing a genuinely sincere representation of the complexities of life in Israel and filled it with characters who are accessible to (though never simplified for) audiences around the world.

Silent Light (2007)

André Crous

Mexico
4*

Director:
Carlos Reygadas
Screenwriter:
Carlos Reygadas
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabé

Running time: 127 minutes

Original title: Stellet licht
Alternative title: Luz silenciosa

It is not only light that is silent in Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’s third film: the characters’ world seems to be in perpetual stasis, though we rarely get the sense that they are frustrated with their quiet way of life. It is refreshing to see a heavily faith-based community presented in a way that makes them appear completely understanding and accepting of human nature, and it is this aspect that raises the film above similar other projects dealing with the same dramatic thread.

The three main characters are Johan, his wife Esther, and Johan’s mistress Marianne, who all form part of a small Mennonite community in Mexico, and almost all the dialogue is in Plautdietsch – a mixture between Dutch and German, with a pronunciation that made me think of Danish. Esther knows about Marianne, because Johan has told her about his mistress from the very start. We discover this important piece of information when Johan confesses to his father, the local preacher, about the affair, and the handful of scenes that precede their conversation is filled with tender moments of interaction between Johan and Esther that make it clear there is love and affection but not without some unknown sadness.

When discussing this film, audiences will focus on the rhythm of the film and the second to last scene, which is very reminiscent of the famous climax in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, though Reygadas refuses to provide a simple “miracle” and instead his film ends on a suitably ambiguous note. The rhythm of the film is slow without being overbearing, and while the camera certainly takes its time recording what seems to be the minutiae of everyday life in the community, the frames are not void of action, and the many actions that do cross the screen are all of great importance to the characters. Perhaps it was not necessary to record a very long take of Johan driving, in which the camera first shows us the road in front of the car, and then Johan at the wheel, but the tedium of this particular scene early in the film quickly dissipates.

The honesty of the main character is admirable and so is the complete lack of judgment of his affair in this tiny community – an affair that ultimately (at least, indirectly) leads to a tragedy. Distinctions between good and bad may only be made by the viewer, for the film does not venture into such territory of clear-cut oppositions, and the drama that does exist is the result of the viewer’s projections and expectations based on the material that is given to us in a very straightforward manner that is unembellished. The film also uses non-professional actors to create a world that is plain yet far from simple.

Silent Light opens and closes with impressive shots that seem to bring cosmic significance to the film, and the sustained lens flares during a romantic scene on a hill also make visible the presence of light in the characters’ lives. The amazing state of grace in which these characters exist is beautiful to behold and a far cry from the usual dramatic tension that results from actions, reactions and tension between polar opposites. The film seems to relate an optimism about forgiveness, but it is important to note the central issue that is the internal struggle of all three main characters and how they deal with it. While Silent Light is entirely divested of extradiegetic music, it does contain a very touching moment in a van when Johan and his children watch Jacques Brel on television performing “Les Bonbons”, a song whose lyrics vaguely mirror Johan’s love triangle.

Carlos Reygadas has made a very special film that illuminates the isolated community of the Mennonites in Mexico and while one might argue that the story is too small for a two-hour film, the pace of the film is as steady and as firm as the flow of the characters’ lives and these lives end up unexpectedly moving our emotions.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)

André Crous

Japan/United Kingdom
4*

Director: 
Nagisa Ôshima
Screenwriters: 
Nagisa Ôshima
Paul Mayersberg
Director of Photography:
Toichiro Narushima

Running time: 118 minutes

Original title: 戦場のメリークリスマス
Transliterated title: Senjō no merīkurisumasu

“War makes friendship among men stronger“, says Lt. Colonel Lawrence to Sergeant Hara of the Imperial Japanese Army. Of course, it does. But Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence examines the consequences of such intimacy between soldiers a bit more closely than most other films, with the exception of Robert Altman’s masterful Streamers, which was released the same year. This “intimacy between soldiers” obviously implies some level of attraction, and the film’s very first scene makes it clear what the two camps, namely the British and the Japanese, make of such behaviour.

This film, by the Japanese director Nagisa Ôshima, is set during the Second World War on the island of Java, while it was under Japanese control. Allied troops, mostly British soldiers, are held captive by the Japanese forces, and while the scenes under the hot sun, among the palm trees, showing British soldiers listening to a Japanese captain who follows orders rather than reason, might look familiar, any comparison with Bridge on the River Kwai would be very superficial indeed. Ôshima’s film starts with a scene that immediately puts the Japanese and British views on homosexual attraction front and centre. When it is discovered that Kanemoto, a Korean soldier. has been committing “improper” acts with a Dutch soldier, the Japanese Sergeant Hara at first decides to execute Kanemoto, lest his shameful acts be made public. But moments before the sword falls, the commanding officer, Captain Yonoi, arrives on the scene to stop the overzealous Sergeant.

Yonoi seems to be a rather complicated individual. The filmmaker introduces him as a slightly effeminate character, approaching the would-be execution in a white robe and sandals; he also seems to be wearing eyeliner, but his fellow soldiers seem not to take any notice. He delays the execution and is called up to Batavia where he participates in a military trial for a captured British soldier called Celliers, played by David Bowie. At this point, during Celliers’s appearance in court, we get the most visible indication that Yonoi is fascinated – perhaps even enchanted – by the blond Brit: he can’t take his eyes off him.

While the charges against Celliers are read out loud, the viewer’s attention is rapt by the very slow zoom in, across the courtroom, on Yonoi’s face, staring at Celliers. When he is finally given the opportunity to speak, he comes to Celliers’s defence and proposes that the Brit be taken as a prisoner of war, rather than executed.

After Celliers arrives at the camp and Yonoi discovers that he used to serve with Lawrence, he questions the latter about him in a very innocent way that nonetheless reveals his interest to us and to Lawrence, who is very bemused by the captain’s almost childlike fascination and the fact that he doesn’t know how to interpret his own feelings. While Celliers notices Yonoi’s eyes on him and takes advantage of the special treatment he consequently receives from the Japanese commander, he is not interested in Yonoi, except as a means of redeeming himself. The viewer is made aware of the need for redemption during two significant incidents that occur as flashbacks – the first takes place years earlier when Celliers protects his younger brother by being beaten up in his place, and the second occurs years later when Celliers does not protect his brother when he is bullied at school.

Celliers’s eventual attempt at redemption demonstrates great cunning on the parts of both Celliers and the director, for it clearly links a number of different events into a solid final moment of courage. Celliers realises that, if violence is not an effective tactic of resistance, the opposite might just be worth trying out, and in the process he not only stands up against his oppressors, but he frees himself from the shackles of the past. The scene is short, simple, and stripped to its bare essentials, yet surprisingly complex, given the resolution of two issues effected in a single leap.

Yonoi shows great promise for dramatic intrigue in the first half, which moves along rapidly once the captain lays his eyes on Celliers in court, and it is very interesting to read the looks of the other Japanese soldiers, who fear that their captain has been bewitched by an evil spirit – the only explanation for the sudden change in his behaviour. However, the second half does not deliver on the promise of the first half but rather shifts the focus to the title character, John Lawrence, who serves as mediator between the Japanese and British language and culture, and Sergeant Hara, whose initial eagerness to kill changes over time and reveals a more human character than we might have expected.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence takes on an interesting subject, but while David Bowie’s character, Jack Celliers, is carefully drawn, I did not find the same kind of depth in either John Lawrence or Hara, though this does not mute their likeability in any way. Nagisa Ôshima focuses on the human dramas of four men, and while the two groupings do not provoke the same level of emotion, the characters are all very firmly established and carry the film squarely (and firmly) on their shoulders.

Stalker (1979)

André Crous

USSR
4*

Director:
Andrei Tarkovsky
Screenwriters:
Arkadi Strugatsky,
Boris Strugatsky
Director of Photography:
Alexander Knyazhinsky

Running time: 163 minutes

Original title: Сталкер

Andrei Tarkovsky has a reputation for making films that are slow. This reputation is not entirely warranted, except for that eternal take inside the empty swimming pool in Nostalghia. His films usually have an average shot length no longer than 60 or 70 seconds, and his debut, Ivan’s Childhood gallops along at a refreshing pace. Now, compare that number to the films of someone like Béla Tarr, and you’ll see what “slow cinema” really means. Stalker is the second Tarkovsky film that I’ve watched in a week – the other being Solaris – and what struck me at the beginning of Solaris, and all the way through Stalker, was the number of monologues and dialogue in both. These minutes of speech, though necessary to sketch the characters in real-world terms, constitute my major gripe against both; however, they remain my favourite films from this extraordinary director.

Stalker is an incredibly simple story set in a film that constantly generates different perspectives on the theme of religion, and Christianity in particular. The “Stalker” is a man who guides anybody with enough money to a house deep within the forbidden area called “The Zone”, where it is alleged that their innermost wish will come true. In this story, the Stalker leads two anonymous men – a Writer and a Scientist – to the “Room” that is their Jinn. However, the Stalker never sees anybody again after their encounter with the Room, and he has never tried it himself. All of this can be taken as a metaphor for Heaven, from which no one has ever returned but whose existence, according to those who believe the guide, in the form of a preacher, cannot be denied. But Tarkovsky’s film never pivots to any particular interpretation of events and remains wholly ambiguous from beginning to end. While the mystical nature of the Zone may just be hogwash, the events may easily be interpreted, by those who believe the words of the Stalker, as proof of the Zone’s sentience.

The Zone is one of the most beautiful areas ever conceived on film. The different shades of green, the water, the fog and the serenity of the silence make for an atmosphere that can only be described as heavenly. At the same time, however, the characters are mostly enclosed by frames – window frames, door frames, walls – and seem to be trapped even while they should feel completely liberated. One very impressive use of this technique occurs during a scene where the characters wait in a room where a telephone suddenly starts to ring – a moment that startles because the landscape around the building is littered with broken telephone poles and power lines. Tarkovsky, by means of sound and image, suggests a boundless complexity in his characters; however, as I mentioned above, it is unfortunate that a few very long speeches contribute to this complexity, but even so, they are relatively effective.

There are a few obvious religious references, such as the narrated Biblical story of Jesus’ meeting with two men shortly after his death without being recognised by either of them. It is the voice of the Stalker that relates the story to us, but the story is changed slightly: the men don’t have names either. The choir’s rendition of “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony also ends the film on a beautifully spiritual note.

While the film deals with hope, desire, dreams and religion, it has been composed in a way that eludes definitive interpretation but is easily accessible and while a few scenes do drag on a bit, in particular, the climactic scene at the Room, as well as another silly scene in a room full of small sand dunes, the film overall is an absolute joy. The film’s cinematography is pitch-perfect and the entire film is on the level of some of the other very moving moments of beauty in Tarkovsky’s films, such as the frozen lake in Solaris and the final shot of The Sacrifice.

A Reasonable Man (1999)

André Crous

South Africa
4*

Director:
Gavin Hood
Screenwriter:
Gavin Hood
Director of Photography:
Buster Reynolds

Running time: 101 minutes

The South African A Reasonable Man is a carefully executed investigation into the importance of tribal or traditional beliefs in a country that sees itself as Western-oriented. The screenplay takes great care to handle the material sensibly, demonstrating the significance of the past in the present, and highlighting the fact that non-Western beliefs should not be dismissed out of hand, for they too have a role to play, however “unreasonable” their basis might be in the eyes of the law.

The film opens in Angola in 1988, during the final years of the South African Border War. South African soldiers arrive in a tiny village where they find nothing but abandoned houses. The squad separates and a young Sean Raine goes to hide in one of these houses. When a closet door creaks, the tense Raine unloads his gun on the flimsy plywood door. What tumbles out of the closet will haunt him for a long time.

Ten years later, having recently returned to South Africa after spending a decade abroad with his wife, Raine meets a young cowherd named Sipho in a village in the Eastern part of the country known as Kwazulu-Natal. Sipho is found with a bloody hatchet in his hands, while a woman clutches a one-year-old baby in her arms, its head split open. Sipho swears that he was only trying to kill the “Tikoloshe” (or “Tokoloshe”, as I know it), an evil spirit, and not the baby. Luckily, Raine is a lawyer, and because of his experience in Angola, he decides to give the boy a chance and chooses to represent him in court.

But “Tikoloshe” is not a word that anybody takes kindly to – except Sipho and a witch doctor (or “sangoma”) who would help rid Sean Raine of his demons from the past – and it seems unlikely that the boy, who admits to having swung the hatchet, would be judged innocent. Hearing this case is Judge Wendon, whose initial surprise at Raine’s refusal to let his client plead insanity defence slowly morphs into a more accommodating view of the young lawyer. Starring as Judge Wendon is Nigel Hawthorne, who brings a very welcome combination of compassion, wit and judicial solemnity to the role.

At the centre of the film, however, is director Gavin Hood himself, who is cast as Sean Raine, a man whose big clean-shaven face is innocent yet shimmers with conviction and perseverance. The film is as much about Raine’s personal story as the criminal proceeding, for he feels that he would finally be freed from this “snake deep inside” if he manages to assure Sipho’s acquittal.

Now, it is made clear that Sipho took a hatchet and struck a baby in such a way that the baby was killed. Sipho believed that it was the Tikoloshe, but the steadfastness of one’s beliefs has nothing to do with the law, as Judge Wendon makes very clear in his comparison of Sipho’s beliefs with those of mass murderers and historical figures such as Hitler and Stalin.

Hood’s screenplay flows very well, although its desire not only to meet the audience more than halfway but to spell everything out in overly informative sentences sometimes seems quite contrived. Sipho’s character has to be a bit of an enigma in order for the film to exist, but the lack of interaction between him and Raine, as well as the complete absence of the mother of the murdered baby, left me wondering whether Hood was not too interested in his own character.

The film makes an interesting analogy between Christian and tribal beliefs, including the ever-popular metaphor of Christ’s blood and body, and in this regard, Hood is successful in introducing his audience to customs that might be foreign to them. Hood’s choice to make the state prosecutor a black advocate and himself, a white man, the representative for the defence of tribal beliefs, is very interesting and provides this film with a much richer texture than it would have had otherwise.

The implications of an imbalance, in the eyes of the law, between Western and non-Western morality is hammered home a bit too forcefully, but in the end, the film survives its examination of social and religious customs and certainly provides ample material for discussion afterwards. The courthouse is in Pietermaritzburg, in South Africa, a town whose licence plate designation is NP. Perhaps this is a coincidence. But, considering the film’s attention to detail, perhaps it isn’t.

No Man’s Land (2001)

André Crous

Bosnia and Herzegovina
5*

Director:
Danis Tanović
Screenwriter: 
Danis Tanović
Director of Photography: 
Walther van den Ende

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Ničija zemlja

No Man’s Land is a small yet devastating film about two soldiers from opposing sides stuck in a trench on the battlefield (no man’s land), somewhere near Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The central action of the film takes place over the course of a single day, and in these few hours of sunlight, we get a very human take on the story of war and especially the lives affected by it.

One night, under thick fog, a group of Bosniaks forming a relief squad are led to their base, but the guide gets lost and they end up falling asleep. At daybreak, they discover that they are sitting ducks and when the Serb forces arrive in their tanks, the Bosniaks have to run for cover. Čiki (Branko Đurić), who wears a Rolling Stones “Tongue and Lip” T-shirt all the way through the film, initially appears to be the only one to survive, and he ends up in a trench halfway between the Bosniak and the Serb camps – in no man’s land.

When two of the Serbs are sent to the trench to make sure that all the Bosniaks had been killed, one is killed by Čiki and the other, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), a young inexperienced soldier, is injured. Nino and Čiki, both speaking the same language, Serbo-Croatian, have a heated discussion about the origin and the development of the war, and Čiki, his gun pointed straight at Nino, finally has to agree that the Serbs started all the madness. Many such admissions are made under duress, and Čiki doesn’t fail to remind Nino who has the gun.

But they are both stuck in the trench together for two reasons: Neither of them can be sure that the other side will respect a cease-fire if they are rescued or return to camp; and a bouncing bomb had been placed under a Bosniak soldier, who turns out not to have been dead, and unless a deminer saves the soldier, Ćera, his friend Čiki insists that they all stay in the trench. Since he has the gun, there is no use arguing.

Tanović’s script is light on action but heavy on tension and very incisive dialogue that clearly captures the human face of the drama of warfare. These are two people who often don’t know what to do next, but when one of them sees an opportunity to establish power over the other, he goes for it. Caught in the middle is Ćera, who can’t move for fear of setting off the bomb underneath him and blowing them all to pieces.

When UNPROFOR (the United Nations Protection Force) is called in to mediate and resolve the situation, we realise very quickly that they are out of their depth, somewhat willingly, and refuse to get involved because they are in Bosnia strictly for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid. A French sergeant, Marchand (played by Georges Siatidis, who is fascinating in this role), is clearly frustrated by his superiors’ lack of compassion but manages to secure media exposure (and pressure on UNPROFOR), when he meets Jane Livingstone, a news correspondent out in the field.

Livingstone’s overly dramatic character, and her news broadcasts, are perhaps the only weak spot in the film and suffers from the film’s small budget, but her purpose is clear: Her presence at the scene compels the UN to protect lives instead of merely sustaining them, but she will also go to great lengths to interrogate all the parties implicated in the story without really grasping anybody’s point of view. From the outside, the whole setup seems like internal madness, but the subtitles provide the viewer with a very fine understanding of the different reasons for the soldiers’ actions.

The film shows the inadequacy of the UN and especially UNPROFOR during the war. This is understandable, given the international forces’ infamous timidity when faced with the situation at Srebrenica in 1995, which they allowed to happen because of such administrative restrictions as a mission of non-involvement.

No Man’s Land advances in a way that gives us a sickening feeling of inevitability, and a situation that is grim because we see people doing things they know to be wrong, but which they must do to save face or to obey the orders of their callous superiors. The humiliating effects of these decisions are visible in the close-ups of Ćera’s face. The film contains almost no extradiegetic music and makes important points in a subtle way, by means of a photo in someone’s hand or a story about a girl in Banja Luka whom both Nino and Čiki had known.

Tanović is a Bosniak himself, but his film treats the two sides with equal respect and is certainly one of the most poignant war films of our time. A comment by one of the men in the relief squad at the beginning of the film (“A pessimist thinks that things can’t get worse; an optimist knows that they can”) becomes more and more relevant to the situation the men find themselves in. These are not heroes: They are men caught in a war, and they don’t want to die. No Man’s Land‘s acknowledgement of this basic truth makes the film stand out from the crowd.