Countries

Duck Season (2004)

André Crous

Mexico
4*

Director:
Fernando Eimbcke
Screenwriters: 
Fernando Eimbcke
Paula Markovitch
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabe
Running time: 85 minutes

Original Title: Temporada de patos

When we, the viewers, spend an hour and a half in the company of a very small group of characters (four, to be precise) in one location, then they better be likeable. Fortunately, Duck Season does not disappoint.

One Sunday, two young teenage boys, Juan Pablo (“Moko”) and Mario (“Flama”), both 13 or 14 years old, spend the day at Flama’s mother’s flat, while she is out doing her chores. They drink Coke, eat chips and play video games. Then, 16-year-old Rita from next-door arrives to use their oven. They don’t pay much attention to her. Even when the power goes out, they prefer to sit in silence in front of the TV, rather than strike up a conversation. They order pizza, which leads to an oddly thrilling sequence in which the pizza delivery guy tries to outrun the clock. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t (although the soundtrack is clear on this point), and this uncertainty leads to a showdown between him and the boys.

By this stage, we’re only 30 minutes into the film, but you’ll have noticed that quite a lot actually happens, in spite of the many, many moments of silence, at least initially, in which the characters are visibly bored and just waiting for time to pass, for things to become less awkward.

Director Fernando Eimbcke demonstrates real skill in finding many different positions to place his camera: inside cupboards, inside the refrigerator, inside the oven – at one point, the camera even takes the place of an important painting in the living room. The film, shot entirely in black and white, on what must have been a shoestring budget, shows what can be accomplished when the characters are interesting and the story is well-developed.

The only deviation from the apartment setting (apart from the quirky sequence, mentioned above, in which Ulises, the pizza delivery man, races to deliver the pizza on time) is a flashback to a dog pound, which feels completely out of place. Also, the film tends to cheat from time to time by using the cuts, occurring between the scenes that mostly take place in the living room and the kitchen, as bridges across time, and these ellipses actually obscure important events that occur offscreen.

The self-confident Rita provides plenty of material to work with, but it is the young Moko, played by actor Diego Cataño, who impresses the most with his splendid performance, hinting at awkwardness and secrecy in his outer appearance of mere shyness, and yet these traces are never overstated or overplayed.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

André Crous

Japan/USA
4.5*

Director:
Paul Schrader
Screenwriters: 
Paul Schrader
Leonard Schrader
Chieko Schrader
Director of Photography: 
John Bailey

Running time: 115 minutes

An extraordinary film about an artist’s desire for political change brought about by his art. The multidimensional way in which the tale presented to us is vibrant but by no means attempts to give a complete picture of the man.

The story is played out in three distinct parts that are woven together throughout the film: present (1970), in colour; past (pre-1970), in black and white; imaginary, in very bright colours. Of course, it is no coincidence that the present and the imaginary are both shown in colour, and by the time the film reaches its climax, the pure expression of Mishima’s ideal that art and action somehow be fused is visualised magnificently onscreen, accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, without whom this film would not have had the same energy.

The film is based on the real-life individual, Yukio Mishima, a writer, director, actor and admirer of the samurai traditions. The content of his own novels forms the backdrops for the episodes in the film. These episodes – the four chapters of the film’s title – are labelled as “Beauty”, “Art”, “Action” and “Harmony of Pen and Sword”.

The different novels on which the film draws, and whose visual representations in the film are nothing short of breathtaking, are The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses. Naturally, the omission of such a novel in the final part of the film implies that the episode itself, directed by Mishima, is another kind of novel, although he seems to achieve in real life what had eluded him in his fiction: the fusion of words and action.

Director Paul Schrader’s treatment of Mishima’s sexuality does not aim for sensationalism; on the contrary, it provides one of many points of coherence between the different storylines, and the storylines do sometimes overlap, in the manner of the opening credits sequence of Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (whose soundtrack was also composed by Philip Glass).

While director Paul Schrader took great pains to portray this Japanese story with Japanese actors, performing in Japanese, he opted for an English voice-over because he felt the amount of subtitles would otherwise be unbearable for the viewer. Perhaps this is true, but his solution to the problem – an American voice-over whose speaker pretends to be Mishima – damages the film’s otherwise impeccable handling of the material.

The music, as much a contributing factor as Schrader’s direction, enthuses the viewer even when the thread of the present – and its inevitable conclusion (seppuku, or harakiri: suicide by disembowelment) – might have provoked a very different reaction. And in those closing moments, when the different stories finally culminate, the viewer will recognise that Schrader has a masterful grip on the material and that the transcendent power his main character speaks of during the film is powerfully evoked.

The Witness (1969)

André Crous

Hungary
4*

Director:
Péter Bacsó
Screenwriters: 
Péter Bacsó
János Újhegyić
Director of Photography:
János Zsombolyai

Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: A tanú

József Pelikán, by his own admission, is “ideologically ill-defined”, in spite of his affiliation with the Communist Party; he is a continuous victim of circumstance. All he really cares about is the dyke next to his house, where he does his best to keep the gophers from burrowing and destroying this wall that protects him and his family against the slowly rising level of water. And rise it does, in the end providing the inevitable tragedy in this tragicomedy.

In one of the film’s opening scenes (incidentally, one of the only instances when Pelikán deliberately defies the law of the land), he slaughters a pig in the basement while his children, standing on the trapdoor above, sing at the top of their lungs. Such an activity – the killing, not the singing – is illegal under law, and soon enough, by way of more misunderstandings, Pelikán is arrested and thrown in jail.

Very quickly, the film’s structure becomes a chain of predictable causality: He is thrown in jail, let out almost immediately, given a job by a Party senior, he fails to respect someone high up and is thrown in jail again. But the situations themselves are comedic gems. Pelikán is appointed as director of a swimming pool, director of an amusement park and director of an orange research institute but fails to impress.

However, the Orange Research Institute provides one of the funniest banners in the film, visible during a ceremony supposed to celebrate the success of the Hungarian Orange: “Forward with the Hungarian Orange!”

This film is one of those Communist-era comedies that clearly poke fun at the regime and still astound by virtue of having been made in such a political climate in the first place. In particular, I’m thinking of a Polish film called Miś, by Stanisław Bareja. The Witness is less overtly laughable, but there is a lot to laugh at, and this laughter is often derived from the hilarious absurdity of the main character’s ignorance of and disregard for the power structures.

A Witness is a grand farce, and the one character’s recurring reminder that “life is not a whipped-cream cake” might not be as poetic or optimistic as Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, but it makes clear what the characters should not be expecting.

The use of communist slogans in the film is striking and comical and can still be easily comprehended by a contemporary audience. Also, there is no difficulty in understanding the subtext of the episode about the Hungarian oranges. The last part of the story is handled well and contains one or two interesting surprises, which the episodic nature of the film up to that point had sought to conceal.

Death in Venice (1971)

André Crous

Italy
2*

Director:
Luchino Visconti
Screenwriters:
Luchino Visconti
Nicola Badalucco
Director of Photography:
Pasqualino De Santis

Running time: 130 minutes

Some films don’t age well. It’s usually not a question of the film’s content but rather of its presentation. Death in Venice, in which an artist spends all his time and energy stalking a young boy whom he considers to be the embodiment of beauty, lacks the content to sustain its more than two-hour running time and uses an excessive amount of zooms to animate the content that is deteriorating as steadily as its decrepit central character.

Dirk Bogarde plays Gustav von Aschenbach (allegedly, this character is loosely based on Gustav Mahler), a musician who goes to Venice in order to recuperate after a fainting spell. At the Grand Hôtel des Bains, where he stays for the duration of his trip, he notices a young Polish boy, Tadzio, played by the Swedish actor Björn Andrésen. Tadzio is enigmatic and stands out from the crowd not because of his looks, but because the director chooses to bathe him in light wherever he goes.

I thought the androgynous Tadzio was rather bland, and his ridiculous haircut is an embarrassment. This teenager notices Aschenbach’s gaze and delights in the attention, often meeting his gaze and holding it, smiling quizzically at the older man who is always hovering around him but too reserved to introduce himself. Aschenbach chooses to keep his distance, but I found his passivity very frustrating: Ultimately, the character seems to choose inaction over action. He chooses to drool and does not interact with young Tadzio. Empathy becomes more and more difficult, if not impossible because the character is so pathetic.

Aschenbach’s interest in Tadzio is not unwanted by the young boy. This point could have been made with some subtlety and developed in an interesting way, but the film contains scene after scene in which Aschenbach leers at Tadzio while Tadzio smiles back in silence. Not much else happens. Oh, right, there is the cholera epidemic, which slowly grabs hold of the city and squeezes the life out of its victims, in the same way that all my interest in Aschenbach’s lovelorn existence is squeezed dry. But by that stage, we have long stopped caring.

Almost every scene contains a zoom, and this kind of filmmaking, in spite of Visconti’s pedigree, seems more like a childish fascination with the zoom than a director who has a firm grasp on the medium. Mahler’s music is used sparingly (the only music on the soundtrack), and some scenes, like the two boys wrestling on the beach while Aschenbach watches in horror, are presented without any sound – a very prudent move.

However, the film itself is plodding, to say the least, and Aschenbach’s character might as well have been a zombie. The flashbacks are even worse than the scenes set in the present: Abstract discussions of art and beauty pepper the storyline in the past and provide a very theoretical framework for the character. The setting, pre-WWI Venice, is admirably recreated, and the final shot of Tadzio on the beach is magnificent, but for the most part Death in Venice is underdeveloped and completely overrated.

The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006)

André Crous

The Way I Spent the End of the WorldRomania
3.5*

Director:
Cătălin Mitulescu
Screenwriters: 
Cătălin Mitulescu
Andreea Valean
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii

By the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decades-long reign, the ruthless Romanian dictator who had inspired fear in his people was a laughing stock, and while most people showed reverence to him in public, he was the object of ridicule in private.

Director Cătălin Mitulescu’s debut film, one of the gems of the Romanian New Wave, gives us a glimpse of life under the bereted leader who, in a hilarious opening scene, snatches a large block of cheese from a schoolboy because he hasn’t teethed yet. This boy, Lali (short for Lalalilu), should have been the focus of the film. If this were the case, this could easily have been one of the finest films of the Romanian New Wave. The boy is cute and curious with a natural acting ability and none of the contrivances of so many performances by child actors.

But we don’t get him in the lead. Instead, what we are left with is a very patchy storyline involving Eva, Lali’s older sister, who in her final year of high school has to choose between Alex, the slightly rebellious but well-intentioned son of a high-ranking Communist Party official, and Andrei, a boy whose ingenuity makes up for his looks. In one of the best scenes of the film, Alex knocks over a bust of Ceaușescu at his and Eva’s school; when they are both discovered at the scene of the crime, they are expelled and sent to a technical school outside the city.

There are interesting bits of narrative here and there – in particular, the plan hatched by Andrei to escape with Eva across the Danube, and their preparations for this adventure – but often the motivations are not well established, and when it transpires that Andrei and Eva are not on the same page when they find themselves halfway across the river in the middle of the night, the change of heart is left unexplained.

The film offers a nice sketch of the last year of Ceaușescan Romania, where regular power cuts and a general lack of rations are the order of the day, and the political situation is not the focus of the film. Fair enough. But Eva’s character arc is difficult to grasp, while her brother Lali’s adventurous spirit (he even has a plan to assassinate the country’s leader, but his plans fall apart when the revolution arrives) makes for arresting viewing but gets too little coverage. I would have liked a more coherent storyline for Eva, but given he is a first-time director, Mitulescu has staged his film very competently.

Cabaret Balkan (1998)

André Crous

Serbia
3.5*

Director:
Goran Paskaljević
Screenwriters: 
Dejan Dukovski
Goran Paskaljević
Filip David
Zoran Andrić
Director of Photography:
Milan Spasić

Running time: 99 minutes

Original title: Bure baruta

I’ve seen a few movies from the Balkans that deal with the violent, volatile period of the 1990s: among others, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Danis Tanović’s majestic No Man’s Land.

However, while Tanović’s film focused on a singular atrocity committed in the midst of (media, political and social) madness, Cabaret Balkan strives to present Belgrade as hell and the Danube as a river of brimstone.

The film consists of many seemingly unrelated vignettes, all containing some kind of suffering: People are beaten up, killed or humiliated, and the one common thread that does run through the film is fear, on the part of the viewer and very often on the part of at least one character in every scene. The scenes are not solidly connected, and while some of the gaps were exasperating, one must not expect every film of this sort to be presented as a neatly packaged product of hyperlink cinema (in the same vein as Magnolia, Syriana and Short Cuts). This film is more like Nashville, but without the celebrities and with much greater suffering.

One character calls Belgrade the haemorrhoids of the world’s ass, and the film makes it easy to see why. All the scenes take place during one night in the capital, but unexpectedly (and as a result, depressingly), there is nothing special about this night: It is just another night in Belgrade, and these are the kinds of things that happen; these are the kinds of things that people do to each other. It is a city fraught with tension, always already on the verge of combustion.

The characters are not well introduced, and I struggled to remember even three names of characters in the film, but separately, the scenes themselves work very well – especially when the director takes his time to really delve into the dementia of the city. My favourite scene takes place inside a bus: A young man, frustrated by the system and the fact that people have to wait while the bus driver drinks coffee, takes the passengers hostage with a mixture of threats and playful rebellion. Another impressive scene features a confrontation between a retired, handicapped policeman and the young man, a taxi driver, who had beaten him up to a pulp a few months earlier. The fact that this taxi driver is one of the most likeable characters in the film demonstrates what kind of a city this is.

Not being East European myself, I couldn’t distinguish between the languages and, therefore, the different ethnicities, which would be pivotal to an understanding of the social dynamics in this part of the world. There were brief mentions of Bosnian and Macedonian culture or sense humour, but I never knew which was which, or when such individuals were in scenes with the local Serbs.

The film works because we know it is Belgrade, but even if we didn’t, the film would still pack a punch with its collection of hellish episodes (always brutal but never alienating) set in an unstable environment where the concepts of law and order are no longer part of the city’s make-up. It is sometimes painful to watch, but it will stay with you.

The Man Who Copied (2003)

André Crous

Brazil
3.5*

Director:
Jorge Furtado
Screenwriter:
Jorge Furtado
Director of Photography:
Alex Sernambi

Running time: 125 minutes

Original title: O homem que copiava

André is a photocopier operator, barely out of his teens, who falls in love with a girl living with her father in the housing block on the other side of the street. He is also a single child living with a single parent – his mother, who spends her evenings in front of the television before shuffling off to bed.

I liked André, and it’s not just because we share a name. He seems genuine, naïve and in love. From time to time, he realises that his prospects don’t seem all that good, but he glimpses bits and pieces of other lives – the lives of the people who come into the shop to have their work photocopied – and wants to work towards a life that provides him with greater opportunities, including the girl, Sylvia.

André makes some impressive illustrations, which we get to see in a handful of animated sequences. But while the film’s first half pulls us in with the main character’s awkward attempts at courtship, the second half loses nearly all credibility with an avalanche of coincidences and a few deaths that easily eliminate the complications resulting from these coincidences.

I wanted to like the film. In the role of André, actor Lázaro Ramos gives a steady performance as a young guy who wants to grow up and leave his impoverished surroundings behind. Although he is much better off than the characters of, say, City of God, he lives with his mother, and his job as a photocopier doesn’t exactly charm the ladies he meets at the nightclub. But the second half, while competently shot and executed, is lazy in its story development and leaves the audience feeling cheated.

Many viewers might find the final reel, in which a secret is revealed that goes a long way towards explaining Sylvia’s tolerance of André’s advances (especially in the early stages when he seems to be stalking her), a bit too romantic at such a late stage of the plot. But while the film is hurt by the incredible sequence of events in its second half, the last 10 minutes are more or less believable and, more importantly, they do represent a state of affairs we want to believe.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Lisa Cholodenko
Screenwriters:
Lisa Cholodenko
Stuart Blumberg
Director of Photography:
Igor Jadue-Lillo

Running time: 104 minutes

The other night, I watched an episode from the fourth season of the television series Queer as Folk. The lesbian couple, Lindsey and Melanie, had been together for many years and ont he verge of having their second biological child. Unexpectedly, an arrogant but brilliant chauvinist artist arrives and philanders his way into Lindsey’s panties – Lindsey clearly enjoys the sex but doesn’t see herself as any less of a lesbian. Nonetheless, this kind of sex puts a tense question mark above her sexuality.

There is a similar dilemma at the heart of the drama in The Kids Are All Right, a film by Lisa Cholodenko, who openly self-identifies as a lesbian. I mention her sexuality, because I think I would have struggled to reconcile the events of the film with my idea of realistic character development had anyone but a lesbian director made the film. Whether the viewer is gay or straight, the problem of strict definitions regarding human sexuality is still a biggy and very often, we will be confronted with situations we have absolutely no experience with, either in real life or in the lives we see on screen.

Paul, the “other man” in this film, is no random sleazy artist – he is the two children’s biological father and has never had contact with anyone in this family until the start of the film. He is single and likes to sleep around, with his employees and with other people he meets at his restaurant. He has a rebellious streak and when his children decide to contact him, he jumps at the opportunity to see what life might have been like in some other realm of possibility.

Obviously, he never would have been a part of this family. He is the father of two children, technically a step-brother and a step-sister, whose mothers are their parents. But he tries to be a part and successfully manages to get Jules, who is losing faith that her wife Nic still loves her, into bed.

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are delightful as the mothers of two children who simply wanted to meet their dad because they had the means to track him down. But it is Annette Bening in particular who shines as Nic, Jules’s tough-skinned but not insensitive partner, and I think this representation of an unconventional family with many problems, not unlike any other family, is necessary and convincing for the most part.

However, I take issue with the representation of lesbian fornication. Granted, I know nothing about it, but just as I do not choose to watch girl-on-girl pornography, I can’t really comprehend the thinking behind Nic and Jules’s decision to watch gay porn while having sex. Now, perhaps it problematises sexuality right from the get-go and that is probably the justification, but it becomes a plot point that their children address but neither they nor we get any satisfactory explanation for this beyond the “fluidity of sexuality” or something equally vague.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Vilmos Zsigmond

Running time: 98 minutes

Another year, another film from the neurotic New Yorker. The extraordinarily prolific Woody Allen is back in London, after the enjoyable but forgettable interlude that was Whatever Works. “Enjoyable but forgettable” seems to be a very appropriate way to qualify his recent films. In fact, the narrator of his most recent film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, admits that the story is all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. And indeed it is.

As usual, the cast is a veritable smorgasbord of talent: Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Gemma Jones are all delightful to watch. And Lucy Punch, representing a cross-section of the cheaper side of East London, is as fantastic as her character is grating.

Having recently separated, Alfie and Helena (Hopkins and Jones) go their own ways: Alfie ends up marrying a prostitute (Punch), while Helena blindly follows the advice of a clairvoyant who can’t see beyond Helena’s own desires and her pocketbook. Meanwhile, Sally (Watts), the daughter of Alfie and Helena, starts to work at an art gallery and gradually falls in love with her boss (Banderas), while her husband Roy (Brolin) is struggling to finish his latest novel and regularly sneaks a peek through the rear window at a young woman on the other side of the courtyard.

There are misunderstandings, no lack of lust, and a risky measure of self-delusion on the part of many of the characters, and it is good fun to watch the stew come to a boil. But the stories branch out in every direction and I’ve grown tired of Allen’s jazz soundtrack, which attracts too much attention. Also, it is perhaps a sign of Allen’s auteur sensibility that his films all look the same in spite of having different DoPs on every production, but with a cameraman like Vilmos Zsigmond at the helm, I would have expected a look that is a little more risky. No such luck.

The film is lukewarm at best and while it is a nice temperature for this relaxing 100-minute distraction, it is hardly worth remembering and will be all but forgotten by the time his next film rolls round – which should be any day now.