Countries

Zinneke (2013)

André Crous

A very young boy insists on committing a crime, and his two middle-aged accomplices see the upside to him tagging along in Rémi Allier’s short film, Zinneke.

ZinnekeBelgium
4*

Director:
Rémi Allier
Screenwriter:
Rémi Allier
Directors of Photography:
Kinan Massarani
Erika Meda

Running time: 20 minutes

“In the Brussels dialect, ‘Zinneke’ refers to the small Senne River that flows past the city. People used to throw stray puppies into the river to get rid of them.”

Zinneke’s stray puppy is the nine-year-old Thomas (neither his age nor his name appears in the film itself). The first time we see him, he is sitting alone in the middle of a flea market in Brussels. His gaze is melancholy but curious. His focus is on two men in their late 40s, Pascal and Bruno, hawking their wares. Although it seems they have met before, Thomas’s assertiveness in offering to help them and then, getting into their minivan and even threatening them if they don’t let him join them, catches us off-guard. What is he up to?

Whether he is after money or adventure or a substitute family is unclear, Thomas is undeterred and eventually convinces the guys to let him ride along. Day turns to night, and they arrive at a nondescript row house, where Thomas has to enter through the cellar and open a window for Pascal to climb through. Everything goes as planned, and they get their hands on a few pieces of household art. But then the alarm goes off, and the new friendship is put to the test. Do the experienced thieves stay and get their young accomplice out of trouble despite the risk of arrest?

Pre-teen Nissim Renard excels in the lead role as a boy whose confidence is tinged with melancholy but never veers too far from the centre. He is a model for child actors everywhere seeking to convey characters who are strong but still act their age. Thomas is insistent but doesn’t throw tantrums, and he is curious while never sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.

Initially, this 20-minute short seems to contain a wild mixture of visuals that don’t always fit together. The often rough camerawork and editing during the burglary and the kaleidoscope-like raindrops on the car windows are two prominent examples in this respect. But viewed as an oblique manifestation of Thomas’s own frame of mind – both scared and mesmerised by the experience – this representation is unobtrusive and entirely appropriate.

For all the naturalism of the acting, the effortless switching between French and Flemish and the careful approach to obtain a coherent representation, however, the film doesn’t really allow us to invest emotionally in the drama until the very last moment. Here, Thomas’s domestic situation becomes a little clearer. We also see traces of the beginning of a real friendship between him and Pascal. And yet, this is one of those films whose pieces all seem to be cut from the same cloth: Nothing feels out of place. Everything is tightly bound to each other, largely thanks to the realism of the performances. And when the final credits roll, we ignore the nagging part of our brain that wants to know what comes next, and we soak up the energy from a short film whose director and cast were fully in control of every second.

Cosmopolis (2012)

André Crous

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is an anti-capitalist snooze fest set in the future, whose sheer incompetence earns its director a firm downgrade.

CosmopolisCanada
1.5*

Director:
David Cronenberg
Screenwriter:
David Cronenberg
Director of Photography:
Peter Suschitzky

Running time: 105 minutes

Though billing itself as an apocalyptic vision of the future resulting from capitalist greed, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is a vanity project for him and Twilight star Robert Pattinson. It degrades the director’s brand and contributes diddly-squat to the very topical debate about the battle between the elites of Wall Street and the hoi polloi of Main Street.

The film is recklessly bad. The writing is as vapid as the characters, and the setting – more than two-thirds of the film takes place inside the cork-lined state-of-the-art limousine that transports the main character, 20-something Eric Packer – is not utilised for any purpose other than to alienate us even further. In the process, the film’s potential relevance to our world is completely disregarded.

Whatever possessed Cronenberg to make this film? And to make it in this way? There are so many problems – seemingly a result of total ineptitude, notwithstanding the filmmaker’s résumé – that it is difficult to know where to begin.

The most significant disappointment is probably the time spent with the talking heads inside the youthful Packer’s limousine. Had there been some action or interesting points made by the airheads in the car, or even some tension between them, the viewer might have forgiven the filmmaker for this bland portrayal of the life of a multimillionaire.

The only moment of some interest occurs when Didi (Juliette Binoche), a high-class prostitute, services Packer. Seeing Binoche bob up and down on Pattinson’s crotch is bizarre, but puts a rare smile on our faces. Not just because it is the otherwise classy Binoche doing it, but also because it is one of the few moments in which the characters actually reveal that they might be human after all.

It would be foolish, however, to assume that all the characters are human, as Packer’s wife is very clearly a product in the Stepford line of robotic spouses. Without a sense of humour or even a speck of emotion, she is a complete and utter drone. While it is never clearly stated that she is, in fact, inhuman, this is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn. Perhaps that is a shot in the dark and gives Cosmopolis too much credit, but it deserves to be said that Cronenberg is usually not an idiot.

The film opens with a quotation from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Report from the Besieged City”, in which he observes that “the rat has become the unit of currency”. These words very vividly (and pungently) come to life as the city’s 99 percent, the poverty-stricken populace who live on the other side of the financial chasm dividing them from the 1 percent of financiers, walk around throwing rats at the ruling class.

There is no middle ground between the two classes. Cronenberg, who adapted the screenplay from a book by Don DeLillo, likely thought this fact would generate greater tension and present an easier way for him to get his point across about the current trajectory toward class warfare.

Cosmopolis exceeds our wildest expectations of incompetence. It is a self-involved mess: ideologically inscrutable, narratively tedious and visually catatonic. The characters have long dialogues devoid of sound and fury, signifying less than nothing. Consider for a moment one of these characters who speak to Packer in his cork-lined bubble. Played by Samantha Morton, Vija Kinsky is another emotionless android better known as Packer’s “chief of theory”, And yes, she is as boring as her title makes her sound.

The film doesn’t know how – or doesn’t try – to engage the contemporary, pertinent theme of the Occupy movements, though these are clearly the inspiration for the potential for tension, and ends up squandering an opportunity to present them in a coherent and interesting light.

Cosmopolis doesn’t have anything to say and doesn’t even pretend to offer the illusion of saying something of value. Most of the film involves a journey across town to a barbershop, as Packer absolutely insists on a haircut from the barber he has known since childhood, despite the always imminent threat of pernicious barbarians launching an attack on his car. But this long-awaited scene at the barbershop is another in a string of letdowns, as it fails to show a deeper side to Packer and ends way too early. Cronenberg couldn’t recognise the viewer’s need for substance and produces another disappointing scene in an already third-rate film.

The film is an abomination. As images wash over you, your mind will be free to boggle at the film’s inclusion in the official selection at Cannes. The pleasant memories of Cronenberg in top form doing reality-based science fiction in eXistenZ or giving Viggo Mortensen an ambitious role as a former criminal in A History of Violence or a hardcore criminal in Eastern Promises quickly fade in the face of such mind-numbing folly.

Carnage (2011)

André Crous

Based on the Yasmina Reza’s play, Roman Polanski’s Carnage tightens the screws when two couples sit around the coffee table.

CarnageFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Yasmina Reza
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 75 minutes

The main premise of Roman Polanski’s Carnage is to have two couples stuck in an apartment, unable to leave because of the hosts’ social obligation to offer their guests more coffee and cobbler, the guests’ obligation to indulge their hosts by accepting said offers, and above all, the collective obligation to keep smiling despite a shared desire to skip forward in time. Social commentary forms an important layer of this 75-minute film, though the most interesting aspect is the way in which the confined spaces of a New York apartment – of which we see the lounge area almost exclusively – can serve as a pressure cooker for the frustrated emotions of four seemingly level-headed individuals.

In the very first scene, which takes place in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, there is an altercation between two teenage boys symmetrically framed by big trees on either side. Visually wedged in the middle of the shot, one boy swings a stick and hits the other in the face, leaving him visibly injured.

In the subsequent scene, the parents of the two boys are in front of the computer, typing out a carefully worded statement that seeks to establish the facts (one boy’s teeth were knocked out) without offending either party. The parents of the alleged victim invite the parents of the alleged aggressor to their apartment to figure out how to proceed.

They all walk on eggshells, scared of being perceived as aggressive, for that would reflect on their children’s roles in the fight, but equally scared of being perceived as weak, for the same conclusion could be drawn just as easily. These people, acutely aware of the meaning of reputation, suddenly find themselves embroiled in a story of teenage aggression and need to find a solution.

But in twists that oscillate between purposefully frustrating and hilarious, and despite simmering tension and mutual contempt, the two couples, as a result of common civility, find themselves unable to leave the apartment. The setup is more realistic than, say, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a dinner party can’t leave and ultimately eat themselves to death, but such thoughts couldn’t have been far from the dark mind of Polanski.

Carnage depends heavily not just on the sharpness of the dialogue but also on the delivery by the four actors. In this respect, it is a very successful ensemble piece, pairing the slightly reserved Jodie Foster with the garrulous John C. Reilly, and the very uptight Kate Winslet with the snotty Christoph Waltz.

Based on a play by Yasmina Reza called God of Carnage, Polanski’s film is about the way dialogue can be wielded to gently do away with belaboured niceties. All that is required is some time and an airtight lid. It becomes obvious how laughter is used to alleviate moments of social uncertainty, though laughter itself can easily turn awkward, leading to a vicious circle of self-inflicted torture.

Ultimately, this Gordian knot of awkwardness is cut in a way that is greatly satisfying, though it comes at some personal and professional cost to Waltz’s loudmouthed character, whose devil-may-care attitude generates the most laughs by far and allows the actor to channel some of his Inglourious Basterds persona.

It is fascinating to watch the cracks appear in the formal pairings of the couples and alliances shift to give the characters the illusion they are not weak, although much dirty laundry is aired in the process of re-establishing a zone of social comfort.

As opposed to David Fincher’s Panic Room, in which Foster also starred, or Polanski’s own Death and the Maiden, both of which took place in one location, Carnage lacks a central animating force, some big goal, and the viewer has no real narrative expectation. There is much verbal mudslinging and even a few moments of physical conflict, but the conversations go off on multiple tangents, and after an hour, the whole muddle becomes a bit draining.

Luckily, Polanski doesn’t outstay his welcome, and when the conversation runs dry, the film simply ends. Carnage has a great deal of the explosive potential that its title suggests, featuring generous performances by its four main players. Unfortunately, the plot is too thin to make this a truly great piece of work.

An Officer and a Spy (2019)

André Crous

Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair.

An Officer and a SpyFrance
3*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Robert Harris
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: J’accuse

Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration.

We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him.

One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus.

Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing.

It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. I realise that I no longer recognise France. [Please protect] what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. Polanski also fails to detail how the Dreyfus affair exacerbated feelings of Christian Gallic pride among the general population.

But Picquart goes it alone, persevering despite his inherent antisemitism, driven by a desire for justice. He carries out his investigation without the help of anyone else in his intelligence office. No amount of pushback from the generals above him can douse his passion for the truth, and no one intimidates him. These might be admirable characteristics in a man, but we do not see him emotionally tested. Everything always works out. By the time all sense of justice seems lost, he suddenly meets not only Deputy (and future Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau but also revered novelist of the working class, Émile Zola. Within days, Zola’s famous newspaper article, “J’accuse!”, lays into every powerful individual involved in the Dreyfus conspiracy. And thus begins the final legal brawl.

But despite France being a colonial power, the scenes in court, openly biased in favour of the military, paint the country as little more than a banana republic. What should be the most intense part of the film is staged and edited together as a comedy.

Jean Dujardin stars as Picquart, but despite his amiable demeanour, the character doesn’t undergo any change – a point strikingly made in the film’s final scene. An unrecognisable Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus, whose lack of presence in the film makes him a peripheral character in his own story. But in the scenes where he does appear, he responds to the constant humiliation with brave stoicism that sometimes cracks under the pressure of boiling anger. In other words, like a real human being.

It is well established that in 1977, a 43-year-old Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey. He admitted to this in court. So, while he has said explicitly that he understands Dreyfus’s persecution, their cases are in no way the same. Dreyfus was innocent and was framed because he was Jewish. Polanski was and is still guilty because he committed a criminal act. In this regard, his being Jewish is about as relevant as his being 5’5″. If the director really wanted to make a film about his alleged innocence (despite pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor), let him stage a re-enactment of his starring role in the vile 1977 rape. 

But there is no connective tissue whatsoever between An Officer and a Spy and Polanski. The film isn’t good or bad because of his personal life. It is just mediocre because he couldn’t be bothered to imbue it with the authentic messiness of life.

Venus in Fur (2013)

André Crous

Venus in Fur is a two-character, single-location film by Roman Polanski that is delicious, sexy and gripping.

Venus in FurFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
David Ives
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: La Vénus à la fourrure

The term “masochism”, which refers to the feeling of excitement some people get from being hurt, abused or degraded, comes from the surname of the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz), published in 1869, revolved around a man who willingly lets himself be dominated by the woman of his desires.

The novel has been adapted for the big screen at least five times before and is the source material for Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, which ignores the side plots and focuses like a laser on the central couple. Besides having only two characters, the master filmmaker has gone for even more minimalism by setting the action in a single location, a theatre.

It is the kind of setup Polanski knows well from another film he made, Carnage, which saw four characters stuck in an apartment, determined to solve the problem of the one couple’s son having beaten up the son of the other. Both Carnage and Venus are tightly wound pieces that rely on powerful acting and subtle shifts in the power balance to hold our attention instead of the camera.

Venus in Fur is set inside a small, rather rundown theatre in Paris, where a middle-aged theatre director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is holding auditions for his upcoming play – of course, based on Sacher-Masoch’s book. He is desperate, having seen too many actresses who have absolutely no grasp of the main character and is about to leave when in stumbles Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is wet to the bone; however, the rainstorm outside hasn’t doused her garrulousness in the least, and Thomas wants to get this chatty, slightly overbearing (or intimidating?) woman out of his sight as quickly as possible.

She has her ways to break down his defences, however, and it is only a matter of time before they end up on stage, with Wanda (also – coincidentally? – the name of the main character in the play) gently wresting control from the director after she impresses him with her interpretation of the role.

Films that take place in a single setting are few and far between. The best-known examples are probably Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, both of which starred at least a dozen different characters whose interactions we could follow, which made the director’s job very easy when it came to keeping the viewer interested.

But those two films were from 1957 and 1947, respectively. An equivalent may be found in one of Ingmar Bergman’s last films, After the Rehearsal, from 1984, which is also set in a single space, and moreover takes place on the stage of a theatre and only has a total cast of five. There are a few other examples of note (such as Richard Linklater’s Tape, the overlooked but tense Buried and the modern-day triumph starring Robert Redford, All is Lost). However, this kind of self-imposed minimalism is something directors tend to avoid because the setup doesn’t showcase their dazzling use of the camera or innovative editing or control of a crowd of extras.

It takes an individual with a certain kind of talent to film what is essentially a theatre piece and make it come alive despite the obvious limitations. Polanski, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Ives, infuses his story with sexual tension, comedy and the word that keeps popping up in Thomas’ vocabulary, “ambiguity.” (Wanda keeps confusing it with ambivalence, and with good reason.)

The sexual tension is expected, but the film really earns our admiration through its comedy. Look how the ring tone of Thomas’ mobile phone references Wagner (definitely not a good omen), or the jacket Wanda pulls out of her bag is not only historically accurate but fits Thomas like a glove. This may not sound like comedy, but the actors let the moments sink in just long enough to thoroughly enchant us.

Despite our better judgement, we are constantly aligned with Thomas in the position of victim. We know this Wanda is up to no good, but Polanski’s camera always returns to a spot at the same level as Thomas, who seems to be getting ever more enjoyment out of her game of domination. In terms of content, there is not much going on here – Wanda seems to be omniscient and always in control, and she displays no real signs of character development – but the mystery of who she is very effectively animates the film throughout its 90-minute running time.

Polanski cleverly elides the space between the worlds of the film and that of the text, either by having Wanda respond in character to a question posed by Thomas (rather than the play’s Severin), inserting the name “Thomas” in the play, or even adding sound effects to give invisible objects a measure of existence, exactly as Lars von Trier did in Dogville.

Although we are captivated by the two characters, whoever they are, there are one or two big jumps that spoil the film and seem to come from nowhere. The first takes place right at the beginning when a misunderstanding leads to Wanda taking to the stage and Thomas simply yielding to her brazen informality. The other happens at the end when we are asked to believe Thomas has surrendered his sanity to the point where he would give up everything for a moment longer with his crazy actress.

More bizarre moments follow, and the film ends with some strong, dramatic catharsis that is both powerful and hilarious, answering some of our questions without removing all the ambiguity about Wanda’s identity.

Venus in Fur is a highly entertaining film that, although not as strong or as entertaining as Carnage, proves Polanski’s skills as one who can manipulate his audience’s emotions. Even while he deals with a story as intimate as that of two individuals vying for power, he deftly draws us in with a laugh here and a lingering question there.

Frankenweenie (2012)

André Crous

With Frankenweenie, a remake of his own material, Tim Burton outdoes himself by mostly restraining his creative tendencies.

FrankenweenieUSA
4*

Director:
Tim Burton
Screenwriter:
John August
Director of Photography:
Peter Sorg

Running time: 85 minutes

Frankenweenie is a stop-motion film made by the master of the morbid, Tim Burton. However, while many would readily think of his visually exuberant ventures (Big Fish, Dark Shadows and Alice in Wonderland, among many others, spring to mind), he is also the author of works that are at once comical and reflexive, even moving, like Edward Scissorhands or Corpse Bride.

One of Tim Burton’s first films was a 1984 short titled Frankenweenie, in which a young boy called Victor brings his pet bull terrier, Sparky, back to life by flying a kite during a thunderstorm with Sparky attached at one end. The film was a clever adaptation of the 1931 James Whale–directed horror classic Frankenstein, which centres on the misunderstood loner embodied by Frankenstein’s monster, who comes to a nasty end when he is chased by hordes of rabid townspeople wielding torches and pitchforks and ultimately perishes inside a windmill that’s been set alight.

Burton’s 1984 film was a scream, with violins throughout the score and people in constant hysterics, but it is absolutely worth checking out, even though most viewers tend to shy away from short films while having no problem watching an episode of a television series that is exactly the same length.

This live-action film has now been remade by Burton with numerous changes, some of which are inspired, while others are the almost expected consequences of stretching the same story from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.

In both stories, Victor is a bit of a recluse whose only real connection to the world is his dog, and he suffers terrible guilt and loss when Sparky dies as he crosses the road to fetch a ball Victor either threw or hit, depending on the film you’re talking about. In the new film, equipped with his own editing suite to perfect his short film projects, Victor is more of a nerd, and it’s not difficult to recognise Burton as the young boy.

The first half of the story stays more or less the same, but many formerly peripheral characters have here been given extra weight, with their particular actions expanded to fill the time. Whereas the original film was mostly about Victor’s discovery that electricity can reanimate the dead (incidentally, Victor’s surname is Frankenstein) and Sparky’s subsequent adventures that upset the small-minded townspeople, Burton’s feature-length film has many extra storylines.

The most intriguing of these involves the square old man living next door to the Frankensteins with his soft-spoken niece and her French poodle. He is the mayor of the small town and basically a carbon copy of Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace, except we never have any sympathy for him. Sparky has his eye on the French poodle, Persephone, and the attraction is mutual. In what is bound to be one of the film’s signature moments, a spark of electricity flies from the recently resurrected Sparky to Persephone, producing a white streak in her honeycomb, à la Bride of Frankenstein.

One unexpected improvement on Burton’s original is the personality Sparky now has, which Burton wasn’t able to glean from a real animal in his previous live-action short.

The plot is modestly modelled on Frankenstein, though only the transformation from death to life and the final chase of townsfolk with torches (but without pitchforks) are worth paying attention to.

What is more interesting is Burton’s use of his short film to tease the viewer in a way that is enriched by her having seen the earlier film but for whom such knowledge is not essential: Certain pivotal scenes are deliberately drawn out a little longer, and in the process, we move closer and closer to the edge of our seats, even though we know things will work out they did in the first film. Sparky’s death is one such moment, and so is the film’s final scene.

The director’s creativity is on full display in scenes at the pet cemetery, where gravestones are shaped into peculiar objects that reflect the animals buried below, but the last part of the film, in which a Godzilla-like tortoise, a halfbreed bat-cat and a delirious tribe of sea monkeys terrorize the small town of New Holland, is overkill and feels out of step with the rest of the production. Especially in light of the very touching, intimate shots that are interspersed with the footage, mostly with Sparky the outcast, this detour into mega-monster territory is wholly uncalled for.

With the addition of characters such as the wide-eyed cat, Mr. Wiskers, whose clairvoyance is proved by the form of its faeces, and the long-faced and eerie but misunderstood science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski (voiced by Martin Landau), this Frankenweenie has its eye firmly on the goal of entertaining the viewer. Add to this the central character of Sparky, the coat on his freshly exhumed body barely held together by screws and stitches, the evocative music of Danny Elfman and Burton’s always funny take on small-town America, and you have a film that is mostly as good as it can be given its apparent limitations as an adaptation of a 30-minute film.

Even if you are not a fan of most of Tim Burton’s films, this one is a must.

Whale Valley (2013)

André Crous

Geographical isolation and emotional remoteness go hand in hand in Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s personal short, Whale Valley.

Whale ValleyIceland
3.5*

Director:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Screenwriter:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Director of Photography:
Gunnar Auðunn Jóhannsson

Running time: 15 minutes

Original title: Hvalfjörður

The titular whale is already dead and being sliced up in silence to feed the small community. Meanwhile, taciturn teenage Arnar is still thinking about taking his own life. Or is he?

The 15-minute Whale Valley takes place almost entirely on a farm in rural Iceland. The blustery, barren landscape mirrors Arnar’s unexplained but clearly unbalanced emotional state. This atmospheric resonance with inner turmoil (“nature in sympathy”) is an element that director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson would go on to develop three years later in his feature film début, Heartstone (Hjartasteinn). But the brutality of his later work is much more discreet here. The film’s focus is sharply trained on the climax, which is hard to watch, although not unexpected.

The first time we see Arnar (one can assume the director’s choice of this name, his own middle name, was deliberate), he has a noose around his neck. He is standing on a flimsy wooden crate inside the farm shed, his body rigid with fear but awkwardly twitching. So, will he or won’t he? We don’t have to wonder long, as his younger brother, Ívar, happens upon him. In shock, he runs off into the distance, and out of fear that Ívar would tell their parents, Arnar tears after and quickly catches up to him. This is their secret, but we don’t know much more. Was this Arnar’s first time trying? Was this the first time that Ívar found him? And wouldn’t a noose hanging in the shed draw attention and suspicion from their father?

We don’t get answers to any of these questions. In fact, for all the initial focus on Arnar, he isn’t even the main point of interest. Gradually, we realise that Arnar and the explanations for his eternal melancholy take a backseat to their impact on Ívar. It is a dynamic tension, if such a thing is possible, as Ívar is always aware of his brother’s morbid intentions, but despite their tussles, the uncertainty hangs in the air until the climax. Two short scenes in the brothers’ bedroom also poignantly underline the protective bond between the two here in the outback.

Halfway through the film, the beauty and confusion merge in the wordless scene with a sperm whale. Lying beached on its stomach, the giant mammal is imposing, even in death. It completely dwarfs young Ívar, just like near-death seems to loom over everything here. But the boy stretches out his hand to touch the oily skin and then proceeds to gently stroke the animal. We follow his hands, collecting oil as they slide further, before he puts his head on the animal’s body and listens. For a second, he seems to think it might be alive. It is a beautiful moment rudely interrupted by the arrival of his father and friends with their flensing tools. Although initially stunned, the boy doesn’t run away this time. He looks on, and as the men start cutting the blubber, his gaze turns impassive.

Life and death and love all meet up in the next sequence, which takes us back to the barn before a final coda in the brothers’ bedroom. This is a story of unfledged emotions that try to stand out here in the wilderness but are often blown off-course by life’s unpredictability. 

Like the brothers it depicts, Whale Valley is cold and distant on the outside while hinting at warmth and intimacy. The boys’ father could have been benefitted from a bit more interaction with his children. As it is, he seems to care as little about Arnar’s state of mind or Ívar’s daily routine as he does about the whale. But despite Guðmundur’s reluctance here to engage in robust storytelling, the emotions that he teases out are clear, and his two main characters clearly have inner lives. In a longer film like Heartstone, he would succeed in giving us a true peek into their souls.

A Hidden Life (2019)

André Crous

A Hidden Life may have relatively more substance than most of Terrence Malick’s other films, but the director’s immutable style is lazy at best and incongruous at worst.

A Hidden LifeUSA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
Jörg Widmer

Running time: 170 minutes

Most of us tell ourselves that we would have stood up for justice if we had lived in Germany under Hitler. While it is true that many Germans at the time were unaware of the full extent of the Jewish genocide, they knew enough. But what if your neighbours and friends also went along to get along, regardless of whether they believed in the Nazis’ hysterical nationalism and ideology of Aryan superiority? At what point would you have resisted the march towards groupthink? At what point would you have abandoned your principles?

A Hidden Life doesn’t get close to answering this question for us. However, this is a Terrence Malick film, so the question is not even evident at all. Nothing is, except the audio-visuals: In addition to reams of pages of voice-overs, which is, unfortunately, par for the course in a Malick production, there is also the expected curated selection of classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Dvořák) and other stunning instrumental pieces (Górecki, Pärt), as well as breathtaking emerald-green scenery that is far more complex than the film ever tries to be. 

Based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, a young Austrian farmer who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, the plot is more substantial than many of the director’s other recent films. And yet, because it is Malick, we get very few scenes of genuine drama. Instead, there are plenty of oh-so-serious voice-overs or off-screen monologues to convey romance and struggle. These narrations are delivered in English by German actors. And since Malick has never cared much for the realism of the spoken word, they all fall flat.

We first meet Franz (August Diehl) and his young wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), in 1939, around the time Germany invades Poland. We don’t get to see any of this, however, because the camera is too busy roving the lush green hillsides and calling our attention to the prominent church tower in the small town of St. Radegund, very close to the former border with Germany. (Austria had been annexed by the German Reich in March 1938.) The town’s aggressively nationalistic and often drunk town mayor likes to rant and rave about how “foreigners swarm over our streets – immigrants who don’t care for the past, only for what they can grab”. And the townspeople appear to share these views.

But all the while, the taciturn Franz’s face is sombre. We see his stubborn resistance. We see the wheels turning in his head. And we see his unwillingness to take up arms against Germany’s so-called enemies. But whatever personal, emotional or intellectual motivation he has remains obscured all the way through. Why does he resist when no one else does? What makes him different? Where does he find the resolve to persist despite threats of violence and, ultimately, the certainty that this path leads to an early death?

At first, Franz is called up to do military training. Although he is against the idea of ultimately using this knowledge to fight for the Reich, he heeds the call. A few years later, with the war in full swing, he is called up to serve, but upon arrival at the garrison, he refuses to pledge allegiance to Hitler and is arrested. He says he would be willing to serve in a non-combat capacity, but for this, he also has to take a loyalty oath. Thus begins his incarceration, which quickly leads to a trial and, in short order, his execution.

While he is away, his wife, Fani, becomes the target of the villagers because her husband has a moral compass. On top of taking care of her three young daughters, she also has to plough the field, harvest the crops and draw water from a drying well. But the village turns against her, first with the scowling looks they give her, then by shouting at her in public and finally by shamelessly stealing produce from her field. She is even hounded out of church by the stares of her fellow congregants. She is othered because of her husband’s refusal to kill for their Führer and, more importantly, because of her love of and respect for Franz. But what her own views are is impossible to determine despite the hours we spend with her.

While Franz languishes in Tegel prison in Berlin, the soundtrack continues to be filled with his and Fani’s monotonous voice-over readings of their letters to each other. But because Franz speaks so rarely, at least outside the ethereal sphere of the voice-over, we don’t understand what he is really thinking in real time, and this ponderous approach gets us nowhere close to understanding what brought him to this point. “I can’t do what I believe is wrong”, he says. The Nazis are perplexed as to why he would risk his life to take a stand that is bound to be forgotten by history. Time and again, they tell him that his voice doesn’t matter. However, the question of why they should care if his actions are supposedly so insignificant is never addressed.

It goes without saying that this kind of bravery, especially in retrospect, is absolutely extraordinary. History provides us with very few examples of such men or women. And it is a shame that the film recounting his story is so empty. Over the course of its three-hour running time, we get to know every inch of the farm and the granite mountains but learn very little about the man at the centre. He is religious, but we never see him reading the Bible. He has no real answers to others’ questions, but he has no questions of his own.

Despite the vertiginous use of wide-angle lenses and restless camera movements, not to mention the frames that decapitate its characters, there are also countless beautiful shots. But presenting a film about suffering as if it were a spread in Outdoor Photography is highly questionable, particularly as these images have no discernible purpose other than beauty for the sake of beauty. Unlike The Thin Red Line, in which Malick depicted the Solomon Islands as an exotic utopia ravaged by the horrors of war, A Hidden Life never deviates from portraying Radegund as an aesthetically pleasing wonderland that is always lush and green, no matter the season.

By now, the Malick approach to cinematography has long run its course. A film cannot live off push-ins, pull-outs, jump cuts, low angles, a dazzling colour palette and endless voice-overs alone. Any five-minute extract will contain all of these elements. Sometimes, there is a surprise, but it is never a good one, as when the camera suddenly takes a first-person perspective for no other reason than to show off. The most memorable example is of a prison guard assaulting Franz, causing the camera to flail around violently on the ground. Or when a fade-out elides an expected confrontation before it even starts. Or when a Nazi officer quotes from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

The struggle and the suffering get lost in the poetry of it all. Whatever is going on, there will be a tiresome voice-over intruding on the action or a violin playing in the background. It’s all mesmerising and can lull us into a state of reverie but is completely lacking in immersion or immediacy. 

This is a story worth telling, but A Hidden Life is not the way to tell it.

Exile (2020)

André Crous

In Exile, a long-term German resident originally from Kosovo appears to be experiencing daily discrimination at work, but is he overreacting and paranoid or is something sinister afoot?

ExileKosovo/Germany
4*

Director:
Visar Morina
Screenwriter:
Visar Morina
Director of Photography:
Matteo Cocco

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Exil

If Franz Kafka had written in anything other than German, perhaps his Josef K. would have been a well-balanced individual and the nameless, overbearing powers that be would have left him in peace.

A bit like Dancer in the Dark, Visar Morina’s Exile is about desperation (for both the central character and the viewer) in the face of injustice, except here, there aren’t any musical numbers to dilute the misery. No, from the very first scene, we have a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs. And it doesn’t get better or go away, not even once, over the course of a full two hours. 

Xhafer Kryeziu (Mišel Matičević) is a man in a country that is not his own and works with people who never accept him. Originally from Kosovo, he works as a pharmaceutical engineer at a big laboratory. His native language may be Albanian, but his life is effectively German: his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his job and everyone working with him. With a name like his, however, it doesn’t matter how well you speak the language. When you introduce yourself and people notice the slight accent, everyone will remind you, often by flashing a quizzical smile, that you are different.

In that opening scene, he finds a rat tied to the fence in front of his middle-class suburban home. The fact that his workplace often uses rats in experiments and that his colleagues know he has a phobia about these rodents is no trivial coincidence. But without any proof, what can he do? What can he accomplish against an invisible enemy?

Xhafer soon realises that he does not receive any group e-mails, which causes him to miss important meetings. He hears others sign up for a weekend trip, but he doesn’t get an invitation. And whenever he wants to speak to the boss, the secretary says there is no way because running the company keeps him so busy.

Does he keep his head down to pretend everything is fine and nothing is getting to him? Or does he confront those he perceives to be the most antagonistic towards him? He opens up to his wife, Nora (Sandra Hüller, playing the same emotionless character here as she did to such great effect in Toni Erdmann, whose director, Maren Ade, co-produces here) about this silent bullying at work, but she comes up with benign excuses for her fellow Germans. Maybe these incidents were all unintentional. Or maybe, she says, he is just an asshole and should try harder to be friends. After all, she says, things could be much harder: “You don’t look like a foreigner. If you were an Arab, it would be different.” Indeed, it might be, but why should it matter?

Understandably, Xhafer’s exclusion leads to loneliness. Without any emotional support, his attention turns to those who are somewhat more similar to him. He strikes up a casual sexual relationship with the film’s only other Albanian speaker, a cleaning lady at his company. But we quickly see that this doesn’t alleviate his problems; it merely pushes them out of his mind for a five-minute quickie in a bathroom stall.

Just like people, the film is much more complicated than it appears at first blush. We gradually come to understand that Morina is not going to offer us any real explanation for the central mystery of what is happening to Xhafer or why. He doesn’t confirm Xhafer’s paranoia but slowly makes us a part of his world. This means we expect other people to behave indifferently towards him because to everyone else, a foreigner is a foreigner is a foreigner. His colleagues all think he’s Croatian. But is this indifference or something darker? Are they behaving from a place of malice or are they just condescending, passive racists?

The film’s inference is that Germans are either racist to your face or racist behind your back. Xhafer says as much during a very well-written and even better-executed altercation with Nora. This may be too harsh a judgment on German society as a whole, but there is an evident, ubiquitous hostility to his mere presence. Because we lack a global understanding of the facts, we empathise with Xhafer, whose point of view we share to the point of witnessing his nightmares. He is far from perfect, but that doesn’t make him any less worthy of respect than anyone else.

But in the film’s final act, a few things happen that seem to contradict Xhafer’s (and our) reading of events. Our precarious explanation slips through our fingers, leaving us with an even more uncertain understanding of what is going on. We cannot read other people’s minds; we can only go by their actions, but these interpretations are almost always tainted by our own perspectives. Do his colleagues really hate him? Does he intimidate them, somehow? Or is their behaviour informed by factors that have nothing to do with him personally? And when they seem to reveal their intentions, can we trust what they say?

The fragmented editing, the hypnotic tracking shots inside his laboratory’s gloomy corridors, the darkness that envelops his marriage bed, the cold blues and nauseating ambers and the eerie music on the soundtrack all make for a disorientating experience as we try but fail, along with Xhafer, to make sense of it all. It all leads to a final shot that – similarly to that of another recent immigrant film, Synonyms – brutally but figuratively conveys the uncertainty of having to wait for acceptance, perhaps indefinitely.

Exile is a film that deserves to be watched a second time, but few in the audience will have the nerve or the stomach to go through this harrowing ordeal again straightaway.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

My Salinger Year (2020)

André Crous

My Salinger Year, about an awkward girl learning the ropes at a literary agency, is as shallow as a glossy magazine.

My Salinger YearCanada/USA
3*

Director:
Philippe Falardeau
Screenwriter:
Philippe Falardeau
Director of Photography:
Sara Mishara

Running time: 100 minutes

She has never read Catcher in the Rye but worships its elusive author, J.D. Salinger. She wants to be a writer but rarely puts pen to paper. She never learns any hard lessons but is constantly on the verge of tears. Her name is Joanna, and she is a mess, a bit like the movie she stars in, called My Salinger Year.

In the mid-1990s, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) is fresh off a degree in English literature and has published two poems in the Paris Review. On the spur of the moment, she decides to put her studies at Berkeley on hold, break up with her boyfriend and move to – rather, stay on in, as she is the kind of person whom things happen to rather than the one who makes them happen – New York City. She wants to become a writer, but in the meantime, she has to pay the bills, so she contacts a recruitment agency.

Like a godsend or just a magnificent manifestation of serendipity, she immediately lands an interview with the serene but mostly expressionless Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), an agent who always seems to be moving in slow motion. Joanna is told that she will spend her days typing out dictation and answering the heaps of fan letters sent to her client, “Jerry” aka J.D. Salinger, by using rather impersonal form letters. Under no circumstances is she to write on her own, at all.

Of course, she ignores this advice, but not in the way we might expect. She doesn’t appear to write much, except a line of poetry here and there, which we never hear or read. No, she is so filled with her own sense of importance and a naïve Messiah complex that she starts writing personal responses to the fan letters. Her own life is a disaster, but she wants to help others, most of whom are obsessed with Holden Caulfield (it seems those who admire Salinger’s other novels are much more balanced individuals), fix theirs.

In the meantime, director Philippe Falardeau spends an inordinate amount of time trying to cram his screenplay full of retrospective comedy about the time period, particularly as far as the then-nascent internet technology is concerned. Somehow, while this is 1995, Margaret is still afraid of bringing a computer into the office. When a PC does appear, everyone is told it should be used to track down Catcher in the Rye facsimiles on the World Wide Web. And people gossip about how silly e-mails are and how they are, fingers crossed, just a passing fad… Har har.

But then, despite her plain incompetence at the job, Joanna receives more and more responsibilities from Margaret, who cannot be a fool because, after all, she represents the mythical Salinger. Joanna even starts chatting to “Jerry” over the phone, who encourages her to write every day. We never see her following his advice, but by the end of the story, she suddenly has a collection of poetry ready to be submitted to that pinnacle of excellence in the realm of the printed word, the New Yorker. She might just be full of herself, but the film appears to be telling us that she has blossomed into a publishable author along the way (perhaps via osmosis through her connection, however tangential, with literary greatness?).

We never figure out what is going on in Joanna’s head because she appears to be a teenage girl trapped in a 20-something wannabe poet’s body. She has told herself that she will be a writer one day, but this film provides no blueprint or development that would allow her to reach that goal. Very little drama is on display. Even when things get heated (for example, when a teenage Salinger fan, much more mature than her, comes to the office and gives her a good dressing down), she simply persists with her juvenile rebellion by continuing to write non-form letters to the fans.

The decision to present Salinger as an enigma (his face is never clearly shown) deserves some praise, as does the long single take at the end of the film that turns out to be a dream, but Qualley never rises to the challenge of infusing her character with more than a deer-lost-in-the-headlights quality.

My Salinger Year, which is lit so brightly that even the night-time scenes feel like they are taking place at high noon, is the ultimate feel-good Hallmark Channel film. At least the similar-in-the-broadest-outlines The Devil Wears Prada had two strong intriguing central characters, but Falardeau’s film has none, despite a last-ditch effort to inject some drama into Weaver’s character, Margaret. And at a major moment towards the end of the film, when Margaret reveals to Joanna that she knew the latter would make a fabulous agent the first time she laid eyes on her, it is difficult not to wonder whether Margaret has lost her marbles.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.