Countries

Persian Lessons (2020)

André Crous

Persian Lessons may not be the most believable film about a Jew’s survival under occupation, but Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s seemingly infinite skills as an actor make this a worthy addition to the genre.

Persian LessonsRussia/Germany
4*

Director:
Vadim Perelman
Screenwriter:
Ilja Zofin
Director of Photography:
Vladislav Opelyants

Running time: 125 minutes

When people talk about the Holocaust as something we should never forget, they are usually referring to the events: the othering, the captivity, the humiliation, the torture and the extermination of human beings. But what is often forgotten is the individuals themselves. Jews were the primary targets, but what were their names? Who were they?

In a surprisingly effective high-wire act that pays off in large part thanks to the discreet but ultimately emotionally overwhelming performance of its lead actor, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons uses its entire cast to construct a truly unique language. The film centres on a dark-featured Belgian Jew named Gilles, who poses as a Persian named Reza in order to avoid being killed in a firing squad by German officers in France during the Second World War. The officers spare him because they know their captain, who wants to open a restaurant in Iran (commonly known as “Persia” at the time) once the war is over, is looking for someone to teach him Farsi. Thus begin the many months, which turn into years, of Reza teaching “Farsi”, when in fact he only knows a single word: “bawbaw” (dad, بابا).

If you can look past this rather improbable plot point and suspend your disbelief for the two-hour running time, you will be well rewarded. There is one reason we are able to do this, and his name is Nahuel Pérez Biscayart. After making waves with a dizzying performance in 120 BPM, this Argentine actor who has quickly learnt to speak the language like a native Frenchman appears to have no problem forming sentences in German either. Although Biscayart and his character, Reza, are obviously two different people, the former’s facility with languages goes a long way toward making us believe the latter might possibly remember the hundreds of fake words he teaches his captor.

It all starts with a German Army truck driving through a forest in Occupied France. It is transporting a new batch of Jews, including Gilles, a rabbi’s son, who has managed to sneak a sandwich with him in his coat. A fellow passenger trades a first-edition book with a handwritten dedication in Farsi for the food. He explains that it was a gift from “bawbaw” to his son, Reza. Moments later, the first dozen of them are gunned down. Gilles, in the second wave, sees what is coming and insists he is not Jewish but Persian.

At the transit camp, which serves as a limbo between Occupation and certain death at a concentration camp, Hauptsturmführer Klaus Koch (played with chilling friendliness by Lars Eidinger) is delighted to meet “Reza”. Over time, we learn that Koch’s brother lives in Teheran and escaped Germany just before the rise of the Nazi Party. However, Captain Koch is a loyal soldier and has no qualms about being a Nazi, but he is clearly a complicated individual; Perelman drops a few incredibly subtle hints that Koch might be gay, but thankfully there is never a reason to empathise with him, and his final scene in the film will be particularly satisfying to the viewer.

Gilles’s continued survival depends on him teaching a fake language and learning to speak it as if it were a second tongue. He does this with astonishing (at times, impossible) adroitness, but our suspense of disbelief is assisted in this regard by other films about the Second World War we may have seen already, like Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella), in which Roberto Benigni shelters his son from the horrors of war by pretending it is all a game, or In Darkness, whose Jewish characters hide out in sewers in the war-torn Polish city of Lviv. Over the decades, we have learnt in the history books, through survivors’ eyewitness accounts and on film how some people managed to find inhuman strength to hang on to life amid the abominable reality of the Shoah. As a result, this story, dissimilar though it might be to our own experience, does not seem entirely unrealistic.

The film generally steers clear of so many of the obvious moments in similar films. There is a single aerial shot that indicates the ongoing massacre of people and their cremation in nondescript buildings across the European countryside. But in this transit camp, people do not inhale gas in the showers, and the number of swastikas is kept to a minimum. There is no need for Nazi pageantry. One small picture of Hitler in the background of a shot suffices to remind us of the ongoing horrors at the next camp, and the next, and the next.

Perelman, who is best known for his 2003 feature, The House of Sand and Fog, has finally delivered another film on the level of that stunning début. Not just because both films refer to their final moments in their opening scenes but also because when their background tension is unexpectedly released, there will be few dry eyes left in the house. This was mostly thanks to Perelman’s staging in his first film, but here our gratitude goes to Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who is simply extraordinary as “Reza”.

Persian Lessons is what a mainstream film about Jewish oppression during the Second World War (as opposed to, say, a more artistically minded film like Son of Saul, which was unconventionally staged for maximum visceral effect) should look like. One can nitpick about the necessity of opening the film by revealing the ending or question the decision to have the main character interact so little with his fellow prisoners, but none of this takes away from what is simply a remarkable production.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Minamata (2020)

André Crous

Jacques Rivette would not be pleased with the tragedy porn that is the dramatisation of the Minamata chemical disaster of the 1970s.

MinamataUSA
2.5*

Director:
Andrew Levitas
Screenwriter:
David Kessler
Director of Photography:
Benoît Delhomme

Running time: 115 minutes

I recently mentioned Gillo Pontecorvo’s notorious Kapò while reviewing a film that appeared to strive for a deliberately artistic depiction of war. This reference, always tied to Jacques Rivette’s review in Cahiers du cinéma, has become commonplace in film criticism. But it is because of the ferocity of the allegation and the clarity of the writer’s moral vision that it continues to pop up in reviews.

Look, however, in Kapo, at the shot where [Emmanuelle] Riva kills herself by throwing herself on an electric barbed-wire fence; the man who decides, at that moment, to have a dolly in to tilt up at the body, while taking care to precisely note the hand raised in the angle of its final framing – this man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.  (Jacques Rivette, “On Abjection”, translated by David Phelps with the assistance of Jeremi Szaniawski; originally published as “De l’abjection” in Cahiers du cinéma 120, June 1961, pp. 54–55)

When atrocities are presented in a way that prioritises our appreciation of the beauty and the composition of the image over the inherent misery that is depicted, then the author of the image deserves our contempt. And it is difficult to argue against having contempt for the way Minamata goes about glamorising the suffering of others. This is tragedy porn writ large.

Based on the real events surrounding the Chisso Corporation’s dumping of mercury in the Japanese town of Minamata, which deformed the town’s population (mostly its children, but also some adults), the plot focuses on acclaimed LIFE photojournalist W. Eugene “Gene” Smith, played by Johnny Depp. Gene, who appears to deal with the post-traumatic stress accumulated over a lifetime on tough assignments by drinking himself into daily stupors, is visited by a young Japanese woman named Aileen. The pictures that she gives him immediately convince him he has to go and witness the horrors for himself.

His editor at LIFE, who can see the writing on the wall for the once prestigious magazine, whose pages are now filling up with ads to make up for the decline in subscriptions, harbours many a doubt that his prize-winning photographer will be able to cope and make the deadline, but as usual, an inebriated Gene somehow wraps him around his little finger and gets the green light. It is tough to stomach that the editor of a publication as illustrious as LIFE could be so easy to manipulate, but before you can say Jack Robinson, he has agreed to Gene’s terms, and the latter is off to the land of the rising sun.

It isn’t long before we see the calamitous effect of mercury on the local population. Gene and Aileen stay with a very friendly couple whose daughter Akiko is one of those suffering as a result of Chisso’s unsafe dumping of its chemicals. The world-renowned Japanese hospitality is on full display as Gene gets his own darkroom kitted out almost exactly the way it looks back home. Where his host found the money (and the time!) to do this remains a mystery, however.

What is not a mystery at all is the physical effect of the chemicals on the people, and especially on the children. Again and again and again, the camera seeks out the stiff and deformed hands and feet, constantly reminding us of the toll this disaster has taken on people’s bodies by directing its gaze at them. In so doing, the film is not showing us these characters as people but as objects to inspect and to pity.

Gene doesn’t speak the language, but Aileen translates for him. However, it is often very challenging to understand the English spoken by the Japanese characters. This is particularly true when the soundtrack contains additional noise or people are speaking over each other. A handful of moments when the characters speak Japanese and the film uses subtitles are very helpful. But it is head-scratching how Gene and Aileen end up together by the end of the film and, according to the end titles, get married around the same time. They are merely two people in the same place more or less sharing an experience or two, although he spends most of the day taking and developing his pictures on his own without her help or support.

But beyond the ludicrous relationship that the film wants to suggest, the most objectionable part is the stylised approach to the objects of suffering, namely the children of Minamata. In particular, the film features an extended take in which the real Gene’s famous Tomoko in Her Bath picture comes alive. Meticulously restaged to be identical to the photograph, albeit initially in colour, we see the mother holding her deformed daughter in the bathtub. The moody lighting perfectly conveys the feeling that this is a moment of significance. When Gene’s editor subsequently receives the picture, the significance is further underlined by him nearly bursting into tears. This is tragedy porn at its most grotesque.

The story of how a Japanese company could get away with deforming people barely 25 years after the Americans’ atomic bomb had created tens of thousands of hibakusha (in fact, Nagasaki is located close by) seems like material for a significant dramatisation. But we mostly get Gene walking around (drunk) with his camera, conspicuously taking pictures of as many of the town’s inhabitants (and their deformities) as he can, which feels very much like an invasion of privacy. In addition, the cinematography is not only all over the place and without a perspective but is sometimes rather crude, as when close-ups on faces go in and out of focus or a tracking shot of one female assistant fills the frame with her skirt-covered bottom as she moves down the corridor.

Minamata feels like it was produced in a rush. The basics of the tragedy are intriguing, and some title cards remind us of similar catastrophes around the world, but the people who are used to tell the story are made to look one-dimensional and uninteresting. Add to that the absolutely immoral decision to artfully depict the victims as freaks, and you get a film that is an abject failure.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

High-Rise (2009)

André Crous

High-Rise is a documentary feature that exposes (rather than examines) how shallow the people at the top of the Brazilian real estate market really are.

High-RiseBrazil
3*

Director:
Gabriel Mascaro
Screenwriter:
Gabriel Mascaro
Director of Photography:
Pedro Sotero

Running time: 70 minutes

Original title: Um Lugar ao Sol

They live in penthouses atop giant high-rises named “Stradivarius” or “Versailles” or “Rembrandt” in Brazil’s biggest cities.  They are among their country’s elite real estate owners, but their isolation from the rest of society is immediately visible when they open their mouths. And their views expose almost all of them as meritless ignoramuses.

Gabriel Mascaro’s barely feature-length documentary entitled High-Rise (the original Portuguese title translates as A Place in the Sun) contains snippets from eight interviews the director conducted with some very wealthy people. Most of them are single, although we also meet an adult son and his mother, a teenage boy with his parents, and a couple. Unfortunately, we don’t see much of their living quarters, but there are plenty of shots showing how far removed they are from the hustle and bustle of life at street level.

While penthouses are generally thought of as expansive and sometimes do take up an entire floor (or more), most of the interviewees focus on the privacy such a location affords them. They are not disturbed by people one floor up moving furniture around because there is no one above them. They are not disturbed by people in the next building looking at them because many of them live in the highest building around. And one particular individual even cheerfully elaborates on how her two-floor apartment separates her from people inside her own home, especially those working for her.

This part, which lets us peek behind the curtain at the eccentricities (or, less diplomatically, classism and even racism), is easily the most galling. “Living up high, you have the opportunity to experience another reality. It gives you a sense of domination”, says one woman, who may just have the most self-reflection of the lot. Another penthouse owner complains how the people from the favelas have “invaded the hillside” and tells us, without a hint of irony, that they have “shut themselves off from everything and make up their own rules”. This is a breathtaking statement from someone who chooses to live on the top floor of a skyscraper.

But she’s not done yet. She goes on to suggest that the poorest members of society should just learn to behave. “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean that you have to be a bandit.” It gets worse. A French woman, who has lived in Brazil for around half a century but still doesn’t speak Portuguese like a native, refers to a sculpture of a black face in her home as “my slave”. Later on, a businessman, perhaps the film’s most professional individual, refers to economy class on flights as “slave quarters”. For these people, the world is black and white: They are white, and from their high-rise they look down at everyone else; the rest are black slaves invading their view.

It’s a very sad array of people, indeed. We never see them interact with anyone else. They appear not to have any friends, and the film makes a point of showing us that the couple, who lives in a truly gargantuan penthouse, moves around in silence with each doing his own thing. In addition, almost everyone dresses like they are from the lower middle class, with sandals and bad clothes.

Although the subject matter has a great deal of appeal, this High-Rise almost seems unfinished. The individuals are never introduced, so we don’t know who they are, in which cities they are or what they do. Some footage is of the home-video variety and looks absolutely atrocious. Fortunately, from time to time, the camera is used in some creative ways: A long ride up a glass elevator feels like we’re headed to heaven, and the images showing the buildings’ giant shadows on the beach, between which beachgoers have to find a sliver of sunlight, are truly remarkable. But it is regrettable that the director did not allow us to get to know his subjects any better. The interviews zig and zag all over the place, and in the end, there simply isn’t enough material to hold our attention for a full hour.

1917 (2019)

André Crous

As a purely technical exercise in depicting the First World War, 1917 (and its seemingly unbroken single take) is successful but offers no insight into the characters it depicts or the events it recreates.

1917UK
3*

Director:
Sam Mendes
Screenwriters:
Sam Mendes
Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 120 minutes

One of the most infamous examples of a camera movement is the push-in of Kapò, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film about the Second World War. When a young Jewish woman in a concentration camp throws herself on an electrified fence and dies instantaneously, the camera dollies in see her corpse up close. The shot is grotesque and was justly condemned at the time by Jacques Rivette and subsequently by Serge Daney and many others. While showing something that everyone can agree is horrific, the camera seeks to beautify the moment for no purpose whatsoever.

Sam Mendes’s film about a single mission in the First World War, entitled 1917, does not commit quite the same atrocity, but it does use the camera to reach for beauty when that is precisely what a director should avoid if seeking to examine the human cost of war in any serious way. We follow along with two very young British lance corporals, William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (‎Dean-Charles Chapman), when they are sent across no man’s land to warn some 1,600 soldiers they are walking into a trap and should call off a planned attack. The director’s choice of a seemingly unbroken take, whose aim is clearly to immerse the viewer in the experience of war, is not without merit, but the execution makes it clear how shallow his reasoning was.

The single take appears to be the film’s raison d’être because it certainly isn’t the plot. Such a shot is often used to emphasise both the passage of time and the unity of action. We are meant to see development or interaction in a much more personal way as the point of view is generally tied to a single character. While The Lady in the Lake is the well-known but rather unrefined archetype, the best example is unquestionably the close focus of László Nemes’s Son of Saul.

In 1917, the camera starts with the two young men and ultimately settles on just one, who appears to mature over the course of around 18 hours of ominous calm, brutal warfare, bloody injury, a near-death experience and worse. But the camera has no particular point of view. While it starts as a humanlike observer alongside Schofield and Blake, it doesn’t take long before it flies low over a lake or high above a roaring river while the characters have to trudge around it or struggle to keep their head above water.

The notion of being immersed in the action also suggests that the viewer gets to experience the events (more or less, given the relative safety of the movie theatre) in the same way. But 1917 is so chock-full of Thomas Newman’s music, whose volume is dialled up all the way, that it is often impossible to focus on anything other than the mood being communicated: fear, happiness, danger, etc. The climactic battle scene is little more than soldiers running across a field as bombs explode to punctuate the heroic boom of Newman’s score. A scene in a medic’s tent after the battle is filled with bleeding injured soldiers, but they are mostly whimpering, and any loud screaming is drowned out by the music on the soundtrack.

Mendes is not showing us the war as it is. He is showing us the war as a work of art and uses a continuous tracking shot to do so. In addition, the camera and the lens stay squeaky clean for the duration of the running time, despite the explosions, the water, the dust and the mud that at least one of the characters has to wade through. This approach is simply unacceptable. The fact that the shot is, in fact, stitched together from multiple smaller shots, with some of the stitches easily noticeable, does not mitigate this problem, as the film’s ultimate goal is still, quite clearly, to look pretty rather than convey the visceral experience of being down in the tranches, not flying above them. 

But what is particularly irksome is the camera’s inhuman movements, as when Schofield plunges down a waterfall while the camera is not only suspended above him but tracks backwards high up in the air. Or when the same character charges down a trench packed with soldiers, and the camera, instead of following closely behind to show us the chaos at close range, rises up out of the trench and follows smoothly above the soldiers’ heads. These are pretty shots, but they undercut the very role of the camera here, which is to serve as an invisible soldier.

The story itself is as thin as a rail, and the two major characters have little to no complexity. One long scene is wasted in a French town so that 1917 can implicitly hint at Schofield’s past, which is a secret it could have kept to itself until the final moments, when this implicitness is made explicit, in case we had missed the earlier scene.

This was a purely technical exercise aimed at further developing the skills Mendes had already showcased in the opening scene of Spectre. However, unlike, say, Alfonso Cuarón (and, specifically, DoP Emmanuel Lubezki), who has mastered the use of the unbroken take, the result here feels vapid and inconsequential, devoid of significance because it contains so little and says even less.

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Diamonds of the Night (1964)

André Crous

By mixing the present reality with memories and nightmarish visions and presenting them all as a fragmented whole, Diamonds of the Night offers a personal, often surreal glimpse of the Second World War.

Diamonds of the NightCzechoslovakia
3.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriters:
Arnošt Lustig
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 65 minutes

Original title: Démanty noci

Diamonds of the Night is an unconventional film about two Jews during the Second World War. For one, the two central characters are taciturn to the point of almost being mute. For another, it is unclear what does and what does not happen in the moment. But it brilliantly conveys a nagging sense of being sucked into a world collapsing onto itself.

This one-hour film, Czech director Jan Němec’s début feature, is as full of contrasts as its title suggests. It is drawn from the eponymous book (more specifically, the short story entitled “Darkness Casts No Shadow”) by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig and is filled with fragments of dreamlike memories, nightmarish visions and brutal reality. Following a black screen and the ominous tolling of a bell, the opening sequence is by far the film’s most memorable. Lasting an impressive 137 seconds, it is an exhilarating unbroken tracking shot that follows two young men (Antonín Kumbera and Ladislav Janský) uphill, frequently in close-up, as they run away from a train. Every so often, another round of bullets reminds us that this is life and death.

Finally, albeit temporarily, they reach safety deep in the forest. Because of the jackets, marked with KL, for Konzentrationslager, they were wearing, one can assume they were headed for a death camp. But the darkness they have just escaped has stained their consciousness and begins to penetrate their lived reality, too, as a giant field of rocks in the middle of the forest soon makes very clear. Suddenly, a tram passes Prague’s Municipal House in broad daylight, and we see one of these men, wearing the KL jacket, jumping in, before there is a cut back to the forest.

The film will be filled with such moments, all without any dialogue – in fact, it takes almost a full 15 minutes before either of the two men speaks a word. Many of the inserts are taken through the window of a moving vehicle, presumably a bus or a train. We see life outside continuing as normal, as if nothing is the matter, but the implication is that we share the point of view of the Jews being transported away from this “normality” that is oblivious to them.

This is confirmed when we get an insert showing the inside of a windowless train compartment meant for cargo, but we see a group of people, some dressed in striped pyjamas. The two nameless young men are seated in a corner at the far back. They devour the corn they had snuck in and put on the shoes they had hidden in their jackets. But this is the past from which they had just managed to break free. Or is it? The story unspools in such a fragmented manner that the pieces ultimately fit together so loosely that the big picture escapes us. There is even room for an (admittedly slightly contrived) reading of the ending as a prelude to the opening.

Diamonds of the Night is at its best during those brief moments, created via the inserts, that give us a vivid sense of the fear and confusion inside the mind of the younger man (Kumbera). A few shots, brilliantly captured by director of photography Jaroslav Kučera (who would become one of the most prominent cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave), show tall trees being felled and falling almost straight onto the camera. In another famous composition, ants crawl over an anonymous (either remembered or imagined) young man’s feet, hands and face. And in one of the most action-packed scenes, when he goes to a farmhouse to beg for bread, he imagines himself, over and over again, killing his well-doer out of concern that she will surrender him to the authorities.

But many might view all these interruptions as little more than impressionist smudges on a threadbare storyline, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In particular, there are too many flashbacks (albeit distorted or misremembered, as made clear by the KL coat that Kumbera’s character is already wearing) to brighter days, and they do not appear to contribute substantially to our understanding of the characters or their backgrounds.

The last part of the film is the most interesting because of the tension it evokes through a very simple approach: repetition and little alteration. Having been captured by a group of dimwitted Kraut fogies, members of the so-called Volkssturm militia, the two men are made to stand with their hands in the air and face a blank wall. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, the old Germans merrily gorge themselves on chicken and drink pints of beer. Every so often, there is a cut back to the two men, immobile with fear. This alternation between the two shots, as well as the contrast between the silence and the yack-yack-yacking, creates incredible tension.

But while the film gives an atypical insight into the mind of one of its two central characters, the other (Janský) remains an enigma. Towards the end of the film, an apparent flashback even seems to suggest the possibility that he never made it past the opening scene. And as potent as some of the images are, there are just as many shots whose meaning is not immediately evident or are needlessly repeated. 

Diamonds of the Night is a film of contrasts. It uses an experimental approach to conjure up a world of mental imagery that doesn’t always connect with the viewer. And yet, we do get a glimpse of the main character’s inner struggle to make sense of the senselessness around him.

Les misérables (2017)

André Crous

Although the resolution is surprisingly anticlimactic, Les misérables pulses with a pervasive sense of injustice. It is a masterful time bomb that keeps ticking until close to the end.

Les Misérables (2017)France
4*

Director:
Ladj Ly
Screenwriter:
Ladj Ly
Director of Photography:
Julien Veron

Running time: 16 minutes

For most people (especially for a middle-class white man like me), the low-income suburbs of Paris have a quality of mystery around them similar to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Known as the banlieues, they are filled with expansive but dilapidated high-rise apartment blocks around half a century old. They are widely known as places of poverty and unrest, and in recent years they have been the venue for countless riots directed at the police. Films like City of God (Cidade de deus) and Hate (La haine) draw attention because they offer a glimpse of this eventful but often dangerous other world that is visible from the city centre (of Rio and Paris, respectively). They also make waves because of their politics and their skill at making this world accessible to a viewer who may be too scared to set foot there.

With a few caveats, let’s add Ladj Ly’s 16-minute Les misérables to the two aforementioned masterpieces. In this short film, a trial run for his acclaimed 2019 feature with the same name, the director sets two polar opposites against each other: a group of three policemen patrolling the streets of a notorious banlieue, Clichy-sous-Bois Montfermeil, and a trio of teenage boys, likely the sons or grandsons of immigrants, who are flying a drone over this (their) neighbourhood.

The policemen patrol the streets and harass the locals under the guise of laying down the law. But their approach is both verbally and physically violent, more than likely as a way of pre-emptively defending themselves against any potential enemy in this part of the city where they don’t belong. In an early scene, they drive past a bus stop where they see a young girl smoking. The loudest cop in the group, Chris, (arguably, sexually) assaults her in an effort to uncover any amount of drugs on her person. This confrontation is followed by another arbitrary shakedown and a violent altercation in which the police appear to shoot a defenceless boy.

But it is all captured thanks to the drone, whose owner the policemen do their best to track down and… assault. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Hate also deployed a drone (when the film was shot in the summer of 1994, such a thing didn’t exist, so the 27-year-old fashioned one out of a camera tied to a remote helicopter), and Ly clearly pays homage to his cinematic predecessor. This time, however, the point of view does not belong to God but to the very real technology of today. By 2017, surveillance drones had become commonplace in modern warfare, and while they can kill from far away, they can also record things that would otherwise remain unseen, as Dziga Vertov already made clear nearly a century ago.

Les misérables opens and closes on Laurent, the newest member of the police team. Having recently been transferred from the relatively quiet city of Poitiers, he has to balance the pressure of his peers to quash any alleged wrongdoing with his own moral code, which is more accommodating and less pugilistic. Between those bookends, a firestorm erupts and his life changes.

The best shorts show how quickly things can change. In his rush to string all the parts together, however, Ly botches not only his staging of the critical police assault but also the series of events leading up to the film’s (anti-)climax. It feels like essential contextual tissue was cut in order to bring the film in at a certain length, and we are left with a central scene that appears out of nowhere. The expected clash between the two trios of characters also fizzles out as the teenagers and their lives are all but ignored in the second half, which makes it less easy to empathise with them as people.

With an ominous bass line supporting the minimalist electronic score that builds ever higher, couching the latter’s optimism in a vague sense of dread, the film rises to its climax only to stumble momentarily at the finish line. And yet, this restless short film’s portrayal of the Parisian banlieue and the injustice of living under corrupt police rule in a supposedly democratic society is nothing if not visceral and in-your-face.

Denali (2015)

André Crous

Denali is a love letter that conveys a lifetime with a wave of feeling but without ever reaching for emotion.

Denali

USA
5*

Director:
Ben Knight
Screenwriter:
Ben Knight
Director of Photography:
Skip Armstrong

Running time: 8 minutes

It is rare for voice-overs to be deployed successfully. But Ben Knight’s Denali is rare in many ways.

It may be the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been written on film. All of 8 minutes in length, including credits, it looks back over a lifetime filled with comedy and tragedy. But in large part, it’s an adventure, a shared experience of a bond that is as strong as anything we can imagine. When the identity of the narrator was unexpectedly revealed about a minute into the film, tears started streaming down my face and didn’t stop until the closing credits rolled, at which point I was literally gasping for breath. The voice-over narration belongs to the title character, Denali, who (not which) is a 14-year-old mutt.

Of course, it’s a human being reading the lines. But that is also the point. Most people have animals as pets, but few have them as part of an active life in which they serve as loving companions, fellow adventurers and compassionate co-survivors. Denali’s friend and owner is adventure photographer Ben Moon, who got the dog in his mid-20s and has spent his entire adult life with Denali by his side.

This life includes a great deal of time spent on the beach but also in hospital as Moon struggled with but ultimately survived a bout of cancer, a period during which his insurance company kicked him off his plan (after all, the story takes place in the USA). Denali’s emotional intelligence lies in its knowledge that we want to see what we believe to be true. We believe that our pets – especially our dogs – can sense how we feel, that they understand us without us needing to tell them and that they care for us no matter what happens.

“When someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy”, the narrator tells us. It serves as a reminder that many of us already have this kind of love in our lives and should recognise it more often. It may seem like the act of a simpleton – of someone who cannot remember the past and does not consider a future in which the affection is not returned. But it is as pure an expression as one can imagine of life-giving love that soars the heights of Denali’s namesake, the highest mountain in North America.

Unsurprisingly, given the title and the fact that one of the world’s best-known outdoor clothing brands provided half the budget, every single image looks like a crisp painting and offers a direct link to nature. The voice-over is delivered nearly monotonously and yet, it is deeply moving. Human but different, it stands in perfectly for the quasi-human thoughts of a dog.

Denali is not just a film for those who have lost pets they loved. Nor is it even for those who have ever had pets. It is a film for anyone who has ever had an intimate relationship with anyone or anything. If you have lost that person or that animal, this is for you; if you have ever been scared of losing him or her or it or them, this is for you; if you are human, this film is for you.

Marriage Story (2019)

André Crous

Marriage Story tells the tale of a divorce, but instead of focusing on the protracted heartache, Noah Baumbach shows how entangled two souls can be, especially when they are struggling to uncouple. Marriage Story

USA
4*

Director:
Noah Baumbach
Screenwriter:
Noah Baumbach
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 135 minutes

The devil is in the details, but so is the divine. Two people who have lived together for years, had a child together and worked together suddenly separate to file for divorce, but these details remain embedded in their beings. With every encounter, the two souls are inadvertently drawn back to each other, even as the brains in the two bodies tell them not to. This is the tragic soil of a separation in which the two people who know each other best and can still stand each other try not to be together.

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is not so much an autopsy of a failed marriage as it is a forensic examination of a burgeoning divorce. What is most striking, however, is that things look grim even when the characters have the best intentions. The film opens with an extended montage that is filled with so much love and emotion the viewer may very well burst into tears right at the outset. In voice-over, we hear Charlie (Adam Driver) list all the things he loves about his wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Next, Nicole relates to us everything that makes Charlie so special to her. These are all details, many of them mundane, but they are the accumulated moments and qualities that epitomise their loving perception of their partner in sickness and in health, in love, marriage and life. That is, until it all falls apart.

We are quickly disabused of our fanciful notion that the love we see onscreen is enough, as the sequence ends with the couple at a marriage counsellor. But Nicole has made up her mind: She wants to leave Charlie and his theatre company and her job as actress in his plays and their life in New York – all of it – and move back to Los Angeles to star in a television pilot. And she is taking their young son, Henry, with her. A few days later, when Charlie comes to California to visit, he finds out she is intent on staying and has hired a high-powered kale-eating lawyer (Laura Dern at her absolute best) to defend her interests, just in case.

It should come as no surprise that Marriage Story is most affecting when the two main characters try to work through the rubble of their relationship. Filled with words carved from the flesh of its two leads, these moments are particularly poignant when they play out in an intimate setting. In a pivotal scene halfway through, Baumbach puts Charlie and Nicole in an empty room with nothing on the walls and no other characters to distract us, and he forces the couple to empty their souls. It works brilliantly as drama, and the scene is written in such a way that neither of the two characters consistently has the upper hand. We can easily sympathise with either of them. In fact, our sympathies swing back and forth between the two as the scene unfolds and they glimpse more and more of each other’s (and their own) deepest darkest sides.

It all comes down to the details – sometimes hidden, sometimes out in the open – and how they accumulate over time. Nicole’s reason for leaving Charlie does not have the drama we often associate with break-ups. We never even see the moment it happens. It was one final straw that landed on a decade of detail and broke the marriage carriage. It was as simple as her receiving a script for a pilot and him letting out a chuckle at the idea she would swap off-Broadway for Hollywood.

But that is exactly how these long-term relationships fall apart. Not with a bang, but with a fizz that is long in coming. And after holding their emotions in for long enough, the dam break is a sight to behold, especially in the hands of players as accomplished as Scarlett Johansson and, particularly, the large-of-frame but vulnerable-0f-voice Adam Driver.

In an early post-breakup scene at their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie finds his wife speaking to him like a stranger, but when Nicole says good night and turns the corner and the camera lets us see her unguarded, the true emotions are overwhelming. It is a breathtaking revelation that demonstrates how Baumbach puts his characters through their paces while never letting go of them as fully fledged human beings.

Those details of a relationship remain deep down, even when the people involved tell themselves they have moved on. We are reminded of how embedded they are again and again throughout the film, right to the very end. In so doing, Baumbach stitches his characters together even as their relationship irreparably disintegrates, offering a tragic reminder of the past while the present lurches forward, inexorably, towards a future that appears all but inevitable.

Mustang (2015)

André Crous

Showing five young sisters all seeking to break free from their conservative grandmother’s iron grip, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang has a potentially activist message but delivers it very meekly.

MustangTurkey/France
3.5*

Director:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Screenwriters:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Alice Winocour
Directors of Photography:
David Chizallet
Ersin Gok

Running time: 95 minutes

In Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s delightful Mustang, carefree childhood runs up against the brick wall of tradition as five teenage sisters do all they can to defy their uncompromisingly conservative grandmother. Not without reason, the grandmother serves a mostly symbolic function and has no name.

Although the film takes its sweet time giving them each a barely distinct personality, they are, from eldest to youngest: Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale. In a small Turkish town on the coast of the Black Sea where they have grown up under the iron hand of their grandmother, the girls spend their afternoon on the final day of term frolicking with their school mates in the ocean. When they return home, their grandmother rakes them over the coals for allegedly “pleasuring themselves” on the boys’ necks. In fact, they merely sat on their shoulders. But clearly, the grandmother’s imagination is running wild with sexual fantasies. So, too, does the mind of their live-in uncle, Erol, who assumes the girls have somehow lost their virginity in the process.

Before long, the grandmother starts insisting that the girls get married, lest they spoil themselves as teenagers and no longer suitable marriage material. She turns the house into a “wife factory”, where the sisters are instructed how to do all the work a good wife is expected to perform, from cooking to making the bed. But interaction with boys remains strictly off-limits.

All of this already feels like the dark ages, but things get even more insane about halfway through, when Selma, one of the first sisters to get married, completes her wedding night consummation. Outside the door, the in-laws are waiting impatiently for the bedsheet so that they can see proof of their new daughter-in-law’s ruptured virginity on her wedding night. As well as anything else in the film, this particular scene shows how the girls’ domestic situation is really part of a broader social problem.

There are fleeting moments of freedom, however, like when the girls manage to escape the house to watch a football match or make out with a boy they fancy. But every so often, more burglar bars are added, and the walls get higher. When the eldest girls leave home, we start noticing single Uncle Erol behaving ever more curiously, as does Ece. And when Ece is no longer at home, her younger sister, Nur, bears the brunt of Erol’s attention. This abuse is conveyed in a very fragmented and cursory way, although it does a very good job of exposing the absurd sexual repression he has imposed on his nieces.

But we are particularly attuned to this abuse because it seems to have a moving target – that is, moving ever downward – with Lale, the youngest sister likely being the inevitable ultimate target. Once we realise this, Mustang establishes its ticking clock. (The title is never explained, although the notion of roaming freely like a group of fillies, or the inability to do so, is central to the narrative.) We see most of the action from the perspective of Lale, who even turns up, wholly unnecessarily, to deliver some sporadic voice-over narration.

Her opening words perfectly encapsulate the circumstances: “It’s like everything changed in the blink of an eye. One moment we were fine, then everything turned to shit.” On the same day when Lale’s favourite teacher, Ms Dilek, moves a thousand kilometres away to Istanbul, the five girls’ seemingly nonchalant existence is upended when nosy villagers report on their alleged promiscuity at the beach. Nothing will ever be the same again, even though, presumably, things were already pretty dire before. But this fact makes their surprise at the repercussions (the family’s overreaction) a bit difficult to swallow, given they have lived with these horribly myopic people their whole lives.

It is commendable that the sisters all stick together, more or less, but it makes them a homogenous group without distinct personalities. It would have been infinitely more interesting if one or more showed honest doubts about either following the traditional path or cutting one’s one path. No such struggle is on display, which makes the narrative terribly simplistic in its approach to an issue such as female identity in tradition-oriented Turkey.

In her début feature film, the director mostly sidesteps melodrama, even though the film’s opposition to the traditional roles of women in Turkish society shines through. The assertive girls are rewarded with what they want, while their unassertive counterparts struggle to do the same. Unfortunately, their genuine desires are not always clear because we learn so little about their wants and needs.

This scratching of the surface extends to the treatment of issues that are arguably just as serious as (and complement) women’s rights to control their own lives, like Erol’s sexual abuse of his nieces, which is treated so lightly as to be almost invisible.

On the whole, however, Mustang offers a warm-hearted and hopeful story of and for 21st-century women in Turkey who seek to make their own decisions.