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Requiem for a Dream (2000)

André Crous

Getting up close and personal with Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film about drugs and other addictions, is both an immersive and a repulsive ordeal.

Requiem for a DreamUSA
5*

Director:
Darren Aronofsky
Screenwriter:
Darren Aronofsky
Director of Photography:
Matthew Libatique

Running time: 100 minutes

François Truffaut famously said that any anti-war film nearly always turns into a pro-war film. He was among those who had lived through the trauma of the Second World War and wanted to consign all of the war’s evils to the dustbin of history, not project them onto a giant screen. But many directors, anxious to prove themselves, have other ideas and often relish in showing us epic, gory spectacles that are entertaining, not nauseating.

The same tends to be true of films that deal with drug use: All too frequently, the feeling of immersion created by the sounds and the images is a warm cocoon rather than a frightening shroud.

Nearly two decades after its 2000 release, Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, the exception that proves the rule, remains a nightmarish vision of addiction – one that excels at bringing us so close to the drugs we can practically feel our gorge rising with revulsion. The film uses rapid-fire editing to signal its characters’ broken attention spans, fish-eye lenses to distort their already warped perspectives on life around them and a devastating score by Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet to bring the titular requiem vividly to life.

In the story, adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel of the same name, the 20-something Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) regularly pawns his mother Sara’s (Ellen Burstyn) television set for money to buy hard drugs. Sara, an elderly widow living in an apartment in Coney Island, is spending more and more of her time in front of the TV, watching game shows. Her favourite has a studio audience roaring with unbridled passion every time Tappy Tibbons, the charismatic host, energetically intones, “We-e-e-e-e got a winner!” But she is growing lonely from seeing her son so seldom. Out of the blue, she receives a phone call informing her she has been selected as a contestant on one of her favourite shows. She decides to go on a diet, but when the results are too slow in coming, she starts taking questionable diet pills that steadily drive her to the edge of psychosis.

Along the way, Harry’s girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly), dreams of opening her own clothing store, and his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), wants to make his mother proud by living up to his promise that one day he’d do everything he can to “make it”.

But Requiem for a Dream has no patience for the dreams of people whose focus is diluted by their weakness for drugs of various kinds. The three “chapters” in the story are titled as three seasons, but it is telling that it starts with summer and ends with winter: There is no spring, no blossoming of new life; there is only an agonising, seemingly ineluctable downward spiral. By the time the closing credits roll, everyone’s dreams have not only come crashing down but shattered into a million pieces, with the shards cutting the dreamers to the bone.

What makes this particular film rise above its innumerable counterparts that have been made about drugs and addiction? It is full of colour, yet grim as hell. The camera is free as a bird, even when it depicts characters who cannot escape their fates. And oddly enough, instead of pulling us closer, the close-ups end up alienating us from the objects of their focus. Aronofsky’s stroke of genius is to use the cinema’s tools of intimacy against us and redefine the potential of old conventions.

The close-ups are repulsive, and the alienation we experience is antithetical to the intimacy we usually expect from this visual approach, which yields a crippled euphoria – a synthesis that is far superior to its constituent parts.

Although best summarised by the simultaneous presence of light and darkness in the title, this dialectical triad is most prominently on display in the climactic sequence: As the music’s rhythm builds to a crescendo, the pace of the cuts quickens and shots from all four storylines (one of which includes an orgy) alternate faster and faster until breaking point, when various liquids are released and the screen suddenly fades to white. The insinuation is that the film itself is having an orgasm, but instead of lust and desire, the entire sequence is filled with despair and dismay.

What we see is repulsive, and yet, because we are so close to the action, we cannot disconnect from it, which sends us into a state of vertigo that also hints at the characters’ mental turmoil. Aronofsky’s kaleidoscope of visual approaches suits the material perfectly and even includes an implicit religious component. Many of the images, particularly those that show us someone curled up in the foetal position, are overhead shots, and at the bleakest of moments, the camera pulls back even farther. It’s not a stretch to interpret these images as God’s point of view. However, there is no intervention, and the implication is that divine indifference gradually turns to divine disregard. The emotional impact on the viewer, who is always open to empathising with the characters, is absolutely devastating.

It’s as if Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone are all screaming into a void, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” But no one answers, and they continue their plunge into the abyss. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, by the time he hits rock-bottom, Harry has a bloody hole in his arm. Every time he shoots up, we get the same extreme close-ups in almost identical sequences: among others, someone flicks a lighter, a syringe injects, a pupil dilates, and blood cells surge inside a vein. We hear a gasp of anticipation and then a sigh of ecstasy.

But the repetition, instead of providing comfort and security, is emblematic of a vicious circle from which the characters cannot escape. This sequence of hard drug use spills over into Sara’s life as well, as we see her popping pills in extreme close-ups, which ultimately leads to one of the most upsetting parts of the film: Sara’s hallucination of a rumbling refrigerator that seeks to tempt her into rejecting the purple, red, orange and green pills.

Sara, whose voice just about breaks with emotion every time she opens her mouth, is the central focus of the viewer’s empathy. The scene between her and Harry, in which she levels with her son about her obsession and her loneliness, is not just heartfelt but downright heart-breaking. She is vulnerable but determined to keep going, no matter what, and she keeps on smiling through the tears.

This interaction includes perhaps the best performance of Ellen Burstyn’s career. It becomes all the more poignant when we witness Harry realise that his mother’s situation is as sad and hopeless as his own. But despite his love for Sara, he is incapable of preventing her from going down the same path as him. It would take a miracle to escape from this desperation, but the world of this film is utterly devoid of miracles.

Requiem for a Dream is unrelentingly bleak, and none of the major characters manages to escape the calamities their addictions inflict on them. Artistically impeccable and deeply affecting, it is not only the most brutal of Aronofsky’s illustrious career but also easily one of the top movies of the past two decades and infinitely superior to the much more conventional Traffic, the other big drug production from 2000, which walked away with multiple Academy Awards that year.

This is an anti-drug film that never once runs the risk of showing the bright side of its sordid material. Many movies depict their action and spectacle on a scale that ends up stimulating the viewer on the level of the senses by rousing us instead of pulverising our emotions. But Requiem for a Dream starts with its heel already firmly planted on our skulls and keeps pressing down firmly until the very last moments, when our life just about flashes before our eyes.

And this is exactly as it should be.

“We-e-e-e-e got a winner!”

Matthias & Maxime (2019)

André Crous

In Matthias & Maxime, Xavier Dolan continues his downward trajectory by choosing to keep his two titular characters apart for almost the entire film.

Matthias & MaximeCanada
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 120 minutes

We know the drill: Two straight best friends – more specifically, two guys, stuck somewhere between graduation and responsible adulthood – kiss, and the moment changes their lives forever. At times, Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime is marginally more nuanced than that, but the nuance is actually just long stretches of inertia separated by spasmodic revelations.

As it happens, the kiss is not of their own choosing but merely a result of them agreeing to appear as actors in a short film project about identity. The small-statured, tattooed Maxime (“Max”) volunteers, while his smouldering best friend, Matthias (“Matt”), has to be pressured into accepting the challenge, which he does because of their decades-long friendship. Although initially horrified at the idea of kissing each other (especially because of unverified whispers that this is may not be the first time), the two friends eventually man up and lock lips, which is so momentous the screen turns black.

Almost immediately, Matt has an identity crisis that he takes the entire film to work through. Unfortunately, for the duration of the plot, he appears to be in the closet, emphatically in denial while repeatedly staring at every half-sexy guy moving through his line of sight but without showing any sign of development. Max’s focus is elsewhere. He is about to move to Australia to run away from his problems, the most urgent of which is his mentally ill mother (played to perfection, as usual, with seething resentment and no shortage of verbal abuse by Anne Dorval), but gradually we come to realise he is likely running away because of his sexuality, too. One mesmerising scene with Max on a public bus reveals exactly what we were hoping to learn but then fails to build on this discovery in any meaningful way.

Matthias & Maxime tips its hand early on when Matt’s boss at his law firm, hinting at an upcoming promotion, suggests that many people may be used to doing one thing before discovering much later that they enjoy doing something different. In fact, despite our initial impressions, the kiss did not reveal unexpected inner emotions to the two men but was an expression of feelings they had been struggling with and suppressed for their entire lives, as the film’s final act – and, specifically, a very powerful scene at the house of Matt’s mother, portrayed to emotional perfection by Michelin Bernard – makes so poignantly clear.

And yet, the narrative structure here inhibits (and even undermines) our sympathy in at least two important ways. Firstly, unlike the similar examples of Y Tu Mamá También or Humpday, the kiss comes not towards the end but right at the beginning. This means we don’t know how things were before, and therefore, there is no opportunity for involvement in the awkwardness that follows the physical encounter. This is equivalent to providing a climax without any dramatic build-up.

Secondly, and even worse, the film then proceeds to keep Matt and Max apart for around a full hour. They do not discuss what happened, they do not tell each other (or us) how they feel or what they think, and there is no possibility of a resolution until a brief moment of in vino veritas followed by a narratively contrived final shot and a cut to the end credits. The only thread connecting them for most of the film is their timidity to address this quandary over their friendship and their similar domestic situations: In both households, the only parent around is the mother. 

Despite the amount of dialogue and the admirable delivery by the entire cast, we don’t get close to either of the two M’s. An elaborately staged scene in which Matt tries to rid himself of his existential demons by swimming across an entire lake, getting lost, then swimming back, is mind-numbing because it takes forever, the shots are uninspired, the piano music is monotonous, and we don’t know Matt well enough (or at all) to sympathise with this sudden bout of sexually motivated hysteria.

A film like Marco Berger’s exquisitely paced Hawaii, which focused its energy exclusively on fleshing out its two characters, slowly increased the sexual tension until the point of satisfying release. By contrast, Matthias & Maxime opens with bad foreplay, proceeds straight to the climax and then languishes for more than an hour in a painful refractory period. 

An inordinate amount of time is spent treading water. Throughout the film, Dolan is much more interested in presenting life around the characters rather than focusing on their own lives and inner turmoil. And yet, Matthias & Maxime is at its most captivating when the two titular characters are in the same scene. Max, whose crimson birthmark flows from his right eye across his cheek, is infinitely more interesting than his friend, but despite Dolan playing the role himself, he struggles with the same passivity that hampers Matt’s character from ever becoming more than pitiful. Unspoken desire can be a powerful driver for a story, but at some point, people have to start speaking, and Dolan inexplicably does all he can to avoid this critically important moment.

For all the talk of this Canadian director’s talent, two films continue to stand head and shoulders above the rest in Xavier Dolan’s career: His début feature film as director, I Killed My Mother, released in 2009, showed him at his most creative. And in 2014’s Mommy he reached the zenith of his storytelling prowess with an intimate story told as if it were an epic. But his films since then have been disappointing. Despite its wonderfully recreated tension, It’s Only the End of the World was an annoying powder keg of a chamber drama with another incredibly passive central character. And his subsequent short-lived foray into English-language filmmaking, in the form of The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, produced little more than a full-length dark-toned flashback.

Matthias & Maxime is not unlike Matt himself: While handsome to look at and intent on speaking correctly (Matt’s insistence on using correct grammar is reminiscent of the early films of both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and the screenplay’s own dialogue is flawless), it prefers limbo over taking things to their logical conclusion. 

Viewed at the 2019 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival.

Synonyms (2019)

André Crous

In Synonyms, a former Israeli soldier forsakes his country and its language and turns up in Paris only to find that knowing French is very different from being French.

SynonymsIsrael/France
3*

Director:
Nadav Lapid
Screenwriters:
Nadav Lapid
Haim Lapid
Director of Photography:
Shai Goldman

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Synonymes

The opening shot of Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear–winning Synonyms is one that will be repeated on many occasions throughout the film in a (surprise, surprise, given the title) way that looks different but has essentially the same meaning. Moving forward and sideways with no clear sense of the horizon, we alternate between pavement and sky. In between, we catch brief glimpses of buildings, immediately recognisable as Parisian. It is our point of view, but then and later again and again, it always floats away to show the person whose view it actually is: the twenty-something Yoav (Tom Mercier), a former Israeli soldier who has “escaped”, in his words, to France and shunned his life in Israel.

Somehow, oddly, we never learn exactly what his motivation for leaving was. The film deals almost entirely in the present without recognising the past, which is exactly what Yoav is intent on doing. On his first day, he arrives at an expansive but bare apartment in the French capital, where he spends the night. The next morning, while taking a shower, his backpack disappears, and he is left without a stitch of clothing. Lucky for him, his curious upstairs (and upscale) neighbours find him passed out in the bathtub and take pity on him by dragging him up to their place, laying him down in their bed and covering his naked body with their goose down. One of them notices that Yoav is circumcised.

That “one” is the boyish Émile (Quentin Dolmaire), a struggling writer with perfect skin and an exquisite wardrobe, who also gets under the covers to warm up the stranger’s body by rubbing against him. It turns out Émile runs a factory (somewhere, making something) and likely inherited it from his family, who also pay the rent. The other is the oboe-playing Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who is ostensibly his girlfriend, although there is no apparent affection between the two. Affection is reserved for the newcomer, Yoav, who shares many an intimate moment (though never explicitly sexual) with Émile in the first half before Caroline makes a (sexual) move in the second. The setting may be comparable, but the tension of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Dreamers is completely missing.

Yoav is nothing if not absolutely entrancing. In his feature film acting début, Tom Mercier draws us closer to his character primarily by having the face he has and by utterly devoting himself to his character. Yoav’s chosen uniform of Frenchness is an extravagant orange overcoat, given to him by the extremely French, polo neck–wearing Émile, which he wears almost throughout the entire film. Looking like a Jewish version of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his youth, albeit with the eyes of a zombie, Mercier exudes a sex appeal that is derived not from his body (although the many full-frontal shots will thrill a sizable part of the audience) but from the combination of vulnerability and devil-may-care self-confidence.

And yet, very little of substance actually happens. When it does, it comes up against Yoav’s self-imposed obstacle of language. Whatever happened in Israel was so terrible that he has given up speaking Hebrew, although he gladly engages in accented French with Hebrew-speaking Israelis in his newfound home, including at the Israeli Consulate General in Paris, where he works (!). But when an old girlfriend Skypes him or his father turns up in Paris and somehow tracks him down, his refusal to speak his mother tongue cuts off all avenues to us gaining a better understanding of his motivations. A small scene that shows (unwanted) remnants of his past in the present – even a dream with him speaking Hebrew – would have helped enormously to overcome this linguistic absurdity. 

The film takes nearly two full acts to arrive at anything resembling a raison d’être. While we know all along that Yoav’s integration into French society is limited to his frequent interactions with Émile and Caroline, it is only in the final stretch that he takes his duty to assimilate semi-seriously. This is where the film finally starts to look more earnestly at the drama associated with changing one’s national identity and the struggles one faces while trying to be accepted into the fold.

But the screenplay and the directing fail in many of the scenes where Yoav speaks French. Despite the accent, he speaks the language fluently and even uses multiple complicated constructions. And he relies on an erudite vocabulary to expatiate on everything from his own experience in the military to Hector’s adventures in the Trojan War. Then, suddenly, everyday words, like “chaussette” (sock) or “tiède” (lukewarm), trip him up. Such moments feel completely unrealistic. Besides, we have no idea where or how Yoav learned to speak French so well in the first place. He even seems to understand it almost perfectly, which is a miraculous feat for a non-native speaker who just moved to a new country. These instances remind us that the film is manufactured, and they alienate us from the experience of living the diegesis that Mercier, in so many other respects, fully embodies. 

The wild camerawork out on the street can be nauseating, but director of photography Shai Goldman does an exceptional job of the more intimate moments. In particular, the kissing scene in the tiny apartment where Yoav stays for most of the film is shot in a way that conveys feeling and puts us inside the two actors’ private bubble but leaves us scratching our heads at how he managed to pull off such a show of dexterity.

But dextrous is not a word that can be applied to the screenplay. Besides the structural issues – in particular, the number of scenes that fail to advance the plot – there is also the issue of character development or just presence. Some characters that play a major role in the first half simply fall out of the narrative by the latter part of the film. One memorable example is the roid-brained Yaron, who suspects everyone of being a potential anti-Semite and seeks to smoke them out by loudly humming the Israeli national anthem while invading everyone’s personal space on the metro. His behaviour has us on tenterhooks for a while, but then he disappears in one of the many gaps between scenes.

In a flashback, we see Yoav during his military service shooting a target to smithereens to the beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympathique”. The song’s lyrics continue to resonate in the present, as most of the film consists of Yoav channelling the sentiment that, “Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner, je veux seulement oublier” (“I don’t want to work, I don’t want to have lunch, I just want to forget”). Some viewers may feel the same way.

Synonyms might have been better titled Ellipsis. Or Suspension Point. Or Three Dots…

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

André Crous

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature film as director, Quentin Tarantino reminds us that even when movies are based on very real events, their stories are in the hands of the filmmaker.

Once Upon a Time in HollywoodUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 160 minutes

At the end of his Second World War drama and perhaps his greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino did something shocking: He recast history to give us the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in a movie theatre in 1944. While the viewer often suspends disbelief to follow the story of fictional characters in a recognisable historical setting, there tends to be an assumption that the main events will remain, in large part, intact and unaltered. But Tarantino says (correctly) that the filmmaker is in control of his or her depiction of history: Since a representation is already separate from the original, why not go even further and rewrite history for the purpose of entertainment, especially when there is no risk that anyone would mistake the film for actual history?

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature in the director’s chair, Tarantino is his revisionist self again: He tells a wholly fictional story within a recognisable context (Hollywood in 1969) with all the meticulous attention we would expect from David Fincher before reminding us that he can change the facts of history because the real world is only applicable to the extent he wants it to be. Many of the characters are very close to their real-life counterparts, but only up to a point. And in the tension between real life and representation lies the possibility to create great art.

Released exactly 50 years after the tumultuous year it depicts, Tarantino’s film is set in Tinseltown of the late 1960s, where we find the curious combination of a yearning for the innocence of yore, the hippy rebellion against the status quo and an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over it all because Hollywood in 1969 means only one name: Sharon Tate. Tate, an up-and-coming 20-something actress, had married Polish director Roman Polanski the previous year, a few months before the release of one of the highlights of his career, the classic Rosemary’s Baby. A little more than a year later, eight months into her pregnancy, she and three of her friends were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson.

Sharon Tate is played by Margot Robbie in Tarantino’s film, but the real Sharon Tate does show up onscreen when Robbie’s Tate goes to watch The Wrecking Crew at the cinema, and we see Robbie as Tate watching the real Tate play an awkward Danish blonde named Freya Carlson. And yet, while many viewers might notice these are technically different people, the entire setup is clearly one of make-believe, so the suspension of disbelief holds. What has been more controversial, however, is the clear divergence from historical fact at the film’s climax, even though the entire film is, by definition, covered by a “This is fiction” disclaimer.

So, what is this fiction all about? Despite all this talk about Tate, the film is actually primarily interested in her next-door neighbour on Cielo Drive: a former cowboy television star named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose friendship with his long-time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is by far the most intimate he ever allows himself to get with another human being. Missouri-born Rick’s career has gone downhill since his starring turn in Bounty Law in the 1950s, and he is scared of having to pack up his bags and say goodbye to Hollywood. But Cliff, who lives with his pit bull, Brandy, in a caravan next to a drive-in, is always available as his driver, a shoulder to cry on and a constant companion through thick and thin.

The plot, most of which unfolds over two days (one in February, the other in August), follows Rick and Cliff, together and separately, as well as Sharon, who spends most of her day at the cinema watching herself. Rick, who has all but given up on himself, meets a child actress (although she refers to herself as an “actor“) who will change his life. Meanwhile, Cliff gives a young hippie a lift to Spahn Ranch, where mistrust hangs thick in the air. At the ranch, peopled almost exclusively by young white girls, Cliff seeks out an old friend, the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who has gone blind since Cliff last filmed on the ranch and has shacked up with the most domineering girl in the group.

DiCaprio and Pitt both give some of their best performances ever here. DiCaprio, whose appearance is still strikingly boyish more than two decades after Titanic, conveys the sentiment of being an outsider very well simply by showing up. His character goes through multiple ups and downs, and we can always see the gears grinding behind his eyes during his silences. Pitt, by contrast, is the epitome of cool and easily outshines the character of Steve McQueen, who makes a brief appearance in a very unnecessary late-night party scene at the Playboy Mansion. Channelling the energy (and still sporting the looks) of a man half his age, he is kind to everyone but is not beyond striking a very hard blow, as we find out in a memorable interaction with Bruce Lee and a hilarious flashback with his former wife, whose demise he is very likely responsible for.

A major improvement on Tarantino’s previous film, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood gives itself space to breathe but never meanders. Two of the longest scenes – the one at Spahn Ranch and the wholly immersive production of the television show Lancer, in which the dialogue and the actions run almost indefinitely, without cuts or camera changes – have very good reasons for being there, albeit in retrospect. Spahn Ranch upends our expectations and introduces us to some very important characters, while Lancer marks a major turning point in Rick’s perception of his own potential.

But ultimately, after more than two and a half hours of leisurely comedic drama, most people will only talk about the ending. Those who know the story of the Tate/Manson murders will have a sickening feeling towards the end of the film when we see the eight-month-pregnant Sharon Tate and it appears Tarantino is about to shift from the leisurely fifth gear out on the highway right into first gear. But then, the director intervenes like God to give us a rousing version of history instead. In fact, knowing what really happened to Tate makes the events of the film, by comparison, all the more exhilarating, just as Tarantino had done with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t skimp on the violence but directs it elsewhere and even borrows a flamethrower from his Second World War masterpiece for added showmanship.

The final moments include one of the most acute examples of dramatic irony imaginable, as Jay Sebring, unaware that in a parallel universe (i.e. the real world) he has just been brutally shot and stabbed in a bloodbath, invites Rick over to Sharon’s house after the Manson trio has been taken away by the police. He has no idea what happened to his counterpart in the real world. But we know. And this discrepancy between the real and the fictional is particularly poignant because, in a sense, these characters are real to us, and the fictional murderers have gotten what was coming to them. When they are killed, we feel like they are punished not only for attacking Rick and Cliff but also for murdering the real Tate and her friends.

It is unfortunate, however, that the film does not make the connection with real life more concrete. While he appears on one occasion, Charles Manson’s name is all but left out altogether (his followers refer to him as “Charlie”, but he is never seen in their company). But perhaps Tarantino wanted his film to exist more in the world of make-believe than as a representation of history, which is why an infrequent and incongruous narration (by Kurt Russell, who plays a minor character here) pops up on the soundtrack.

To take the term used by André Bazin, a representation is always at best an “asymptote of reality” and never reality itself. So much focus has been on the closeness of those two lines as the film draws to a close, but few have extolled the artistic tension that results from that intimacy. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would have been entertaining enough without the last 30 minutes, but what happens there reaffirms its director’s capacity to amaze us.

The Painted Bird (2019)

André Crous

The Second World War was a grim time to be in Eastern Europe; The Painted Bird depicts it as the seventh circle of hell, in which episode after episode ends in horror but adds precious little to our understanding of the war or its victims.

The Painted BirdCzech Republic
2.5*

Director:
Václav Marhoul
Screenwriter:
Václav Marhoul
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný

Running time: 165 minutes

Original title: Nabarvené ptáče

Persistent death by gunshot, brutal eye-gouging, paedophilia, skull-pecking, shoving a glass bottle up a woman’s vagina. These are just some of the horrific acts inflicted on the characters of The Painted Bird for no apparent reason. It also features a good-hearted Nazi soldier as one of its lone sympathetic characters, which is almost always a bad idea.

Based on the eponymous novel by Polish writer and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosiński, the plot comprises a string of nine episodes. And each of them tries to top the horrors of the previous one. The story, filmed in gorgeous black and white, takes place during the Second World War in an unnamed East European country where everyone speaks a fictitious Slavic language (Interslavic, an artificial language developed by Vojtěch Merunka).

Everyone, that is, except the main character, who is called Joska but remains anonymous until close to the end. We first lay eyes on him when he is about 10 years old, and over the course of the film, he ages enough for us to notice the passage of time. Played by Czech actor Petr Kotlár, he speaks Czech, is Jewish and lives on a farm with an old lady named Marta. To demonstrate how obscure the storytelling is, it is wholly unclear whether this is just a nice old woman, his grandmother or his aunt, and reviews filed from the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival have come up with different interpretations.

In the very first scene, he is already being terrorised, as a group of young boys pursue him through the forest and eventually catch up to him. They grab his pet ferret, pour gasoline over it and set it alight. Together with Joska, we watch helplessly as the animal twitches in agony before it ultimately stops moving and turns into a pile of soot. But much greater tragedy lies ahead for the poor boy.

Very soon, Marta dies from old age, and when he discovers her, his shock is such that he drops the lantern and burns down the house. This incident sets him on a journey of discovery not so much of himself but of the evil in people. Hell is other people, director Václav Marhoul seems to be saying.

These hellish figures take many forms, but most of the episodes are so superficial that there is no chance to get to know the characters before they inevitably die in a variety of ways or commit atrocious acts that send Joska fleeing their company or, often, both. After his parents have left (or were taken) but before all the other tragedies befall him, he already engages very little with Marta, and he is so emotionally isolated that it takes him a full day to discover she has died.

What follows are episodes of such depravity that it is difficult to view them as anything but gratuitous – flogging a dead horse to give the illusion it is still breathing. In the next village, Joska is taken under the wing of a sorceress named Olga, who buries him upright, leaving only his head exposed and sticking out of the ground. This leads to a gruesome scene in which giant crows descend on him. At first, he scares them away by screaming at them, but when they return he inexplicably falls silent, and they start pecking at his shaved head.

He escapes the crows’ claws and Olga’s clutches, only to face the first truly disgusting setup at a mill, whose miller (played by Udo Kier) is paranoid that his wife, whom he beats all too frequently, is interested in another man and proceeds to gouge out the poor man’s eyes. We get a giant close-up of the eyes lying on the ground. Later, the naïve Joska tries to return the eyes to the man, who now sports giant black holes for sockets.

And so it goes, on and on. Before long, he witnesses a woman being raped with a milk bottle, is forced to eat out a lascivious young widow and is himself raped more than once by a man who buys him from the local priest, played by Harvel Keitel. There is simply no end to the cruelty. And yet, we never get any insight into Joska’s mind, because he is more or less expressionless throughout the ordeal.

The concatenation of horrors offers no point of entry for the viewer but, instead, beats us over the head with some universally loathsome villagers committing unspeakable acts. If Marhoul had wanted to convey to us that the Nazis were not the only bad people fighting the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and that the non-Jewish population was similarly deplorable, he could easily have found a better way.

But arguably as controversial as anything else is a scene in which Stellan Skarsgård makes an appearance as a Nazi called Hans. Soon after a drunk Soviet soldier tells the villagers to deliver Joska to a nearby group of German soldiers, Joska is seen walking the train tracks accompanied by a clearly conflicted Hans. But rather than kill him, Hans, for no real reason other than this is what the screenplay obliges him to do, lets the boy escape. The film contains barely any warfare to speak of, and for the most part, Nazis are wholly absent. Therefore, it is pretty distasteful for the director to insert them here and make one of them the kindly Hans, whom we never get to understand beyond his charitable act.

The Painted Bird‘s one major missed opportunity comes right at the end, when Joska is sitting around a fire under a bridge with fellow war survivors. This scene goes nowhere but would have made sense and packed a serious punch if some of the faces had been shown to belong to some of his erstwhile adversaries. There are certainly more examples of this, but one scene that springs to mind where this is done correctly is the celebration in the streets shortly after the Normandy landings towards the end of Claude Lelouch’s Les Misérables.

There are only three commendable elements here: Firstly, the idea of using Czech as the “outside language” even though it is mutually intelligible with Interslavic is a brilliant metaphor for Joska’s “outsider” status as a Jew among the general population. In addition, the fact that Kotlár himself is a Gypsy gives further depth to this metaphor. Second, the images are beautiful, although they stick in our heads for their grisly content rather than their composition. And third, a scene late in the film when Joska shares a tree with taciturn Soviet soldier Mitka (Barry Pepper) is disarmingly charming, with them finding a moment of real serenity amid the gloom. That is, before Mitka mows down the inhabitants of a small village.

The Painted Bird is an austere account of war. Its sympathies are ambiguous, but its intention is clearly to shock us rather than put us in the shoes of its main character. The shocks are grotesque, and instead of punctuating the plot, they end up being the plot. 

The film’s screenings at the international festivals in Venice and Toronto were followed by sensational reports of people fleeing the cinema, distressed by the events they were forced to witness. It has to be noted here that the implication was always that people can’t handle the truth. Let me offer a counterpoint: Sometimes people simply walk out of a screening because the film is bad.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (2018)

André Crous

In his epic documentary entitled CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur provides a comprehensive and sometimes mind-blowing overview of the Czechoslovak New Wave. 

CzechMateIndia
4*

Director:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Screenwriter:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Director of Photography:
David Čálek

Running time: 430 minutes

Without exception, an entire generation of Czech and Slovak filmmakers made their best films – and arguably some of the best their country ever produced – shortly after leaving film school. A perfectly balanced dose of freedom and oppression, along with powder kegs of talent, made these works possible. Unfortunately, half a century later, only a handful of them have received the recognition they deserve outside Central Europe. But now a new documentary clocking in at more than seven hours goes a long way towards remedying this oversight.

Almost every viewer interested in the history of cinema is aware of the French New Wave. Dating to the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the nouvelle vague basically comprised a handful of male film critics from the monthly Cahiers du cinéma journal who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities and looked up to many of the same filmmakers (“auteurs” like Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks and Robert Bresson). However, despite being even more ambitious in scope and more numerous and diverse in its composition, the Czechoslovak New Wave (Československá nová vlna) is much less known.

The movement’s best-known film is Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), which was released at the end of 1966 and was then-28-year-old Jiří Menzel’s début feature. It was based on the eponymous novel by famed Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, which had been published the year before. The film was screened at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1968 – the first Czech film and only the second Czechoslovak film (after Ján Kadár’s Slovak-language The Shop on Main Street) to do so. This elegant depiction of a young station agent who loses his virginity during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia remains one of the defining films of the era.

And yet, it is but one in a panoply of cinematic masterpieces produced by Czech and Slovak filmmakers under extraordinary political circumstances in the 1960s. To better understand the time and the people involved and to inform the world of the magic that was conjured up between Prague and Bratislava in a very small window of time, Indian filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur travelled to the Czech Republic to interview Menzel. Along with Miloš Forman, he is perhaps the best-known Czech filmmaker outside his own country. What developed from their initial conversations over the course of seven years was the 430-minute CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel.

“Film is my job”, Menzel announces in the opening moments of this massive film. It is a seemingly unremarkable comment but perfectly encapsulates this man’s view of his place in history, and its implications vibrate throughout the rest of the film. He sees himself not only as being at the service of a customer but also as part of a greater network of individuals. Most importantly, in order to get his movies made, he saw (and still sees) compromise as part of the process. Others, most notably Miloš Forman, who had enjoyed wild success with Black Peter (Černý Petr), Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) and The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko), chose to leave the country rather than work out a deal with totalitarians.

The morality of compromise is addressed most directly with the ambiguous case of legendary director and FAMU founder Otakar Vávra. Vávra was a chameleon able to adapt to the regime of the day and has been sharply criticised for his pro-communist films. And yet, many of his film school students subsequently went on to make anti-establishment films. Agnieszka Holland, who studied under him, says the dossier the secret police kept on her revealed how Vávra had falsely vouched for her belief in socialism, presumably in order to keep her from being kicked out of the school. Unfortunately, while writer-director Drahomíra Vihanová, who was banned from making features under communism, touches on Menzel’s apparent willingness to downplay the tragedy of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the film doesn’t push its professed subject on this point.

CzechMate focuses mostly on the 1960s but also spends a good chunk of time on the films the directors (especially Menzel) managed to make after 1968. It is at its best when it drills down into the historical context and the different ways in which political pressure affected or illuminated the character of the young filmmakers. Easily the most attention-grabbing part of the documentary is its account of the events between August 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and January 1969 (the funeral of Jan Palach, a student who had set himself alight in protest against the Soviet occupation). Director Ivan Passer’s description of how he and Miloš Forman escaped the country is also an unforgettable episode packed with adrenaline, incredible luck and white knuckles.

Emir Kusturica notes that Vávra once impressed on him the importance of having strong conflict in a film, as no one could keep still for two or three hours without it. In a surprising self-own on the part of Dungarpur, whose film contains no conflict whatsoever, Kusturica makes this statement around the three-hour mark. Menzel’s incredulousness at what the documentary will ultimately look like also provides some occasional levity, and more than five hours into the running time, he quips: “It will be long, long, long, long film!” Fortunately, the length is mitigated in no small measure by the absolutely stunning imagery from the directors’ films, with almost all of the clips appearing to have been restored to mint condition. 

Jiří Menzel, in his late-70s, cuts a congenial figure who can seemingly talk for hours on end without much prodding. With a lifetime of experience in the director’s chair and counting many of the best-known directors of the time among his friends, he is a font of knowledge about the New Wave. His infatuation with the female body, although infinitely less nuanced than the work of François Truffaut, is also emphasised on multiple occasions and gives a childlike quality to this director, not unlike that of his main character in Closely Watched Trains. However, quirky as he is, there are simply too many scenes with him speaking while lying in an empty bathtub, his dirty feet sticking out at the bottom, and this becomes a distraction in the latter part of the film.

He may well be the most talkative, but it is wholly unclear why Menzel should be the focus of attention and what the “search” in the title refers to. While Dungarpur provides a multifaceted view of Czech and Slovak filmmaking in the 1960s and beyond, thanks in large part to Menzel’s willingness to discuss it at great length, the latter is never challenged in any serious way. The last hour or two of the film does make clear that he is not universally beloved, but the director is not directly confronted with the criticisms his peers have of him and his work.

This brings up another missed opportunity. Perhaps it was just a matter of logistics, but it feels regrettable that almost all the interviews were conducted one on one. One of the film’s only truly emotional scenes is when Menzel talks about a rare group photo showing the luminaries of the New Wave together and goes down the line to point out the rare ones who are still alive. What the film doesn’t make all that clear is that many of the interviewees actually passed away during the seven-year production of CzechMate, including Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Drahomíra Vihanová and renowned cinematographer Miroslav Ondřícek.

Although some thematic montages are stronger than others, the film’s editing consistently ensures smooth transitions between a free-flowing, somewhat heterogeneous mixture of topics. The loose structure also means that a  lot more time is often spent on one film in Menzel’s filmography while another is almost completely ignored (Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut had the same problem, among many others). Thankfully, despite the vast number of interviews with close to 100 people, we never feel like this is all just a sequence of talking heads.

Watching a seven-hour film is physically exhausting, and one has to wonder whether a theatrical release was the best format. Given the lack of a strong thematic thread (sometimes, Menzel and his work all but disappear from the film), it might have been a better idea to rearrange the material as a miniseries according to topic or time period. The screening I attended at Prague’s Ponrepo cinema had no intermissions, so for those wishing to have a snack, relieve themselves or keep their legs from turning to jelly, it was necessary to leave the theatre and, therefore, miss out on part of the film. This situation is far from ideal, and it is up to either the cinema or the filmmaker to solve the problem.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel judiciously positions the Czechoslovak New Wave, brief though it was, as one of the most important movements in the 125-year history of the seventh art. While the highlights include the beautiful first scene of Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání), the amazing three-minute opening shot of Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) and a memorable dream sequence from Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic (Ať žije republika), the list goes on and on, and one can easily feel overwhelmed by just how talented this group of individuals clearly was.

Menzel is on the right track when he says that two of the most unfortunate events of the 20th century were the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the talkie. Seeing what these filmmakers created in the 1960s and knowing that it had all been snuffed out by 1969, when the most interesting works were banned (put in “the safe”) in the name of “normalising” the country is absolutely tragic. Just as cinema would undoubtedly have been better off had silent cinema evolved well past 1927, the global motion picture industry almost certainly would have benefitted from the raw energy and unbridled creativity of the nová vlna continuing long after the Prague Spring. While their counterparts in France were receiving rave reviews for each making one or two convention-busting films, these Central Europeans were churning out one jaw-dropping film after another, often in very different ways. Of course, just like the French films, not all of them were masterpieces, but CzechMate certainly piques our interest, and during the screening, one can’t help but make notes of which of these films to watch (again).

Successful at conveying the mesmerising skill on display in the many, many, many films that can be classified as part of the Czechoslovak New Wave but less exhaustive a portrait of its main protagonist, this documentary hides its minor flaws very well behind an assortment of likeable and very informative individuals and editing that rarely draws attention to itself. Because of its unusual running time, this is not your average film. But then, it was far from your average film movement.

I had two minor quibbles with the onscreen text: Only the English (not the original Czech or Slovak) titles are shown, which is a shame. In addition, we are not reminded very often of the names of the nearly 100 people who are interviewed, and over the course of more than seven hours, it is impossible to remember who is who. More reminders of people’s names would have been very helpful.

Parasite (2019)

André Crous

At times slapstick horror, at other times pitch-black comedy, Parasite pits a poor but very ambitious family against their polar opposites.

ParasiteSouth Korea
4*

Director:
Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriters:
Bong Joon-ho
Han Jin-won
Director of Photography:
Hong Kyung-pyo

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: 기생충
Transliterated title: Gisaengchung

If looks could kill, a wrinkled nose would eviscerate. A stare can be ambiguous as to precisely what the objectionable feature is, but a wince of disgust signalled by a movement of the nose is as clear as day: The smell is simply unbearable. When the stench emanates from an individual who, in turn, notices the nauseated expression on the receiver’s face, shock and embarrassment inevitably follow. And in the case of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, all of this leads to a surprisingly poignant bloodbath.

Loosely referencing his entry in the three-part anthology feature, Tokyo!, Bong starts his film with pizza boxes. The boxes are piled from floor to ceiling in a grimy basement apartment in a South Korean metropolis where the lower-class – and, from the looks of it, blissfully unemployed – Kim family resides. The father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), used to be a chauffeur but is now the one folding most of the boxes, albeit not very well. His post-teenage children, who epitomise the term “parasite singles”, are still living at home. And both the children and the parents, who live together in bug-infested squalor and leave their tiny piss-stained windows open to profit off the free municipal fumigation at street level, rely on proximity to their presumably slightly better-off neighbours to mooch off their Wi-Fi. But such multifaceted parasitism is not enough for them.

Through the fortunes of circumstance, Ki-Taek’s son, baby-faced 20-something Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-shik), is handed a job as an English tutor to a teenage girl at her wealthy family’s mansion. In terms of the relative standards of living, the contrast with his own family home is stark, and he soon spots an opportunity to spread the wealth, as it were, by getting servants fired and replaced with his sister (posing as an arts teacher for gifted children), his father (the driver) and his mother (the housekeeper). Thus, before long, the entire Kim family has all but moved into the perfectly manicured, ultra-modernist and very spacious compound of Mr and Mrs Park, and when the upper-class owners decide to spend the weekend glamping at a retreat, the Kims make themselves at home.

While they work hard to manipulate the elites, the Kims are, above all, interested in having the ability to partake of their employers’ material wealth; to this end, however, they remain dependent on the Parks. They are indeed parasites, gorging themselves on their host, but they can only continue provided that they don’t die, the host doesn’t die, and they are not removed by force.

Around the halfway mark, things turn slightly more serious (and, unfortunately, the plot gets bogged down in meandering conversations) with a revelation about some unexpected previous occupants of the house who may have more cunning and perseverance than the current crop of employees. We are also made ever more acutely aware of how body odour is tied to class. The Kims, who cannot afford the same extravagant treatments as the Parks and do not have the luxury of moving in slow motion to avoid breaking a sweat, may as well have a neon sign above their heads that is constantly flashing “paupers”. There is something appealing about this struggle to rise above one’s circumstances, but the Kims’ increasingly violent ambition to climb the social ladder – and, more importantly, get their competitors booted from the rungs – makes it difficult to root for them.

Not that it was ever easy to be on their side. While the first act is full of energy, and we are constantly surprised by how easy it is for them to wrap the well-to-do but seemingly vapid Parks around their little finger, we do not exactly sympathise with either of the two families. The Kims are devious and scheming but also want a better life for themselves, while the Parks genuinely want to protect what is theirs but are living their life in a bubble isolated from the rest of society. The only true caricature is Mrs Park, whose shopping sprees, white Pomeranian and ennui-driven naps around the house provide ample fodder to view her as privileged and clueless, and each of her scenes is likely to elicit a good chuckle. A juxtaposition late in the film contrasts Mrs Park choosing dresses from her walk-in wardrobe with people at a shelter receiving clothes.

As the narrative unspools, director Bong turns up the dial on his social commentary, which peaks with an astonishing visual tour de force. Just as things seem to reach boiling point, a devastating rainstorm begins to rage. While Mr and Mrs Park lie on their living room couch and have sex as their young son plays in his colourful teepee in the garden, which is so lush it almost resembles a real forest, the lower-lying city, including the Kims’ basement apartment, falls victim to a flood of biblical proportions. As the downtown dwelling (and the screen) fills up with rising water, the perspective dissolves to an innovative divine point-of-view shot slowly floating high above a river of destruction in the heart of the city.

Bong Joon-ho is in full control of proceedings in Parasite, and although it may take a while to warm up to his particular brand of genre-bending hybridisation, the pay-off is deeply satisfying. Some may quibble with the two-hour-plus running time (or, more justifiably, the amount of time spent on the post-climax coda) or the lack of any real texture in the relationships among the members of the Kim family, but this opportunity to indulge in a socially conscious comedy with elements verging on horror should not be missed.

Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

André Crous

Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a photographer whose work was only recognised after her death, takes audience on a voyage of discovery.

Finding Vivian MaierUSA
4*

Directors:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Screenwriters:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Director of Photography:
John Maloof

Running time: 80 minutes

When he bought his first box of Vivian Maier negatives, John Maloof had no idea who the photographer was. At the time, in 2007, Maloof was just a 20-something guy who knew little about photography but sometimes frequented flea markets and auctions, a gift that had been passed down from his father, and to him by his father before him. He says he always had a talent for noticing something worth having, and when he started sorting through the negatives he had bought, he was struck by their consistent quality.

He knew these pictures were the work of a certain Vivian Maier, but searching online did not help him very much, as Maier had never achieved any kind of professional success. Two years later, after posting some of the pictures on the Internet and getting an unrestrained euphoric reaction from commenters, he tried again. This time, he found an obituary, posted only a few weeks earlier, that helped him embark on a journey of discovery into the life of this unknown but obviously talented individual.

There is no question that Maier is a subject worthy of an investigation that runs the length of a feature film, even though the opening sequence, clearly meant to be comical, shows us her acquaintances unable to come up with a word to describe her. They eventually more or less settle on “eccentric”. Although it becomes clear that people did not particularly dislike her, she was generally perceived to be somewhat odd.

There are multiple reasons for this, and whenever Finding Vivian Maier pursues another strand of her story, it always grabs our attention. The first act, however, is by far the most interesting, as Maloof takes us through his early realisation that he was onto someone remarkable. He also waits until just the right time to reveal to us what Maier looked like, and we get a real rush from the small discoveries along the way, from her name and her accent to her photographs and her occupation, and finally, her appearance.

For a long time, there is uncertainty as to whether Maier was French or American, and the interviewees have vastly contradictory statements. Along with Maloof, who has managed to get hold of some very curious individuals to interview for this film and thereby made them and the film especially memorable, we find out when she was born and what she did for most of her life. She started in a factory and eventually worked as a nanny, even though her approach to child-rearing is far from admirable, and late in the story we get to the darker side of her character, which unfortunately is examined rather superficially.

We watch the film, the photos and the person herself develop in front of our eyes from our perch inside the theatre – itself a darkroom of sorts – and ultimately the image we get is one from which we simply cannot turn away. Maier remains elusive to the end, and even though Maloof makes do with little information about her past, except for snippets revealed by a genealogist or those she worked for over the years.

Yet the magnetism of the story lies primarily with the photos, as would Van Gogh’s paintings, Mozart’s music or Kafka’s stories. In contrast with these artists, however, Maier created her pictures as a full-time hobby rather than her occupation, and she never tried to actively sell her work or get it seen by the public. She had taken more than 100,000 negatives over her lifetime, but almost none of them had been developed. Countless pictures are shown onscreen, accompanied by breathtakingly emotive music scored by Academy Award–winning composer Joshua Ralph, who has worked on some of the most widely acclaimed documentaries of the past few years, including Man on Wire and The Cove.

Maier shot hundreds of rolls of photographic film and film stock, but while we get to see an impressive variety of her films, we almost exclusively see her photos in black and white taken in the 1950s and 1970s, and the lack of colour photos, which goes unexplained in the film, is rather peculiar. What we see in these black-and-white pictures, however, takes our breath away, and there are many visual references to pictures by other renowned photographers of the era whom Maier was either consciously emulating or by whom she was influenced. Or perhaps she was doing all this without even knowing about someone like Diane Arbus or Helen Levitt.

It helps that Maloof himself is such a visual filmmaker, and his curious eyes draw us into the story he is telling, but we never get a satisfactory explanation for why he signs the backs of Maier’s prints that go on sale and are shown to great success at art galleries around the world. Another detail that was a bit hard to swallow involved him trying to track down a church steeple in a French town on some of Maier’s pictures: He says he used Google images by typing something like “French church steeples” and somehow found the picture. Perhaps because of a lack of information from the filmmaker, this bit seems mind-blowing at first and then suspicious in retrospect, especially because the village somewhere deep in the Alps only has only a few dozen inhabitants.

Whatever qualms there may be about the investigation itself, the quality of Maier’s images is unassailable, and while the character herself may fade into the background after we have seen the film, the striking compositions of her work will not.

Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel expertly connect details from interviews with the life captured in Maier’s tens of thousands of photographs, and while we cannot retrace the subject’s life exactly or feel like we are following in her footsteps, we do get multiple glimpses of the moments she caught with her camera. She may have been eccentric or even mentally unstable, and she may very well have lacked social tact, but what remains today is her extensive body of work, and everybody who sees Finding Vivian Maier would agree that her pictures have earned her a place alongside some of the greatest photographers of people of the 20th century.

The Missing Picture (2013)

André Crous

The story of the atrocities in Cambodia in the 1970s is one worth telling, but by using static clay figures, The Missing Picture just looks silly.

L'image manquanteFrance/Cambodia
2*

Director:
Rithy Panh
Screenwriters:
Rithy Panh
Christophe Bataille
Director of Photography:
Prum Mesa

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: L’image manquante

“There is no truth, there is only cinema; revolution is cinema”, is a woolly quotation from The Missing Picture, which is a documentary that uses some archive footage but mostly clay figures to depict the terrible events that took place during Cambodia’s re-education programme under the Khmer Rouge in 1975–79.

Made by the Cambodian-born French filmmaker Rithy Panh, the subject’s importance is unquestionable. One of the best-known films of the 1980s was the unforgettable The Killing Fields, which followed one man – who worked as an interpreter for The New York Times – from the moment the capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the communist forces, through the desperate times working in the rice paddies in the countryside with little or no food for long stretches of time, until he finally escaped across the border to Thailand. It was a true story, beautifully brought to life by director Roland Joffe.

Panh’s hundreds of clay figures, which occupy extremely detailed sets, almost never move, except when they are involved in some cinematic process. They are frozen in place, seemingly devoid of spirit, but when Panh shows us a cameraman shooting film or a film director doing his job, these figures start moving.

The quotation at the top sounds like something Jean-Luc Godard would have said, and whatever you think of its poetry, it is important to note how the director contradicts himself only a few moments later, when he observes how films were used as propaganda by the Khmer Rouge to show people smiling while they work in the fields that offer what they would describe in their language of exaggeration as an “extraordinary, glorious” harvest.

Panh also doesn’t dig into the absurdity and hypocrisy of the Khmer Rouge showing films to educate the country’s people about Marxist ideology and reading books by Lenin while they themselves denounce any and all Imperial (i.e. Western) devices and call anyone who deigns to read books a pig. We even get some archive footage of pigs parading around in front of the National Library to sear this idea into our heads.

The Missing Picture is Panh’s story of his own life under the brutal form of communism that turned the country into a mass Gulag camp run by the all-powerful entity called Angkar, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the country’s name under the Khmer Rouge). People were forced to work in the fields, manually transporting dirt and rocks from one place to another throughout the day, every day. They lost their possessions and sense of individuality and were encouraged to act and think collectively.

Panh was 13 years old at the time the Khmer Rouge took over, and the few scenes that compare the bustling markets of Phnom Penh before the invasion with the shots of a completely deserted capital during the years of Khmer rule are absolutely riveting.

At various points throughout the film, he attempts to fuse the archive footage to his clay figures in order to bridge time and create a reconstruction that is tied together across the span of history, and he does this by superimposing the figures on the black-and-white footage from the time. The idea has merit, but don’t expect a Forrest Gump–like experience; sometimes, it is effective, but more often than not it just looks ridiculous.

The worst offence is a scene in the second half of the film in which three children die from malnutrition. At first, we see the clay figures dissolving away to disappear completely from their beds. It is a powerful moment, but this scene is followed immediately by colourful shots of clouds and the clay figures flying like superheroes across the sky as they presumably make their way toward heaven.

The film contains a great deal of information, shared with us via voiceover that pretends to be the director, as the text is written in the first person, but late in the film when someone is interviewed on television and we learn it is Panh himself, we are disorientated because the voice and especially the accent is so pronouncedly different. In fact, the voiceover was done by co-writer, Christophe Bataille.

What may have sounded like an intriguing proposition for a film is actually a frustrating viewing experience that contains many cringeworthy scenes. The Missing Picture was clearly born out of a very personal experience for the filmmaker, but the viewer learns very little and does so in a way that does not rely on the unusual approach to storytelling on display here.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013.

John Wick (2014)

André Crous

There is too much shooting and not enough character in (this first instalment of) John Wick, an action vehicle tailor-made for Keanu Reeves

John WickUSA
3.5*

Director:
Chad Stahelski
Screenwriter:
Derek Kolstad
Director of Photography:
Jonathan Sela

Running time: 100 minutes

Tarantino, by way of Star Trek, taught us that revenge is a dish best served cold. The ice-cold temperament of Keanu Reeves is therefore perfectly suited to a tale of revenge that produces an almost never-ending stream of corpses but is all the more chilling because of its main character’s utterly cool demeanour.

Jonathan “John” Wick (Keanu Reeves) used to be a bad man. Until five years ago, he did astonishingly successful work as a heavy – halfway through the film, someone reminds us, perhaps a tad euphemistically, that Wick used to be the guy you called to “beat people up” – and was an associate of one of the nastiest Russian mobsters in New York City, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist).

A few days after the death of Wick’s wife, a group of young Russians notice his 1969 Boss Mustang at a gas station; that evening, they beat him to within an inch of his life and take the car. By some crazy coincidence, one of the men is Tarasov’s son, Iosef (Alfie Allen), who has no idea yet what he is about to unleash. And we know that some bad things are on the way because his father the strongman goes silent.

Chad Stahelski (David Leitch performed co-director duties, but because of DGA rules, only one person can receive credit as director) reveals very few details about Wick’s past life, either working in the business or living with his now-late wife, whom we only see in flashbacks and in a prominent video on his mobile phone. This lack of information hinders our understanding of the character but it also makes him an enigma whose strength lies demonstrably in the number of people he can kill without breaking a sweat, or a nail.

The first shots of Wick at home show us he is living very comfortably, but we don’t know how this is possible, whether his wife knew anything about the way he used to make his money or whether he has a day job. When a policeman stops by late one night during an altercation, the scene between them is deliberately comical but will baffle the viewer on second thought, because we don’t have enough insight into his life to understand why the cop plays dumb on purpose, albeit much to our enjoyment.

Thankfully, it is Reeves in the role of Wick, and even when he becomes emotional, be it out of sadness or out of anger, his expressions are muted, which in this case is a very good thing. What is not a good thing, however, is the casting of his nemesis. While Michael Nyqvist is a fine actor in his native Swedish (he starred as Mikael Blomkvist in the original TV series adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels), his English is terribly wooden, and he is done no favours by a screenplay that makes him recite dialogue that sounds like it is from more than a century ago. His Russian may very well be better than his English (I couldn’t tell), but the film would have been much better off with a different actor in the role.

The story of a man unwillingly drawn back into his former life in the underworld to avenge a more recent injustice may sound a bit like The History of Violence, but John Wick has nowhere near the same insight or sense of drama as Cronenberg’s stunning 2005 film. Instead, we just get a lot of gunshots, stab wounds and broken bones, often without even knowing anything about the victims.

If you like violence, you will love John Wick. There is little variety, as more than half of the living shuffle off their mortal coil with a shot to the head, and the story is terribly thin, but the film does remind us that Reeves has a place in the action film genre, and sometimes it needs him as much as he needs it.