Countries

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

André Crous

David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo breathes fire over the chilly Swedish countryside.

Girl with the Dragon TattooUSA
4*

Director:
David Fincher
Screenwriter:
Steven Zaillian
Director of Photography:
Jeff Cronenweth

Running time: 160 minutes

At their first meeting, the septuagenarian Henrik Vanger, head of the powerful Vanger Industries, warns an investigative journalist about “thieves, misers, bullies … the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet.” These people, we learn, are his relatives, and in the cold winter air of rural Sweden, the fog that permanently hangs over the quiet desolation is the uncertainty about the intentions of a handful of people on a tiny island: the Vanger family.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, has come to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl, Harriet, which dates back to the summer of 1966. On that day, sumptuously recreated by director David Fincher and his cinematographer in shades of gold, Harriet seemed to be on edge, and by nightfall she had vanished like a dream.

Blomkvist seems to be the perfect man for the job: He is a keen detective and isn’t scared of naming and shaming the guilty parties, no matter how influential they are. He also happens to need some time alone, and the excursion to the remote town of Hedestad seems to be the perfect opportunity for him to regroup after a devastating legal defeat.

He soon realises that he is in over his head, however, with many corpses – all of them girls, which explains the (original) Swedish title of the book on which the film is based: Men Who Hate Women – rearing their heads from beyond the grave, and decides to bring in the goth cyber expert Lisbeth Salander to help him hack his way through the swampland of cold cases. Lisbeth is the girl with the titular tattoo, and has clearly had a very rough life, though presumably the details of her childhood will be dealt with in the sequel(s).

That is a shame, because the 2009 Swedish film, with which Fincher’s version will inevitably be compared, handles Lisbeth’s backstory very cunningly by using a momentary flashback to hint at an extremely violent streak. Furthermore, this American interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling three-part novel differs in one significant respect from the source and the other film version: While the setting, the characters’ names and all newspaper headlines are Swedish, the dialogue is in English, though Swedish interjections for “Hi” or “Thanks” do feature in speech.

Daniel Craig, who plays Blomkvist, overcomes this linguistic mishmash by playing his usual British self, and it works. Christopher Plummer, as Henrik Vanger, is an American who pronounces Swedish names with a Swedish accent. But Rooney Mara, who plays Lisbeth and has the right body gestures for the character, has a face that is too delicate for the role and her attempt at imitating a Swede speaking English fails miserably.

Fincher, who has had ample experience putting information-heavy storylines onscreen, skilfully guides us through the wealth of details from that fateful day in 1966 when Harriet disappeared. In one very effective sequence, while Blomkvist reads a timeline of the events with a yellow highlighter, we get brief glimpses of the day in the same yellow tones.

In contrast with the bright sunbathed images that constitute the past, the present is murky, perfectly anticipated by Fincher’s opening credits sequence – his best since Fight Club – in which a grey, metallic fluid seems to gush over a body that is half-animated, half-decomposing, while Trent Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” pulsates on the soundtrack.

Fincher allows himself one moment of the darkest brand of humour, pulling the kind of stunt Kubrick did when his main character in A Clockwork Orange committed a rape while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain”. Here, under slightly different but similar circumstances, some of Enya’s music is used to the same bloodcurdling effect.

Such effects are the director’s forte, and he uses image and sound both subtly and grippingly to affect the viewer on a subconscious level, often hinting at more ominous details that others have overlooked to their detriment. The film’s focus on Blomkvist and Salander is sharp, but the 2009 adaptation offered an impression of danger despite the family members’ proximity to each other. Then again, Fincher does provide greater detail about the investigation’s many twists and turns, and he does so in a firm and comprehensible way that has less violence than its Swedish counterpart yet is equally effectual.

Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

André Crous

In Searching for Sugar Man, documentary filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul pieces together the unlikely story of how an almost anonymous singer in Detroit became a star in apartheid-era South Africa without his knowledge. 

Searching for Sugar ManSweden
4*

Director:
Malik Bendjelloul
Screenwriter:
Malik Bendjelloul
Director of Photography:
Camilla Skagerström

Running time: 85 minutes

In Searching for Sugar Man, Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul travels the world to track down the major players in a drama that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic starting in the early 1970s. It is a tale almost too tall to be credible.

We hear the story of an unknown singer-songwriter performing in small smoky bars in the rundown centre of the Motor City, where on cold winter nights the lyrics would drift through the noise and the drinking and stick with anyone who bothered to pay attention. The singer wasn’t looking to make an impact on the audience, but one couldn’t help admiring the wisdom and sometimes the pain of the poetry in the lyrics.

This man was Sixto Rodriguez, and when he was discovered by some record producers, they thought they had found the next Bob Dylan. His first album, Cold Fact, was recorded and released in 1970 but sold so poorly that by the time his second record was put out the following year, the label thought it best to relieve him of his contract.

He didn’t give up on performing, but it was never the centre of his life, and he spent most of his time doing what he could get paid for: construction and renovation in the housing industry. He has lived in the same Detroit house for more than 40 years.

Meanwhile, completely unbeknown to him, he was becoming a star in a place he had never been to, and it’s still unclear what the genesis of his foreign fame was: In the 1970s and 1980s, despite no one knowing who Rodriguez was or what had become of him after his two albums, his records had phenomenal sales figures in South Africa, at that time mostly cut off from the international scene because of its racial segregation policy of apartheid.

The South African producers who sold his records in the country said they had either heard the legendary stories of his death – some said he set himself on fire during a performance; others claimed he was so disappointed by the lack of support at another show he blew his brains out onstage – or they thought he would never consider coming to South Africa because of politics and what they considered his “obvious” stardom.

Actually, he never had any idea, because those who made money from his records never told him. A very powerful interview takes place in Hollywood with the erstwhile chairman of Motown Records, Clarence Avant, who states that though Rodriguez was one of the best singers he ever worked with, it is pointless to look for where the money went. Avant is an odious fellow, getting riled up and defensive very quickly, and it is clear where the blame for Rodriguez’s situation lies.

In the meantime, the artist’s popularity surpassed that of Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones in South Africa, and a few music buffs tried to track down the man, or at least piece together his life story as they were more or less convinced that he had died early in his career. What would come of their investigation is something quite remarkable: After decades out of the limelight, Rodriguez went to South Africa in March 1998 to perform six sold-out concerts for people who had grown up listening to his music – most notably, his single, “Sugar Man”.

From the opening scene, in which Stephen Segerman drives along the stunning Chapman’s Peak Drive mountain pass on the western side of the Cape Peninsula, it is made clear what a friendly influence South Africa and its people would be on the story of Rodriguez. Although it is easy to say the weather was merely dependent on the time of year when the documentary was shot, one comes away from watching the film with very strong images of a warm, welcoming South Africa and, by contrast, the icy, desolate cityscape of Detroit, where Rodriguez has toiled all his life without any kind of acclaim.

The beginning of the film does use the snow-swept Detroit in an interesting way: In a few rare instances, black-and-white scenes turn to colour and static shots become mobile when Rodriguez’s songs start playing on the soundtrack.

One shot in the film, however, is particularly irritating: the staged arrival of Rodriguez at Cape Town International Airport in 1998, which consists of silhouettes, starkly contrasted with a painted orange backdrop of Table Mountain, moving toward a horde of waiting paparazzi. It is out of place in a film that draws so much on almost-unreal reality, and it undercuts the power of the facts. Luckily, this scene is complemented by photos of his real arrival at the airport.

The film briefly touches on apartheid and shows footage of anti-government demonstrations and police beatings. This is important in conveying the feeling of oppression that Rodriguez’s music helped people to cope with in some way, but the focus is still mostly on the singer’s lack of knowledge about his fame on the other side of the world.

Searching for Sugar Man is truly inspirational and shows how small gestures can lead to big things. With scenes all around the Cape Town city bowl, the film is also another reminder of the beauty of the city at the bottom of Africa, and it encourages further investigation of the country’s rich (musical) history and its influences.

The Little Man (2015)

André Crous

Czech puppeteer Radek Beran’s The Little Man is an unconventional fairy tale and a lovely adventure for children and adults alike.

The Little ManCzech Republic
4*

Director:
Radek Beran
Screenwriter:
Lumír Tuček
Director of Photography:
Filip Sanders

Running time: 70 minutes

Original title: Malý Pán

With his second feature film, puppeteer Radek Beran sets the bar deceptively low so that we are continually surprised and exhilarated by events, visuals, twists and turns that we do not see coming. The Little Man (Malý Pán) is a film shot on location in a Czech forest but starring puppets (technically, marionettes) that are visibly manipulated, as their movements are somewhat jerky and the strings from which they hang noticeably rise up to the top of the screen.

Based on a children’s book by Lenka Uhlířová and Jiří Stach entitled The Little Man’s Great Journey (Velká cesta Malého pána), the film is an adventure that is primarily aimed at children but offers very funny moments for adults, too.

The titular man, voiced by Saša Rašilov, is youthful and slightly naïve and recently left his parents’ home to build himself a refuge in the middle of the forest, but he is haunted by a recurring nightmare of a door that won’t open while a mysterious voice orders him to open the door. This dream pushes him towards a discovery of his surroundings and eventually to open his eyes to unexpected friendships with those around him.

His first point person on solving the mysteries of existence is Empty Head, a giant disembodied head lying on the ground not far from his house. Empty Head looks rather worse for wear and says it cannot provide any answers before drinking the crystal clear water found in a fortress guarded by the evil Great Strait.

Thus begins Little Man’s journey, during which he has to persuade Fishrew (a kind of gentle half-dodo, half-Nessie that guards the moat around the fortress) to let him through, fight the Cheeky Punk (voiced by the not-dissimilar-looking Pavel Liška), research ways to fight off Great Strait, visit an expert robotic handyman that can repair anything, make friends with a larva named Fida, ask gherkins questions, find talking trees brimming with wisdom that is succinctly expressed, and much more.

The plot is a magical ride that may be light on substance but has enough quirky moments, an easy-to-follow storyline and an eclectic soundtrack by Tata Bojs frontman Milan Cais to keep the viewer fully engaged.

On the technical side, the decision to put puppetry front and centre in the visuals (by showing the strings instead of removing them in post-production) never impedes our suspension of disbelief. The work on location certainly helps the process and perhaps in light of the generally light-hearted tone of the narrative, a character’s sometimes erratic movements frequently succeed in sustaining the levity.

That is not to say that the production appears to have been simple or the product simplistic. On the contrary, the interior shots are beautiful, and director of photography Filip Sanders deserves praise for his lighting in these scenes. The flyover shots, especially the ones from the point of view of a hot air balloon late in the film, are also impressive to behold and truly gives the viewer a feeling of briefly inhabiting the world of the film along with the characters.

Although the target audience is children, Beran adds one or two curiously gruesome moments to his film that will be particularly funny to adults because they are so incongruous with the rest of the approach. One such example is the depiction of a plan conceived by the Cheeky Punk to kill Little Man, and we are shown his fantasy not by means of puppetry but through animation that includes various forms of gory execution. Another striking moment of adult comedy manages to reference Immanuel Kant and Harry Potter in the same sentence.

For the most part, however, the storytelling does little to distinguish itself from that deployed in a fairy tale. The visuals are certainly more interesting here, and since there are no actors, as such, we are spared any overacting. In fact, whenever the voices become hysterical, the effect is comical and clearly intended to elicit that reaction from the viewer.

It would be easy to belittle the film for the uncomplicated progression of its story and that it is merely a life lesson (life is worth little if you don’t have friends) presented as a flimsy adventure story. However, as suggested above, Beran’s creativity comes through on many occasions, and although he does use a handful of special effects, their use can often be explained by pointing out the scene is a dream or a fantasy or (in the case of the “Universal Fixer”) simply unrealistic, even in the world of the film.

This unconventional film may not be the most polished or the most insightful film of the year, but it keeps our attention despite its flaws. Its characters are quirky and unpredictable, and it is always a joy to keep suspending our disbelief, even when what we see is so obviously make-believe.

The Night Before (1988)

André Crous

Bad acting be damned. The Night Before is more than a guilty pleasure. It is a classic.

The Night BeforeUSA
4*

Director:
Thom Eberhardt
Screenwriters:
Gregory Scherick
Thom Eberhardt
Director of Photography:
Ron Garcia

Running time: 85 minutes

There once was a time when Keanu Reeves was a bit of a dork. Not the actor, but his characters. Although in the minds of most viewers, the line has always been a bit blurred. He is as much Neo as he is John Wick as he is the second half of the unforgettable duo that is Bill & Ted. Keanu (because nobody refers to him as “Reeves”) has played some iconic roles over the years, but the main reason for this muddled boundary is that he is not much of an actor – at least, not one who produces speech in a natural way. As a result, his various performances have been remarkably similar in expression.

The Night Before was among his very first films and the one in which he made his début as a leading man. This mostly farcical production fits his adorkable line delivery and excessive hand movements to a T. But despite the laid-back nature of this pretty derisory undertaking, it should be regarded as a high point of Keanu’s career because it is so consistent in its wackiness.

His character, Winston, is a nerdy senior in high school whose biggest achievement is being vice-president of the Astronomy Club. Two of the coolest girls in school made a bet, and the one who loses is punished by having to go to the prom – and, worst of all, be seen in public – with Winston. That lucky girl is Tara Mitchell (Lori Loughlin), the daughter of a very protective single dad who is also an ominously cool-as-a-cucumber police captain. Naturally, the traditional “chat” between the date and the father involves a shotgun.

But The Night Before opens after the prom has already ended, and we never even get to the prom. One reason is the action itself: Winston gets off the highway too early and loses his way in an unseemly part of downtown Los Angeles. The other reason is structural: The film is a cleverly assembled mixture of quirky flashbacks triggered by a verbal or a visual cue in the present. But there is no way the prom was even a fraction as exciting as what Winston and Tara get to experience.

It all starts long after sunset, when Winston wakes up in a dark alley dressed in a white jacket and a pink carnation, just as a truck is about to (and then does) drive over him. He has no idea how he got there. This amnesia takes a while to shake off as he slowly pieces together the events that led up to him alone in the middle of the night without his wallet or his car keys, but $1,400 stuffed deep into his jacket.

While asking around, he quickly learns that he has to meet the local crime boss, “Tito”, at dawn, where they will have it out over… something. This impending doom imbues the entire film, comical as the events sometimes are, with a foreboding feeling of danger and dread, even as Winston (always awkwardly but, somehow, usually successfully) evades countless obstacles in his way. He also realises Tara has disappeared, and he doesn’t remember dropping her off at home, which means her father will have a bullet with his name on it.

A string of bad decisions – from Winston unwittingly helping a thief steal his car to him mistakenly selling Tara to a pimp – lead to the night unfolding as a horror show that the two teenagers take in their stride. They are either fearless or insane, and by the looks of things, these two options are not mutually exclusive. When a bartender overtly pockets Tara’s credit card before shuffling off, she blithely responds to no one in particular, “Well, there goes my credit rating…(!)” And when she is stuffed into the trunk, she is more worried about her silk dress getting ruined than the fact that she is about to be trafficked. Lori Loughlin plays this role of an airhead high school princess, who is indifferent to danger because she has always lived in a protective cocoon, exquisitely.

The night-time setting is remarkably seedy, and almost every character in both the present and the recent past (the flashbacks from earlier that night) either is a criminal, has criminal tendencies or gives off a vibe that has us grabbing our wallet to make sure it is still there. The Night Before particularly maligns its black characters: With a lone exception, every single one is some shade of a crook.

But it is the unexpected Proustian “madeleines” – those sensory triggers that evoke a particular memory – that stitch the plot’s two timelines together in a perfectly suited comical fashion and create a synthesis that is also an impetus constantly pushing the story forward. These bits of connecting tissue are very potent tools in a filmmaker’s toolbox, as Stephen Daldry proved in the opening credits of The Hours, which created visual links between three stories. Here, the moments are admittedly much less sophisticated but equally successful at establishing strong and memorable ties between the past and the present, thereby illuminating our (and Winston’s) understanding of his predicament.

The flashbacks are filled with such entertaining characters and events that we care little about the major plot hole: Locating the exact moment about halfway through the film where the flashbacks finally catch up with the film’s opening scene is not as easy as one would hope. But the reason this closure is lacking is that the film is always rushing full-speed ahead towards dawn, with the events around Winston quickly spiralling out of control as we reach the final act.

No one would have guessed Proust would make an appearance in a review of a Keanu Reeves film. Then again, many a Keanu film exists on a plane of existence that transcends that of its peers. The Night Before is serious yet ridiculous, clever yet superficial. And unlike many a comedy from the same period, the humour hasn’t aged a bit. (If you haven’t watched Wayne’s World in a while, try again and see whether you can call it anything other than cringeworthy.) Held together by performances that, if tweaked just a little bit, might have been unbearable, the film has a rhythm all its own and surpasses its respectable but staid counterparts, like those of John Hughes.

The Book Thief (2013)

André Crous

The Book Thief, which seems to shift the blame for the atrocities of Nazi Germany to an offscreen character named “Death”, is one of the worst World War II films that have ever seen the light of day.

Book ThiefUSA
1.5*

Director:
Brian Percival
Screenwriter:
Michael Petroni
Director of Photography:
Florian Ballhaus

Running time: 130 minutes

There is something sadistic about the industry inflicting movies on us on a near-annual basis that have to do with Jews hiding from the Nazis. From time to time, these films have undeniable strength and importance – for example, films that are documentaries, like Shoah or The Night and the Fog, or those that veer close to being documentaries, like Schindler’s List or Europa Europa – but just as often, there are movie producers who are interested in the subject more as a moneymaking device than as a historical tragedy.

This is where things usually fall apart. If the subject of fear is used not to teach us about the evil of the past, but merely as a backdrop to a story about a Christian girl who falls in love with a Jewish boy, and who reads him bedtime stories when he is bedridden, it can only be described as abominable. And that is exactly what The Book Thief is.

The Christian girl in question is an orphan named Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). Her brother died recently in the arms of her mother, who has had to flee because she is a communist, leaving Liesel in the care of a parentless couple. Her new “papa” is the kind-hearted, patient and loving Hans Hubermann, played with grace by Geoffrey Rush. Her second “mama,” of course, is the strict and offish Rosa (Emily Watson), who is sharp-tongued, always finds fault with everyone else, and whom we never grow to like.

At her brother’s funeral, Liesel had picked up a book, and with this book her world, which has suddenly shrunk to a small home on a short street in a tiny swastika-emblazoned town in the German countryside, opens up again, and her relationship with her new father blossoms. She falls in love with books, and after the predictable scene of a Nazi-organised book burning in the town square, she can’t help but take one of the books, even as it singes under her coat, making her clothes billow with smoke.

The Book Thief, which is based on a novel by Austrian author Markus Zusak, may have had the best intentions, but when the street on which the girl lives is called Himmelstrasse (Heaven Street), and we constantly have a narration supplied by no one other than Death himself (voiced here by Roger Allam), and everyone speaks as if they’re on the radio, it is truly embarrassing. And the embarrassment is infuriating because of the importance of the historical context.

For a large part of the film, a young Jewish man, Max, hides out in the Hubermanns’ cellar, and Liesel’s fascination with him, mixed with the secret she has to keep – even from her best friend, Rudy, the boy from next door who never leaves her alone and who, from the way he is acting, apparently had decided to fall in love with her even before they met – could have been the source of an interesting story. But because of the terrible acting by almost everyone in the cast and the very one-dimensional characters they all portray, it is difficult to take anything seriously, despite the terrible setting of Nazi Germany.

The only time when the film packs a punch is near the beginning, shortly before the start of the war, when director Brian Percival intercuts the violence of Kristallnacht with a choir of fair-haired German children singing their hearts out, dressed in their Hitlerjugend uniforms with enormous flags of the Nazi Party draped on either side of them. It is a deeply distressing scene for the viewer, which seems to belong to an infinitely more capable film. It is also a scene whose gravity is almost entirely undermined by one a few minutes later in which Liesel and Max make fun of Hitler’s mother.

But the worst is yet to come. Never mind Liesel effortlessly wading into frigid waters halfway through the film and Rudy diving into the ice-cold river to prove his love/friendship, and neither of them so much as get gooseflesh from the cold: The film ends with almost an exact copy of the final scene of Titanic, in which the memories of a lifetime are exhibited on cabinets for our perusal so that we can all have a nice, warm feeling upon leaving the cinema, knowing that Liesel’s post-Holocaust life was beautiful.

The Book Thief is one of the worst World War II films I have ever seen. It is one thing to try to balance humour with the grotesque events that no man or woman – and certainly no child – should ever have to face, but it is quite another to essentially make light of the events by having a director who doesn’t seem to mind his actors sounding like they are reading from a page just out of reach of the camera, and a story that is incompetently vying for our emotions. Having Death narrate the events is silly, if not appalling, beyond belief, and the whole experience leaves the viewer immensely disappointed, with a desire that someone should have set light to the screenplay.

Booksmart (2019)

André Crous

Told from a female perspective but playing like a cheap Netflix fusion of American Graffiti and Superbad, Booksmart hopes (in vain) that we can look past its lead’s impish behaviour because she’s more-studious-than-thou. 

BooksmartUSA
2.5*

Director:
Olivia Wilde
Screenwriters:
Emily Halpern
Sarah Haskins
Susanna Fogel
Katie Silberman
Director of Photography:
Jason McCormick

Running time: 90 minutes

There are few people as annoying as know-it-alls. Now imagine someone like this playing the lead in a feature film and failing to recognise her own deficiencies at any point in the story. It is near impossible to root for such an individual. And yet, this is the main character in Booksmart, a film that takes place over roughly a 24-hour period on the last day of school and seems to pitch itself as a female-driven American Graffiti or Superbad. Unfortunately, it has little more going for it than meagre production values, a forgettable soundtrack and a complete lack of visual creativity.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) is student body president and will be valedictorian at her high school graduation the next day. Seemingly living a life of privilege (we never see her parents, and the implication is that she somehow lives on her own on the top floor of a big duplex apartment unit), she sees herself on a glide path to the Supreme Court bench within a few years. Clearly, there is no shortage of hubris, although it is not rooted in anything except grades.

She and her best friend, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), have spent their entire school career seemingly insulated from any and all social contact, as we soon learn when Molly overhears her classmates maliciously gossiping about her. Confident in her own academic superiority, however, she confronts them by suggesting graduation is the end of the road for them, only to learn that the cool kids have way more layers than she thought: One is going to Harvard, another is headed to Stanford and the most popular guy in school has been accepted at Georgetown, while the resident stoner and long-term school student has been recruited as a programmer for Google. She not only misread the classroom: She has misread the classroom for years and never learnt anything except her school work. By the looks of it, social interaction and life, in general, have completely passed her by.

For Amy, life is somewhat more complicated. An out but introverted lesbian for the past two years, she has focused all her energy on work (and, presumably, the high-maintenance friendship with Molly) and has yet to find an outlet for her teenage hormones like her peers. She has super-religious parents who are fully supportive of their daughter, so getting laid is (as in so many other films) actually the most pressing challenge to her otherwise blissfully elite existence.

Having just realised that they have missed out on being teenagers, and given the symbolic importance of the last night of school, Molly devises a plan to attend the year’s biggest party and rack up some experiences before she graduates to residing inside the law library at Yale. Basically, her big plan is just to go to the party, where she will get to hook up with her uber-popular vice-president, Amy will finally make out with a girl, and they will somehow make up for a youth ensconced in a bubble of superiority. This “plan” is pathetic, but what is even worse is that the film somehow allows most of Molly’s dreams to come true, without her having to change a thing about herself.

The characters’ passivity is mirrored by the film itself, which has little in the way of either physical or audiovisual dynamism. Most scenes feel desperately empty, and shots with more than two characters involved in the action are few and far between. The screenplay’s central focus is on the Molly/Amy duo, and yet, by the end of the film, they are still two-dimensional, at best. The film isn’t interested in doing more than scratch the surface, and in the one big confrontation between the two girls, their dialogue fades out so that we can’t hear them, lest they appear to be more complex than a blank page.

By far the most interesting character is their cool English teacher, Miss Fine, played by the supremely talented Jessica Williams, who belongs in a much better film. The amount of personality, back story and feeling she brings to her character in just a handful of scenes is simply astounding. Jason Sudeikis is another comedian in the cast and turns up at school as the principal, although his talents are much better deployed later on when he pitches up as a Lyft driver. The topical issue of teacher pay is hinted at but probably too serious a subject to address in a film that is clearly more about lip service than thoughtful speech. (Props are given, however, when props are due: Uganda is dinged for its abysmal LGBT record.)

It might be unfair to expect any film about high school seniors to ever equal (never mind surpass) the brilliance of Will Gluck’s Easy A. But Booksmart‘s central characters are nowhere near as dynamic, independent and charismatic as Emma Stone, and the camera, by comparison, looks like it is fixed in place. In addition, while Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in Easy A have rightly been called the best movie parents of all time, Molly’s mother and father are inexplicably absent. Meanwhile, Amy’s very Christian parents (played by Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) only appear once and come across as overwrought caricatures every bit as childish as a baby on a sugar high.

Booksmart touts its feminism by pointing to other strong women (Molly’s room is adorned with pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) instead of infusing its own potentially thought-provoking central duo – a loud feminist and an out lesbian – with any kind of energy or insight beyond juvenile frolicking. They know everything, but they know nothing. Worst of all, it took them their entire young lives to figure out that being self-centred outsiders has its drawbacks.

It is incredible that it took four writers to come up with this shallow narrative headlined by a girl devoid of self-reflection and her omega-female sidekick. All the students change their minds about their peers within a single night and mostly without any serious drama. The scales fall off their eyes as if by magic, and by the end, there is absolute harmony and understanding. One half expects them to burst into a full-on musical number.

This film is often as nauseating as the excessive compliments Molly and Amy give each other and deserves a failing grade.

The Best Offer (2013)

André Crous

In The Best Offer, Giuseppe Tornatore reminds us that while love is blind, the love of art can be blinding.

The Best OfferUK/Italy
3*

Director:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Screenwriter:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Director of Photography:
Fabio Zamarion

Running time 125 minutes

Alternate title: La migliore offerta

Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is a respected auctioneer in Vienna and lives a very lonely life of luxury. He is surrounded by works of art every day at work, and he dines at some of the most expensive restaurants in the city at night. But he does so alone.

At home, he has a special room where his most-prized possessions adorn three very high walls: portraits of women, all staring back at him while he lounges in a comfortable chair in the centre of the room, reads gilded literature and consumes a glass of pricey wine.

He has dedicated his life to his job at the auction house, and he has not let anybody get close to him in all that time (he always wears gloves, because he distrusts other people’s hygiene). However, his frequent sessions at the barbershop, where he dyes his hair, suggest he has not given up looking quite yet.

And then, one day, he gets a call from Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), a woman who wants him to appraise the value of her substantial collection of paintings and antique furniture. She phones him, arranges to meet with him, and he starts appraising the objects in the expansive villa. But there is something a bit off: He never sees her.

It transpires that she has been living alone in the house for many years, and she has an assistant, who has never seen her either but delivers her groceries and cleans up after her. This mystery casts a spell over Oldman, and of course, he slowly gets reeled in by this creature not only because of her sensuous voice but also because of the many items that suggest a great deal of value. Mostly, however, it is because of a few unexplained metal objects he finds lying around the cellar.

He gives these bits and pieces, which he inexplicably finds lying around the cellar every time he visits the villa, to Robert (a very engaging Jim Sturgess), a charming young clocksmith he has become friends with (although, significantly, we do not see how this friendship is struck). Robert puts the pieces together without much trouble, and the two of them quickly realise these are all part of an automaton – the kind of 19th-century robot, perhaps even older, that also made an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Moreover, the supposed inventor is someone Oldman has been studying his whole life. If they manage to put the pieces together, this would be a stunning discovery.

While the relationship between Oldman and Claire becomes more intimate, and he grows more and more fond of her, despite her hysterical outbursts of “I love you! I hate you! Oh, forgive me, I do love you!”, he also confides his feelings – heretofore alien to him – of romantic interest in the young woman to Robert.

But Claire remains an enigma. At some point, the viewer may very well start to suspect she may be an automaton herself, or perhaps the real-life version of one of the portraits on his wall, but the director doesn’t drop enough hints to make us pursue this line of thought, which could have led us down some interesting rabbit holes.

The director is Giuseppe Tornatore, whose 1988 film Cinema Paradiso may very well be the most evocative film about the cinema ever made, but his handling of English material is as mediocre as can be expected. The dialogue is at times silly, and the delivery is far from polished.

The theme of forgery could have been exploited to a much greater degree, and so too Oldman’s statement that there is always something authentic in a fake. Tornatore loses a real opportunity for depth here by not relating it better to his own film. But with Oldman at the centre of every single scene, we obliquely take on his point of view, which is a very good strategy, given the revelations towards the end of the story. 

The cinematography is badly handled and very rough around the edges. Despite a beautiful opening sequence that underlines the exquisite service of the restaurant Oldman frequents, a particularly grating moment occurs halfway through the film when he is given access to a hidden room, but instead of a tracking shot following him into the room, the camera starts to follow him and then abruptly cuts to a position in front of him, inside the room. The reverse tracking shot that ends the film demonstrates what kind of approach Tornatore could have taken here, in a scene that actually needed such a shot.

The music of Ennio Morricone, which is not altogether dissimilar to some of his work on Once Upon a Time in America, suggests a measure of mystery but is never strong enough to make any real impact on our experience of the film.

Far below his marquee Cinema Paradiso, The Best Offer is certainly not the best the director has offered in quite some time.

The Tribe (2014)

André Crous

‘Showing instead of telling’ takes on a whole new meaning in the subtitle-free The Tribe, set in a boarding school for deaf students in Ukraine, which rewards the viewer who is paying attention to detail.

The TribeUkraine
4*

Director:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Screenwriter:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Director of Photography:
Valentyn Vasyanovych

Running time: 125 minutes

Original title: Плем’я
Transliterated title: Plemya

Silence can speak volumes, as long as we keep our eyes peeled and our ears pricked. This is the central conceit of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s unusual feature film, The Tribe (Plemya), which features no spoken dialogue but has a lot of signing going on between its characters, who are mostly high school students at a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf. The only explanatory title card appears before the first shot to inform us that there won’t be any subtitles or voice-over.

This unorthodox approach of limiting the viewer’s ability to understand the dialogue has been used in the past to confuse us, as Michael Haneke did rather pointlessly in the opening scene of his Code Unknown (Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages). Fortunately, in Slaboshpytskiy’s film, the action and the body language play a big part and help us in our quest to make sense of the story behind the gestures. Above all, the film reminds us that life is always happening whether we see or hear it or not. It doesn’t matter whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound or not; it fell nonetheless.   

Although we don’t learn his name until the closing credits, the main character is the teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), whose arrival at the school during the opening moments sets the bar so high that the second and third act, despite some stunning set pieces, never quite seem to live up to it. Dressed in everyday casual clothes, he enters his classroom to find all the boys sporting the same kind of white shirt and business jackets. Nothing has to be said; his peers’ condescension (or revulsion) is immediately apparent. Even – or particularly – in silence, the facial expressions tell a lot. And yet, Sergey seems unfazed. Does he not realise how he is perceived? Or does he not care? And why?

These questions are answered gradually as Sergey reveals himself to be a quaint mix of violence and sensitivity. His ability to protect himself quickly gains him the respect of the most delinquent and industrious guys, as he gets roped into petty crime and is soon promoted to pimping two fellow girls in his class to drivers at the local truck stop at night. At the film’s weakest points, it veers off into territory where Sergey views himself as a saviour to protect a girl he has spent an intimate moment with, and all of this feels like something we’ve seen before in countless other spoken-word stories.

The Tribe finds greatest success in those scenes where we realise the degree to which the characters’ hearing impairment affects their lives in ways hearing viewers may be ignorant of. These are scenes (sometimes dramatic, sometimes tense, sometimes gruesome) that are unique to stories about these kinds of characters. Whether it is their soundless assaults on strangers, their inability to hear approaching danger or to call for help, or the realisation that their pain sounds so much worse when they can’t hear themselves scream, these moments are stripped down to the basics and pack an eerie, visceral punch. 

Sergey’s journey from zero to hero to zero (and possibly – depending on one’s reading of the potent but ontologically dubious final scene – back to hero) is compelling but ultimately undermined by the terribly contrived romanticism that fuels some significant developments in the story’s second half. The film also struggles with coherence, as scenes in the second and third acts feel much more fragmented than those that introduced us to Sergey and presented his integration at school.

In addition, the quality of the acting is also all over the place. While Sergey is seemingly contemplative and not overly emotional (at least, for the most part), Shnyr (Olexandr Sidelnikov), who is his first point of contact with school life and also partakes in the students’ late-night criminal ventures, has persistently wild hand gestures that would seem over-the-top even when viewed with a long shot. The same is true of one of the girls being procured by the truck drivers for a bout of silent intercourse, and these histrionics are incredibly distracting.

For the most part, however, the film commands our full attention as we rely on extra-auditory cues to make sense of the diegesis. There is usually enough happening for us to follow along, even if at times we can only make out the bare outlines and have to take our best shot at figuring out the details. But it was a peculiar decision for the filmmaker to eschew any form of backstory for Sergey and to avoid introducing us by name to any of the characters. And it is equally strange that the soundtrack is already audible (in the form of a car horn being honked) on a black screen before the film proper has even started.

If The Tribe had been as thoughtful in developing its narrative past the first act as it had been up to that point, this might have been a truly breathtaking production. In his role as Sergey, however, Fesenko has a magnetic presence even when the screenplay lets him down and we struggle to empathise with him, and he is a big part of the film’s general impressiveness. 

Sworn Virgin (2015)

André Crous

Sworn Virgin, which tells the story of an Albanian woman who first becomes a man, then a woman again, is sturdy, but the main actress stares too much.

Sworn VirginItaly/Albania
3.5*

Director:
Laura Bispuri
Screenwriter:
Francesca Manieri
Director of Photography:
Vladan Radovic

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Vergine giurata

Although mostly expressionless and saying very little, Mark hopes that the journey away from his homeland will set him free and bring about a life-altering metamorphosis. Mark grew up in the north Albanian countryside as a woman named “Hana,” but because of the strict rules of the area, which include countless restrictions on women’s activities and freedoms, she rejected her womanhood, at least insofar as the term is used in this context.

However, in order to access the traditionally male activities of hunting, smoking, drinking and many others, she had to swear to remain a virgin for eternity and give up any desire to love (it is not clearly stated why this is the case, as most men born as men are presumably allowed to experience this basic human emotion). She has also had to work hard to look like a man and took the name “Mark”.

In the role of Hana/Mark is Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, who speaks Albanian throughout the film. At the beginning of the film, after leaving the homeland, she turns up in Milan at her sister’s place. Her sister, Lila, resisted tradition in her own fashion, as she rejected the idea of being married off by her father and instead left for Italy with the man she chose herself. But any expectations of a kindred spirit are dashed when Mark arrives to find that his niece, Jonida, has never been told of his existence, and Lila also appears uncomfortable that this news has so now come to light.

The film develops at a leisurely pace that remains engaging, as we put the pieces together (many of them provided to us by means of flashbacks to Hana and Lila’s childhood) and attempt to understand why Mark has made the journey to Italy.

The central character is very hesitant to share his reasons for coming, but the opening scenes in Rogam, in the Albanian Alps, where Mark had been living in complete isolation, suggest a longing for companionship, which would obviously require him to break his vow of eternal virginity and surrender his gender pronouns. Slowly, Mark becomes Hana again, and although some activists from the gender police might baulk at this turn of events, début director Laura Bispuri does not rush toward a sudden transformation but rather makes the viewer feel as immersed yet as unsure of the direction of the story as the title character almost certainly does.

Rohrwacher’s appearance also contributes significantly to our understanding of her character’s awkwardness in either gender role: With her gaunt figure here, she barely passes for a man at all, except for the flat, breast-bound chest and the cropped haircut. However, her long-time isolation and apparent lack of social interaction have led her to appear clueless about some very everyday things in Italy, and when she opens cosmetics in a store or stares at a mannequin wearing a bra, one could think of the oafish Crocodile Dundee, which is a very unfortunate point of reference.

The opening scenes are replete with atmosphere and meaning, as we not only get a glimpse of the idyllic, misty landscape of the mountain region, full of lush green mountainsides and deep blue waters, but one exterior shot of Mark’s house also includes a brief moment of a sheet of snow sliding off the roof – an unmistakable metaphor for the veil that is about to drop to reveal the original structure.

But it is the structure of the rest of the film – the gentle back-and-forth shift between the past and the present, which is the trajectory from woman to man and then from man to woman – that most visibly showcases the two hands shaping the character of Mark/Hana, and it is a strategy that works well to make the viewer aware of the struggles and the layers of this person. Her past and present mould and represent her as much as the two gender roles she takes on.

Scenes from Hana’s youth show why she wants to take on male roles, while those in the present focus on the difficulty of adapting to an entirely new context in geographical, social and sexual terms. We do not always have a perfect grasp of her reasons, but the pieces fit together well enough for us to acknowledge her conviction that this re-definition of herself is necessary.

The transition has its fits and starts, but one scene shrewdly and vividly illustrates the shedding of the old and the acceptance of the new. Having found a job as a security guard at a parking garage, Mark sits in front of a pane of glass late one night, removes his name tag and places it in front of him, on the glass, physically at a remove while still visually attached to his slight reflection. The moment is brief, but it has emotional and cerebral resonance for the viewer, which helps to signpost Mark’s transformation.

Unfortunately, the lack of emotion makes Mark/Hana a difficult character to grow close to, and her constant staring at people or things around her is sometimes grating. It is also a little far-fetched that Mark would simply up and leave from half a lifetime in Albania, with nary a belonging, and arrive in Milan to not only turn over a new leaf but write a new story. Nonetheless, Sworn Virgin is an assured first film by Bispuri that provides the viewer with little but never too little information, although a less distant performance by her lead would be welcomed as an improvement in her future projects.

Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Us (2019)

André Crous

Jordan Peele’s second feature film, Us, is a serious horror production that surpasses his début, Get Out, in style if not in substance. 

Us (2019)USA
4*

Director:
Jordan Peele
Screenwriter:
Jordan Peele
Director of Photography:
Mike Gioulakis

Running time: 120 minutes

For the film critic, the problem with twist endings is that it is frowned upon to dwell on that final revelation, despite their importance to the experience. Even just mentioning that there is a last-minute information dump that causes us to rethink the entire film is often too much for the reader to handle. It’s a fine line to walk, but neither the critic nor the reader/potential viewer should be overly sensitive, particularly if it is made clear why such information is included.

Jordan Peele’s Us ends with a labyrinthine flashback that seems to tell us everything before turning our whole notion of the story’s past upside down and then, for good measure, twisting our collective nuts one last time before the credits roll. But while the film does contain traces of this shocking development throughout, most notably in the form of a tune that is whistled, the character concerned simply does not embody the skeleton she has in her closet. The traces seem planted, while the central performance is almost unaffected. The actions do not bespeak a closely held secret, and therefore, the film will not be much more interesting the second time around. And that’s worth a mention in a review such as this.

It all starts out very peculiarly and then gets weirder and weirder until the climax in a subterranean, rabbit-filled lair. In 1986, a young girl named Adelaide visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. At some point when they aren’t paying attention, she wanders off and into a mirror maze (in a dark twist of humour, it entices the customer to “find yourself”). She looks around for a way out but doesn’t find one. Someone appears behind her – a stranger who is as tall as she is, wears the same clothes and has the same hairstyle. But before we can see their face, the film cuts to the opening credits sequence, which involves a multitude of white lab rabbits.

Peele’s second film is a far cry from his first, Get Out, the global smash hit that somehow managed to induce in the viewer the anxiety of a psychological thriller while very clearly poking fun at supposedly liberal white Americans’ racial prejudices. In Us, whose title hints at a link with the United States (a link that is ultimately very weak if not altogether obscure), he is much more interested in making a genre film than in making a statement about contemporary society.

In the present day, an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is just settling in for holiday with her family at a cabin. Husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is happy-go-lucky, seemingly without a care in the world, and is particularly excited about taking his children to the nearby beach in Santa Cruz. This news, a close-up reveals, hits Adelaide like a ton of bricks. But she puts on a brave face for her children, Zora and Jason.

The same night, after the visit to the beach, a mute family of four appear in their driveway. But it’s not just any family – it’s their doppelgängers: four individuals who have features very similar to theirs but are wearing crimson-coloured clothing. In addition, each of them is armed with a golden pair of scissors. Only one of them speaks, albeit with great difficulty and a voice that sounds like someone who is always being strangled: Adelaide’s alter ego, Red, who is quickly revealed to be the mastermind behind an uprising from the underworld.

This underworld consists of underground walkways alluded to in the film’s epigraph, which informs us of “thousands of miles” of tunnels beneath the continental United States. The characters down below mostly behave in a way that mirrors their above-ground counterparts (although, curiously, that is not always the case). This intimate relationship means they are “tethered” to each other. Plato’s cave, but with sentient shadows, would be an eerie but apt comparison.

Except for the epigraph, the first real foreshadowing we get of this tethering is a stunning image at the beach, where the camera hovers straight above the action to capture the family walking in a straight line, barely visible, while seemingly attached to their giant shadows that are lifelike but take on a life of their own as animate shadows. National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz is famous for a similarly striking composition he made with camels in 2005.

Following the initial home invasion, we quickly realise that the uprising is not just limited to the family of four but extends to the entire United States. Somehow, as is all too often the case with disaster movies, the rest of the world is unaffected. The family sticks together, trying to learn from each other how best to kill the impostors, until the final act, when Adelaide races (all alone, for reasons unexplained) into the underworld to find one of her children, who has been abducted.

This is where things take on a real mind-bending dimension as we have to put all the pieces together when the film climaxes in brightly lit hallways that could very well be tethered to the hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peele hits us with the climax, then knocks us off our feet with a bombshell surprise before delivering a second body blow. It’s the Sixth Sense of horror films, but the unexpected double twist vaults the film into a league all its own.

And yet, whereas M. Night Shyamalan’s famous blockbuster both made immediate sense and elicited admiration for blinding us to something that was in plain sight the entire time, Us conceals more and thereby reveals less, even on a repeat viewing. In his effort to shield the truth from us, Peele varnished over all the details that would have contributed to a richer fictional world, even at the risk of unveiling too much.

Even if it seems much more complex than it actually is, this is an original and stunningly crafted horror film.