USA

Citizenfour (2014)

André Crous

Chilling documentary about maligned whistleblower contrasts his consistent belief in privacy, transparency with government’s wild, dishonest flip-flopping.

citizenfourUSA/Germany
4.5*

Director:
Laura Poitras
Edited by:
Mathilde Bonnefoy
Directors of Photography:
Kirsten Johnson
Trevor Paglen
Katy Scoggin

Running time: 115 minutes

One of the biggest disappointments of the Obama presidency has been that while the president has distinguished himself by seemingly approaching questions of national security with greater circumspection, or seriousness, than his predecessor, he has often arrived at the same conclusions and committed similar actions that have eroded public trust because of the seemingly sweeping power of the executive.

This administration, which has billed itself as the most transparent in history, has been equally opaque to both the press and the public, and those who criticise the government’s operations are labelled as traitors and their patriotism questioned, not only by those who did so in support of the previous administration but also by many in the current one.

Edward Snowden is not the first government whistleblower during the Obama years, but his case has certainly generated the most publicity because of the almost unimaginable reach his leaks have exposed to the public. Halfway through Laura Poitras’ chilling documentary Citizenfour, when we see President Obama for the first time, saying “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot”, his words convey the exact opposite of what he represented when he ran for office, and he seems out of touch with reality, having become a prisoner to the greedy national security apparatus.

The title of the film refers to the name by which Snowden introduced himself when he first made contact with Poitras online. Poitras is no stranger to the government’s heavy-handedness, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have interrogated her on multiple occasions since the 2006 release of her My Country, My Country, which looked at life in Iraq after the U.S. forces invaded and occupied the country in 2003.

She shot most of Citizenfour during that exciting time in the summer of 2013 when the world did not yet know who had leaked the abundant treasure trove of National Security Agency (NSA) documents that indicated relentless, government-sanctioned spying on almost everyone. It suddenly seemed like this leak would finally cast light on the U.S. government’s invasion of privacy. For a while, that is what happened, but because the spectre of terrorism still hangs over and propels every argument from the intelligence community more than a decade after their failure to prevent the events of Sept. 11, 2001, many people at all levels of society and government are hesitant to call out the invasive nature of surveillance.

Just like those who questioned the United States–led invasion of Iraq were labelled anti-American, Snowden and those who support his selective leaks about the state’s reach into everyone’s electronic footprint are now said to be friends with America’s enemies. Although they will deny it, the people who flippantly make the latter argument seem to think that the government is their friend, when in fact it has become their enemy. Ironically, it is taking away U.S. and non-U.S. citizens’ rights while pretending to do so for their own good.

Half of the film – exactly one hour – takes place in Hong Kong, most of it inside Snowden’s room at the Mira Hotel, whither he had invited Poitras and Rio de Janeiro–based journalist Glenn Greenwald, as well as The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill. While these four people were holed up in that tiny room, Snowden’s life is on the verge of going up in flames, a fact underscored when he learns government agents have paid a visit to his girlfriend back home, even though his identity as the whistleblower was still undisclosed.

He provides documents, charts and other presentations to the journalists and helps them sift through the information that at times is almost too stunning to contemplate. Recognising the sheer scale of the revelations, Snowden confirms this is as bad as it seems. “It’s not science fiction; this is happening right now.”

This central part covers brief explanations of the meanings of multiple acronyms or other code names, such as Prism, Tempora and XKeyscore, with enough disclosure about profound overreach to keep on giving the audience goosebumps for the entire duration. This section is bookended by 20 minutes to set the stage and 40 minutes to follow the consequences of the revelations, including the infamous detention of Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport in August 2013. It is an emotional moment for the audience when Miranda arrives back in Rio de Janeiro, because the feeling of despair is palpable and truly overwhelming.

What follows Greenwald’s and MacAskill’s initial articles is a media frenzy and a clampdown on Snowden’s freedom, including the U.S. Department of State’s decision to revoke his passport, which left him in the no man’s land of one of Moscow’s international airports. We do not get to see this part of the journey, because Poitras says her own security was compromised by the leaks, and she spent much of the next year in Berlin to edit her footage.

However, one scene in Brazil is surprisingly moving and concerns a speech by Greenwald at a senate hearing to investigate NSA spying on Brazilian citizens. While Greenwald lays out some of the surveillance programs and their significance, a few people in the audience hold up paper printouts of Edward Snowden’s face. This kind of solidarity with a man on the run for illuminating the dirty truth is admirable and fortunately is free of the political shading it would be subjected to if it occurred in the United States (at the very least, the silent protesters would likely be put on a watch list immediately, curtailing their freedom of travel).

The film ends with a few big moments, but because the story is so current and still developing, it is necessarily incomplete. For now, Snowden still lives in Russia as a refugee. The film contains a single scene with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, who is also a refugee, currently in hiding inside the Embassy of Ecuador in London, but while we see him aware of Snowden’s flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, it is unfortunate that we get very little other information about his involvement in the affair.

The final scene strongly hints at the knowledge of wrongdoing that time and again goes all the way to the top of the U.S. executive branch. Even just going by the Snowden documents, it seems to be clear that Obama has utterly failed to live up to the promise he made in a campaign speech in 2007, when he said, “I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens, no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime, no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war, no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.”

Citizenfour is an absolutely riveting and utterly compelling documentary that provides details about the U.S. and UK surveillance industries that only the most dedicated reader of The Guardian may have been familiar with. Snowden, dressed in a white T-shirt as he patiently explains the complex ways in which the NSA and its partners ignore people’s right to privacy, often smiles and projects a warm, friendly demeanour, far from the egomaniacal vision of self-righteousness many in government have suggested. He is calm, direct and very articulate; he also clearly measures his words when he speaks and is reluctant to become “the story”, even though he knows it is probably inevitable.

The only person less interested than Snowden in being the focus of the media spotlight is Poitras, who never appears on camera and whose voiceover is delivered dispassionately, because the information is powerful enough and does not require any emphasis for effect. Compare this approach with the bombast and the saturated onscreen presence of Michael Moore in his films, and the narcissism of the latter becomes difficult to ignore.

It is impossible to estimate what the importance of this material will be 10 or 20 years from now, and Snowden’s future (his current residence permit is valid until 2017) remains as opaque as his own movements. Poitras’ unique access to her subject has shown us the relatable man behind the revelations whom many call a traitor even though he came forward armed with the truth, while they ignore those who lied and were caught red-handed, like James Clapper and Keith Alexander, because they were allegedly doing this to protect the country. The battle for the truth and for the recognition of Snowden’s trailblazing activities continues, but Poitras’ film has gone a long way towards rightfully rehabilitating the image of one of the 21st century’s most consequential freedom fighters.

Machete Kills (2013)

André Crous

The sequel to Machete is a sad film that leaves us despondent and makes us yearn for the audacity of the original.

machete-killsUSA
2*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter:
Kyle Ward
Director of Photography:
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 110 minutes

Once you’ve ripped out someone’s intestines and used them to scale a building, there’s really no way for you to up the ante. But in a nod to the film’s predecessor, one of many references to countless films, Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills charges ahead and lets the title character rip out his assailant’s intestines once more and sling them into a helicopter’s fast-moving rotor blade so that we can have blood and guts splatter all over the camera lens.

If you never saw the first Machete, you may not mind this as much, but anyone seeing this follow-up will miss the good ol’ times of Machete’s former adventures. This sequel, and its main character, is sad from beginning to end, and we simply cannot allow ourselves to enjoy such a waste of talent, especially as the melancholy of the sometimes sardonic Machete is completely unbecoming.

The man with the machete, who used to be a Federale, still loves to wield his weapon of choice, slicing and dicing his enemies with the poise of a master chef. But in this instalment, he has to face some revolutionary technology that is straight from a B-movie director’s wet dream. Case in point: a defective molecular disruptor that turns people inside out. If he can successfully evade this device and the women wearing bras fitted out with machine guns, he may just save the world.

Opening with a fake trailer for this sequel’s sequel, titled Machete Kills Again … in Space!, the film doesn’t beat about the bush about its intentions: We are being prepared – or set up – for the ultimate finale that will take place in a galaxy not very far away, where technology from many decades ago will vie for our attention amid some expected carnage. The narrator boldly claims that Leonardo DiCaprio may be starring, then admits the actor is subject to change.

It all seems a bit silly, but while we watch this second part of the now-official trilogy, we discover many of the characters are the same, and by the end of the film they’re all being beamed up beyond the exosphere. Rodriguez’s version of space looks incredibly boring, but perhaps he will bring the sexy back.

Unfortunately, there is no such sexiness on display in Machete Kills. The first film’s many moments of excess, which had some of the same flippancy of Tarantino’s Death Proof but without all the stylistic flourishes, provided a sensational spectacle.

At present, however, it seems Rodriguez’s imagination has run dry, as he makes wholly inappropriate references, including Mission: Impossible and the television series 24. At one point, the soundtrack even alludes to James Bond.

As it is, the film has too many famous faces anyway – Lady Gaga, Mel Gibson, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Antonio Banderas are all villains, some more super than others – although, more often than not, they are just masks that hide the true identity of yet another mask. Rodriguez must have been aware how ridiculous this approach is, as was made clear at the time John Woo’s version of Mission: Impossible was released, but even when he is using it for fun, it becomes annoying.

The only face that brings a smile to ours is the one put forward by the overly ambitious U.S. President Rathcock, played by the one actor who has nothing to lose: Charlie Sheen, credited by his real name Carlos Estévez. Rathcock wants to prove he can live up to both parts of his name: For the first part, he employs Machete, but the second he can do himself.

He tells Machete he will become a U.S. citizen if he accepts the mission to kill Mendez, a Mexican drug lord who has a missile pointed straight at the United States. In this way, he indirectly visits his wrath upon his enemy. But his campaign videos speak of his pornographic lust for violence, as he poses with enormous weaponry to make clear his intention to safeguard the Second Amendment. He mixes some of the more objectionable traits of recent U.S. presidents to create a skirt-chasing cowboy that is both a caricature and frighteningly familiar.

But with Machete’s name in the title, one would have expected him to have more gravitas in the film itself, instead of being a bit of a sideshow to all the opulent tastelessness we have to witness, including the bit with the intestines. Machete is demeaned as a character because one of his most impressive skills turns out to be his ability to dodge bullets, or to be sprayed and still survive. Even in a film that aspires to being a B-movie, such a lack of imagination is unacceptable.

Let’s hope the third film is either wildly different, with pre-production time heavily spent on character development, or gets scrapped altogether – preferably with a mean machete.

The Counselor (2013)

André Crous

A drug war on the border does not produce the most original of storylines, but the raunchy film certainly includes its fair share of brutality.

counselorUSA
2.5*

Director:
Ridley Scott
Screenwriter:
Cormac McCarthy
Director of Photography:
Dariusz Wolski

Running time: 115 minutes

Novelist Cormac McCarthy is known for his sombre vision of humanity, and the two best-known films made from his work, the Academy Award–winning No Country for Old Men and the harrowing post-apocalyptic The Road, were both shrouded in a suffocating pessimism about the direction of the world.

Such pessimism is on minimal display in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, which doesn’t even have a touch of the McCarthy melancholy we would expect. Instead, the images are crisp, imbued with a stark clarity that is wholly at odds with the clumsy narrative. Although the content is far from joyful, and the film contains countless scenes of people getting killed whom we would have preferred to see alive, the overwhelming sense of doom of the other two films is almost entirely absent from this one.

The titular “Counselor”, otherwise nameless for whatever reason, is the main character. Irishman Michael Fassbender brings an indefinable and entirely appropriate accent to the role, providing him with just the right amount of enigma. He is a lawyer who lives a happy life in the border town of El Paso, Texas, and has just proposed to his girlfriend, the fragile and religious Laura, played by Penélope Cruz.

The utopia of their existence soon disappears, however, when he decides to take part in a drug operation that is high risk but even higher reward. The risk becomes real when, because of a few coincidences that stretch back all the way to his appointment by a court to defend a murderer in a Texas jail, the cartel suddenly has the Counselor in its sights, and the cartel should not be messed with.

Members of the cartel engage in an escalating torrent of violence, and their preferred method of killing someone invariably seems to involve decapitation. In the first scene between the Counselor and drug lord Reiner, an unlikely friendship that is never explained, Reiner mentions a device called the bolito, which is a motorised decapitation device that, when we inevitably see it used, produces thick blood splattering directly onto the camera in a way we haven’t seen in a long time, if ever, in a film that is not a comedy.

Scott struggles with tone, as his characters can be both funny (we need look no further than Reiner’s cold-hearted girlfriend, Malkina, having an orgasm while making love to the front windshield of his Ferrari) and ruthless, but the ups and downs are never smoothly stitched together. Reiner, one of the most important individuals in the narrative, always seems out of his depth, with much of his dialogue consisting of three words: “I don’t know.” And yet, he is supposed to be the big kahuna in the area.

The Counselor isn’t much more eloquent, and a surprising number of his lines invoke the Almighty. But God is nowhere to be found in this wasteland of a film. Not that Scott is incompetent, but we simply cannot relate to these people whose relationship with each other is vague and whose motives for acting the way they do are never examined.

In one of the opening scenes, the Counselor has flown from El Paso all the way to Amsterdam – just to buy a ring for his fiancée, mind you – where he has a long, recognisably McCarthy-like talk with the diamond dealer about the brevity of life. It is more of a monologue by the dealer (not coincidentally played by Wings of Desire’s angel, Bruno Ganz), and it would look great on the page, but in this beast of a film, it feels out of place and quite silly. 

Cheetahs pop up onscreen from time to time, perhaps as a reminder that we should be mindful of those creatures that are graceful but can incite terror and inflict terrible harm to those who are not as fast or as clever. Although in some ways it resembles the cheetah, the film is also closely aligned with the jackrabbit, as it scurries hither and thither in a vain struggle for survival before the ineluctable bloodletting.

For all the commendable sensitivity Fassbender brings to his role, his character is simply too weak to even know where to start managing this situation that is only somewhat of his own making. He lacks the wisdom of those in Ciudad Juárez whose help he seeks late in the film – people who have spent their lives reflecting on the fragility of life.

The Counselor does not look or feel like the other big films that have been produced from McCarthy’s work, but that is not its only fault. Except for the mostly superfluous meditations on life and death, not dissimilar from Tommy Lee Jones’s droning in No Country for Old Men, it brings nothing new to the type of film we already know about drug-running across the border.

Lucy (2014)

André Crous

Luc Besson’s fantastical, mad rush of a movie reminds us that the cinema is capable of wonderful things.

lucy-luc-besson-posterFrance/USA
4*

Director:
Luc Besson
Screenwriter:
Luc Besson
Director of Photography:
Thierry Arbogast

Running time: 90 minutes

Effortlessly referencing films as disparate as Nymphomaniac, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Transcendence, although with a deliberate lack of seriousness, Luc Besson’s Lucy is a breathless combination of visual effects and sympathetic fantasy like only the cinema can deliver. It never strives for anything more than pure entertainment and even sidesteps issues of power in favour of showing us unexpected domination, often by very gentle means, but the result is a thrilling ride you won’t want to miss.

The central (widely debunked) idea is one that most people have heard about at school or at college: Humans use a very small amount of their brain, and there is no telling what deeds we may be capable of if we used more. The screenplay hypothesises what would happen in a scenario where someone absorbed large quantities of CPH4, which is supposedly formed in the bodies of pregnant women to help the fetus grow, thereby rendering the individual almost infinitely brilliant.

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, the girlfriend of a smalltime drug dealer in Taiwan, who is kidnapped and forced to be a drug mule carrying CPH4, hidden in a bag stitched into her stomach. But when one of her kidnappers tries to fondle her and she fights back, she also gets kicked in the stomach, and the CPH4 bursts into her veins, filling her with immense power and boosting her mental capacity into the higher double-digits.

The person who gives meaning and a measure of credibility to her rapid development is the brain researcher, Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman, who provides the fantastical plot with the right measure of gravitas it needs while also linking the material with that of Wally Pfister’s Transcendence, a similar but far inferior movie in which he played a very similar part). Norman has written volumes on the potential of the human brain, but most of it is pure conjecture. That is, until Lucy contacts him. She has just read all his work in a matter of minutes and tells him he is on the right track. However, she has only about 24 hours left on Earth as her mind will expand to the point where her body cannot contain her any longer.

And so the clock starts ticking while director Luc Besson points us in strange but thoroughly entertaining directions. The first half of the film is unexpectedly closely tied to Lars von Trier’s two-part Nymphomaniac films, as simplistic metaphors are made very vivid, although the effect is at times laughable, such as when Lucy is in danger and there is a sudden cut to an antelope being chased by a cheetah. These references culminate with Besson’s use of Mozart’s “Requiem”, which Von Trier also used in his film.

But the film’s loose structure enables Besson to incorporate references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular the stargate sequence but also the unforgettable monkey, obviously played by someone in an ape suit, with which both Kubrick’s and Besson’s films open. By the time we meet up with the monkey again towards the end of Lucy, having gone through something of a magical ride on a time machine that conjures up haunting images, we realise that Besson is attracting us on a primal level, through memories and desires to see moments from the past in a way only made possible by the technology of the present.

The film is not entirely successful, however, as it suffers from a few dialogues that don’t come across as particularly believable, such as the overly descriptive telephone conversation between Lucy and her mother, and a faux stargate sequence that simply cannot compete with the one that came 45 years earlier in one of Kubrick’s masterpieces.

A few details are also missing, such as an explanation for her ability to learn languages without any significant exposure to them, or her inability to notice her car being tailed when her level of brain use is nearing 99 percent. But in general, the plot is very easy to follow and while the film never appears to be pretentious, it certainly strikes a very able balance between amusement and intelligence, inasmuch as the one is constrained by the other in a form of mass entertainment like this one.

This may seem at times like a dumbed-down version of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, but while there is enough to keep the popcorn gallery entertained, Lucy also shows us the wonders the cinema can make us a witness to by recreating time in its almost unimaginable richness. Words cannot adequately describe the sense of awe we feel seeing the world going in reverse in fast motion, and while these sequences are also slightly comical, they remind us what movies can make us see and feel that we can never experience in the world outside the theatre.

Boyhood (2014)

André Crous

Childhood and adolescence are explored in film that was shot over more than 10 years with the same cast.

boyhoodUSA
3*

Director:
Richard Linklater
Screenwriter:
Richard Linklater
Directors of Photography:
Lee Daniel
Shane Kelly

Running time: 160 minutes

Sprawling but not unwieldy, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood takes the eventful but not overly dramatised life of an ordinary teenager from a broken home to construct an epic tale of one boy’s slow transition to manhood. His role models – a mother whose many husbands always end up drinking the relationship into calamity and a father who doesn’t hold a steady job and seems to be entirely carefree – don’t have the strongest or the most ambitious personalities in the world, but they form him nonetheless in their own ways.

Linklater shot the film over an unusually lengthy period of time (from 2002 until 2013), using the same trio of actors at its core: Ellar Coltrane as Mason Jr., Lorelei Linklater as his older sister, Samantha, and Patricia Arquette as their mother, Olivia. Ethan Hawke also features in many of the scenes as the children’s biological father, Mason Sr., who has already divorced Olivia by the time we meet them all in the opening scenes.

Obviously, Boyhood’s peculiar production schedule is the primary reason many readers will be intrigued to watch it. But another, related rationale better explains the attraction to the film: The process of ageing has been compressed into 160 minutes, and time flows much more quickly, perhaps too quickly, as we come to realise towards the end, when we sympathise with Olivia during the most heartrending moments of the production.

While it lasts, as Marcus Jr. says, the present is “always right now”: That is what we deal with. It is only at the end of a sequence of these moments that we can take a step back and consider the history of our lives, however long or short they might be, and appreciate the people who have been there with us through it all.

But the first act already points towards a life of memories that might not be shown but are unequivocally present in the lives of the characters. It is a powerful moment when the family ups and moves from their small town to Houston, selling their house and repainting the inside, including the years of pen markings of the children’s heights in the door frame that vanish with the stroke of a brush.

With a title like Boyhood, one would expect the focus to be solely on Marcus Jr., but the importance of his mother’s turbulent life, tied to and impacting his own, becomes more and more clear as the film progresses. Despite the many years of them living together, the inevitable cutting of the chord still comes as a punch to the stomach, as we realise she has kind of been taken for granted.

The film contains many beautiful moments, perhaps the best of which is captured in a long, unbroken take (calling to mind the work Linklater did with Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset, the opposite of this film in that it took place in a single afternoon) between Marcus Jr., walking back from school, and a girl on a bicycle next to him. The girl is teasing out Marcus’s feelings for one of her friends, Lee Anne, but in the process of a single camera take, we see these two actually ought to strike up a relationship. The moment is comparable to a short but strong exchange in You, Me and Everyone We Know, as we see an entire world can change within the space of a few words exchanged between people who were strangers when the shot started.

Overall, however, the film has a meandering quality that many viewers might find frustrating. We don’t have any sense that the story is going anywhere, except that time is passing, and everyone is growing older. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but in terms of content, there is no clear issue that needs to be resolved or question that needs to be answered.

Many would argue this is what life is like, and that may be true, but Boyhood would have benefited from having a tighter focus on the narrative as it relates directly and visibly to the development of Mason’s character. Furthermore, Mason is simply too nice to relate to, especially over such an extended period of time. He never seems to do anything he feels bad about, or anything that embarrasses him. A scene with bullies at school goes nowhere, and Linklater patches up the boy’s frustration with his drunken stepfather’s decision with ellipses that show off spectacular scenes of conflict rather than seething scenes of anger, which are sorely missed by their absence.

It is also understandable and even commendable that Linklater didn’t show too much of his own daughter growing up (she plays Mason’s sister), but we lose any indication that she has much of a relationship with her brother, a bond that could have supported or undermined the boy in a way that would almost certainly have been successful with the audience.

Boyhood may be original, even unique, in its treatment of the teenage years of a single character by the same actor, but the final product feels too much like a documentary about a mostly ordinary family, leaving us with the question why the director felt so compelled to tell their story. Yes, people grow old and experience ups and downs, and usually they don’t grow as wise as the other movies tend to suggest. Is that an insight that warrants a running time of 160 minutes? Time will tell.

Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

André Crous

Iranian-American filmmaker’s Farsi-language vampire film is unusual in all the right ways.

a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-nightUSA
4*

Director:
Ana Lily Amirpour
Screenwriter:
Ana Lily Amirpour
Director of Photography:
Lyle Vincent

Running time: 100 minutes

The gorgeously greyscale landscape of a noir reality that seems familiar yet distant, sweet yet mysterious, even mystifying, is the setting for a Farsi-language vampire film that is certainly unlike your average Iranian film. With major themes of drug use and prostitution, and even a very revealing scene in the bathtub, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as unusual as it is entertaining, and while the filmmaking is minimalist rather than schlocky, the Farsi-speaking female vampire is as appealing as any femme fatale.

Set in Bad City, the two threads of the narrative – involving a lonely vampire on the prowl and a young man whose father has drug problems – come together when the two main characters meet late at night. As usual, the girl, who always walks home alone at night, is on the hunt for a fresh jugular vein, but when she sees the young Arash, dressed up as Dracula and crashing after an Ecstasy high, looking up in wonder at a street lamp, she has second thoughts, and that is when the magic happens.

The magic is an unexpected moment of audiovisual bliss, as a static camera captures the two slowly moving toward each other in the girl’s subterranean dwelling while a disco ball inexplicably keeps spinning, throwing little spatterings of light on the wall behind them. All the while, the music on the soundtrack, the White Lies’ “Death”, is infectious and can easily rouse the viewer out of her seat. But even this scene is just a forerunner to greatness, as a few minutes later, a prostitute, a balloon and an unbroken take from a mobile perspective come together to create the most poetic and poignant moment of the entire film.

Director Ana Lily Amirpour, a British-born Iranian-American who collected money for her film online through Kickstarter in 2012, has crafted a film that doesn’t seek to subvert the conventions of the vampire genre as much as it wants to play with those conventions to tell a story of two unusual individuals who find love in a way neither of them ever would have expected.

The girl’s black-as-night waist-length hijab, which looks a bit like a fashion accessory, suggests mourning, and she is certainly not a barrel of laughs; on the contrary, she barely says a word. But it is this silence that makes her so mysterious, and while we might have our suspicions that she is up to no good, we are also very happy when one of her first victims is the drug dealer who is keeping Arash’s father in crushing debt. She also appears to care a great deal about the prostitute, Atti, who just wants to get by but is tormented by loneliness, and she becomes a friend of sorts to her.

Despite the Farsi-language signage on the street, Bad City is very obviously neither in Iran nor in the United States. It forms part of a filmic reality that suits the genre and functions remarkably well because there is always a feeling that we don’t exactly know what to expect.

While the characters speak Farsi, the film’s sexual imagery – which includes, among others, fingers that find their way to mouths, and pumpjacks that piston in and out of the ground across the desert landscape on the outskirts of the city – is wholly unexpected for an Iranian production and contributes to the pleasure of watching something wholly unorthodox. The film was shot in the United States and was produced in part by Elijah Wood.

Director Amirpour has a light touch when it comes to the use of the vampire genre conventions, and while the title character only drinks blood, doesn’t eat and doesn’t appear during daytime, she does have a mirror (all the better to put on her lipstick) and there is no mention of garlic or stakes or coffins that serve as night-time sanctuaries of repose. Amirpour’s use of music is equally laudable, with the soundtrack, ranging from Western-like and Morricone-inspired to British post-punk, impossible to fault and thoroughly enjoyable.

The girl who walks home alone at night is a vampire, but that doesn’t take away from her romantic timidity, and when she finds a man willing to love her in spite of her immortality and thirst for blood, we readily share her initial reluctance to pursue the affair. The character, whom we still don’t know much about by the end of the film, suggests enough complexity for the viewer to keep watching.

The result is very different from the noirs or the Westerns we may know (and it very well may not live up to the expectations of fans of the latter), and although there are small quibbles with the development of the story, this heavily stylised film is comical, moving and sexy, and it will entertain many a moviegoer.

All Is Lost (2013)

André Crous

Robert Redford’s tour de force as a man lost at sea makes us realise what has been missing from single-character movies.

all-is-lostUSA
4.5*

Director:
J.C. Chandor
Screenwriter:
J.C. Chandor
Director of Photography:
Frank G. DeMarco

Running time: 105 minutes

It’s not easy to carry a film all on your own. Philip Baker Hall did it as a ranting Richard Nixon in Secret Honor, a film that unfortunately wasn’t as compelling as director Robert Altman’s other chamber film, the ensemble-driven Streamers, and to some extent Ryan Reynolds (with the help of voices on the other end of a phone line) pulled it off in the disturbing Buried.

All is Lost puts all previous lone-character efforts to shame (most notably, Tom Hanks’ talkative island man in Cast Away), as the film’s main and only character does not even have a name, and the director doesn’t take the easy way out by having him speak to himself. Played by Robert Redford, “Our Man” has a full three lines of dialogue, of which half consist only of the odd four-letter word to explain his frustration with the situation or vocalise the realisation that this may be the end.

The situation is the following: Having navigated his yacht to a point on the Indian Ocean far away from any civilization – and most significantly, 1,700 miles from the seaway all cargo ships use to transport their goods across the vast body of water – he wakes up to discover his yacht, the Virginia Jean, is taking in water. While he was asleep on the calm seas, a container filled with tiny shoes had fallen off a cargo ship, bobbed on the waves and eventually struck his boat. Fortunately, for the most part, the hole can be repaired; unfortunately, it’s not going to be calm seas all the time, and plain sailing is out of the question.

The film is about survival on open waters as much as Gravity is about survival in outer space. In both films, there is no one to help you when you need it most, and you are left to your own devices to figure out what to do and how quickly to do it, because time – or oxygen, or freshwater – is running out.

Being a seaman means being creative and prepared for anything. When you are exposed to the elements, with only yourself and a tiny boat standing between life and death, a situation can turn extremely challenging if you don’t know how to deal with potentially disastrous turns of events. You can never completely relax.

That is what Redford’s character here learns very quickly. And even though we know nothing about him – not his name, nor how long he has been on the water, nor anything about his family history – we feel entirely sympathetic towards his predicament. We can see he is doing his best, and he clearly has spent some time on the water during his lifetime, but still, the fear is always there that nature will wreak too much havoc for him to handle.

Every time we hear thunder rolling, our stomachs start to churn, and for most of the second half of the film, the tension is nearly unbearable. It is the result of many different factors that include the sharpening of our senses because there is never any dialogue to distract us from the action; the potential that the lead character will drown; and the uncertainty of how long this ordeal will last before the sun breaks through and the enormous waves subside.

We have not seen this kind of action at sea since The Perfect Storm, and although a few shots of Redford at the helm taken in the midst of a storm don’t look entirely realistic, the rest of the production comes across flawlessly, at least in its visual presentation. I am no seaman, so I can’t judge how accurate or suitable the character’s actions are and whether they in any way made the situation better or worse. But Redford’s depiction of a man whose demeanour changes from calm, controlled and determined to dehydrated, exhausted and slightly delirious is a truly compelling job of acting, and he deserves great credit for steering the film in the right direction.

The film is only the second by director J.C. Chandor, whose 2011 début Margin Call also took place in a limited time and place: over a period of 24 hours in an investment bank, shortly before the 2008 financial crisis hit.

All is Lost has a perfectly ambiguous ending, and although one can quibble about the need for an opening voice-over that attempts to frame the film in terms of suspense rather than surprise (as if the title didn’t suffice), it is a breath-taking work of fiction that shows what single-character dramas should look like.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Nebraska (2013)

André Crous

Alexander Payne returns to his native Nebraska to charm us with eccentric characters who will warm your heart.

nebraskaUSA
4*

Director:
Alexander Payne
Screenwriter:
Bob Nelson
Director of Photography:
Phedon Papamichael

Running time: 115 minutes

The Midwest of Alexander Payne is at times reminiscent of the kind of America that Umberto Eco wrote about, although the former tends to focus on suggestive details rather than the vapid excess at the heart of the latter’s fascination with the country.

Early on in Payne’s Nebraska, there is a single shot of signs lined up next to each other in a small town, pointing to different religious establishments. We read the first two, and they seem like the kind of signs you would find anywhere else, but then the third sign, similar in appearance catches our attention: “Masonic Temple”.

After a delightful detour to Hawaii in The Descendants, Payne returns to his native Nebraska for his particular kind of comedy, which works because his comic timing is perfect. He evinces a kind of humour similar to that of Buster Keaton, or some of Jim Jarmusch’s films, which takes the deadpan very seriously and can take almost any subject that would make us uncomfortable and turn it into comedy suitable for anyone older than first grade.

Nebraska opens in Montana, hundreds of miles from the title state, where we meet septuagenarian Woody Grant, his thin white hair completely dishevelled, as if he stuck his finger in an electric socket, on the side of the highway leading out of the city of Billings. He seems to be walking both aimlessly and determinedly. A policeman takes him back to his wife, who is angry with him for having left and probably also for not having stayed away.

Woody is either going senile or has Alzheimer’s disease (we never get a conclusive answer), but that is only one of his problems. Payne chose as his central character someone who ought to be unlikeable and who fits all the stereotypes of growing old: He has lost about as much of his hair as his mind, he is forgetful and simple-minded and always grumpy. And yet, in no small part thanks to a heart-warming performance by Bruce Dern who benefits from a very strong echoing board in his onscreen wife, played by June Squibb, we are always interested in and never scared by whatever foolhardiness he may be capable of.

He has his mind set on going to Nebraska because he got a “You’ve won $1 million” sweepstakes letter, and he wants to collect the money in person, conveniently overlooking the fine print that mentions the requirement of a subscription to multiple magazine titles.

After the third or fourth try, he makes to undertake the 850-mile trek on foot, one of his two sons, David, relents and decides to take time off work to spend with his speedily ageing father and prove to him the letter is a scam by driving to its distributor, Cornhusker Marketing, in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Woody’s forgetfulness, hardness of hearing and stubbornness make for a ride that is probably more interesting for the viewer than for his poor son, who believes a dose of reality will shock his father out of the dream he clings to with such passion that he may do something stupid to make it real.

They eventually end up in Nebraska, but before they get to Lincoln, they stop over in the town where Woody grew up and where his family and many of his old acquaintances still reside: Hawthorne. The characters that populate this rural hamlet all grab our attention the moment we meet them, and Payne easily succeeds in drawing our attention to the beauty of some of these people even while we may snicker at their almost unbelievable goodness.

That is particularly true of the utterly sweet and fragile Peg Nagy, the editor of the local newspaper, The Hawthorne Republican, whose history with Woody goes back a long time and whose fondness for him nearly breaks our collective heart.

The decision to shoot Nebraska in black and white is an odd one, as the desaturated images appear to have had their lifeblood sucked out of them, and although we are not alienated from the film, the monochromatic images in combination with the steadily approaching winter we feel when we notice the frost on the grass next to the highway create a gloomy impression that is at odds with Payne’s more kindhearted approach to his characters.

The theme of growing old has been a theme in storytelling since time immemorial, but in Nebraska Payne has struck exactly the right tone to show us no matter how different people are, a life shared with others is one that those others will appreciate you for.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Prisoners (2013)

André Crous

Denis Villeneuve’s dark film about obsession is not his best, but story’s complexity makes for a riveting tale.

prisonersUSA
3.5*

Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter:
Aaron Guzikowski
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 155 minutes

The final minutes of Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s sombre Prisoners are as dark and thrilling as anything that precedes them, but their impact could have been infinitely more powerful had Hugh Jackman’s character not been so incredibly thick.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, a manly family man with a remodelling and repairs business who in the film’s opening scene accompanies his son, Ralph, on his first deer hunt and does his best to make the youthful teenage boy feel he is now in some way being initiated into manhood. Keller tells Ralph how his father used to always be prepared for everything, good or bad. In other words, a real Boy Scout. Of course, he will soon face a situation he has no idea how to handle.

But there is something off about Keller. He is intensely serious about everything, his body literally taught with tension, and in a pivotal scene early in the film, when he is searching the house and we get the first glimpse of his basement, the camera lingers just long enough for us to notice a gas mask hanging in the corner.

Halfway through the film, when we return to the basement, we get a better view of the neatly arranged stock on the shelves and have the disturbing impression Keller is a survivalist. Prisoners doesn’t elaborate – the film is more show than tell, and you need some patience for this simple yarn spun out over two and a half hours – but one questions what purpose this information serves our understanding of the plot’s central event, other than to make us increasingly uneasy.

This central event is the abduction of Keller’s and his wife’s young girl, Anna, together with Joy, the young daughter of the Dovers’ friends, the Birches, with whom they spent Thanksgiving when they thought the children could quickly go back home to look for an SOS whistle.

Villeneuve already signals in a scene very early on that we should be suspicious of a caravan that is parked in the neighbourhood. We cannot see who is inside, but we know it is an ominous vehicle because we get at least two shots from the point of view of someone unknown on the inside. Luckily, Ralph sees the caravan, and when his sister disappears, he mentions it to his parents, who inform the police.

The police track down the caravan soon enough, but the driver, the young man Alex Jones, seems to be either on drugs or otherwise handicapped, and as he tries to flee, he rams the vehicle into a tree, obviously making his involvement in the disappearance of the girls seem all the more likely. But with him clamming up, the police thinking he is merely mentally handicapped, and the law requiring either arrest or release after 48 hours of detention, he is let go, which angers Keller to no end.

This is where he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of his daughter’s disappearance. But life is not so simple, and while we have grave suspicions that Alex had anything to do with the abduction, one or two tiny but not insignificant moments make us question what he is thinking, or at least what he has seen and may not want to share because of whatever fear he has.

In the end, the film turns out to be infinitely more complex than we may have anticipated, and there are countless incidents or images that seem to be loose ends – or worse, dead ends – that we may never tie together. But slowly, things fall into place. The theme of a maze, made visible by one particular loony whom we and the police notice once word spreads of Anna’s and Joy’s disappearance, is very appropriate here.

The major investigating officer is Detective Loki, and as played by Jake Gyllenhaal there is some trace of his character in Zodiac, as the normally cool and rational individual becomes very attached to the investigation, to the point where he may very well take the law into his own hands if he feels it is not proving to be effective enough on its own.

As the snow falls in rural Pennsylvania and hope disappears of ever finding the two innocent girls, the action escalates, mostly due to Keller’s and Loki’s growing obsession with finding the perpetrator of the crime. However, Keller’s obviously strained relationship with his wife (we almost never see the two of them together in a scene) and Loki’s past, which we can surmise has been filled with sadness even though we have no idea what is at the root of this sadness, are left unexplored by the film, and ultimately leaves us more unattached to the narrative than we ought to have been.

Villeneuve has made some wonderful films in the past, including the widely acclaimed Incendies and the extraordinary Polytechnique. Both of them were violent films, but they were told with great style and a sense for telling a story in an interesting way. Although Prisoners is far from those highpoints, it is a work most directors would be proud of, and despite the slow pace of the storytelling (we only grasp the meaning of the title almost right at the end thanks to a newspaper headline), it remains a strong presentation of an investigation where leads seem to be in such short supply.

Anomalisa (2015)

André Crous

Charlie Kaufman continues his quirky quest to understand the human soul by deploying stop-motion animation.

anomalisaUSA
4*

Directors:
Charlie Kaufman
Duke Johnson
Screenwriter:
Charlie Kaufman
Director of Photography:
Joe Passarelli

Running time: 85 minutes

Michael Stone is big in Cincinnati, for what it’s worth. He is recognised the moment he checks into the city’s “la-di-da” Al Fregoli hotel, as a former flame describes it. Said flame is comically named Bella Amarossi (a very deliberate maiming of the word “amor”). But before we get to her, let’s back up a second to Michael Stone. Stone is a star in the world of customer service and has arrived in Cincinnati to deliver a major speech on the topic; after all, he has written a bestselling book titled How May I Help You Help Them?

Stone is the star of Anomalisa, a stop-motion animation film set in 2005 that marks writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s return to the director’s chair after one of the best début (and arguably one of the most imaginative) films ever made: Synecdoche, New York. Voiced by David Thewlis, the middle-aged, more-salt-than-pepper character is stuck in a world where everyone has the same lily-white voice (one that belongs to Tom Noonan) and different shades of the same face. Everywhere he goes, people have different names, even different genders, but the same voice every time. That is, until he meets Lisa.

Lisa is an anomaly, and Stone cannot believe his luck that he has found such a diamond in a place as uninteresting as Cincinnati, where people cannot stop talking about the city’s zoo and chilli but have absolutely nothing else to recommend. Jennifer Jason Leigh brings her voice to Lisa’s body (it is perhaps a tad disappointing the voice again belongs to a white woman, and the film would have been ever more buzzworthy had it been a little more inclusive), who vividly brings the shy introvert to life.

Before Stone meets Lisa, however, we are treated to a hilarious establishing opening act in which he is haunted by and ultimately faces the woman he dumped for no good reason 10 years earlier, in 1995: the aforementioned Bella. Bella has put her life on hold and never forgiven Stone for leaving her just when they were at their happiest together. Their meeting in a public area is as pitiful as we expect it to be, and Kaufman’s dialogue gleefully thrashes around with cringe-inducing moments of awkwardness that will have many in the audience in stitches.

It is after he gets back to his room on the 10th floor, takes a shower and looks into the mirror that his jaw literally drops: He hears a voice different from all the others, which seemingly causes his cheek to detach from his face – albeit just momentarily. He rushes out of his room, and after knocking on many other doors in the corridor, he finds Lisa, a customer service rep who has come all the way from Akron to hear him speak. When she opens her mouth, her voice is like magic to his ears.

And yet, the film does not pretend that these two are meant for each other in an otherwise dreary, hopeless world. Instead, it digs deeper, very subtly, to direct our attention towards the likelihood that even the most marvellous of experiences – falling in love – can be reduced to crass ephemerality within moments. It is in this process that Kaufman, as he did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, again shows us his cynical curiosity about people’s actions and the way they are tied to our psychological states of mind.

Take the name of the hotel, for example. Most of the film is set inside the fictional Al Fregoli Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. Names in Kaufman-scripted films are often subtle nods at a wider range of references, and in this case, Fregoli undoubtedly refers to the Fregoli delusion or syndrome, a condition that leads people to believe that someone they know changes disguises on a regular basis, instead of realising they are all different people. The connection to the material in this film is obvious although (fittingly) not a true incarnation of the disorder.

The quality of the film is superb, and while the dolls’ faces are deliberately crude, they move about elegantly. Such grace is even more pronounced in the cinematography, as the camera often slowly zooms in on action taking place, and sometimes there are multiples layers of action in a single shot, for which the choreography and the direction are almost too complicated to get one’s head around.

Anomalisa is unlike almost anything else you will have ever seen before. It cleverly draws laughter from the most uncomfortable of situations without ridiculing those involved. It gently reveals the complexity (as well as the humour and the tragedy) that accompanies the act of falling in love. And it has a sex scene that is filled with the clumsiness and uncertainty but also the innocence and desire to satisfy and be satisfied that the first sex act with a new partner often entails.

Although the story is sometimes painfully thin (much of the film takes place during a single night) and some scenes last much longer than they ought to, Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson successfully mine the material for laughs while keeping their collective eye on the ball that is human emotion. This may not be at the same level as his previous works, but Kaufman’s voice remains one that stands out from the others, and for that, we should all expect to fall in love with his work again and again.