1990-1999

Mindwalk (1990)

André Crous

Mindwalk is a philosophical talkathon that promotes a vision of the world as an interconnected whole even as its central trio barely interacts with anyone or anything else.

MindwalkUSA
3*

Director:
Bernt Capra
Screenwriters:
Floyd Byars
Fritjof Capra
Director of Photography:
Karl Kases

Running time: 110 minutes

Mindwalk is a film with talking heads. It engages in deep philosophical discussions about the complexity of life and the shortfalls of the Cartesian way of thinking. But it features very little human drama and completely ignores its spectacular setting, the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey off the coast of France.

Written by Fritjof Capra, a physicist and expert in systems theory, and directed by his brother, Bernt, the film features a politician, a poet and a scientist ruminating at length on whether one can understand life by approaching it piece by piece, like a machine. Actually, it is mostly the scientist, Sonia Hoffman, doing the ruminating. As the clear proxy for the systems theorist who wrote the screenplay, Ingmar Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann takes charge of the conversation and never lets up. Shifting back and forth between physics and philosophy, she elaborates in detail on the two fields and quickly plays the role of wise teacher lecturing to her curious students.

Sam Waterston plays Jack Edwards, a conservative Democratic senator who is fresh off an unsuccessful run for the White House and has come to France for a long weekend to recuperate. His longtime friend and former speechwriter, Thomas Harriman (John Heard), is living in Paris and accompanies him on his trip. No sooner do they land at Mont-Saint-Michel than they come across Sonia, who comes here to think big thoughts. But this is where the action, limited as it is, stops for the next 90-odd minutes. And what follows is scene after scene of Sonia explaining her “ecological” vision of the world that emphasises interconnectedness.

And yet, this intellectual trio is completely cut off. With rare exceptions, they do not interact with anyone but move about in empty spaces in and around the abbey. They resemble the electrons inside the vast expanses of the atom over which Sonia waxes lyrical. She is continuously in a position of power. Seemingly all-knowing, she is the one who teaches but speaks with the force and the tone of someone used to having to speak over people to convince them. Now and then, Waterston and Heard make quick quips or ask a question, but they are like well-read middle-schoolers attending a lecture for PhD students.

But given the setting, namely the famous abbey on an island that is only accessible on foot during low tide, it is astonishing that religion never features in their exchanges. Nor, for that matter, does Jack’s or Thomas’s personal life. And the conversation twists and turns at the whim of the speakers. Very little is based on the actual environment they move through. This is a truly breathtaking lack of imagination and creativity and proves the film’s real purpose: to educate rather than to entertain.

Sonia swings wildly between pure physics and the heavy burden of being connected to (and, therefore, responsible for) everything. She even appears to promote Béchamp’s terrain theory by pointing to the relative difference in cost between maintaining a healthy diet and paying for a medical procedure because of bad eating habits. But what she is talking about is nothing short of a systemic overhaul where the modern world (and politicians, like Jack) prioritise quick fixes and incremental change, if any. She mentions the Native Americans making decisions by considering their impact seven generations down the line. And there are some worthy insights about the impact of our perception on the thing we perceive. 

These are all interesting thoughts, but in a narrative vacuum, they struggle to breathe and ultimately suffocate under their own weight. There is a very meek attempt to show that Sonia does not, in fact, have all the answers. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, who is always in a huff, and seems to live a very solitary life with her books and her theories. But Mindwalk offers us no insight into her life, and she shows no signs of personal development.

Every now and again, Thomas quotes a philosopher (“as Heraclitus once said…”) or a mythical figure (“as Merlin once said to King Arthur…”) or recites an entire poem (Pablo Neruda’s “Enigmas”), however tangentially relevant to the conversation. But no connections are as bad as the filmmaker’s attempts to jump from one scene to another. The cuts are hard and sharp and there is no winding down of a comment, just a realisation that the scene has come to an end, and it’s time for a change of locale.

Although it is unclear how far Jack came in the race for the presidency, his mere presence here should provide a rich opportunity to investigate the potential for implementing Sonia’s ideas in practice. Jack freely admits he is beholden to lobbyists and the whims of his constituents, but his tendency to compromise is at odds with the paradigmatic shift that Sonia desires. And yet, this clash of approaches is never seriously tackled. All three seem to agree that all of this talk of change is hopelessly impractical, at least within the current system. But no one is willing to change the system itself; they would rather be content with merely discussing the benefits of living in a different system.

The film, bereft as it is of narrative development, could easily have been staged as a theatre play instead. What saves it from utter mediocrity is the performances of its three leads, who all do the best they can under the circumstances. Waterston, in particular, conveys a genuine empathy and intellectual curiosity to stand in for those viewers who find this kind of thing more appealing.

Mindwalk is not a work of entertainment, not by a long shot. It is a video with a single purpose: For Capra to have something to screen for his first-year systems theory students on their first day of class. The question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there something when it mostly consists of nothing?” We could easily ask the same of the film.

Sweet ‘n Short (1991)

André Crous

While some would correctly argue that the films of Leon Schuster, South Africa’s most profitable director, have done lasting damage to the industry’s reputation, his Sweet ‘n Short was a prescient work of art.

Sweet 'n ShortSouth Africa
4*

Director:
Gray Hofmeyr
Screenwriters:
Leon Schuster
Gray Hofmeyr
Director of Photography:
James Robb

Running time: 90 minutes

I never thought I would review a Leon Schuster movie, much less do so positively. Schuster is the candid camera king of South Africa, and for the past three decades, he has barely changed his formula: Stage outrageous situations, often with a racial undertone, then reveal the prank to the victim so that everyone can have a good belly laugh at being so gullible. His films are cash cows for the South African film industry, often spending their entire run at the top of the box office charts, but no one would describe them as paragons of cinematic excellence.

And yet, in the waning days of apartheid, during the uncertain time between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, Schuster wrote and played the lead in a film that used equal measures of comedy and intelligence so well that, one might reasonably argue, he played a significant role in assuaging white South Africans’ fears about the future and helped pave the way for a smooth transition to a post-apartheid era. That film was Sweet ‘n Short.

Schuster stars as the titular Sweet Coetzee, a 40-year-old TV sports broadcaster who has been with the station for half his life and recently received a service award. He spends the night celebrating, wakes up late, has to get dressed as he speeds down the highway and barely makes it to work on time before utter catastrophe strikes. Crestfallen, he takes to the casino, where he wins the jackpot, moments before an inept criminal crashes into him and sends him off to the hospital. When he wakes up, the world has changed.

Actually, it’s only South Africa, but during the apartheid years, it might as well have been the world. Most noticeably, the previous white/black hierarchy has been reversed, and in what might very well be the highlight of intellectual and comedic symbiosis in Schuster’s work, we see the country’s most famous Afrikaans news presenter, Riaan Cruywagen, read the day’s news in Zulu. It is difficult to emphasise how mind-blowing this depiction would have been to a white South African viewer in 1991.

There are many other sly additions that serve as a wink and a nod to the potential transformation that South Africans were anticipating once the whites would no longer be in power: Among others, the national rugby team’s name change from Springboks to Zambucks (Zam-Buk is a wildly popular antiseptic ointment in South Africa); the flamboyant South African “Shaka” war cry based on the New Zealand “Haka”, but with a local twist; and the renaming of the D.F. Malan Hospital in honour of the country’s first-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Albert Luthuli.

Given the apartheid-era Communist Party’s long-standing support for the ANC, it should come as no surprise that Russian is quite prevalent in Schuster’s depiction of the New South Africa – from businesses advertising their goods in Cyrillic to them selling the traditional ushanka fur hats. But all of this is treated with a gentle chuckle, as if Schuster is seeking to re-assure a frightened white viewership that, even if the blacks and the communists got to run the country, its warm, friendly spirit would continue to triumph, and there is nothing to be afraid of.

One particularly prescient moment of screenwriting comes at the end of the first act, when Coetzee and Alfred (Alfred Ntombela, whose filmography overlaps almost perfectly with Schuster’s), his guide in the New South Africa, attend a rugby match. The match is preceded by a breathtakingly moving rendition of a new national anthem, written by Wendy Oldfield. Because it consists of lyrics in many of South Africa’s 11 languages, it conveys the kind of unity that such a hymn ought to produce, and the pride with which all the different races at the match sing it is simply extraordinary. It should be noted that the country’s new post-apartheid anthem ultimately also contained words sung in Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sesotho.

But like so many of Schuster’s other films, Sweet ‘n Short sees him dress up in blackface for the sake of getting a laugh, albeit at the expense of whites who get easily flustered and are made to look ridiculous because they are so obviously racist. Now clearly, this is quite different from the minstrel context in the United States in that racist whites are the butt of the joke here, but one can also easily make the argument that Schuster is reinforcing particularly egregious stereotypes of blacks by giving these caricatures any airtime at all.

Tackling a serious topic at a time when there was a great deal of worry in the country, Schuster and his director and co-screenwriter, Gray Hofmeyr, succeeded in creating an insightful (even intelligent) and comforting piece of entertainment that prepared his (white) countrymen and -women for the immense political and societal changes that lay ahead. But given the major role he plays in getting South Africans to the cinema, it is an utter tragedy that Schuster’s subsequent efforts have been skewed towards a much lower common denominator.

The Celluloid Closet (1995)

André Crous

The Celluloid Closet, a ground-breaking documentary released in 1995, reveals many of the queerest moments from the first 100 years of the cinematic art form.

The Celluloid ClosetUSA
5*

Directors:
Rob Epstein
Jeffrey Friedman
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Jeffrey Friedman
Director of Photography:
Nancy Schreiber

Running time: 105 minutes

Just like the people they portray, films with LGBT characters have always been around. In 1995, at the 100-year mark of the birth of cinema, an expansive documentary rounded up a century of (mostly, but not always, implicitly) homosexual or queer characters and narrative trends to show how, even in the darkest days of the moralistic Hollywood Production “Hays” Code, the closet door was often ajar.

Based on the exhaustive overview provided by Vito Russo’s 1981 landmark book of the same name, The Celluloid Closet was made by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, two openly gay documentary filmmakers who had already won Academy Awards for tackling subjects close to LGBT viewers’ lives in The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Their 1995 documentary features a treasure trove of film clips, as well as interviews with numerous industry professionals who talk about how they perceived certain movies while they were growing up, how they had to work within and around the Code and what the challenges were in producing an authentic representation of gay life. Among the best-known interviewees are playwright Armistead Maupin, actor-director Harvey Fierstein and writer-provocateur Quentin Crisp, with mainstream actors like Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg and Susan Sarandon (all of whom portrayed gay characters during their careers) also contributing their impressions.

The opening clip crystallises the early years’ depiction of same-sex activity: In the 1934 film Wonder Bar, a man and woman are dancing at a ball when another man approaches to ask whether he can “cut in”. The woman moves towards him, assuming the request is directed towards her, only to be rebuffed when the two men grab each other’s hands and start dancing. A few steps behind them, singer Al Jolson’s eyes are big as plates. He throws a limp wrist into the air and exclaims, “Boys will be boys!”

But such tolerance, even if mocking or condescending in tone, was soon torpedoed by the Hays Code, which sought to clamp down on films’ generally permissive attitude with regard to sexuality – by then, big-name filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille had already made blockbuster films showing full-fledged (heterosexual) orgies. Starting in the early 1930s, the Code curtailed depictions of rape, abortion, sex perversion (i.e. any positive representation of LGBT life), prostitution, nudity, white slavery and the use of profanity, among others.

Thus, gay characters were driven into the background, their stories were made to look straight, or it was made clear that their lifestyle was abominable. And they were almost always killed off by the final act. But while some viewers were happy to see characters similar to themselves, the representation was terribly one-sided, even tragic.

For most of the 20th century, films consistently presented gay characters as outcasts who were to be made fun of, judged as degenerates or pitied for the miserable lives they lead. Generally speaking, the characters were trapped and unable or unwilling to effect change, which made them powerless and frequently led to them committing suicide or dying in various ways. In one eye-opening sequence, The Celluloid Closet shows us one death after another of these films’ gay characters: by gunshot, by stabbing, by hanging, by fire, by crossbow… even by having a tree fall on them.

Narrator Lily Tomlin correctly points out that “Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves.” When all you see of gay life is a one-dimensional depiction of melancholy ending in tragedy, there is inevitably an effect on all viewers irrespective of their sexuality. Of course, there are people identifying as one or more of the letters in LGBT who are sad or suicidal, just like their straight counterparts, but representations need to reflect the diversity of real life, which only comes from telling more stories and treating all characters as full human beings with real agency.

But even when characters, especially those based on real-life individuals, were mostly stripped of their sexuality, traces remained. Perhaps it is because many filmmakers remained committed to reflecting real life. Or perhaps the reason is that, throughout the filmmaking process, some screenwriters were gay, some directors were gay, some actors and actresses were gay, and so on, and they wanted to include part of themselves and what they knew in the product they were creating.

This is a documentary that adds depth and nuance to characters and narratives we thought we knew. We see how affection between men – approached with surprising sensitivity – was often there if we looked a little more closely. An excerpt from Their First Mistake, in which Laurel and Hardy share a bed, help each other take care of a baby and confess their bond to each other, makes this plain for all to see. So, too, does a scene from Wings, the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, which features two men stroking each other’s hair, with one planting a kiss on the other’s lips.

Cabaret scribe Jay Presson Allen laments the fact that the 1950s were an era of such “towering dullness” because the stories being told were all terribly safe and uninspiring, but the ever-irreverent Gore Vidal lets us in on a juicy gay angle in the biblical epic Ben-Hur, released in 1959, which he had a hand in writing.

It is said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. Films with LGBT characters or storylines provide sunlight by highlighting people and plots that are not as well-established as the decades of straight storylines, thus washing away the veneer of grime that had built up over decades of misrepresentation. And while this documentary certainly does not pretend that every classic film falls somewhere on the Kinsey scale, it does encourage us to examine them more critically and potentially to discover the rainbow in the black and white.

Although its focus is squarely on the U.S. film industry, The Celluloid Closet makes little mention of the broader historical context, namely that the advent of the modern gay rights movement (the 1969 Stonewall riots) coincided with the downfall of the dreadful Code, and that the subsequent AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s pushed LGBT stories out of the metaphorical closet and into the limelight.

It would be fascinating to see an updated account of LGBT representation in film, as a great deal has changed since 1995. The number of films built around gay characters who do not fold under pressure but stand up for themselves or, better yet, are simply part of a story other than their sexuality, has risen sharply over the past few years.

As witty and entertaining as it is informative, The Celluloid Closet remains the gold standard for information about and insight into the traces of homosexuality in films during the first 100 years of cinematic history. Over the ensuing quarter of a century, films like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Blue is the Warmest Colour and Moonlight would all make a big splash on the global circuit. Myriad more, from those of Sebastián Lelio, João Pedro Rodrigues, Marco Berger and Kimberly Peirce to the ones of Dee Rees, Todd Haynes, Xavier Dolan and Pedro Almodóvar, have already given a firm indication that the next 100 years will produce an infinitely greater variety of movies than before – in whatever way their storytellers choose.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

André Crous

Despite its long gestation and its release more than a decade after the original trilogy, the Star Wars origin story (Episode I) is one of the worst instalments in the entire series.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom MenaceUSA
2.5*

Director:
George Lucas
Screenwriter:
George Lucas
Director of Photography:
David Tattersall

Running time: 135 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– The Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)
– The Last Jedi (Episode VIII)

“Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.
While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events, the Supreme Chancellor has secretly dispatched two Jedi Knights, the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, to settle the conflict….”

Thus reads the opening crawl of the first instalment of the Star Wars series. It is lengthy (that final paragraph is a single, 35-word sentence), mentions taxation in the opening paragraph and is generally uninspiring. All in all, this is a terrible way to start a franchise, but luckily Episode I had history on its side: A trilogy of films, Episodes IV–VI, released between 1977 and 1983, had already gained a mass following and laid a firm fictional foundation by the time this origin story was released in 1999.

Episode I contains its share of dramatic irony because thanks to the other films we have the benefit of foresight regarding many of its characters’ destinies. Nonetheless, it is surprising that director George Lucas presents key moments with a complete lack of energy or flair. Consider the first meeting between Anakin Skywalker, here an 8-year-old boy, and his future bride, Padmé, or the first time the astro droid R2D2 lays its eye on C3PO, its eventual partner through thick and thin. These moments are not visually highlighted, and there is nothing to suggest their future importance, even though Anakin asking whether Padmé is an angel is kind of cute.

But then, it is generally accepted that the instalments directed by Star Wars creator Lucas were mostly dull in comparison with those that were not. Episode I, in the works for a decade and a half after the original trilogy, disappointed many people who had grown up on this series loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (隠し砦の三悪人 / Kakushi toride no san akunin). Lucas fumbles with comic timing again and again and again, mostly because of the ludicrous character named Jar Jar Binks, a creature that is both physically and tonally awkward and reaches for laughs at many an occasion by saying “How wude!” with a pout that does not elicit a single laugh but rather a queasy shrug from the viewer.

The plot in this first film revolves around Queen Padmé Amidala, who is strung up so tightly in a variety of elaborate costumes that she can barely speak a word when she opens her mouth. This gimmick gets old very quickly and minimises the charm and sparkle she has when she is out of her costume, as in the first half of the film when she pretends to be a handmaiden and spends a great deal of time in the company of the young Anakin Skywalker.

Queen Amidala’s planet of Naboo has been taken over by the Japanese-accented Neimoidians. They are receiving guidance from a shadowy figure who only appears to them as a hologram (thus, he is the “Phantom Menace” in the title, although this term never appears in the film), whom we know from later films as the Emperor. Lucas finally reveals the identity of this individual during the final moments thanks to a quick pan that ends on the face of someone who has gained more and more power throughout the film. 

In the meantime, the origin story of Anakin Skywalker’s journey to becoming a Jedi starts with a chance stop on the planet of Tatooine, where two Jedis, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, are seeking help while the queen’s planet is under occupation. They meet Anakin, whose midi-chlorian levels are off the charts, meaning not only that the Force is strong with him but also that he might very well be “The One” who will “bring balance to the Force”. Although just 8 years old, he is remarkably gifted at podracing (the film’s podrace is shown in full and lasts an exhausting 10 minutes) and has even built his own droid, C3PO.

Qui-Gon is so sure of himself that he decides to buy Anakin’s freedom and take him to the Jedi Council on the city-planet of Coruscant, where the boy undergoes a test not unlike the one the Tibetan lamas administer to find the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. Master Yoda, who cannot see into the future but can sense negativity radiating back from it (possibly by means of past films), says Anakin may very well be The One, but his anger and fear, tied to his mother who was left behind on Tatooine, could lead him to the Dark Side. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

This may be one of the worst initial films ever in a series. While the technology in 1999 had certainly improved over that of the 1970s and 1980s, and Lucas was able to bring to life a civilisation like Coruscant and stage a fast-paced (albeit overlong) podrace inside canyons, there are major flaws. For one, the humanoid characters like Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padmé all look above the faces of the CGI characters, like Jar Jar, when they are speaking to each other. That is very distracting and should not be happening.

Another problem is the chemistry between Anakin and his mother, Shmi. Although the latter was played by the legendary Pernille August, she speaks her dialogue as if she is performing a line reading. Meanwhile, Anakin, played by Jake Lloyd, is at times perfectly restrained, but when he is called on to show any kind of emotion ranging from sadness to elation, he rushes headlong towards the histrionic side of the spectrum. And when these two characters interact with each other in the same scene, the result is absolutely frigid and unaffecting.

Lucas also made the peculiar choice to break the fourth wall and put the viewer in the position of a droid, C3PO, on three occasions during a scene when Anakin is speaking to him (and looking directly at it/him). This feels completely out of sync with the rest of the filmmaking style and is not grounded in any apparent perspective.

The highlight of this first instalment is the climactic lightsaber battle between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on the one side and the evil Sith, Darth Maul (basically, a nemesis of the Jedis), who wields a red double-sided lightsaber, on the other. While the location is limited, the stakes cannot be higher, and for those who have already seen Episode IV, the death of Qui-Gon will have at least a narrative, if not a visual, parallel with the death of Obi-Wan, who survives the attack here.

Episode I lays some of the groundwork for the rest of the story, but despite having a wealth of elements at its disposal and knowing full well that most people who saw it at the time were already familiar with the characters’ eventual development, the film is disappointingly reticent about presenting its material in a way that would enthuse its base. Lucas’s almost laser-like focus on mining for a laugh at the end of scenes, usually by deploying Jar Jar Binks, is as misguided a strategy as he could have embarked on, and ultimately the film feels exceptionally inept.

Chungking Express (1994)

André Crous

Chungking Express 2Hong Kong

5*
Director:
Wong Kar-wai
Screenwriter:
Wong Kar-wai
Director of Photography:
Christopher Doyle

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: 重慶森林
Transliterated title: Chung Hing sam lam

Chungking Express has boundless energy, revels in repetition and is quite simply one of the most absorbing films ever made. This may be the only film made by director Wong Kar-wai that I have ever enjoyed (with the possible exception of Fallen Angels, released in 1995), and it is because whatever stylisation takes place always serves to propel the story forward. There is never a dull moment. The repetition is aural, not visual, and although often slightly manipulated, the images are infused with a gritty Hong Kong realism and feature two of the most likeable cops you’re ever likely to see.

These two cops are #223 and #663, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, respectively, and they both suffer from broken hearts. Their tales are told in two separate storylines, with the Midnight Express fast-food stall serving as the only solid connecting thread between the two. 

The film has one of the most exhilarating opening scenes I have seen in my life. The images jump off the screen, and for a while we are blinded, not by the visuals, but by the music. Michael Galasso’s “Baroque” cranks the action forward with rhythms and sounds that immerse you in a world that is audibly — and then, you notice, visibly, too — in motion. Coming after about 1 minute of opening credits (simple white text on a black screen) in complete silence, the score hits a nerve.

The pictures we get are also different from what we’re used to. A step-printed sequence of images (which means the 24 frames per second shot by the camera were altered in post-production to unspool at the same speed, but every second frame has been duplicated, and every other frame discarded) makes for dizzying action, captured with a mobile camera that seems to move both more quickly and more slowly than we are used to from the world around us — or, for that matter, the worlds we know on film. The step-printing process is used again at various points in the film, and it continually succeeds in adding another layer of frenzy to a film that positively throbs with adrenaline in the stiflingly humid, concrete jungle that is Hong Kong.

The action in this first scene, and elsewhere in the first story, takes place at Chungking Mansions, a marketplace where everything can be found because every colour and creed on the face of the earth seems to be hawking their wares here.

In the first story, Cop #223 — whose name, He Qiwu, is only mentioned at rare intervals — has just broken up with his girlfriend, May, whom we never see. He hangs out at Midnight Express, a fast-food joint, almost every night, where the manager (played by “Piggy” Chan Kam-Chuen, who was the film’s still photographer) tries to set him up with girls who are waitresses in his employment. But #223 is not interested. He has decided to grieve for one month, until the 1st of May (yes, the name of his ex), when it will also be his birthday, before seriously pursuing any girl again.

The film’s joyous opening scene ends with #223 brushing past a woman in a blonde wig and is accompanied by a voice-over in which the cop tells us he would soon fall in love with her. At the same time as we follow his melancholy-laden trips to grocery stores where he buys canned pineapples set to expire May 1, we also see snippets of this mysterious blonde’s life. She is dealing with a group of drug smugglers but when she delivers them to the airport and turns around, they’ve suddenly absconded with copious amounts of cocaine.

Honestly, there are parts of this film that do not gel together all that smoothly. The blonde’s working relationship with the owner of a nightclub, who is also deeply involved in the drug business, takes a few viewings to piece together, and even then it’s not entirely clear, because we are asked to infer meaning and function from mere glances. But thanks to the rapid editing that also accelerates the pace at which the stories are told, small jumps are effortlessly papered over, as it were, by the colourful neon.

The first time around, the viewer may be disoriented by the first part, as there are a few very brief shots (lasting no more than a few seconds) with the three main characters from the second part, whom we don’t know yet. But first, a word about the second story.

Cop #663 meets Faye at Midnight Express, where she starts working at the end of the first story, just as #223 disappears from the film (something else that is never explained). He has a sometime girlfriend, an air hostess, but she gives up on their relationship and hands the key with the “Dear John” letter to Faye, who hangs on to the letter for a while, and on to the key to #663’s apartment for much longer. Meanwhile, she becomes fascinated by this man and even starts going to his place (these scenes were shot in DOP Christopher Doyle’s apartment) to clean and reinvigorate his home (some may think of Amélie here). Here, there are questions of credibility, as she replaces certain items, which #663 notices but doesn’t question.

Faye, the air hostess and the cop all make surprise appearances in the first part. First, the air hostess appears outside the airport when the woman with a blonde wig escorts her Indians with their drugs to the departure gate. While the woman in the blonde wig waits outside a toy store, Faye exits with a massive Garfield toy, which we will see again in #663’s flat later on. Moments later, when #223 leaves Midnight Express, there is a short take on #663 looking down from a raised platform, seemingly at #223, but since geography is rarely established in this film, we cannot be certain.

These are very minor points, but they suggest a film that is slightly experimental and strives to make it clear all the buzzing belongs to the same world yet tells its story at full speed in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion, producing a vibrant combination of narrative, sound and colour that stays with you.

You’ll never hear The Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin'” again without thinking of Tony Leung and Faye Wong. Few other directors — Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terrence Malick with Badlands and A Thin Red Line, and Oliver Stone with Platoon — have managed to pull off such an exquisite audiovisual melding using music that had been around for a long time.

Oddly enough, the repetition of the music holds the unconventional storytelling together: Not only is the film divided into two parts, and do the characters from the one turn up unannounced in the other, but like the sequence in Citizen Kane that telegraphs the dissolution of a marriage, a quick succession of scenes involving an array of fast food for the girlfriend precedes the actual introduction of the girlfriend — in a flashback, no less! But Wong Kar-wai breezily ignores the convention of narrative linearity, and yet the viewer stays riveted because these are all such wonderful people.

We love the movies we love despite their faults, not because we think they lack any. Chungking Express, with its numerous awkward plot transitions, is as good an example as any of this, but because I trusted the film from the very first moment and let myself be carried along the stream of images of audio and was never let down by the story or its gentle characters, this remains a truly dazzling film.

Olympic Garage (1999)

André Crous

Argentina
3.5*

Director:
Marco Bechis
Screenwriters:
Marco Bechis
Lara Fremder
Director of Photography:
Ramiro Civita

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Garage Olimpo

Although this makes it all the more frightening, it is refreshing to see a conflict not based on race or religion, but on ideology. The reason this should inspire fear in viewer and character alike is that this kind of setup makes it much more difficult to distinguish a friend from an enemy.

Olympic Garage is set during Argentina’s Dirty War of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which many Argentines were rounded up, because they’d been denounced by someone as a traitor to the system or an anarchist or a subversive, and tortured before simply disappearing. The mass disappearances of the country’s citizens led to a commission established after this time of military rule called the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons to look into the vast scope of the government’s actions to silence the general population.

What the film manages to convey better than anything else — and there are many scenes of torture and calculated moments of sudden, cold-blooded violence to demonstrate how power-hungry and callous some of the policemen were who enjoyed this civil war against the people they are meant to protect — is that shocking, government-sanctioned acts can take place in the middle of a city without anyone knowing about it.

A great deal of the film takes place underground, in a parking garage in downtown Buenos Aires, and we regularly see people (often, the same people, going about their daily life) walking lazily past the entrance to this parking garage, ignorant of the abhorrent acts being committed inside. In the same vein, there are multiple shots taken from a helicopter that might signal the constant surveillance of the citizenry, but as the sound is cut completely, all we get is a feeling of cars flowing over highways and people walking on sidewalks, unaware of the things their fellow citizens are suffering.

These scenes in the parking garage focus on Maria Fabiani, a girl whose French mother living in Buenos Aires doesn’t know where her daughter is, only that the police came to take her from their home and that she will be at Police Station 23, but she is nowhere to be found, like so many others. Over the course of the film, Maria slowly loses her mind (who wouldn’t?), but actress Antonella Costa isn’t always convincing.

However, her boyfriend Felix, played by Carlos Echevarría, is a study in how to effectively communicate conflicting emotion and convey complexity with few words. While he is her boyfriend in an on-again-off-again kind of way, he never told her that he tortures people for a living in a parking garage (luckily the torture sounds are mostly obscured by a portable radio outside the room whose volume is turned up whenever the pain is about to start), but when she shows up as a suspect he has to fulfil his duty while not alienating or hurting her. It is a delicate balance that Echevarría, in his début feature film, pulls off admirably.

The film has a nice bookend structure involving a man in whose home a bomb is planted right at the beginning of the film, though the woman with the bomb, called Ana — a friend of his daughter’s — is not given any back story nor integrated into the rest of the film, which is a real shame.

There are some nice little details, in particular the relationship (or the beginnings of a relationship) cultivated between Maria and a fellow inmate, a mechanic called Nene, as well as the hints of feelings that Maria inspired in another fellow anti-government activist Francisco, and the observation of how Felix tries to assert power over Maria, but the film is not very strong on story. 

Toward the end, the film becomes very political as the church is implicated in oppressive regime’s horrible deeds and a final title card informs us that many of these people responsible for the disappearance of thousands of innocent civilians today walk the streets freely.

Olympic Garage offers a glimpse of the hardship endured by those fighting for a better life but who were tortured and ultimately ended up dead as a result of their desire to fight, or just resist. The film is not entirely engrossing but it has many points of entry for anyone wanting to know what kinds of things went on underground during Argentina’s Dirty War.

How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate (1997)

André Crous

Ireland
4*

Director:
Graham Jones
Screenwriters:
Graham Jones
Aislinn O’Loughlin
Tadhg O’Higgins
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 77 minutes

First things first: This was the début feature of a 22-year-old, and yet neither the usual first-time desire to show off nor the flaws of not knowing how to direct actors are on show here. The film has fast pacing but slows down at very significant points to focus on effecting smooth transitions through credible though very well-written dialogue; it is also great fun.

Shot during the summer of 1996 and showing the last school year (culminating in the middle of 1997) at James Joyce College in Dublin, the film quickly assembles a group of characters who want to beat the system by cheating on the big school-leaving exam called the leaving certificate or just “leaving cert”.

The film exploits the creativity and ingenuity (and, perhaps, blind optimism) of school children to make us believe they can put their heads together and best the security of the establishment, i.e. the Department of Education. But they, and the filmmaker, present the case in almost meticulous fashion to make us believe this can be done, even by complete amateurs.

Now, as the narrator reminds us, “cheating in the exam properly isn’t easy”, and it takes the group of students, almost all of them intelligent in ways that are different to the one tested by the school-leaving exam, a full year to put together a plan that would work.

They have few real obstacles, but while there are one or two tense moments, including a classically staged but very effective sequence of cross-cutting that brings to mind the famous tennis sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, the goal of How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate is to be more like a manual than a dramatic tale.

The idea of a manual is supported by delicious, informal but very informative narration provided by Nial O’Driscoll, who sets out all the information one would need to successfully pull off the act of stealing the papers from the Department of Education’s high-security warehouse in the rural Irish town of Athlone.

The narrator also continuously reminds us of how important the exam is, and we often go back to the teachers who try to explain to their students how they should divide up their time to study for this once in a lifetime opportunity to make it big in the world and go to university. “Failure in the leaving certificate means failure for the rest of your lives!” a teacher bellows ominously in the opening scene.

The main actor in all this is Fionn (Garret Baker), a pupil whose friend Cian committed suicide when he was found cheating in his exams. Fionn is a lonely boy but he is committed to making a point by cheating and then coming out afterwards to show that his skill at staging such a heist apparently means nothing because it is not the kind of skill tested by the leaving certificate exam.

The logic is a bit flawed, but his quiet determination to prove to himself and to those around him the Department of Education is not as intelligent as they would like to think is certainly admirable and keeps the viewer glued to the screen.

The generally light-hearted approach of director Graham Jones to his material, especially in the form of the pleasure of listening to the narrator explain in great detail (at one point he even laughs at the naïveté of the characters, immediately endearing himself to us), goes a long way towards gaining our confidence that this is a film to be enjoyed fully.

And yet, with Cian’s suicide in the background and the sad face of Fionn claiming our attention in many scenes, it is also clear that this entertaining film is tinged with sadness that adds unexpected depth to the characters.

It is a great joy to watch this film, which shares the same kind of wit as The History Boys but is far more straightforward in its intentions and its emotions, perhaps unfortunately eschewing the complexity of the latter. The title tells us that everything will be fine, and the moments of dramatic tension because of the uncertainty about what is going to happen are very rare. The writing is superior to the film itself, although there is the odd well-chosen visual flourish, and it would have been good to see Graham Jones contribute to more screenplays, which unfortunately has not really been the case since the release of this film.

The Adopted Son (1998)

André Crous

Kyrgyzstan
3.5*

Director:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Screenwriters:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Avtandil Adikulov
Marat Sarulu
Director of Photography:
Khassan Kydyraliev

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: Бешкемпир
Transliterated title: Beshkempir

The films of the countries that used to form a part of the Soviet Union are not very well-known, primarily because there are so few of them and the nascent film industries in those countries in general have neither the money nor the experience to make films that can be marketed to a larger audience outside the country. From time to time, filmmakers from elsewhere come to take advantage of these foreign lands and the vistas that viewers around the world might never have seen on film before and thereby produce small but interesting films, for example, the French production Moi Ivan, Toi Abraham, made in 1993 in Belarus; Tengri, made in Kazakhstan by a French production team that used Kyrgyz actors; or notable films out of Tajikistan thanks to director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov in the 1990s, before he started making films in Russia.

Kyrgyz director Aktan Abdykalykov, who also goes by the name of Aktan Arym Kubat, is a Kyrgyzstan native who worked as a production designer on some of the films made by the former Soviet Union’s local Kirgizfilm, the films almost always — with a few rare exceptions, mostly in the 1980s — in Russian. The country’s independence at the end of 1991 also heralded the coming of the Kyrgyz-language film industry. The films of Abdykalykov (and more recently, of Ernest Abdyjaparov and the young Nurbek Egen, as well) have been some of the lone cinematic voices in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Like all the other films made in the country since the fall of the Iron Curtain, The Adopted Son is set in rural Kyrgyzstan. The film stars the director’s son, Mirlan, in the role of the young teenage boy Beshkempir, whose life is about to “go berserk”, as his grandmother puts is. But this is not his grandmother: The opening scene, 12 years earlier, shown to us in warm colours, already established that he was adopted at birth, and this fact is about to turn his life upside down.

Cut to the present in black and white, when Beshkempir’s hair is cut and the sound of clippers is suddenly replaced by garden scissors cutting a small branch from a tree. Things obviously do not look good for the boy’s future, and the rest of the film is in black and white, with the exception of some slightly more optimistic shots (rather than scenes) briefly presented to us in colour, almost all of them unfortunately disconnected from the storyline, bringing atmosphere rather than substance.

The other children play with him and he is not socially isolated, but at this age, children have started to show their true colours, and we can see them whispering in each other’s ears, clearly spreading a story about him: the story about his origins that, soon enough, he will discover for himself.

The other strong thread in the film has to do with the sexual coming-of-age of the boys, and as Beshkempir sees another boy, who already has a job as a projectionist at the open-air cinema where they screen Indian musicals from the 1960s, picking up a girl on his bicycle, and he wants to eventually do the same with the girl he has his eye on, Aynura.

But in the meantime, he is frustrated, as first a woman the boys make out of dirt, for them to have their way with, is trampled by a heard of bulls, and then when he lies in bed one morning and his hand slips down to his grown, a bird flies into the room (a hoopoe, whose sound permeates the soundtrack of the film).

Beshkempir tries very hard to be poetic, and while there are numerous important incidents that should energise the narrative, they are all presented as fragments with little or no transition between them, and furthermore the addition of colour, often completely unexpectedly, draws more attention to itself than is required for this particular film. So does the racking of focus from Beshkempir and his father, a bitter man whom we don’t get to know or understand, to water dropping from a makeshift tap in the foreground during an altercation.

The dialogue is post-synchronised, but even so, one of the central scenes, in which Beshkempir is most seriously stabbed in the back by one of his best friends, features a boy whose words are, even in Kyrgyz, delivered very poorly, which makes our empathy with Beshkempir and our interest in the events more difficult.

While the film shows some technical creativity, the narrative is more opaque than necessary, as it leaves many questions unanswered and sometimes even unasked, though the viewer needs more information to know who these people are (most of the characters are never introduced by name) and why they are behaving the way they do. However, despite its shortcomings, Beshkempir is a more-than-adequate contribution to world cinema.

The War Room (1993)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors:
Chris Hegedus
D.A. Pennebaker
Directors of Photography:
Nick Doob
D.A. Pennebaker
Kevin Rafferty

Running time: 96 minutes

D.A. Pennebaker knows how to pick the right candidate – a political candidate who is not the favourite to win but who brings with him a sense that things are about to change big time.  He became the father of political American “Direct Cinema” in 1960 when he filmed John F. Kennedy’s campaign in New Hampshire, which ended in a win, propelling him forward and enabled him to capture the nomination of the Democratic Party. The film was called Primary and it changed the face of the documentary film.

The War Room starts in New Hampshire in January 1992, where William J. Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, is preparing to win the state, but he loses to Paul Tsongas from neighbouring Massachusetts. It is curious to see all of the names of the candidates who participated in this primary back on screen. I was too young at the time to be caught up in the minutiae of the process, but it is wonderful, as we approach another election cycle, to look back at this field and their obstacles and be reminded of the repetition that is nonetheless always exciting because the participants bring new baggage every time.

The film opens with the accusations made by Jennifer Flowers against Governor Clinton, complete with the tape recordings to prove it; she alleged that Clinton had had an affair with her reaching back many years. Of course, we now know today that she should not have been ignored as quickly as she was, and it does appear rather odd that his own campaign never questions their own candidate, but I guess that is normal for presidential candidates’ campaign staff. It is made obvious, and his senior adviser James Carville acknowledges as much, that everybody thinks Bill Clinton is the perfect candidate, the only one they would spend their time and their energy on to promote, and they believe in him so completely that they prefer not to get involved in any negativity about him.

Perhaps he never would have been elected if they had questioned him, and the country would have been worse off as a result.

Besides Carville, who is the main attack dog and chief strategist for the campaign, there is the young George Stephanopoulos, his communications director, who would later act briefly as Clinton’s press secretary in the White House. These two guys have total confidence in Clinton’s abilities and inspire us with their attitude of getting the message out that (George H.W.) Bush has been a failure as a president, despite his skills as a politician.

The film follows the campaign from New Hampshire through the primary process to the eventual nomination at the Democratic Convention and ultimately ending on November 3 with the general election. A lot of material has to be squeezed into this film and obviously, when the film was released in 1993, many things could be left unsaid. Today, that is a problem because we are left with questions that go unanswered and expectations that are often unfulfilled. We don’t know what the pay-off was, because we are looking at a kind of shorthand that is difficult to decipher after nearly twenty years have passed.

For example, while much is made of the upcoming appearance of his Democratic competitor Jerry Brown at the convention (he was going to make like Ted Kennedy in 1980 and ruffle feathers because he had not collected the most delegates), we never see his speech. We also learn that Perot withdraws from the race only to re-enter a few weeks later, without much fanfare either in the media or in Clinton’s campaign headquarters. Bush is like a barking dog in the background: we are aware of him but we don’t see him all that much. We know he seems hesitant to debate Clinton (citing issues with the format of the debate), but there too the film puts very little information on the screen.

The most important thing to remember while we watch this film is that it is about the “war room”, in other words, it is about Carville and Stephanopoulos and their tactics, and not really about Bill Clinton. It is fascinating to watch Carville come up with a political barnburner on the spot, the product of his passion for the moment, his enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy and his political savvy.

The camera’s mobility is a great advantage for putting us in the “present” with the events – in particular, when we run through the corridors backstage with George Stephanopoulos after the presidential debate, when he has to make his way to the media gaggle as soon as possible to comment on the evening’s proceedings.

For anyone who follows politics, it is also nice to see much younger faces of those who are still ubiquitous on television. People like Paul Begala and John King.

Finally, on the election night, the film comes to an end. And while we all know how the story ends, it is the team behind the scenes that make this a story to really appreciate. The emotion of team Carville-Stephanopoulos at the last war room meeting is beautiful and pure and the film should be studied by every political campaign against an incumbent. For the rest of us, it offers a moment of reflection. Are all these fights important? Would it have made a difference? And how is it possible that Roger Ailes still peddles so much influence?

Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)

André Crous

Mexico
4.5*

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriter:
Carlos Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Emmanuel Lubezki

Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Sólo Con Tu Pareja

In 2001, Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, would open with a shot that is almost an exact replica of the first shot in his first feature film: a young man and woman are having sex on a mattress while the camera slowly tracks towards them amidst their passionate shrieks of pleasure. Cuarón has a penchant for mixing comedy with much more serious reflections on human nature, and his first film, though much more broadly comical than any of his other projects, gives the viewer a taste of things to come.

Love in the Time of Hysteria shares a great deal with a 1980s Almodóvar classic such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and at many points, the film had me in stitches. If you remember the running joke about the Shi’ite terrorists in Almodóvar’s film, you will love Cuarón’s recurring references to a gringa who put her French poodle in a microwave.

A young playboy called Tomás Tomás works in the advertising industry and has stuck it in so many places he has all but lost count of his conquests. When some white spots appear in his throat, he goes to see his friend, Mateo de Mateos, who is a doctor. Silvia, Mateo’s nurse, falls for Tomás and in the blink of an eye, they have arranged to meet at Tomás’s flat that evening. The only problem is that Tomás’s boss and part-time lover, Gloria, is on her way over to discuss the latest ad campaign. When the two women arrive, Tomás has his hands full to ensure that they are both satisfied without finding out about each other.

Unfortunately, a third woman piques his interest: a young flight attendant named Clarisa, who has just moved in next door. And so, Tomás loses track of time and poor Silvia leaves in a huff the next morning. In fact, she is so beside herself with frustration that she decides to play a trick on Tomás: we have already established that she is a lascivious little sadist, but now she informs him that his HIV test has come back positive.

But while this turn of events in Tomás’s life could potentially have terrible consequences, all of which Tomás seems to consider very seriously, Cuarón’s use of the colour green – as in so many of his other films, most visibly in Great Expectations – hints at the victory of life over death, whatever the red arrows of Cupid (that serve as accents on the green text of the opening credits) might otherwise indicate.

This is a film full of incidents of varying hilarity, staged with a magnificent sense of direction and energy, and while one could easily fault the film for a lack of real substance, it certainly holds the viewer’s attention, because the chaos does not overwhelm the storylines. Also, Cuarón’s use of mostly classical music on the soundtrack (which often consists of Mozart – predictably, the “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” aria from Don Giovanni) gives a slightly heavier, though perhaps only ironically, gloss to the events we witness.

Love in the Time of Hysteria doesn’t take itself too seriously – exhibit one is the opening quotation of the film, from e.e. cummings, which states that “mike likes all the girls […] all the girls except the green ones”, but these quotes ranges from such nonsense to Newton’s Third Law; its characters usually have the same first and last names, and Tomás’s friend Mateo uses cliché Latin sayings in most of his sentences.

Nonetheless, the film certainly entertains and while the characters of the two Japanese businessmen have no real place in the story, this film showed the great promise on which Alfonso Cuarón would soon deliver. His cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki, would continue to work with him on most of his subsequent projects, as well as the films of Terrence Malick, while his other cameraman, Rodrigo Prieto, would work with the other great Mexican director of the last decade, Alejandro González Iñárritu.