2000-2009

Hunger (2008)

André Crous

UK
5*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriters: 
Enda Welsh
Steve McQueen
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 90 minutes

There is greatness behind every shot in Steve McQueen’s Hunger. This film marks the début of a remarkable talent that does not come round very often and demonstrates what is still possible within the realm of so-called alternative cinema. All the conventional tricks have been avoided, and they have been replaced by new approaches to representation and produced a work that is poetic yet immediate, at times subjective yet never silly, has gritty realism yet shines with an amazingly distinct visual style and is never drab. And despite its minimal use of the spoken word, it rolls along fluidly.

At the end of 1980, after more than four years of a “blanket protest”, during which prisoners refused to don the prison uniforms, since they considered themselves a different kind of prisoner (i.e. a political prisoner), and a “no-wash protest”, which is self-explanatory, an Irish republican named Bobby Sands decided to go on hunger strike in protest against the British government.

Bobby Sands is played here by Michael Fassbender, and his performance strips him down to the bone, both physically and emotionally. The word that jumps to mind is “visceral”, and it covers much of the film, which contains many scenes of prisoners being beaten with many different kinds of weapons – hands and handheld.

In the film’s first 15 minutes, barely a word is spoken, as we follow a prison guard, whose knuckles always seem to be raw, from his home where he looks under his car before puling out of the driveway every morning to the prison where he works. A new boy has just been admitted, and immediately upon arrival, he sides with the rest of the prisoners at the prison (it is Maze prison, which used to be located just south-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland) in refusing to wear the prison uniform. He is taken to his cell, where the walls are covered in faeces and food.

In one scene, urine streams down a corridor, cascading from mashed potato embankments inside the cells. In another, maggots crawl next to a sleeping inmate inside his cell. To this scene, shot with from a stationary viewpoint, McQueen brings the same beauty as when the prison guard smokes outside in the snow and a close-up of his hands (often repeated throughout the film) shows a snowflake melting on his reddened knuckles.

McQueen fully engages both image and sound, and he stages his action in a way that pushes his film towards a kind of transcendentalism. In another scene, the prisoners are subjected to a cavity search. Scores of guards, in riot gear, line a corridor while a naked prisoner faces the onslaught of batons, fists and feet, until he reaches a central area and is rectally searched in the most violent manner possible. The camera swerves to mirror the energy of the moment, and yet the effect is not confusion but rather inspirational empathy with the prisoners. Then, towards the end of the scene, we realise, with great surprise, that one of the prison guards has been reduced to tears and is standing behind a wall, sobbing.

This brief moment, perhaps more than the technical and visual dexterity of the director, shows his compassion for the whole spectrum of characters in his film and made me think of those few seconds, at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, when the vicious monster that was unleashed on Luke is destroyed and this monster’s keeper is similarly heartbroken. So few film makers realise that it is always more interesting to have characters do the unexpected than the expected actions of their narrative peers.

But it is the film’s much-commented scene at its midpoint, an unbroken take 16½ minutes in length featuring Sands and a priest, that pushes it into the upper echelons of film making and underscores the genius of the filmmaker. Though very different in tone from the aforementioned scene of the full cavity search and some truly violent interactions between the prisoners and their guards, our attention is kept rapt thanks to both the performances and the courage of McQueen, which deliver a breathtaking moment of stasis at the centre of physical chaos.

Even as the film turns towards a more spiritual perspective, while Sands is suffering from the physical effects of being on a hunger strike, the film elegantly switches between direct point of view and oblique point of view, which affects the camera’s movement while still regarding him from the outside. The addition of superimposed birds swarming over his face while the camera hovers menacingly over his hospital bed is no simple-minded Gus van Sant-inspired gimmick but a perfectly distilled, truly magnificent expression of a state of mind.

One minor flaw is the introduction of Bobby Sands’s character – he simply appears, as if from nowhere, to take centre stage. The characters we meet in the faeces-covered cell give a human perspective to the material, and when they are replaced by Bobby’s plot thread, the connection to the story is retained despite the lack of a back story for Sands. So, while McQueen handles this transition very well, the balancing act does not completely make up for the fact that an important part of the story is missing. Perhaps McQueen assumed we would forgive him this oversight since Sands has some messianic status, an argument underlined by a moment in which he is carried, Pieta-like (or Marat-like?), from a bathtub back to his bed.

North (2008)

André Crous

Norway
4*

Director:
Rune Denstad Langlo
Screenwriter:
Erlend Loe
Director of Photography:
Philip Øgaard

Running time: 78 minutes

Original title: Nord

Jomar Henriksen is feeling blue, but he has decided to strike while the iron is hot – the iron being the gas stove in the little wooden structure, somewhere close to Trondheim, that functions as living quarters for this 30-year old who has been depressed since his wife and young son abandoned him following an accident he had on the slopes. He has panic attacks, spends most days lying in bed, popping pills and drinking spirits (often at the same time), and watching the National Geographic Channel on television, which is currently focused on tunnel disasters.

But an unexpected visit by Lars, the man his wife left him for, makes Jomar reconsider the static trajectory of his existence, and so he goes on a trip up north (passing through a tunnel when he takes this decision), to bridge the abyss of the accident and stretch back into the past to reconnect with his family, and with other members of society.

This is a Scandinavian film, so you should expect a fair amount of deadpan behaviour from the characters, though the film seems positively action-packed compared to other well-known ventures such as the Norwegian The Bothersome Man, or the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, not to mention the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. The fine observation of Jomar’s awkward road-trip and his gradual recognition that he must (and can) regain some sense of existence are made possible, in large part, by the very perceptive screenplay written by acclaimed author Erlend Loe.

Nord has a very small cast: scenes rarely, if ever, consist of more than three characters. Norway’s desolate, snowswept, winter landscape is beautiful and as it becomes ever more prominent towards the end of the film – including the gorgeous shots of either a snowmobile or a skier on the clean, white mountainsides – the film finds direct influences or indirect commentary on the events on the ground. A particularly striking moment occurs when the northern lights appear above a lonely shack in the snow while Jomar recounts the day of his skiing accident.

These characters that Jomar encounters on his journey up north prepare him, in subtle ways, to face the rest of the journey and also demonstrates that he has a good heart that has been numbed but not broken by recent experiences. He meets a teenage girl, Lotte, who is slightly abrasive in the way that most teenage girls are, but never annoying; she has her own problems of isolation. When Jomar’s snowmobile breaks down he is saved by Ulrik, barely out of his teens, who is always suspicious that Jomar might be gay – a sign that Ulrik might be a little confused about himself. And finally, close to his destination of the Tamok Valley, he finds an old Sami man who spends his days in a big tent, having chained himself to his snowmobile.

The film consistently ensures that the viewers have a smile on their faces, and the cinematography does an admirable job of capturing the beauty of Norway. I was somewhat disappointed that the meeting between Jomar and Lotte, the teenage girl, was omitted, and we do not share much of Jomar’s perspective on the bleak wilderness around him, but the sad music (mostly strings, though one memorable moment is provided thanks to the Norwegian band “Kaizers Orchestra”) sets exactly the right tone for the story.

Videocracy (2009)

André Crous

Italy/Sweden
3*

Director:
Erik Gandini
Screenwriter:
Erik Gandini
Directors of Photography:
Manuel Claro
Lukas Eisenhauer

Running time: 85 minutes

Videocracy, a documentary by the Italian-born filmmaker Erik Gandini, looks at the extent to which Italian television culture has become Italian culture tout court: it is a culture based on the most extreme kind of artifice and ignores the strides women around the world have made for their rights in the past century. In short, the current Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has shaped a culture that applauds the debasement of women – relegating them to the kitchen and rendering them mute and big-breasted – and he has used his many television stations to promote this idea over the past few decades.

Of course, this is not the first time Berlusconi serves as inspiration for a film (in 2006, Nanni Moretti memorably depicted him in Il Caimano), but Videocracy uses people close to Berlusconi, such as talent scout Lele Mora and celebrity Fabrizio Corona, to present us with a very good idea of the vast media empire that Berlusconi controls, and the power he exerts – not only politically, but ideologically and even culturally.

Italian television systematically presents women as objects of desire – no more, no less. Young Italian women want to conform to this figure of the silent mannequin, so that they might become objects of desire and (the dream!) marry a footballer. The apex of such stardom is the figure of the “Velina”: the silent blonde, who appears onstage during a talk show or a game show always hosted by a male presenter. From time to time she might break out into a 30-second dance routine called a “Staccheto”, before returning to her pose. The film paints a very tragic picture of the extremes of a heteronormative society in which there is no gender equality.

Director Erik Gandini has collected a great deal of material to show us this artifice in all its gaudy glory, but he does not dig much deeper. For example, the character of Lele Mora, an old talent scout who invites young male celebrities to his house so that they can lounge around the pool and he can spy on them from his bedroom window, had great potential as a counterbalance (or at least a contradiction) to the very explicitly heterosexual foundations of Italian society. The fact that such an influential figure has what amounts to a harem at his house in Sardinia presented a wonderful opportunity to Erik Gandini, but rather than pursue this avenue, Gandini gives us Mora’s comparison of Berlusconi with Mora’s own idol, Mussolini.

It is a silly moment that lasts much longer than it should (Mora has a Mussolini ring tone on his mobile phone), but Gandini picks up this train of thought again later in the film during a scene of a military parade, with the expected close-ups of boots marching and Berlusconi looking on as the artillery passes in slow motion.

Neither does Gandini succeed in tying his different threads together. Berlusconi is certainly at the centre of events, but in this 85-minute film we get a story of sad idealism in this society, where a 25-year-old mechanic named Ricky wants to impress the girls by singing Ricky Martin songs while performing karate, but he fails (because of Berlusconi’s television society, the film would have us believe, but it’s actually because he is bad at what he does). He has a firm belief that television ensures “that you’ll be remembered forever” and that an appearance on television puts you “10 steps above everyone else”, making it possible for you to compete with the football players for the hearts and bodies of those sought-after Italian women, i.e. the Veline.

We also get a glimpse of the sad life of Fabrizio Corona, an oversexed narcissist whose business dealing with the powerful elite in Italy is the stuff of gangster films. He memorably refers to himself as a modern-day Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself, but the storylines of Corona, Ricky, Lele Mora and Berlusconi are never really properly tied together.

Gandini also provides a very awkward voice-over that is annoying because Gandini speaks in English, which is not his native language, and there is no apparent reason why a better trained English speaker could not have delivered the narration.

The film lacks a tight focus on its subject and is happy to make us laugh at the madness of this television society, whenever the film is not relying on our admiration of its access to a forbidden world. One moment that does stand out is Berlusconi’s campaign video, a karaoke song about the excellence – nay, godliness – of this man who calls himself President (a label perpetuated by Gandini himself, who never calls the man “Prime Minister”).

Viewed at the Jihlava International Film Festival 2011.

Elite Squad (2007)

André Crous

Brazil
4*

Director:
José Padilha
Screenwriters:
José Padilha
Rodrigo Pimentel
Bráulio Mantovani
Director of Photography:
Lula Carvalho

Running time: 113 minutes

Original title: Tropa de elite

In a city like Rio de Janeiro, whose police force “protects the corrupt”, especially when the corrupt is one of their own, an incorruptible force of guardians is essential: in this case, such individuals have formed an elite group, trained more aggressively than the Israeli army, that performs the function of watchmen, and it is no coincidence that Foucault is discussed in a sociology class attended by Matias, a talented policeman who will be trained as a member of this “Elite Squad”, or BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais).

In the first scene, Matias and Neto – another policeman and a friend since childhood – are singled out as possible replacements for Captain Nascimento, a member of BOPE whose life has been turned upside down by his continued involvement in their operations; his personal life (he is about to become a father) is straining under the pressure of his life as a special forces policeman and he needs to get out.

BOPE is hardcore and they are physically and mentally as tough as they come, but while these guys can track down and punish the most devious of slum lords, they are clearly filled with rage and the film hints at some of the reasons. There is frustration amongst the most law-abiding policemen that everybody is not fully held accountable, that it is too slow or that it is not strict enough. Some of the policemen see their colleagues turn their job into a way to earn extra money by using their position as a way to extort ordinary individuals – by promising them special protections, for example – and this game with the law has ominous potential: “Those who get paid to uphold the law can also get paid to cut it loose.”

At the centre of developments is an upcoming visit by Pope John Paul II (the film is set in 1997) to Rio de Janeiro: His Holiness decided to stay at the favela of Turano, a notorious slum, so that he can be closer to the poor and destitute, and it is up to the BOPE to ensure that the Holy Father will lose no sleep over his safety in such a poor, crime-ridden area of the city. But the preparations for the visit take a backseat to the stories of Matias and Neto, respectively the brains and the heart necessary to make a good BOPE agent, and the challenge Nascimento faces in deciding who would replace him.

Some of the film’s action scenes are quite shocking – not because of the brutal violence they depict, but because the characters committing these acts are often policemen themselves, who are supposed to uphold the law. In one sequence of events, the endemic corruption on the force is treated with some comedy, as heads butt and we see how quickly chaos can erupt in an environment where bribery is a normal part of the job of being a policeman. But the rest of Elite Squad shows a much darker side of the Rio police: portrayed as a bunch of reckless hooligans, more or less kept in check by the cream that is the BOPE, the latter can also act like barbarians in the name of keeping order – at one point they prepare to torture an informant by raping him with a broom.

One should be able to get a clearer picture of the two sides that provide the Rio crime scene with such tension. We are informed that peace in Rio “depends on a delicate balance between the ammunition of the scum and the corruption of the cops,” but the film tries its darndest to show that the police’s brutal tactics may be mitigated by the fact that they are ultimately making the city a better place. However, the film doesn’t come close to equalling Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, a film that still ranks as one of the best favela pictures ever made. It always seems like we get an outsider’s point of view of the slums.

Elite Squad is well-made, and both Matias and Nascimento have stories that the viewer wants to follow through with, but the constant voice-over becomes boring, despite its overload of well-formulated bits of information and the apparent (though strictly illogical) omnipresence of its narrator. Followed by Elite Squad: The Enemy Within.

Summer Hours (2008)

André Crous

France
4*

Director:
Olivier Assayas
Screenwriter:
Olivier Assayas
Director of Photography:
Éric Gautier

Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: l’Heure d’été

Trees and children are reminders of the passage of time. In the first scene of Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, the grandchildren of the oldest surviving member of the family, Hélène, who is celebrating her 75th birthday with her family, are playfully running around her garden in search of treasure. Hélène lives alone in a big house outside Paris, in the upper-class suburb of Valmondois. The house is filled with works of art, either bought or made by Hélène’s late uncle, the painter Paul Berthier.

Berthier’s name is central to the first thirty minutes, during which Hélène’s conversations with her children mostly serve to gauge their readiness to deal with the house and its memories after her death. Of course, the subject is more or less taboo, and they don’t like the idea of discussing things that have not yet come to pass. Her eldest son, Frédéric, seems especially determined to reassure her that nothing will change and that the family will still spend their holidays at the house that they will maintain as well as she has done.

But Hélène wasn’t born yesterday and has no qualms about her children selling off her collection after her death: “No need to become keepers of the tomb”, she tells her son. She realises that her other two children, Jérémie and Adrienne, have their lives abroad – in Shanghai and New York, respectively – and that it would become more and more difficult for them to call her house home. Memories may last forever, but the development of the present shouldn’t be stunted for the sake of physically preserving the past. As the child who has spent the most amount of time in the house, Frédéric is naturally more attached to the place, and the events of the past strongly echo in the present, for example, the plastic bag from Leclerc containing loose pieces of plaster from a sculpture by Edgar Degas that Frédéric and Jérémie had broken decades earlier.

Somewhat reminiscent of the famously sudden demise of Mrs Ramsay in brackets, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, we learn that Hélène has passed away, but it takes some time before we realise that weeks, if not months, have elapsed since the family reunion at her home. And Assayas uses the medium of film to elide the jumps in time almost imperceptibly, the content making clear that important events can quickly become mere memories.

Besides all these memories and the different weight that objects have in the eyes of the beholder, the film provides a very refreshing look at the social complexity of inheritance, without ever stooping to the level of melodramatic backstabbing. While Frédéric had counted on his brother and sister to help out with the upkeep of the house because he assumed that the house and its objects are as important to them as it is to him, Jérémie and Adrienne have their lives elsewhere and have not only lost touch with the house but even with the culture and with their country. They have no wish to disillusion their brother, nor to seem like they are acting as a united front against him and shattering his wishes, but the fact of the matter is that the memories of the past cannot extend into the future, because they are no longer the people they were when they were young.

All three siblings are warm, engaging people who like to laugh and don’t have a malicious bone in their body, but want to get to the business of making their own memories. The actors (Charles Berling; Jérémie Renier, looking more mature than ever before; and Juliette Binoche), despite their pedigree, are kept in check by Assayas, who ensures that a character always trumps the actor playing the part.

The issues of time and memory are embedded in the film without ever taking on the air of abstract philosophy, and the filmmaker takes care to follow the characters, instead of leading them to contrived situations of high drama. The end does lose the plot a little, when Frédéric has to pick up his daughter at the police station, but eventually, her own role in the story is made clear, as the final scene demonstrates the possibility of making new memories even though a longtime dream may never be realised.

It is interesting to note that this film was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, an institution that features prominently towards the end of the film, because when Frédéric and his wife look at a piece in the museum that used to be in Hélène’s study and agree that it “is nicely displayed”, it is clear that a museum is not a home but merely an exhibit: pieces without any real context, pretty vases without flowers.

The Fall (2006)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Tarsem Singh
Screenwriters:
Dan Gilroy
Nico Soultanakis
Tarsem Singh
Director of Photography: 
Colin Watkinson

Running time: 117 minutes

The abilities of Tarsem Singh (or just “Tarsem”, as the credits refer to him) as storyteller have not improved since he gave us his début feature The Cell in 2000, but he has continued his fascination with the representation of images in the mind, and The Fall is filled with breathtaking visuals that will send a shiver down your spine.

It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few would argue with the view that The Fall contains some of the most spectacular locations ever put on film. The Pyramids, Charles Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Blue City of Jodhpur, and many others are scattered throughout the film and compose a unique world in which the mythical story-within-a-story is set.

This particular story is told by Roy — a stuntman who is lying in his hospital bed in Los Angeles after a stunt in which he was supposed to jump from a bridge onto a horse — to a gap-toothed young Romanian girl named Alexandria, who is recovering after her family’s house was burnt to the ground. The story he tells her is “epic” in nature and concerns the adventures of five men who, having been banished by the evil Governor Odious, decide to track him down. They are a mixed bunch of fellows, from Charles Darwin who struts around in what seems to be a peacock fur coat (!) to a burly Italian explosives expert, Luigi, who wears a long, bright yellow coat.

The filmmaker’s only interesting tactic in terms of telling his story is the slow integration of elements from Roy’s own life in the development and composition of the story he tells. However, this tactic would have had much more impact if it had not been present from the very beginning. The transition between the world of the story and the world of the hospital is very often made by allowing the words of the characters of both worlds to overlap.

The film is also quite unclear about the point of view from which the story is told, and individuals from either Roy’s or Alexandria’s life feature as characters at various stages. It is fun to recognise other entities in both worlds, but we get spectacle instead of functionality. When Alexandria says that she likes elephants, Tarsem gives us a scene with an elephant swimming in tropical waters, and no more.

The Fall has been criticised for its total focus on the visual aspect while completely neglecting its content and I tend to agree. The film is rather shallow, and while the beautiful images do keep our attention, most of the time, the filmmakers have paid very little attention to the film’s narrative and music. The only piece of music that is well-chosen is the second movement from Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony”. In terms of acting, little is expected of the adventure story’s characters, since their world plays as a fragmentary, wholly imagined realm of imagined adventures, but unfortunately a great deal of the film is devoted to this story.

That being said, the story that takes place “in the present”, that is at some point during the early days of the motion picture industry, probably around the time of World War I, is not uninteresting. Alexandria is not irritating, and Roy, played by Lee Pace, is accommodating, generous, friendly and thoroughly likeable. I had some difficulty believing him as a man tortured by love, because his face is happy even when it is sad, but this was a minimal objection to his performance.

The film has a satisfactory resolution, though hardly the kind of ending we were looking for in a story that ought to be “epic”. Many images will stick with the viewer, in particular one moment when a keyhole serves as a pinhole camera and draws the shadow of a moving horse upside-down on the wall opposite. However, given the lack of substance, and despite the pleasant interaction between Lee Pace and first-time actress Catinca Untaru, the film itself has very little purpose except as a kind of travelogue about the country of India.

Taxidermia (2006)

André Crous

Hungary
2.5*

Director:
György Pálfi
Screenwriters:
Zsófia Ruttkay,
György Pálfi
Director of Photography:
Gergely Pohárnok

Running time: 91 minutes

How seriously can we take a film in whose first scene a character makes love to a candle and shoots fire out of his penis?

Director György Pálfi has produced a film that doesn’t look half bad but he has put all his eggs in one basket and forgot to fashion a proper story. There are many random episodes of obscenity and downright senselessness, but the film also contains moments that bring to mind a director with visual flair such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Taxidermia is a word that doesn’t mean anything in English, nor in Hungarian, except to suggest the job of one of the film’s characters, Lajoska Balatony, who is a taxidermist. By the end of the film, the viewer will have realised that the title is actually the name of an artwork, the production of which brings the film to a very gruesome climax.

Basically, the film can be separated into three stories that centre on three different characters. Besides the terribly gaunt Lajoska, who is in the last story, we also see his father, Kálmán, a champion speed eater, and Kálmán’s harelipped father (Lajoska’s grandfather), Morosgoványi, who is a soldier by day and pleasures himself at night so that his hard member can either breathe fire or shoot its seed all the way to the stars.

While the first act is all about sex, and ends with a very ambiguous scene in which Morosgoványi seems to fantasise having sex with his lieutenant’s wife before waking up and finding that he has committed an act of bestiality with a dead pig, the second act is about food, and lots of it. Kálmán, who was somehow conceived during his father’s fantasy encounter, was in fact born of a woman but with a pig’s tail. His stepfather, the lieutenant, clips his tail shortly after birth, but then the story skips forward a few decades to a speed-eating championship in Communist-era Hungary, where the event itself is as interesting (and as grotesque) as the post-match purging behind the curtains.

Don’t watch this film if you have an upset stomach.

The main interest of the film lies in its unconventional subject matter and the beauty with which such obscenity can be represented. But for all its interesting little incidents, the film lacks a narrative thread and, most importantly, fails to link the three main characters in any significant way. It is an easy comparison to make, but the taxidermist’s job of removing an animal’s hide, and using it without the original meat that it used to cover, mirrors the film’s hollow innards.

Taxidermia is fond of its extreme close-ups, but very often we cannot easily figure out what is going on because the camera refuses to reveal the bigger picture. However, the special visual sequences, such as a spinning bathtub at the beginning of the film, are dazzling and gorgeous to look at, until we realise that they serve no real purpose beyond the immediate jolt of visual stimulation. I also would have appreciated fewer shots of baby genitals.

The film would have benefited from a more tightly controlled screenplay since there are numerous possibilities to explore, but none is really given the opportunity to develop, until the last act when the film seems to finally settle down and focus on the story and the characters at hand. I applaud this film for coming up with a character even more obese than Gilbert Grape’s mother, and for that character (Kálmán) to deliver the most memorable line of the film: “I had a vomiting technique named after me!” – a source of great pride for the speaker. The instances of body horror are also enough to give Machete a run for its money. However, the film’s final scene, in which a sculpture that looks like a monstrous combination of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David is offered as a work of art, is dangerously close to pretension.

Ajami (2009)

André Crous

Israel
4.5*

Directors:
Scandar Copti
Yaron Shani
Screenwriters:
Scandar Copti
Yaron Shani
Director of Photography:
Boaz Yehonatan Yaacov

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title (Hebrew): עג’מי‎
Original title (Arabic): عجمي

The film opens with a senseless act of violence: a completely innocent teenage boy, repairing a car, is shot dead by someone who passes behind him on a motorcycle. This boy wasn’t the target of the assassins, but even the actual target had not done anything wrong except for belonging to a certain family.

Ajami, which takes its name from a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, is a film that focuses on the tension between many different characters, all somehow connected by blood, circumstance or location. The film takes its cue, in content and structure, from many other films, including Crash and City of God (Cidade de Deus), but the most illuminating parallel can be drawn with Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 drama set in the low-income residential areas (banlieues) of Paris, La haine – a film whose ending has the same emotional resonance as the resolution of Ajami.

The film was developed and directed by two Israelis – one a Christian Arab, the other a Jew – and the collaboration has born fruit that make for dynamic and balanced storytelling that is never contrived for the sake of pandering to a specific ideology or religious group. A comparison with a film such as Julian Schnabel’s Miral makes the raw realism and the real-life significance of Ajami very apparent.

In terms of structure, the film is divided into a prologue and four chapters that deal with different aspects of the narrative, either chronologically or geographically distinct from each other. These time shifts initially make for a slightly jarring experience and the necessity of this reorganisation of the timeline may be debatable, as characters whose deaths we have witnessed suddenly reappear on-screen à la Travolta in Pulp Fiction, but the film’s particular strategy manages to create expectations along the way. In this way, the film may also be compared to the collaborations between the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, especially 21 Grams.

At various points throughout the film, the voice of a young boy called Nasri, introduced by means of a meaningful close-up early in the film, contextualises some of the events we see unfold, and for once, a film uses the voice-over the way it should be used: he says enough so that we can understand the situation better and everything he says is immediately relevant, and the filmmakers only use his voice to communicate summaries rather than long-winded reflections, as is so often the case in the cinema.

After the shocking opening scene, it takes Nasri a mere sixty seconds to summarise the build-up to the event, which makes it appear that revenge is alive and well in the world of the film and one death is not avenged by another death. Rather, there will be blood to spill for years to come as an entire family might see its members taken out as revenge. All of this information is presented to us by means of a very effective fast-paced sequence of events that borrows from Fernando Meirelles’s City of God.

The film is about money and the lengths individuals will go to in order to ensure their safety and survival, and the film’s intelligent screenplay gradually reveals the extensive network of characters who all create a kind of butterfly effect in the neighbourhood of Ajami: the actions of one character could have far-reaching consequences for many other people. In this film, a boy is shot by Nasri’s father. Nasri’s father is shot in return, but not killed. Nasri’s brother, Omar, becomes the next target of this revenge killing, but when a local judge decrees that Omar pay 38,000 Jordanian dinars (about $53,000) in damages within 45 days, he realises that he will have to get hold of the money in a way that cannot be legal.

His need to get hold of a large sum of money is shared by another young man, Malek, who is from the Palestinian territories and works illegally in the restaurant of a man called Abu Elias. Malek’s mother needs a bone marrow transplant and he takes it upon himself to find the money needed to take care of her.

In the meantime, Omar has fallen in love with Hadir, the daughter of Abu Elias, but since Omar is Muslim and Hadir is a Christian, their relationship has to be a secret.

These details all create a very rich tapestry of characters and intentions, and it is remarkable to see how we change our minds about events as the focus slowly shifts from one group of characters to another. The characters are acting according to their needs and while they try to maintain a level head in the process, coincidence, love, and many other factors play a role, as they do in life, to complicate an already chaotic state of affairs.

Directors Copti and Shani have succeeded in producing a genuinely sincere representation of the complexities of life in Israel and filled it with characters who are accessible to (though never simplified for) audiences around the world.

Silent Light (2007)

André Crous

Mexico
4*

Director:
Carlos Reygadas
Screenwriter:
Carlos Reygadas
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabé

Running time: 127 minutes

Original title: Stellet licht
Alternative title: Luz silenciosa

It is not only light that is silent in Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’s third film: the characters’ world seems to be in perpetual stasis, though we rarely get the sense that they are frustrated with their quiet way of life. It is refreshing to see a heavily faith-based community presented in a way that makes them appear completely understanding and accepting of human nature, and it is this aspect that raises the film above similar other projects dealing with the same dramatic thread.

The three main characters are Johan, his wife Esther, and Johan’s mistress Marianne, who all form part of a small Mennonite community in Mexico, and almost all the dialogue is in Plautdietsch – a mixture between Dutch and German, with a pronunciation that made me think of Danish. Esther knows about Marianne, because Johan has told her about his mistress from the very start. We discover this important piece of information when Johan confesses to his father, the local preacher, about the affair, and the handful of scenes that precede their conversation is filled with tender moments of interaction between Johan and Esther that make it clear there is love and affection but not without some unknown sadness.

When discussing this film, audiences will focus on the rhythm of the film and the second to last scene, which is very reminiscent of the famous climax in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, though Reygadas refuses to provide a simple “miracle” and instead his film ends on a suitably ambiguous note. The rhythm of the film is slow without being overbearing, and while the camera certainly takes its time recording what seems to be the minutiae of everyday life in the community, the frames are not void of action, and the many actions that do cross the screen are all of great importance to the characters. Perhaps it was not necessary to record a very long take of Johan driving, in which the camera first shows us the road in front of the car, and then Johan at the wheel, but the tedium of this particular scene early in the film quickly dissipates.

The honesty of the main character is admirable and so is the complete lack of judgment of his affair in this tiny community – an affair that ultimately (at least, indirectly) leads to a tragedy. Distinctions between good and bad may only be made by the viewer, for the film does not venture into such territory of clear-cut oppositions, and the drama that does exist is the result of the viewer’s projections and expectations based on the material that is given to us in a very straightforward manner that is unembellished. The film also uses non-professional actors to create a world that is plain yet far from simple.

Silent Light opens and closes with impressive shots that seem to bring cosmic significance to the film, and the sustained lens flares during a romantic scene on a hill also make visible the presence of light in the characters’ lives. The amazing state of grace in which these characters exist is beautiful to behold and a far cry from the usual dramatic tension that results from actions, reactions and tension between polar opposites. The film seems to relate an optimism about forgiveness, but it is important to note the central issue that is the internal struggle of all three main characters and how they deal with it. While Silent Light is entirely divested of extradiegetic music, it does contain a very touching moment in a van when Johan and his children watch Jacques Brel on television performing “Les Bonbons”, a song whose lyrics vaguely mirror Johan’s love triangle.

Carlos Reygadas has made a very special film that illuminates the isolated community of the Mennonites in Mexico and while one might argue that the story is too small for a two-hour film, the pace of the film is as steady and as firm as the flow of the characters’ lives and these lives end up unexpectedly moving our emotions.

No Man’s Land (2001)

André Crous

Bosnia and Herzegovina
5*

Director:
Danis Tanović
Screenwriter: 
Danis Tanović
Director of Photography: 
Walther van den Ende

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Ničija zemlja

No Man’s Land is a small yet devastating film about two soldiers from opposing sides stuck in a trench on the battlefield (no man’s land), somewhere near Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The central action of the film takes place over the course of a single day, and in these few hours of sunlight, we get a very human take on the story of war and especially the lives affected by it.

One night, under thick fog, a group of Bosniaks forming a relief squad are led to their base, but the guide gets lost and they end up falling asleep. At daybreak, they discover that they are sitting ducks and when the Serb forces arrive in their tanks, the Bosniaks have to run for cover. Čiki (Branko Đurić), who wears a Rolling Stones “Tongue and Lip” T-shirt all the way through the film, initially appears to be the only one to survive, and he ends up in a trench halfway between the Bosniak and the Serb camps – in no man’s land.

When two of the Serbs are sent to the trench to make sure that all the Bosniaks had been killed, one is killed by Čiki and the other, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), a young inexperienced soldier, is injured. Nino and Čiki, both speaking the same language, Serbo-Croatian, have a heated discussion about the origin and the development of the war, and Čiki, his gun pointed straight at Nino, finally has to agree that the Serbs started all the madness. Many such admissions are made under duress, and Čiki doesn’t fail to remind Nino who has the gun.

But they are both stuck in the trench together for two reasons: Neither of them can be sure that the other side will respect a cease-fire if they are rescued or return to camp; and a bouncing bomb had been placed under a Bosniak soldier, who turns out not to have been dead, and unless a deminer saves the soldier, Ćera, his friend Čiki insists that they all stay in the trench. Since he has the gun, there is no use arguing.

Tanović’s script is light on action but heavy on tension and very incisive dialogue that clearly captures the human face of the drama of warfare. These are two people who often don’t know what to do next, but when one of them sees an opportunity to establish power over the other, he goes for it. Caught in the middle is Ćera, who can’t move for fear of setting off the bomb underneath him and blowing them all to pieces.

When UNPROFOR (the United Nations Protection Force) is called in to mediate and resolve the situation, we realise very quickly that they are out of their depth, somewhat willingly, and refuse to get involved because they are in Bosnia strictly for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid. A French sergeant, Marchand (played by Georges Siatidis, who is fascinating in this role), is clearly frustrated by his superiors’ lack of compassion but manages to secure media exposure (and pressure on UNPROFOR), when he meets Jane Livingstone, a news correspondent out in the field.

Livingstone’s overly dramatic character, and her news broadcasts, are perhaps the only weak spot in the film and suffers from the film’s small budget, but her purpose is clear: Her presence at the scene compels the UN to protect lives instead of merely sustaining them, but she will also go to great lengths to interrogate all the parties implicated in the story without really grasping anybody’s point of view. From the outside, the whole setup seems like internal madness, but the subtitles provide the viewer with a very fine understanding of the different reasons for the soldiers’ actions.

The film shows the inadequacy of the UN and especially UNPROFOR during the war. This is understandable, given the international forces’ infamous timidity when faced with the situation at Srebrenica in 1995, which they allowed to happen because of such administrative restrictions as a mission of non-involvement.

No Man’s Land advances in a way that gives us a sickening feeling of inevitability, and a situation that is grim because we see people doing things they know to be wrong, but which they must do to save face or to obey the orders of their callous superiors. The humiliating effects of these decisions are visible in the close-ups of Ćera’s face. The film contains almost no extradiegetic music and makes important points in a subtle way, by means of a photo in someone’s hand or a story about a girl in Banja Luka whom both Nino and Čiki had known.

Tanović is a Bosniak himself, but his film treats the two sides with equal respect and is certainly one of the most poignant war films of our time. A comment by one of the men in the relief squad at the beginning of the film (“A pessimist thinks that things can’t get worse; an optimist knows that they can”) becomes more and more relevant to the situation the men find themselves in. These are not heroes: They are men caught in a war, and they don’t want to die. No Man’s Land‘s acknowledgement of this basic truth makes the film stand out from the crowd.