2000-2009

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

André Crous

Hungary
3.5*

Directors: 
Béla Tarr
Ágnes Hranitzky
Screenwriter: 
László Krasznahorkai
Director of Photography:
Patrick de Ranter

Running time: 143 minutes

Original title: Werckmeister harmóniák

Béla Tarr is probably best known for his epic 1994 film, Sátántangó, which, like four of his other films, including Werckmeister Harmonies, is based on a text by writer László Krasznahorkai. He loves to shoot in black and white, mostly uses long takes, and typically his films are longer than two hours. In the case of Sátántangó, he produced one of the longest films on record and, to date, it is the longest feature film I have ever watched, clocking in at 450 minutes (seven and a half hours). The version I saw, released on DVD by Artificial Eye, was spread out over three discs.

In Werckmeister Harmonies the very long takes certainly contribute to an impression of solemnity, and so do the empty streets and other monochrome images. Anyone with some knowledge of film might like to yell “Bazin!”, but I am not at all convinced that Tarr’s use of long takes puts him in the camp with filmmakers who want to make films that are more authentic or that portray a world very close to ours.

We don’t know where the film is set. Production notes mention the Great Hungarian Plain. We don’t know in which historical period the film is set either, except that it is at some point during the 20th century. As I’ve noted already, the streets are all but deserted, although the town itself, based on the size of the market square in the town centre, ought to be quite big. Something sinister is afoot, and it is sinister precisely because we don’t really feel comfortable: We lack the knowledge of the where, the when, the why, of many things that are happening.

Our ambivalence is made even stronger by the black-and-white images, which are really more grey than black or white. As viewers, our inability to accurately identify certain things (for example, one often cannot determine whether it is fog or ash drifting past buildings and across squares) compels us to be even more attentive.

Visually, Tarr and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky use a very evident theme of “light and darkness” that pops us everywhere. In the opening moments, the main character, a 30-something man named János, demonstrates how a solar eclipse takes place by using the drunkards in his local pub. At one point, when there is a moment of silence that has us on the edge of our seats, the camera peds up ever so slightly to reveal the light source on the ceiling, before pedding down and continuing with the action. There are many other examples of the prominent use of light in the shots, and cinematographer Patrick de Ranter (although an experienced Steadicam operator, this is his only credit as director of photography) does an excellent job behind the camera.

The staging of the action and the fluidity of the camera are commendable, but I found the story very opaque: Critical moments were deliberately not shown, but more importantly, the “infinite sonorous silence” that János mentions in his opening monologue is rather simplistically applied to the mob of people, first in the town square, and then in the streets. I grant that the image of the mob advancing towards the camera in complete silence is interesting, but there is no suspense, because the shot lasts too long, and there is no realistic (or literal) reason why they would fail to speak. These characters lack a human dimension. The same goes for the film’s climax, which takes place in complete silence, in contrast (or perhaps as a counterpoint?) to the events of total destruction unfolding before our eyes.

What is the film actually about?

A stuffed whale billed as “the great sensation of the century”; a Slovak prince who spouts a convoluted mess of words but whom we never see except for his shadow; and young János who somehow manages not to get swept up in the fray to see the enigmatic prince.

Werckmeister Harmonies is composed of a very limited chain of shots (the reviews all say 39; I counted 36) and everything ends in hushed anarchy while the camera elegantly glides between scenes of turbulence. The whale, by sheer virtue of its physical magnitude, makes a big impression and the moment when János visits the beast, underscored by the beautiful music of composer Mihály Vig, rates as one of the film’s absolute highlights.

But while there are moments of exquisite beauty, the film teeters on the brink of pretension throughout because of its stubborn inclusion of ludicrous shots such as a close-up of two characters walking down the street in complete silence, for two minutes; the silent crowds in the streets, walking for four minutes, mentioned above; or a technical monologue that relates to musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister but is wholly irrelevant to the plot. Perhaps there is some relevance to the film itself, but I could not discern this philosophical thread from my single viewing. There are other questions whose answers would certainly have provided the threadbare plotline with a measure of texture. We never learn why János is seen as an outsider whenever he appears in the square, nor can we understand why nobody else visits the whale (and no, given the chronology of the plot, these two events are not related).

Tarr and Hranitzky have produced a film that is thin yet elegant and surprisingly easy to watch. On the downside, its plot leaves more holes than necessary to produce the same kind of ambiguity that the directors are clearly aiming for. Main actor Lars Rudolph (voiced by Tamás Bolba) does a wonderful job as the out-of-place János, and even though the actor doesn’t speak Hungarian, he copes very well in both his monologue and dialogue scenes.

New York, I Love You (2009)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Directors: 
Various (see review)
Screenwriters:
Various
Directors of Photography:
Various

Running time: 102 minutes

How does one review an anthology film? For me, the most important question, given the fact that the film is released as a single feature rather than as separate short films, is whether the world presented by the different films make up a single identifiable world. In other words, do the different stories somehow draw on the same reality? Is there consistency between the different storylines? The answer to this question is a very definite yes.

A thematic follow-up to the 2006 film, Paris, je t’aime, which consisted of 18 short films, the New York version is more streamlined (only 10 shorts), which facilitates better interaction between the different parts. Also, whereas the Parisian stories were all very clearly demarcated by titles, New York, I Love You sometimes cuts between stories and characters. This approach allows the film to feel much more like a single world, as opposed to the many different realities in producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s previous film in this “Cities of Love” series, which will include upcoming anthologies on, among others, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Jerusalem.

The film is structured similarly to Paris, je t’aime in the sense that every episode is directed by a different director with his or her own screenplay, actors and crew, and the episodes are separated by transitions during which we get to see a few images of the city in the title. Having 10 shorts, as opposed to the 18 of the previous film, certainly gives the producer and the editor tighter control over the flow of the film, and while none of the episodes equals the best ones in the Paris film (the divorced elderly couple in the restaurant; an American woman in Paris), none of them is as bad as the worst ones in the previous film either. (Do you remember the vampire story? Or the Chinese hair salon? Some of the shorts in Paris, je t’aime were downright amateurish.)

Despite the many different faces behind the camera, ranging from Fatih Akin, Mira Nair and Brett Ratner to people I’d never heard of before, such as Joshua Marston and Shunji Iwai, the film is consistently funny, and the twists and turns of the different episodes are constantly cute and fuzzy without being syrupy sentimental. But make no mistake, Marston’s film, which comes last, has the same mixture of laugh-out-loud comedy and bittersweet love that made the final episode in Paris, je t’aime – the American woman in Paris, by Alexander Payne – such a treat. Of course, big “New York” directors like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese were not involved, although Allen might have made a very appropriate contribution. These two directors had already participated in a New York anthology project in the 1980s called New York Stories, with Francis Ford Coppola as the third contributor. The reputation of these three directors notwithstanding, I think New York, I Love You far surpasses the bar set by New York Stories.

Apart from Joshua Marston’s story (which he wrote himself), in which an elderly couple played by the always-ready-with-an-answer Eli Wallach and the lovely Cloris Leachman shuffle towards the pier, lovingly complaining about this and that on what proves to be a very special day, I also enjoyed an episode (directed by Wen Jiang) with Hayden Christensen, who picks the pocket of Andy Garcia, before getting the tables turned on him, and two episodes in which one person tries to pick someone else up on the street – the first stars Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q, and the other Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper. These two episodes were both directed by Yvan Attal and strike a wonderfully naughty yet beautiful note.

In a film such as this one, a short will be out of place if it lacks the properties common to the others. The only film that truly feels out of place, and whose 10 minutes go by much more slowly than is the case with any of the others, is the short by Shekhar Kapur, starring Shia LaBeouf and Julie Christie. It is a dry daydream and doesn’t have the wit nor the energy of the other films.

The shorts have the same idea behind all of them: The theme of love is evident in a story that starts off in a certain direction before some twist is revealed, often to the great pleasure of the viewer, who has been duped by the director. The films all fit together very well (except for Kapur’s film) and are a valuable addition to the Cities of Love series.

I look forward to the next instalment.

Directors (in chronological order):
Randall Balsmeyer (transitions)
Wen Jiang
Mira Nair
Shunji Iwai
Yvan Attal
Brett Ratner
Allen Hughes
Shekhar Kapur
Natalie Portman
Fatih Akin
Joshua Marston

Fateless (2005)

André Crous

Hungary
4.5*

Director: 
Lajos Koltai
Screenwriter:
Imre Kertész
Director of Photography: 
Gyula Pados

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Sorstalanság

If you have any sense of compassion, films about the Holocaust are very difficult to watch. And yet, the stories that they tell must be acknowledged and absorbed by a generation that could easily forget the events of more than 70 years ago.

At the time I am writing this review, I haven’t seen a Holocaust film, either fictional or documentary, since I sat down to watch Claude Lanzmann’s staggering multi-disc Shoah (1985) six years ago. Lanzmann and Alain Resnais, whose Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is considered to be an equally impressive achievement reminding us of the need to remember, both constructed films of the Holocaust as reflections of the past that still have striking resonance in the present.

Fateless‘s main character, who features in every single scene and is somehow involved in every single shot, is Gyuri “Gyurka” Köves (played by Marcell Nagy), a teenage boy with a mop of curly black hair, who lives in Budapest with his father and stepmother, part of a Jewish community in Budapest at the beginning of the Second World War. First, his father is sent to a labour camp, and then he himself is picked from a bus and sent to concentration camps, where he stays for the duration of the war, along with thousands of other Jewish Hungarians.

The young actor playing Gyurka is perfectly cast: Exactly on the verge of adulthood, he conveys innocence without childishness, and sometimes he seems to look straight at us, engaging our sympathy without soliciting it. His ideas are still evolving, and during a conversation about the essence of Jewishness, he wants to comfort a girl he has a crush on, who doesn’t understand why being a Jew makes her the object of so much hatred, but he doesn’t quite have the experience to do that yet. It is a touching moment, despite the evident political slant (fortunately, the only time the film hammers home the point) and one that obviously relates to the film as a whole.

Fateless is beautiful. It is the debut film of cinematographer Lajos Koltai and is clearly the work of someone with an eye for visual impact. The film’s colours are very muted: Mostly, the images resemble sepia photographs, and often the colour scheme is almost completely monochrome, with only hints of colour in the frame, especially the colour yellow, which of course is the colour of the infamous Star of David badges sewn onto the clothing of the Jewish population.

The film’s many different moments are not filled with the horrors one usually associates with Holocaust films but add up to a very human portrait of the people in the concentration camps and their desire to support each other. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, especially in the second half, is not always entirely effective, but the fragments themselves are like small gems in the mud of the Second World War.

A few scenes stand out for the emotion they are likely to evoke and very often the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (one of the best he has ever scored, with the always incredible Lisa Gerrard adding her voice to some very emotive pieces) plays a significant role. At one point, the prisoners are asked to entertain their fellow inmates, and they sing a song whose relevance to their plight is difficult to miss:

What does a girl dream on a moonlit night?
That her prince will come on a steed of pure white

It’s a dream so sweet, but soon she must wake
And princes are scarce, so it’s all a mistake

Fateless ends on a very different note from most of these kinds of films and may rub some people the wrong way, but the point that the film makes illuminates the human ability to find light in the darkness and to hold on to the goodness in some people and use it as a shelter against the dreadful acts of others.

Planet Terror (2007)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter: 
Robert Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 105 minutes

It’s a bad night in Texas: The zombies are out. Planet Terror‘s take on the zombie film is much grittier (read: more steamy, more violent, more bloody and less funny) than commercial ventures such as Shaun of the Dead, and what it sets out to do it does very well. The film is made as an homage to zombie movies and the kinds of violent films shown at “grindhouse theatres” in the 1970s. In combination with Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof, these two films constitute Grindhouse.

The film starts with a fake trailer (which would later be done for real and released under the same name) for Machete, in which one of Mexico’s Federales hacks off limbs with a machete. The trailer sets the tone for the movie we are about to see, although very quickly the main feature reveals itself to be even more blood-soaked, and while there are some moments of comedy by actors who deliver rather witty lines deadpan, the film’s dialogue overall is quite serious.

We meet a number of characters who will soon come together to defeat the zombie uprising, including gogo dancer Cherry Darling. On the night she decides to call it quits at the strip club, she runs into El Wray, a former boyfriend, at a steakhouse with the best meat in Texas. Cherry Darling is played by Rose McGowan, while Freddie Rodriguez is El Wray, who is much more talented in the art of mass murder than he lets on, especially when the victims are undead.

Bruce Willis also makes two brief appearances as a general who wants to immunise himself against the green vapour that turns everybody to zombies; he is presented in a way that evokes a kind of alienation (as far as I can remember, he never interacts with another character in the same frame).

The story, which takes place during one night, is very simple: Zombies arrive; some fight the zombies while others turn into zombies; lots of explosions and bloodletting, led mostly by the unlikely hero El Wray; survivors escape to Mexico. There is also some domestic drama with a doctor (Josh Brolin), his unfaithful wife who is also a nurse (Marley Shelton) and their young boy.

The film was made for its visual effects, and the zombies’ bubbling epidermis is consistently revolting. So too are the instances of cannibalism (although zombies don’t seem to eat other zombies, they do like the taste of human flesh) and the drops of blood on the lens of the camera. The scenes of violence are disproportionately bloody compared with the bodies being decimated, and often the bodies seem to disintegrate on impact with a slow-moving motor vehicle, releasing an amazing amount of blood that gushes in every direction.

Planet Terror contains numerous jump cuts, often timed with specific actions in the film itself, and in this way, the film diverges from the films it pretends to emulate since Rodriguez makes visible his evident manipulation of the film itself, instead of the latter being a work that is affected by random factors such as time, heat, friction, etc. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, the viewer will have to decide for himself or herself.

This world is clearly a part of the Grindhouse world that is otherwise defined by Deathproof, and a number of characters appear in both. Also, the show hosted by Jungle Julia, a character in Tarantino’s film, is mentioned here on the radio. But while Tarantino’s universe was conceivably a slightly manipulated version of a world close to our reality, Planet Terror makes a mistake when it mentions Chris Rock by name, thereby pretending both that the world is close to ours and (in being made with the conventions of a zombie film, including the presence of zombies) that it is not. Whatever the viewer’s reading of these finer points, it remains a very entertaining film, though if one took away the fire and the blood, there wouldn’t be much left standing.

Linha de Passe (2008)

André Crous

linha-de-passeBrazil
3.5*

Directors:
Walter Salles
Daniela Thomas
Screenwriters:
George Moura
Daniela Thomas
Bráulio Mantovani
Director of Photography:
Mauro Pinheiro Jr.

Running time: 108 minutes

An 18-year-old boy, who desperately wants to be a professional soccer player, and his three brothers in Cidade Líder, a suburb of São Paulo, go through the motions of growing up in this film by one of the country’s most internationally renowned directors, Walter Salles, co-directing with longtime collaborator Daniela Thomas.

The rite of passage (or “line” of passage in the title) that the characters must go through is different for each of them, and while their stories are slow to pick up speed, they all crash over the line in the film’s final act.

The brothers are the soccer-mad Dario, the charming playboy Dênis, evangelical Dinho and cheeky little Reginaldo, much blacker than his stepbrothers, who wants to find his real father. Their mother, Cleuza, is about to have her fifth, who she hopes will be a daughter, and this would be the third time (as far as I could tell) that a child has a different father than those of its siblings. Cleuza is an angry woman, understandably frustrated by her family’s abject living conditions and the apparently carefree attitudes of many of her children.

Dinho has the most visible character arc and is arguably the most likeable of the four brothers. Even though it is still unresolved by the end of the film (most of the characters’ stories seem to continue into uncertainty when the end credits roll), his thoughts are made visible by his actions. When he fancies his brother’s girlfriend – or rather, sex partner – this interest is subtly made evident by his hesitation as well as a beautiful, understated shot in the shower when he presumably tries to wash himself clean of such thoughts.

The other brothers have their own problems while trying to scrape together enough money or to find themselves a new family, and their different approaches are cleverly stitched together by very good editors Gustavo Giani and Lívia Serpa. As usual, the music, by maestro Gustavo Santaolalla, consists mostly of strings and never takes centre stage. In terms of cinematography, the most exciting scenes are certainly the ones on motorcycles that speed through the sometimes hair-raising traffic of Brazil’s largest city.

Linha de Passe is no Central Station (Vinícius de Oliveira, the boy from the latter, also stars in this film): The lead female character is very unsympathetic, and we never get to know her as well as we can understand the factors that push and pull her sons. Fortunately, although the film’s characters don’t always get what they want, and there is a fair amount of disillusionment, the film itself is never as negative about life as the similarly themed early films of Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

The Rules of Attraction (2002)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Roger Avary
Screenwriter:
Roger Avary
Director of Photography:
Robert Brinkmann

Running time: 110 minutes

Rules of Attraction is mostly about sex. It’s set on the campus of some liberal arts college in New England, where student life consists of parties, intercourse and drugs; in the film’s opening scene, one of the lead characters wakes up while she is being raped by a stranger who proceeds to vomit all over her. We never see any of the students in class, and we see very little class in the students. But the film’s editing is mildly stylised, and one particular shot is unlike any other we have seen before. More below.

Roger Avary co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and Rules of Attraction is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name. Ellis, of course, created the world of American Psycho, which is an extension of the world of The Rules of Attraction. Avary’s film has retained Pulp Fiction‘s playfulness in subverting the time continuum and Ellis’s dark humour mixed with sex and violence. While the film is a succession of parties, the one more debaucherous than the last, we only realise, once we get to the last party, that it is actually the first party and that we have come full circle. This structure, and the presentation of the material (the events often play out in reverse as well), may well be visually associated with the numerous hallucinogens that the students consume over the course of the film.

The four main characters are Paul, Sean, Lauren and Victor. Paul wants Sean, Sean wants Lauren, Lauren wants Victor, and Victor, well, he will take whomever he sees first.

It’s college, students are horny, and people get hurt – physically, emotionally, or both. Ian Somerhalder is perfectly cast as the slightly androgynous Paul Denton, but while Avary might have wanted Dawson’s Creek’s James Van Der Beek to break out of his shell with the role of ultraviolent Patrick Bateman’s drug-dealing brother, Van Der Beek’s character, Sean, is physically presented as a vampire, which turns his performance into something of a farce.

The split-screen is sometimes used to show us two different realities (one really taking place and the other a fantasy), but the film’s most romantic moment is conveyed by means of a breathtaking use of this technical gimmick, when it unites two characters in(to) a single frame. The film has many other clever little tricks up its sleeve, including a gun pointed straight at the camera during a very tense exchange between Sean and his drug dealer.

The Rules of Attraction also contains a horrifying suicide scene, which is more than a little sensational, since the character ending her own life is not a very important character. The film does try to justify itself by pointing out how peripheral she was in the life of the boy she admired, and subsequently also in ours, but the gruesome nature of the act provokes repulsion at the visual instead of the emotional that one would have expected to be concomitant.

The characters’ dialogue sounds right, especially when Sean and Paul leave a party together to go and smoke weed, and the other party guests try to determine whether they have really “left the party together”.

The film is as haunting as Mary Haron’s American Psycho, with the ubiquitous hunger for sex replacing the other film’s desire for violence. Technical gimmicks like the scenes played in reverse do become a little bothersome, but Avary’s approach to his characters is not superficial, and I would love to see what Avary pulls off the next time he is behind the camera, which is way too infrequently.

The Inheritance (2003)

André Crous

Denmark
4*

Director:
Per Fly
Screenwriters: 
Per Fly
Kim Leona
Mogens Rukov
Dorte Warnøe Høgh
Director of Photography: 
Harald Gunnar Paalgard

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Arven

It is regrettable that I have come to associate Danish cinema too readily with the work of Lars von Trier and his Dogme brothers-in-arms. There are many other films from this small country that are (at least) equally capable of tugging at our heartstrings, and Per Fly’s The Inheritance is one of them. Along similar lines, one may look to Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet), released in 2006, a film whose images, like those of The Inheritance, were exquisitely lit and filmed with handheld cameras.

The Inheritance is set up as a tragedy from the start, and the film’s bookended structure is perhaps the only element that is worthy of harsh criticism. Director Per Fly makes it very clear from the start that Christoffer and Maria are no longer together, but as a result, he eliminates the tension that might have resulted from a linear telling of the story. After the opening scene, the film cuts to three years earlier (although, over the course of the film, the math doesn’t work out: It is in fact longer than three years), and we see the couple happy together in Stockholm.

The rest of the film would show us the deterioration of their relationship and, since we know how it will end, the film removes any hope of a successful resolution to the drama. This indication of a tragic outcome is mirrored in the plays performed by Maria, who is a theatre actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre: At first, she stars in comedies, As You Like It and The Twelfth Night, and as the story develops, she becomes involved in a production of Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo & Juliet.

Ulrich Thomsen, who is cast as Christoffer, is an actor I’ve seen twice before, as the ice-cold white-collar terrorist in Tom Tykwer’s The International, and a decade earlier as the emotionally damaged central character of the first Dogme film, The Celebration (Festen). The Inheritance provides him with a golden opportunity to show his range, for his is not a simple character: As the only son of the family patriarch and big businessman, his mother sees him as the natural successor to his father’s steel company, even though he had distanced himself from the operation years earlier because of the pressure.

When his father commits suicide at the beginning of the film – a bad omen for anybody who contemplates the idea of taking over his job – he is shoved into the limelight by his mother and Nils, the chief financial officer, even though his brother-in-law Ulrik had, for all intents and purposes, been the second-in-command. But when Nils tells Christoffer that Ulrik has been spreading rumours about him and his mother tells him that Ulrik doesn’t have the talent to take over from her late husband, Christoffer feels it is his duty to captain the ship. In the process, his marriage gets torn apart.

The film’s depiction of the business world is relentlessly bleak, and while this world does have its benefits, even the most faithful employees sometimes need to be sidelined. Christoffer’s first act as managing director of the steel company is effectively a betrayal of his own wife: He goes against the decision he took with her moments earlier. And these betrayals, justifiable as they might be in the business context, have terrible consequences for human relations. Slowly but surely Christoffer is pulled into the world that he had sworn he would never (and later, only temporarily) be a part of.

The film does jump around from one point on the timeline to another, but in general, the flow is consistent enough for the story to feel like it is developing at the appropriate pace. Per Fly handles his actors with great insight and manages to convey the correct image of the most important figures without resorting to clichés.

Shirley Adams (2009)

André Crous

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Stavros Pamballis
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 90 minutes

Shirley Adams is a proud woman trying to cope as well as she can with her domestic situation. Nine months before the film starts, her teenage son, Donovan, had been hit by a stray bullet while he was returning home in a crime-ridden low-income area of Cape Town, South Africa, known as the “Cape Flats”. The incident left Donovan paralysed, a quadriplegic. A few months later, Shirley’s husband abandoned them, never to be seen again. From time to time, they do receive an envelope with some money, but Shirley never questions the origins of the support, having accepted the responsibility of caring for Donovan all on her own.

In the film’s harrowing opening scene, which takes place in the dead of night, the camera nervously hovers over Shirley’s shoulders while she tries to resuscitate Donovan; he is unconscious, and foaming at the mouth, and in the following scene, in case we couldn’t guess, a doctor tells Shirley that Donovan had tried to commit suicide.

Shirley has devoted herself to the well-being of her only child, but Donovan, who is frustrated by his own helplessness and ashamed at being cared for (his mother has to wash him in the bathtub, an event that Donovan considers the ultimate form of his own debasement), is already in a downward spiral – and his suicide attempt at the beginning of the film is a good indication of how low his self-image has fallen. As a result of his own demons, and probably without any cruel intentions, Donovan lashes out at this mother, and their relationship clearly suffers because of his apparent ingratitude for her help.

The word that best describes the film’s camerawork would be “intimate”. Director Oliver Hermanus and his DP, Jamie Ramsay, tend to show the events from behind Shirley and this stubborn focus on intimacy can cause some frustration in a viewer who – admittedly, by convention, but with good reason, in my opinion – expects an establishing shot now and again. However, despite this unrelentingly close experience of events, a number of self-conscious shots in which we only see the back of main actress Denise Newman’s head, and a story that is very simple, first-time director Hermanus succeeds in gripping his audience thanks to his self-assured direction that steers the film away from any fake sentimentality. His approach is entirely appropriate for the story he is telling, and it is plain to see that the film was a labour of love.

Shirley Adams does not contain any picturesque views of the Mother City (the locals’ nickname for Cape Town), but the accents and the slight shifts between languages make it a very clearly defined story from South Africa; at the same time, it seems odd to label it a South African film, not merely because it mostly eschews any mention of politics, but because, frankly, the country has never before produced anything like it. If any specific influence is to be discerned, it would be the films of the Romanian New Wave: The film contains a number of single takes, but one shot in particular, which occurs during Donovan’s birthday, is very reminiscent of the famous shot around the dinner table in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Hermanus’s Shirley Adams is an example of exceptional filmmaking and ranks amongst the best films his country has ever produced.

Police, Adjective (2009)

André Crous

Romania
3.5*

Director: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Screenwriter: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 min

Original title: Poliţist, Adjectiv

Cristi is a policeman, but he does not have the kind of life we have come to associate, through the American film industry, with the cop genre. He has been assigned to a case of teenage marijuana consumption, and by the looks of things, this is going to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. The opening scene consists of Cristi following a teenage boy between his school and his home. Perhaps another film would have created some mystery about Cristi’s intentions – I’m thinking of the Dardennes brothers’ The Son (le Fils). But Cristi’s lack of self-consciousness indicates that he has probably done this kind of thing before and that he is very likely a policeman.

Our suspicions are confirmed in the following scene, at a meeting between him and one of his superiors. This is also one of the rare times that Cristi, whose face is generally expressionless, betrays any emotion. He has been following the teenage boy and his friends for a while, and he has dutifully written up and submitted his detailed reports, but he finds the mission rather senseless since no other country in Europe would prosecute anybody for smoking marijuana. He suggests they go after a friend, who might be a dealer, but his superior dismisses his suggestion.

The rest of the film contains many more scenes, often filmed in long takes, of Cristi tailing one of the schoolchildren. Sometimes he is lucky: They smoke something, and he gets to recover the butt, to determine whether it was tobacco or marijuana. But more often than not, he just makes a note of the vehicle registration number or a visitor’s times of arrival and departure.

As far as long takes are concerned, the film seems to have a Tarr-esque obsession with recording the passage of time, and in two scenes director Corneliu Porumboiu films actor Dragoş Bucur, who plays Cristi, eating alone at his small kitchen table. The one takes place in complete silence, the other is accompanied by the very bad music (“Nu te părăsesc iubire” by Mirabela Dauer) played on YouTube by Cristi’s wife, with whom he is clearly not very enamoured. And we are not much taken with her either, given her choice of song and her choice to repeat the song ad nauseam.

The film is ultimately an intellectual exercise about the use of language. It is, by no means, the kind of film one has in mind when thinking of a “police film”, which demonstrates the conventional use of “police” as an adjective, but which this film does not exemplify. So what? The scenes showing Cristi’s anxiety at challenging the status quo, namely his superiors, are infinitely more illuminating and constitute the only real points of dramatic interest in this film.

Duck Season (2004)

André Crous

Mexico
4*

Director:
Fernando Eimbcke
Screenwriters: 
Fernando Eimbcke
Paula Markovitch
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabe
Running time: 85 minutes

Original Title: Temporada de patos

When we, the viewers, spend an hour and a half in the company of a very small group of characters (four, to be precise) in one location, then they better be likeable. Fortunately, Duck Season does not disappoint.

One Sunday, two young teenage boys, Juan Pablo (“Moko”) and Mario (“Flama”), both 13 or 14 years old, spend the day at Flama’s mother’s flat, while she is out doing her chores. They drink Coke, eat chips and play video games. Then, 16-year-old Rita from next-door arrives to use their oven. They don’t pay much attention to her. Even when the power goes out, they prefer to sit in silence in front of the TV, rather than strike up a conversation. They order pizza, which leads to an oddly thrilling sequence in which the pizza delivery guy tries to outrun the clock. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t (although the soundtrack is clear on this point), and this uncertainty leads to a showdown between him and the boys.

By this stage, we’re only 30 minutes into the film, but you’ll have noticed that quite a lot actually happens, in spite of the many, many moments of silence, at least initially, in which the characters are visibly bored and just waiting for time to pass, for things to become less awkward.

Director Fernando Eimbcke demonstrates real skill in finding many different positions to place his camera: inside cupboards, inside the refrigerator, inside the oven – at one point, the camera even takes the place of an important painting in the living room. The film, shot entirely in black and white, on what must have been a shoestring budget, shows what can be accomplished when the characters are interesting and the story is well-developed.

The only deviation from the apartment setting (apart from the quirky sequence, mentioned above, in which Ulises, the pizza delivery man, races to deliver the pizza on time) is a flashback to a dog pound, which feels completely out of place. Also, the film tends to cheat from time to time by using the cuts, occurring between the scenes that mostly take place in the living room and the kitchen, as bridges across time, and these ellipses actually obscure important events that occur offscreen.

The self-confident Rita provides plenty of material to work with, but it is the young Moko, played by actor Diego Cataño, who impresses the most with his splendid performance, hinting at awkwardness and secrecy in his outer appearance of mere shyness, and yet these traces are never overstated or overplayed.