2010-2019

The Good Son (2011)

André Crous

A Scandinavian chamber film that is both a thrilling and (gut-wrenchingly) chilling domestic drama.

good-son-hyva-poikaFinland
3.5*

Director:
Zaida Bergroth
Screenwriters:
Jan Forsström
Zaida Bergroth
Director of Photography:
Anu Keränen

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Hyvä poika

The Finnish The Good Son is a typically Scandinavian affair, its characters and their borderline behaviour not unlike those found in many of Lars von Trier’s films. The story is told in small scenes consisting of very believable actions and reactions, though these are often difficult to look at because of a feeling that evil, at worst, or malice at best, is always just around the corner.

The film’s second scene very effectively sketches the main character of Ilmari, the lanky teenage boy who is always by the side of his actress-mother, Leila: When the eye of a stranger at a café lingers too long on Leila, she cuts down the poor man with a histrionic outburst. When she leaves, Ilmari sits down opposite the man and fidgets approvingly with the man’s mobile phone before dumping it in a soft drink.

The Good Son takes place almost exclusively at the family’s cottage in the middle of the summer in central Finland, where deepest night looks like twilight. But don’t let the illuminated wilderness fool you: Despite the light outside, Ilmari’s protective presence is darker than strangers could know, and when anyone challenges his mother or comes between the two of them, he lashes out in ways that are as cruel as they are easy.

The film comprises several very small and seemingly arbitrarily added moments that in retrospect allow us to see how unhinged many of its characters are, and yet the screenplay doesn’t seem to go for the jugular, instead having plenty of opportunities for the characters to be comforted by outside forces.

One of these forces is a writer, Aimo, still grieving the loss of his wife who tragically drowned a few years earlier. He is drawn to Leila even as her son is getting ready to silently declare war on this impostor whose presence as the only adult male in the household, Ilmari’s father having left years earlier, he sees as a threat to family unity.

At the same time, Ilmari’s aggression, alternately active and passive, is counterbalanced by his innocent young brother, Unto, who spends his days lazing in the forest around the isolated cottage, using his camcorder to record the lives of small insects. Compared with the unit of Ilmari and Leila, who decide to use the fireplace despite the birds nesting inside, Unto clearly serves as an entry point and an anchor for the viewer’s experience in this small but brutal world of cascading emotions.

While these emotions often seem inconsequential, they slowly paint a picture of a family in crisis. Ilmari, in particular, is affected by a series of external factors that, while they certainly don’t excuse his behaviour, provide a good sense of a young man in great need of help, not unlike his mother, whose petulance and pigheadedness is visible in his own actions, as well.

Shot with handheld cameras and producing a very real sense of dread, The Good Son is clearly reminiscent of the Dogme 95 filmmakers, but director Zaida Bergroth’s product is much cleaner, with crisp, sunlit images that make great use of the rural Finnish landscape, and sound design that is intended to work against our expectations.

Despite its intensity, the film often jumps between storylines and not all the characters are given a particularly memorable character arc, yet even though we know so little about the characters, the film can affect the viewer profoundly – the result of very finely managed performances and motivations that seem as human as they seem monstrous.

In creating Ilmari, the acting of Samuli Niittymäki, in particular, is notable for its representation of a young man who seems confident and determined yet has no clear idea what he wants to do with his life except be an enemy of anyone outside the family circle. He is a wrecking ball that hits us in the stomach many times during the film because he seems weak and almost pathetic until he decides to wreak havoc.

The Iron Lady (2011)

André Crous

A generally chaotic biopic about one of the most influential leaders of the 1980s nearly makes Maggie wholly irrelevant.

iron-ladyUK
2*

Director:
Phyllida Lloyd
Screenwriter:
Abi Morgan
Director of Photography:
Elliott Davis

Running time: 105 minutes

After the success of her début feature, Mamma Mia!, director Phyllida Lloyd set her sights on the toothy-smiled Lady Thatcher, widely known as the “Iron Lady”, who is famous, among other things, for her power hairstyle, the very 1960s bouffant. Like so many other things, however, the origins of this nickname would be left out of the eponymous film.

From 1979 until her ouster in 1990, Thatcher served as the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister. She had a decisive influence on world history, but Lloyd’s fainthearted approach to this grand lady’s extraordinary combination of ambition and inflexibility has produced a film with even less dramatic weight than the cinematic rendition of the ABBA fairy tale.

The Iron Lady first introduces us to Thatcher in the present day, in a corner shop in London, where she buys a pint of milk without being recognised by anyone. Now, anyone familiar with Thatcher will know the importance of milk in her biography: As education secretary in the 1970s, her decision to end the government’s funding of milk in schools earned her the nickname “Margaret Thatcher the Milk Snatcher”. But the film never even mentions this episode.

The frail Thatcher shuffles back to her apartment, milk in hand, where husband Dennis is waiting to have breakfast with her. Moments later, Thatcher’s secretary sticks her head through the door, and from her point of view, we see the former prime minister having breakfast alone. Thatcher’s mental state is precarious at best, and her grip on reality is slipping away on a daily basis, a debilitating condition aggravated by her heavy drinking.

The Iron Lady could have been forgiven for book-ending the real flesh of the film – Thatcher’s political trajectory and the narrative of her premiership – with this tragic glimpse of her current mental state. Instead, it tries to emulate Thatcher’s erratic state of mind by flitting back and forth between the past and the present in a seemingly haphazard fashion and piling on the scenes between her and an imaginary Dennis.

A Beautiful Mind, the Oscar-winning 2001 film about Nobel Prize–winning economist John Nash’s struggles with schizophrenia, at least had the good sense to slot his delusions into a proper plot. By contrast, The Iron Lady is a mess comparable to the state of the United Kingdom at the beginning and the end of Thatcher’s reign. The film is not a depiction of her life story as much as it is of her state of mind in the present, and this is infinitely less interesting than the actual flow of history and her role in it.

Once one of the most powerful figures on the global political stage, Thatcher’s deterioration could have provided a compelling contrast to her story of human perseverance and a woman’s struggle to beat the odds stacked against her. But the film keeps us at arm’s length throughout: Content to present us with a near-copy of the woman, thanks to the makeup and Meryl Streep’s excellent portrayal, it fails to place her in a network of faces, and even as her own face fills the screen, we never know what she thinks or what she fears.

Moments like the one in which Thatcher’s daughter tells her, likely for the umpteenth time, that Dennis is no longer with them, or another in which she dances with her long-deceased hubby, sadly evoke no feeling from us because they are wooden set pieces that provide no insight into her own perception of these moments.

The dialogue is equally unworthy of an actress like Streep: While the screenwriter may have considered it a priority to either steep Thatcher’s statements in dramatic irony or use them as a knowing representation of her political ideology, the effect on the film is devastating and makes it seem robotic rather than human.

Important landmarks, from Thatcher’s election as prime minister and her determined show of British sovereignty by launching the Falklands War, to the many IRA bombings, her meeting with fellow conservative-in-arms Ronald Reagan and the eventual fall of communism, are dutifully but sloppily ticked off one by one, without narrative intelligence or any hint of their impact on Thatcher’s own life.

The Iron Lady does little to dig beneath the surface of this enigmatic woman. It is a botched film – amateurish at best, despite Streep’s performance – that should have starved to death without anyone batting an eye, just like Thatcher did to the Irish Republicans.

Antonia. (2015)

André Crous

Glimpse at the life of 20-something Italian poetess Antonia Pozzi lacks spirit, insight into her hysterical final act.

antoniaItaly
2*

Director:
Ferdinando Cito Filomarino
Screenwriter:
Ferdinando Cito Filomarino
Carlo Salsa
Director of Photography:
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Running time: 95 minutes

Oh, how terribly hard life must have been as a 20-something poetess living off her family’s fortune while writing poems that are never published during her lifetime. And how awful it must be to pine after two or three individuals that either shy away from her father’s criticism cutting potential suitors down to size or reject her advances and prefer to focus on their careers instead of life with her.

Antonia Pozzi, we are told via a title card at the beginning of Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Antonia., a sumptuous recreation of the final years of her life, is one of Italy’s best 20th-century poets. However, she never saw her work accepted for publication while she was still alive, before she committed suicide out of a teenage-like compulsion to put an end to heartbreak when things don’t work out the way she thought they would.

Actress Linda Caridi’s portrayal of the most productive but most melancholic years of the life of this writer born into a very well-to-do family in Milan is commendable for its consistency and for never dissolving into kitsch. The film also has beautiful imagery that ranges from sweeping vistas of the Dolemites to an exquisitely framed shot of an interaction that takes place in a way that immediately conveys distance instead of the expected intimacy. But despite the technical mastery of the medium, the story fails to engage us because some of the young woman’s actions are simply childish, and while the camera is deployed in a way that does not attract attention to itself, there are also ridiculous close-ups of pages filled with the work, published much later, of this woman whose “struggles” we witness here.

But let us be honest, these are not struggles. She lives a life of luxury at home, exquisitely decked out by the film’s production designer Bruno Duarte, plies her passion for photography and seems to be rather skilled at developing her own pictures (presumably in her own darkroom). She also has friends who respect her and has an outlet for her emotions in the form of her poetry. Perhaps that is why the two suicide attempts we witness do not elicit the tiniest bit of empathy from us.

This is Filomarino’s first feature. His previous film, a 20-minute short entitled Diarchy (Diarchia), starred Louis Garrel and Alba Rohrwacher as half-siblings who receive a visit from an acquaintance at their parents’ villa, and things suddenly get out of hand. The director showed he has not only the talent to put together a visually striking film but also a strong voice of his own with which he addressed issues of class by means of a thriller that in its final shot suddenly turns into a mystery.

But Antonia. is surprisingly lacking in layers, and while the editing does seek to sometimes fold different moments in time onto each other, the effect is shallow and dull. It is easy to blame the upper-class setting that is devoid of any serious struggle or dilemma, but the screenplay deserves most of the blame. Producer Luca Guadagnino’s similarly situated I Am Love (Io sono l’amore) was a tour de force because of its beauty, its performances and above all its wholly relatable human emotions and conflicts that included secrecy, lust and betrayal. By contrast, Antonia. is like a piece of smoothly polished marble that neither conveys a discernible form nor elicits an emotional reaction from the observer.

At one point, without any warning, Filomarino slows down his already lethargic production to play an entire song on the soundtrack while we watch Pozzi’s naked back, buttocks slightly exposed, while she is lying on the bed, presumably overcome by sadness or angst, or both, but we are even left out of the loop here because we do not get to see her face.

Antonia. is not pretentious (although the title certainly could have done without the ridiculous full stop), but it certainly does not entertain nor does it penetrate the head or the soul of its main character. The decision to give us close-ups of her published work, wholly devoid of atmosphere, is unforgivable. It plays a big role in dragging this film about a calm but spoilt woman – who had fits of hysteria when her relationships did not work out – down to the banal and compares poorly to an opening shot of a Rodin sculpture. Surely, one of Italy’s best 20th-century poets was more interesting than this.

 Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Timbuktu (2014)

André Crous

Splendid film about oppression in historic city occupied by Islamic radicals draws us in with its multifaceted view of humanity.

timbuktuFrance/Mauritania
4*

Director:
Abderrahmane Sissako 
Screenwriters:
Abderrahmane Sissako 
Kessen Tall
Director of Photography:
Sofian El Fani

Running time: 95 minutes

Born in Mauritania and raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako has set his last two films in the latter, their respective titles referring directly to the country’s two most famous cities. His thoroughly engaging Bamako literally put the World Bank on trial, and Timbuktu examines life under the Islamists who controlled the famed city with its mud buildings for a few months during the Northern Mali conflict in 2012.

Timbuktu was actually shot in Mauritania, and we don’t get a coherent impression of the city in the film, but rather snapshots of characters at various places, mostly inside their homes, under their tents, at the lake where they fish and on the plains where their cattle graze. We don’t know at what point in time the film is set, but what is clear is that the self-installed Islamist overlords are not welcome in the city.

The opening shot is a memorable one. A gazelle is running in total silence, faster and faster, seemingly gracefully, until we hear the rat-a-tat of machine guns. The men in pursuit on the back of a Land Rover are Islamic extremists, whose demands include that Sharia law be carried out, meaning – as we see in the next shot, when wood carvings are shot to pieces – traditional culture or any form of idolatry is rejected. Music is also forbidden, and people have to start covering themselves. Men have to pull their socks up, and women have to wear gloves. The latter demand leads to a bitter confrontation between a strong-willed fishmonger, already fed up with having to wear a veil, who points out the absurdity of her having to handle fish with gloves on.

Such scenes of tension are essential to making this film and its topic accessible, especially to a Western audience. We naturally side with the women who resist the oppression by the all-male ultra-orthodox wing of Islam, who see no contradiction in using Western-made automobiles, mobile phones and video cameras while condemning the sin that is the West and all its works. The hypocrisy of the movement is exemplified by a character called Abdelkrim, who doesn’t only smoke, albeit behind a tree where he is not in the company of his fellow jihadis, but also openly covets a married woman.

Every scene that makes the sham and the friction within the movement visible is wonderful because it gives the audience a real sense of life’s many facets and demonstrates how the director is not interested in presenting the Islamists as a unified block of identical individuals. Unfortunately, Sissako does not do a very good job of introducing his characters to the audience, and it takes us nearly half the film to learn one of the main characters is called Kidane. Living a modest life with his wife, Satima, and their daughter, Toya, he is proud of his eight cows and has a young boy, Issan, look after them during the day.

But the cows are not acting in lockstep either, and when the pride of the drove, humorously called GPS, veers off-course and into the nets of a local fisherman, Kidane’s life takes an unexpected turn that shows just how fragile the peace is in this seemingly laid-back community.

Elsewhere in Timbuktu, a group of young people are arrested and tried when they get caught late at night singing songs together in the privacy of a house, the same way hundreds of thousands of other youngsters their age in other parts of the world spend their evenings.

Many of these scenes have powerful conclusions, sometimes admittedly verging on the melodramatic, but Sissako is very adept at striking a consistent tone in his story. He uses the nuances of the events and our natural attachment to very likeable (mostly female) characters to bring us along on a ride that has many a tragic undertone.

The images are some of the most beautiful in African cinema but never overwhelm our experience and understanding of the narrative. On the contrary, as can be seen in a key scene that takes place at a lake, what starts out as a gorgeous depiction of nature sometimes ends with a startling reminder that man’s impact on nature can be devastating.

Far from being activist or anti-Muslim, Timbuktu shows the strife ordinary, God-fearing people are facing because of a handful of self-righteous individuals who cannot even live by their own rules but insist on carrying out their interpretation of Allah’s regulations on a society that was functioning very well before they came along and ruined it all.

Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The Counselor (2013)

André Crous

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

counselorUSA
2.5*

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

Running time: 115 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miracle (2013)

André Crous

Attempt to show mental problems of a girl in Slovak working class is a failure about as dismal as the central character’s prospects in life.

zazrak-miracleSlovakia/Czech Republic
2*

Director:
Juraj Lehotský
Screenwriters:
Martin Leščák
Juraj Lehotský
Director of Photography:
Noro Hudec

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Zázrak

Miracle by documentary filmmaker Juraj Lehotský is a fiction film that was clearly influenced by the work of the Dardenne brothers. Unfortunately, a very flimsy storyline, continual jumps in the narrative and a main character who is about as inactive and unlikeable as they come produce a film that is equally uninspiring and far removed from the Dardennes’ studies of the working class.

We first meet Ela, from the Malacky District, the country’s westernmost area, asleep in the car; she is on her way to a correctional facility, where she will spend an indeterminate period of time recuperating with many other girls her age whose scarred arms speak volumes about their emotional state. Ela is expressionless for almost the entire film, but she is also nearly speechless, refusing to share her problems or thoughts because she is certain no one will understand her or care for her.

She had a breakdown when her mother started dating a man Ela describes as “a moron”, but for the most part, Ela is annoyed that the relationship between her and her mother is non-existent and that she has, for all intents and purposes, lost both of her parents.

Having established the disintegration of family life, it is perhaps no surprise that Ela soon discovers she is pregnant, but without a high-school diploma, no money and few prospects, any hope of taking care of herself, never mind a child, is far-fetched at best. Roby, the father of her child, is a drug addict who lives in a small storage room on the side of the highway and already has a child, whom he has never spoken to.

At the facility in the woods where she discovers her pregnancy after a fainting spell, she tells another girl that Roby had caught her stealing something in the shop where he works, and because he didn’t know what to do with her, they ended up together. That’s not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, but Ela seems convinced – despite the evidence to the contrary – Roby would support her if she just escaped from her temporary home.

Ela shows almost no growth throughout the film; we cannot empathise with her because we know nothing of her life prior to the events depicted here (it seems she never had any friends, or at least anyone who would care about where she now finds herself), and because she treats her mother much worse than her mother treats her, we actually end up sympathising with the mother, who is certainly not without faults of her own.

In general, Ela is not just a problem child but seems like a genuinely stupid individual who makes her own life hard, irritates those around her and doesn’t have any social skills. She insults her stepfather even though her boyfriend is exactly the same kind of drone and has a drug habit to boot, and to get money when they need to pay back the drug dealers, she offers to become a prostitute, only to close up like a clam when she has to perform for her new clients.

Miracle‘s director of photography, Noro Hudec, is also at fault here, because all the scenes of Ela having sex are shot from behind her partner, which obscures her face and leaves us with absolutely no idea what she is thinking or feeling, thereby making her more of an object than a human participant.

Ela is generally so unpleasant we actually root for her to have an abortion out of fear that the world would be polluted with another one like her in it. Her cantankerousness isn’t helped by the fact scenes don’t evolve but are rather shown as dots that we simply cannot connect in a smooth way. The film is filled with impressions, mostly just showing Ela’s unsmiling face, that do not present us with a complete character.

At one point, Ela gets out of her mother’s car in a huff and storms down the highway. Instead of showing us what happens when her mother catches up to her, there is a cut to a later scene that suggests she didn’t see her mother again, which is difficult to believe.

Miracle is a badly executed product that, even at a short running time of 78 minutes, feels like a mess the characters have got themselves stuck in and cannot escape. The only miracle here is that the film was made at all.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Lucy (2014)

André Crous

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

lucy-luc-besson-posterFrance/USA
4*

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

Running time: 90 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boyhood (2014)

André Crous

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

boyhoodUSA
3*

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

Running time: 160 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Diana (2013)

André Crous

Film about the late princess of Wales shows her reckless, romantic sides but marks a terrible Anglophone début for its revered German director.

dianaUK
2*

Director:
Oliver Hirschbiegel
Screenwriter:
Stephen Jeffreys
Director of Photography:
Rainer Klausmann

Running time: 115 minutes

With Diana, director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made a film about Adolf Hitler in 2004 (Der Untergang, released for the English-speaking market under the title Downfall), has created a movie about another figure who is not exactly loved in her own country. Though not generating the same kind of vitriol as Margaret Thatcher, the late princess of Wales was thought to be enjoying the limelight a little more than she let on when she was publicly denouncing the British press’s lack of respect for her privacy.

The film only focuses on the last two years of her life, and in particular her on-again, off-again relationship with cardiologist Hasnat Khan. It is easy to see why Hirschbiegel was drawn to this project, as this is again a historical character who was a point of conversation and always in the public eye. Far from empathising with her, the director shows the situation in which she finds herself – at the mercy and yet simultaneously at the beck and call of Buckingham Palace – and her inability to realise how difficult it would be to make a relationship work with someone who cherishes his privacy much more than she does, and for whom hers is an alien world.

Khan seems like a very intelligent man who would give Diana the world if he could, but he refuses to give up his own identity. While the princess claims she is not asking him to do that, she simply fails to realise what an impact the constant flashing of the paparazzi’s cameras – or, for that matter, the hush-hush, the whispering or the finger-pointing in the street or in a restaurant – has on the life of an otherwise ordinary citizen. Having lived with such trifles for a long time already, she simply cannot sympathise with how little desire Khan has to interact with the nosy press.

We are shown what a narcissist Diana was by her constant looks in the mirror, and that goes some way towards explaining her actions late in the film, when she intimately plays along with members of the press, hinting at where she will be so she can be photographed and thus annoy “the Windsors” with her antics. She was anything but a damsel in distress when it came to the media; on the contrary, it almost seems she would start to drool Pavlov-style at the click of a shutter.

But we never get closer to her than did all the tabloids that covered her for so many years. While we see some details about her relationship with Khan, enormous chunks of her life are left out. She interacts with her own children in one single scene, and by the time we meet them she is seeing them off at the airport. For a woman who boasts about having four mobile phones, such an absence of communication between her and her children is impossible to understand.

Poor Naomi Watts, though not given much to work with in the title role, doesn’t meet our expectations either, as her delivery is often histrionic, and especially in the recreation of the well-publicised BBC television with Martin Bashir, Watts tries to interpret rather than mimic the real Diana but ends up appearing robotic and embarrassing.

Hirschbiegel nearly gets into Diana’s mind when she meets famed South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard (who performed the world’s first heart transplant) at an event in Italy and opens up about her love for Khan, but instead of asking him about his own experience reconciling his public and his private lives, she doesn’t even flinch when she asks him to find a job for her boyfriend so they can move abroad. The scene isn’t helped either by actor Michael Byrne, who plays Barnard, making a truly ghastly attempt at an Afrikaans accent.

The viewer will have many questions, most pressing of which is probably why Diana dons a wig only some of the time instead of carrying it around with her to avoid being recognised. But here is one of the most famous women in the world prancing around the streets of London at 3 a.m., completely exposed. Such lunacy does not elicit empathy, and neither does her self-pitying piano rendition of Bach’s “Aria”, which she performs not once but twice.

Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage with Prince Charles, referring to his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, but going by this film, even if they were only two, the marriage would have been too crowded with her ego taking up so much space.

This is a story about a very troubled woman whose problems we are supposed to know from the real world and not because the film tells us or even hints at them, and such a reliance on facts outside the immediate world of the film nearly sinks the production, because it undercuts its very existence. That, on top of the slightly deranged central character whom we never really warm up to, the flat delivery of mediocre dialogue and truly odd directing choices (the opening scene prepares us for a Hitchcockian thriller), makes this film just another run-of-the-mill biopic.

White God (2014)

André Crous

The (under)dogs will not take abuse lying down; expect them to fight back with a vengeance in this gorgeous film from Hungary’s Kornél Mundruczó.

white-godHungary
4*

Director:
Kornél Mundruczó 
Screenwriters:
Kornél Mundruczó
Viktória Petrányi
Kata Wéber
Director of Photography:
Marcell Rév

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Fehér isten

White God, a Hungarian film about a crossbreed dog thrown out on the street after new laws come into force banning its kind, the underworld of dogfighting he is exposed to and ultimately the revenge he exacts, is both gory and glorious, with scenes of great poignancy admirably offsetting some brutal violence.

The film is for those who like dogs but perhaps not for those who like them too much: A central part of the narrative involves the dog, named Hagen, being enslaved, drugged, physically and psychologically abused, and made to fight against other dogs. The scene of two dogs fighting, and the half-dead, soon-to-be carcasses of the hounds littered around the site, may be too tough for some to take. However, despite the bloodbath that concludes the film, it is at heart a story about a dog whose emotional development is immediately recognisable. For days after seeing the film, you will likely find yourself walking the street, noticing a dog and acknowledging it as more than just a furry pet. Director Kornél Mundruczó deserves tremendous acclaim for his ability to portray animals with astonishing humanity.

The film opens with what at first seems to be a dream sequence: Budapest has come to a standstill, and all we see is a single girl on her bicycle driving through the capital’s desolate streets. Suddenly, a large group of rabid dogs turn a corner and chase her down. She rides her bike faster and faster, but they are gaining on her.

Some could easily argue that this opening scene, repeated later in the film, when we realise it is all too real, is superfluous, but it does set a mood of uneasiness for us, as the viewer is thrown into the deep end while getting the strong flavour of contrasts in the film: Beautiful tracking shots accompany this otherwise startling event, and for much of the rest of the film we will find ourselves riveted by the images while often being repulsed by the actions of both people and dogs.

We meet the girl from the opening scene just after the title appears onscreen. The title is never explained, although it probably refers both to Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, in which a dog trained to attack black people undergoes retraining, with ambiguous results, and to the status of the white man in the life of the Hungarian dog, and more generally to the race’s cachet across Europe.

The girl’s name is Lili, and when her mother and stepfather go on holiday to Australia, she has to stay with her unwilling father, Daniél. But Daniél dislikes the dog she has brought with her, Hagen, and has no problem throwing it out on the street when he gets a warning from the authorities that all crossbreeds now have to be put down. This is where the narrative splits into two strands, as we follow the stories of Hagen and Lili, both trying to cope in new worlds they know very little about: life on the street, and life as a teenager, respectively.

Lili’s story is almost entirely forgettable and doesn’t offer much of interest. This is the most serious misstep of the production, as Mundruczó easily could have spared us this rather monotonous view of life as a teenager. Her father, Daniél, also displays a limited range of emotions, and his character has exasperatingly little depth. By contrast, every scene with Hagen contains either a thrill, a shock or a moment of pathos, the latter most often occurring during the dog’s interaction with other dogs, in particular a rough-coated Jack Russell terrier that memorably shares a couch with Hagen.

These scenes are simply phenomenal because they offer us a glimpse of Mundruczó’s ability to tell a story and to move us with amazing tenderness, without using any words. Animal trainer Teresa Ann Miller deserves great kudos for her work to assure our immediate recognition of traits like friendship, kindness, goodwill and even intimacy in these animals.

Towards the end, unfortunately, there are some jumps in the narrative that don’t make much sense, in particular Lili’s seemingly clairvoyant ability to know where to go look for her dog in downtown Budapest.

The uprising of the crossbreed canines should serve as a wakeup call to those in Europe, and perhaps around the world, that the downtrodden will not go quietly into the night. They may be smaller in size, and they may not conform to traditional categories, but if they are mistreated, they will eventually fight back, and those who have power today should take note. This is a powerful message for the people of the Continent who believe their way of life is threatened by those who are different from them and that the minorities need to be kept underfoot because there is no telling how violent the reactions will be.