2010-2019

Moffie (2019)

André Crous

In Moffie, an English-speaking conscript with an Afrikaans surname has to learn how to navigate the army’s world of machismo as a gay man during apartheid.

MoffieSouth Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Oliver Hermanus
Jack Sidey
Director of Photography:
Jamie D Ramsay

Running time: 100 minutes

Either you fall in line or you suffer the consequences. That is the message of the army and, let’s be honest, of society at large. If a recruit (or any other member of society) is brainwashed to believe that the fatherland should be defended even at the cost of sacrificing their own life, any resistance will seem like the work of the enemy. Those who are different, who cannot (or refuse to) toe the line and, therefore, hamper the development of a strong, homogeneous unit, become targets for removal.

In one of the first scenes of Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, a train the colour of blood is chugging along deep into the South African heartland. On the soundtrack, menacing strings with a Penderecki-like quality evoke a palpable fear. The year is 1981, the country is at war, and this cross-country railway is filled with adolescent flesh and bone – for the moment, still alive. Military service became compulsory for white South African men in June 1967 and was a practice that would last until shortly before the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

In the 1980s, scared of the danger of communism brewing in Angola, South Africa sent its young men to defend the ramparts. It was known as the South African Border War and was waged at the edge of the country’s mandate (colony), which it called South West Africa (Namibia). In many respects, South Africa amounted to a military theocracy whose authorities saw themselves and their purpose in biblical terms, and many of those fighting its war were Afrikaans boys around the age of 18. 

In Afrikaans, “moffie” means “faggot”. Incidentally, those two f’s in the middle, which here emphasise the condition of being (in the eyes of the speaker) effeminate and therefore afflicted, also pop up in the Afrikaans equivalent of the n-word. For whites in apartheid South Africa, being in control while being a minority meant standing up to the majority. To do this required (white) machismo, and to prove one’s mettle, war – often considered the manly activity par excellence – was the perfect testing ground. Being a moffie, by contrast, was regarded as unmanly. These two characteristics came head to head during the war on the border.

More than half the film is set at a training camp outside the town of Middelburg, in the middle of nowhere. Upon arrival, the conscripts are (and continue to be) mistreated and humiliated to the point of being dehumanised. Most strikingly, they are called various epithets rooted in the titular insult and told that they have to transform into real men. In charge of this sadistic torture is Sergeant Brand (“blaze” in Afrikaans), who appears to take glee in the youngsters’ despair and exhaustion.

One of them is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He is an outsider twice over: Among these dozens of Afrikaans boys, who speak the country’s language of power and authority, he is one of the only ones from an English family. He is also gay, as we can surmise from the opening scene when his father gives him a saucy present and he responds with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Lucky for him, he quickly finds Michael (Matthew Vey), another English boy, and the two bond over “Sugar Man” and, more superficially, being outsiders in this environment that values and promotes not only ethnic but also linguistic nationalism.

Before long, two young men with bloody faces are publicly paraded in front of their fellow soldiers. Nicholas hears they were caught kissing and then beaten up by a whole mob inside the camp. Now they are being sent off to the dreaded Ward 22. For the duration of the film, he lives in fear that this could happen to him, too. Meanwhile, everywhere he looks, he sees the straight guys touching each other and joking about their genitalia.

In the army, as in life, to be considered a man often means having to take part in a dick-measuring contest. And yet, this contest, by its very nature, vibrates with homoeroticism, as the Top Gun–inspired volleyball match reminds us. Hermanus adroitly conveys the confusion all of this creates in the young Nicholas, whose world becomes ever more complicated the closer he moves to what he desires.

At the same time, the training camp and its activities are designed to make the privates feel like children while scolding them for not behaving like men. This contradiction can only lead to conflict and combustion that many of these adolescent men simply cannot handle.

Hermanus’s debut feature, Shirley Adams, had a suicide. His sophomore film featured a rape in near silence. His third film had a triple murder followed by another murder. Although Moffie, his fourth film, also follows this trend (after all, it is a film about soldiers during wartime), even the moments of relative calm are rife with tension and the nauseating fear that such violence can erupt again at any time. The constant drumbeat of male-on-male violence and brutal macho aggression suffuses the narrative and thoroughly unsettles our experience of watching it.

The film proves the saying correct that mediocre books tend to make the best movies. The eponymous 2006 novel by André Carl van der Merwe has been completely overhauled, and the resulting adaptation is a vast improvement over the original text. Not only because the focus is much stronger but also because all the characters onscreen – even the most contemptible ones – have more nuance than their literary counterparts.

However, when choosing between showing too little or showing too much, Hermanus has consistently preferred the former. Unfortunately, this means that we get to know very little about Nicholas and his aspirations beyond his otherness. The intention may well be that he serves as a stand-in onto which the viewer can project their own stories, but this inscrutability does not always help to elicit our sympathy.

Apart from a peculiarly staged flashback (this is a memory, and there is no reason to highlight the continuity of time and space), we get no real insight into Nicholas’s life outside the army. It was a wise decision to forgo the novel’s multiple interludes into the past. However, the film is still stuck with this flashback that, clever as its depiction of a domineering but anonymous threat is, the director could have easily done away with altogether.

The film is a much more austere and melancholy portrayal of a white gay soldier in apartheid-era South Africa than Canary, which used camaraderie to alleviate the terror its characters experienced. In Moffie, there are no escape hatches. The flawless camerawork and the exquisite soundtrack (including Schubert’s “Piano Trio in E-flat major”, most famously used in Barry Lyndon but here countering the visuals in a jarring yet poetic way that would make Stanley Kubrick proud) do not portend a happy ending. In Hermanus’s films, the characters always end up having to negotiate a truce with disappointment. To survive, Nicholas will have to learn that, in the words of one Nobel Prize laureate who is cited in the film, “All I can be is me, whoever that is.”

With Moffie, Oliver Hermanus has seamlessly welded his stylistic ambitions to his raw material, shaping it to form – by far – the most elegant and coherently visceral film he has made to date. 

Atlantics (2019)

André Crous

Migration, an arranged marriage and zombies form the backbone of Atlantics, all under the ominous glow of an unfinished megatower in Dakar.

AtlanticsSenegal
3.5*

Director:
Mati Diop
Screenwriters:
Mati Diop
Olivier Demangel
Director of Photography:
Claire Mathon

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Atlantique

Resembling something straight out of Metropolis, Muejiza reaches into the sky like the Tower of Babel. It is still unfinished, but those working on the construction site are very unhappy – and with good reason. The developer, Mr. N’Diaye, hasn’t paid them in months. They have girlfriends or families to support, but Mr. N’Diaye is out of reach. They can’t wait any longer, and by nightfall, a group of them take a boat out to Spain. Within days, news reaches their community in Dakar that all of them have perished at sea.

One of the people hardest hit by the news is Ada (Mama Sané). Barely out of school, she was secretly seeing the dashing but now-late Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré). Their relationship was a secret because she is promised to Omar, a wealthy young Senegalese man working in Italy. But her mind is clearly elsewhere, and by the time her wedding night rolls around, her white nuptial bed bursts into flames. Not out of passion but, according to one police investigator, because of spontaneous combustion.

The policeman in charge of this apparent case of arson is Issa, who is around the same age as Souleiman. His boss, the commissioner, refers to him as a “young star”, though his investigative techniques leave us wondering whether he ever received any training. For some reason, he quickly suspects Souleiman of having survived, returned to Dakar, infiltrated the wedding party and set his girlfriend’s bed alight, all incognito. He is so adamant about this theory that he goes straight to Souleiman’s parents’ house, where he tells the grieving mother her son is still alive and has likely committed a crime. None of this endears him to the viewer. But there is something else that is weird. He keeps sweating so much that he collapses. This happens very often around sunset.

Soon enough, we see what all of this means. Halfway through the film, a group of women show up at the mansion belonging to Mr. N’Diaye and demand the three months of wages. Their eyes are all white as an oval moon. They are zombies, although we have seen some of them before among the living. Why these women, in particular, are the vessels for those who drowned at sea is left unexplained. Clearly, they represent the tens of thousands of women who are left behind in Senegal while men make the hazardous journey across the ocean to try their luck in Europe. But then, Issa also becomes a zombie and channels the departed Souleiman.

Again, we don’t get any explanation for why Issa serves as a vessel for Souleiman, nor is it evident why he is the only man to take on such a role. Most likely, the director wanted to avoid girl-on-girl intimacy at the film’s climax, but the screenplay suffers mightily because of this inconsistency and lack of a proper explanation. What makes it all the more confusing is that Issa had already started collapsing before his involvement in Ada’s case.

While the film has a certain charm about it, it leaves the viewer with many questions that are never answered. Ada and Souleiman spend very little time together before his fateful departure, and their interaction is limited. Souleiman doesn’t let Ada know when he leaves, so perhaps he didn’t view the relationship as anything substantive. This makes it difficult to empathise with Ada, whose melancholy persists for most of the film. And almost all of her best friends who come to the wedding are shocked to learn that she doesn’t really care for her new husband. Hadn’t she ever spoken to them before? In addition, there is also zero chemistry between her and Omar, and we get no hint of an explanation for their marriage.

Atlantics is full of images of the ocean that remind us again and again of the tide rolling out with boats of migrants and, presumably, rolling back in with the spirits of the dead. And the film does a wonderful lo-fi job with mirrors, while the grotesque, conspicuous tower is very realistically rendered through CGI. But the screenplay is seriously flawed with almost no backstory to the main characters and very little development of some major peripheral characters.

This is a memorable and ambitiously staged (though problematic) depiction of the consequences migration has on those who are left behind. Diop shows herself to be a very able filmmaker, but in the future, she would be wise to wait until the screenplay is ready before starting production. 

War Horse (2011)

André Crous

The First World War–set War Horse is Steven Spielberg’s formulaic, epic ode to friendship, courage and horses.

War HorseUSA
3*

Director:
Steven Spielberg
Screenwriters:
Lee Hall
Richard Curtis
Director of Photography:
Janusz Kaminski

Running time: 145 minutes

The key to understanding War Horse lies in a shot that occurs about 45 minutes into the film.

What starts as a close-up of a horse lying on the battlefield gradually shifts, as the camera moves backwards and upwards, to reveal an entire field strewn with equine carcasses. The image is a direct copy of the signature shot of the classic Gone with the Wind, in which a city street in downtown Atlanta is filled with hundreds of bloodied bodies of the injured, the dying and the dead – all victims of the Civil War.

The link between the two shots is director Steven Spielberg’s very clear desire to present his central character, the titular war horse named Joey, as he would a human being. If you fail to see this horse as any less human than the individuals who dot the narrative, you will find the experience very frustrating indeed. Though Spielberg stops short of having the animal speak, one has the very firm impression throughout that the horse can understand the humans perfectly.

War Horse starts by making a play for the audience’s emotions immediately. The teenage Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) lives on his parents’ farm in Devon, England, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills. In a drunken stupor, his father – as in most of Spielberg’s films, here too the father is either absent or somehow severely lacking as a parent – buys a show horse for the astronomical price of 30 guineas in an attempt to rile up the other bidder, his landlord. But the family doesn’t have the money, so the landlord gives them an ultimatum: Train the horse to plough the field and earn back the money by next summer or lose the house.

Of course, despite the odds, Joey the horse is trained remarkably easily by young Albert, who by virtue of his combination of sincerity, determination and humility seems to speak to the horse. Actually, he does speak to the horse, and the horse listens. Also, in the matter of a few minutes, Albert and Joey establish their own code of communication: If Albert cups his hands and blows into them to imitate an owl, Joey will come running. When the boy and the horse are tragically separated, we already start imagining what this framing device will look like come the climax.

This listening is one of the baffling aspects of the film that many viewers might find too difficult to swallow. Though it is often noted that Joey is “a remarkable horse”, its reason for being so extraordinary is never explained. To be sure, Joey overcomes some terrible obstacles along the way, most notably the First World War, and accomplishes some daring feats, but mostly it is taken for granted the horse will make it to the end of the film no matter what.

Joey travels between many owners, sometimes because they are killed, sometimes because the horse is captured by someone else. A significant part of the film is made up of these loose threads in which the individual, briefly in possession of the horse but always respectful towards the animal, discovers just how wonderful the young stallion is. In the end, the threads are loosely connected, but by that stage, you might need to have some teeth pulled because of the syrupy storyline you’ve been subjected to already.

Again and again, War Horse portrays Joey as a horse with human qualities, and in the face of the obvious sentimentality that Spielberg conveys with his spotlights and his soft focus, many of these scenes work almost in spite of themselves. A particularly touching moment comes when Joey cares for Topthorn, a companion horse that resembles everyone’s idea of Black Beauty.

Joey is clearly the film’s central attraction, but he is special only because he is the title character and Spielberg’s camera loves him. At one point, in a dazzling moment that will forever be associated with the film, just as the boys riding their bicycles toward the moon is tied to E.T., Joey gallops heroically across a battlefield in a single, unbroken take, while explosions rock the night sky.

For all the galloping and the detailed recreations of battle scenes and the ghastly trenches of the First World War, the film is about a promise Albert made to Joey: “Wherever you are, I will find you, and I will bring you home!” The stench of sentimentality could easily have been worse than the stench of the dugouts on the frontlines, but for the most part, Spielberg’s creativity transcends his material.

Hugo (2011)

André Crous

Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s ode to silent cinema and serves as a fantastic treat for children and cinephiles alike.

HugoUSA
4*

Director:
Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter:
John Logan
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 125 minutes

It was always just going to be a matter of time before Martin Scorsese made a film about a filmmaker. In 2004, the fast-talking film encyclopedia of a director had already dipped his toe in the water with the Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. But in his latest film, Hugo, an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he goes all out. In the process, he rehabilitates one of the pioneers of the seventh art, Georges Méliès, and exhilarates the audience.

The first filmmakers, the Lumière brothers, emphasised cinema’s potential to capture daily life exactly as it takes place. By contrast, Méliès, who had evolved from magician to director, wanted to inspire the audience with flights of fancy made real. Even those viewers today who have never seen a silent film will recognise the shot from his Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket ship crashes straight into the eye of the Man in the Moon.

Scorsese, better known for using the Lumière brothers’ brand of objective realism, fully embraces Méliès and his kind of magic in Hugo. The film is a love letter to the era of silent films and features many clips from films dating to the early years of the cinema.

With action set in a snow-swept interwar Paris, whose blues and yellows have been amplified to suit the fanciful mood of the picture, the film shimmers with fantasy. Scorsese here takes full advantage of the digital format’s ability to liberate the camera, since the content isn’t always real. In the very first scene, the camera descends from the heavens above Paris, swoops down through falling snowflakes, makes its way onto the platform, swerves between trains and passengers at Montparnasse train station, arrives at the concourse and finally rises up toward the clock, behind which we can make out the figure of young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

The 13-year-old Hugo has been living between the walls of the station since the untimely death of his father, a watchmaker, a few months earlier. He stays alive by stealing scraps of food from the dining carts inside the station and swipes clock parts from a toy stand to use in an “automaton”, a kind of robot he inherited from his father.

The man behind the counter at the toy stand is Méliès (Ben Kingsley), whose fame all but evaporated after the Great War and who is now producing mechanical toys that keep children’s dreams alive. An encounter between him and Hugo leads to an eventual friendship between Hugo and Méliès’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a precocious girl whose love of books has her using big words and falling in love with characters ranging from Heathcliff to David Copperfield.

The sets and the background characters don’t always look particularly realistic. But regardless of whether this was done deliberately or is a consequence of the as-yet-imperfect 3-D technology, the almost dreamlike images are exactly in line with the films of Méliès himself. Unfortunately, the film’s dialogue occasionally comes across as rather forced, while a nutty performance by Sacha Baron Cohen as the station commissioner verges on the farcical. His actions, including a stubborn commitment to send stray children to the orphanage, don’t allow us any room for pathos, which the film desperately needs toward the end.

A more general problem is the characterisation of adults as somehow conspiring against children, before having a sudden change of heart to reveal that they have been acting out because they were scared to believe their dreams could be realised.

Hugo is a kind of time machine that takes the viewer back to the days of black and white, when it was so clear there was something magical about going to the movies. It is a work of which Georges Méliès would have been very proud. The clips from films by Harold Lloyd, D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton contain moments that far surpass Scorsese’s film in terms of wonder and excitement, but the importance of making Méliès accessible to a new generation of viewers can’t be understated and is one of the central reasons for recommending this enchanting film.

Zinneke (2013)

André Crous

A very young boy insists on committing a crime, and his two middle-aged accomplices see the upside to him tagging along in Rémi Allier’s short film, Zinneke.

ZinnekeBelgium
4*

Director:
Rémi Allier
Screenwriter:
Rémi Allier
Directors of Photography:
Kinan Massarani
Erika Meda

Running time: 20 minutes

“In the Brussels dialect, ‘Zinneke’ refers to the small Senne River that flows past the city. People used to throw stray puppies into the river to get rid of them.”

Zinneke’s stray puppy is the nine-year-old Thomas (neither his age nor his name appears in the film itself). The first time we see him, he is sitting alone in the middle of a flea market in Brussels. His gaze is melancholy but curious. His focus is on two men in their late 40s, Pascal and Bruno, hawking their wares. Although it seems they have met before, Thomas’s assertiveness in offering to help them and then, getting into their minivan and even threatening them if they don’t let him join them, catches us off-guard. What is he up to?

Whether he is after money or adventure or a substitute family is unclear, Thomas is undeterred and eventually convinces the guys to let him ride along. Day turns to night, and they arrive at a nondescript row house, where Thomas has to enter through the cellar and open a window for Pascal to climb through. Everything goes as planned, and they get their hands on a few pieces of household art. But then the alarm goes off, and the new friendship is put to the test. Do the experienced thieves stay and get their young accomplice out of trouble despite the risk of arrest?

Pre-teen Nissim Renard excels in the lead role as a boy whose confidence is tinged with melancholy but never veers too far from the centre. He is a model for child actors everywhere seeking to convey characters who are strong but still act their age. Thomas is insistent but doesn’t throw tantrums, and he is curious while never sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.

Initially, this 20-minute short seems to contain a wild mixture of visuals that don’t always fit together. The often rough camerawork and editing during the burglary and the kaleidoscope-like raindrops on the car windows are two prominent examples in this respect. But viewed as an oblique manifestation of Thomas’s own frame of mind – both scared and mesmerised by the experience – this representation is unobtrusive and entirely appropriate.

For all the naturalism of the acting, the effortless switching between French and Flemish and the careful approach to obtain a coherent representation, however, the film doesn’t really allow us to invest emotionally in the drama until the very last moment. Here, Thomas’s domestic situation becomes a little clearer. We also see traces of the beginning of a real friendship between him and Pascal. And yet, this is one of those films whose pieces all seem to be cut from the same cloth: Nothing feels out of place. Everything is tightly bound to each other, largely thanks to the realism of the performances. And when the final credits roll, we ignore the nagging part of our brain that wants to know what comes next, and we soak up the energy from a short film whose director and cast were fully in control of every second.

Cosmopolis (2012)

André Crous

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is an anti-capitalist snooze fest set in the future, whose sheer incompetence earns its director a firm downgrade.

CosmopolisCanada
1.5*

Director:
David Cronenberg
Screenwriter:
David Cronenberg
Director of Photography:
Peter Suschitzky

Running time: 105 minutes

Though billing itself as an apocalyptic vision of the future resulting from capitalist greed, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is a vanity project for him and Twilight star Robert Pattinson. It degrades the director’s brand and contributes diddly-squat to the very topical debate about the battle between the elites of Wall Street and the hoi polloi of Main Street.

The film is recklessly bad. The writing is as vapid as the characters, and the setting – more than two-thirds of the film takes place inside the cork-lined state-of-the-art limousine that transports the main character, 20-something Eric Packer – is not utilised for any purpose other than to alienate us even further. In the process, the film’s potential relevance to our world is completely disregarded.

Whatever possessed Cronenberg to make this film? And to make it in this way? There are so many problems – seemingly a result of total ineptitude, notwithstanding the filmmaker’s résumé – that it is difficult to know where to begin.

The most significant disappointment is probably the time spent with the talking heads inside the youthful Packer’s limousine. Had there been some action or interesting points made by the airheads in the car, or even some tension between them, the viewer might have forgiven the filmmaker for this bland portrayal of the life of a multimillionaire.

The only moment of some interest occurs when Didi (Juliette Binoche), a high-class prostitute, services Packer. Seeing Binoche bob up and down on Pattinson’s crotch is bizarre, but puts a rare smile on our faces. Not just because it is the otherwise classy Binoche doing it, but also because it is one of the few moments in which the characters actually reveal that they might be human after all.

It would be foolish, however, to assume that all the characters are human, as Packer’s wife is very clearly a product in the Stepford line of robotic spouses. Without a sense of humour or even a speck of emotion, she is a complete and utter drone. While it is never clearly stated that she is, in fact, inhuman, this is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn. Perhaps that is a shot in the dark and gives Cosmopolis too much credit, but it deserves to be said that Cronenberg is usually not an idiot.

The film opens with a quotation from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Report from the Besieged City”, in which he observes that “the rat has become the unit of currency”. These words very vividly (and pungently) come to life as the city’s 99 percent, the poverty-stricken populace who live on the other side of the financial chasm dividing them from the 1 percent of financiers, walk around throwing rats at the ruling class.

There is no middle ground between the two classes. Cronenberg, who adapted the screenplay from a book by Don DeLillo, likely thought this fact would generate greater tension and present an easier way for him to get his point across about the current trajectory toward class warfare.

Cosmopolis exceeds our wildest expectations of incompetence. It is a self-involved mess: ideologically inscrutable, narratively tedious and visually catatonic. The characters have long dialogues devoid of sound and fury, signifying less than nothing. Consider for a moment one of these characters who speak to Packer in his cork-lined bubble. Played by Samantha Morton, Vija Kinsky is another emotionless android better known as Packer’s “chief of theory”, And yes, she is as boring as her title makes her sound.

The film doesn’t know how – or doesn’t try – to engage the contemporary, pertinent theme of the Occupy movements, though these are clearly the inspiration for the potential for tension, and ends up squandering an opportunity to present them in a coherent and interesting light.

Cosmopolis doesn’t have anything to say and doesn’t even pretend to offer the illusion of saying something of value. Most of the film involves a journey across town to a barbershop, as Packer absolutely insists on a haircut from the barber he has known since childhood, despite the always imminent threat of pernicious barbarians launching an attack on his car. But this long-awaited scene at the barbershop is another in a string of letdowns, as it fails to show a deeper side to Packer and ends way too early. Cronenberg couldn’t recognise the viewer’s need for substance and produces another disappointing scene in an already third-rate film.

The film is an abomination. As images wash over you, your mind will be free to boggle at the film’s inclusion in the official selection at Cannes. The pleasant memories of Cronenberg in top form doing reality-based science fiction in eXistenZ or giving Viggo Mortensen an ambitious role as a former criminal in A History of Violence or a hardcore criminal in Eastern Promises quickly fade in the face of such mind-numbing folly.

Carnage (2011)

André Crous

Based on the Yasmina Reza’s play, Roman Polanski’s Carnage tightens the screws when two couples sit around the coffee table.

CarnageFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Yasmina Reza
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 75 minutes

The main premise of Roman Polanski’s Carnage is to have two couples stuck in an apartment, unable to leave because of the hosts’ social obligation to offer their guests more coffee and cobbler, the guests’ obligation to indulge their hosts by accepting said offers, and above all, the collective obligation to keep smiling despite a shared desire to skip forward in time. Social commentary forms an important layer of this 75-minute film, though the most interesting aspect is the way in which the confined spaces of a New York apartment – of which we see the lounge area almost exclusively – can serve as a pressure cooker for the frustrated emotions of four seemingly level-headed individuals.

In the very first scene, which takes place in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, there is an altercation between two teenage boys symmetrically framed by big trees on either side. Visually wedged in the middle of the shot, one boy swings a stick and hits the other in the face, leaving him visibly injured.

In the subsequent scene, the parents of the two boys are in front of the computer, typing out a carefully worded statement that seeks to establish the facts (one boy’s teeth were knocked out) without offending either party. The parents of the alleged victim invite the parents of the alleged aggressor to their apartment to figure out how to proceed.

They all walk on eggshells, scared of being perceived as aggressive, for that would reflect on their children’s roles in the fight, but equally scared of being perceived as weak, for the same conclusion could be drawn just as easily. These people, acutely aware of the meaning of reputation, suddenly find themselves embroiled in a story of teenage aggression and need to find a solution.

But in twists that oscillate between purposefully frustrating and hilarious, and despite simmering tension and mutual contempt, the two couples, as a result of common civility, find themselves unable to leave the apartment. The setup is more realistic than, say, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a dinner party can’t leave and ultimately eat themselves to death, but such thoughts couldn’t have been far from the dark mind of Polanski.

Carnage depends heavily not just on the sharpness of the dialogue but also on the delivery by the four actors. In this respect, it is a very successful ensemble piece, pairing the slightly reserved Jodie Foster with the garrulous John C. Reilly, and the very uptight Kate Winslet with the snotty Christoph Waltz.

Based on a play by Yasmina Reza called God of Carnage, Polanski’s film is about the way dialogue can be wielded to gently do away with belaboured niceties. All that is required is some time and an airtight lid. It becomes obvious how laughter is used to alleviate moments of social uncertainty, though laughter itself can easily turn awkward, leading to a vicious circle of self-inflicted torture.

Ultimately, this Gordian knot of awkwardness is cut in a way that is greatly satisfying, though it comes at some personal and professional cost to Waltz’s loudmouthed character, whose devil-may-care attitude generates the most laughs by far and allows the actor to channel some of his Inglourious Basterds persona.

It is fascinating to watch the cracks appear in the formal pairings of the couples and alliances shift to give the characters the illusion they are not weak, although much dirty laundry is aired in the process of re-establishing a zone of social comfort.

As opposed to David Fincher’s Panic Room, in which Foster also starred, or Polanski’s own Death and the Maiden, both of which took place in one location, Carnage lacks a central animating force, some big goal, and the viewer has no real narrative expectation. There is much verbal mudslinging and even a few moments of physical conflict, but the conversations go off on multiple tangents, and after an hour, the whole muddle becomes a bit draining.

Luckily, Polanski doesn’t outstay his welcome, and when the conversation runs dry, the film simply ends. Carnage has a great deal of the explosive potential that its title suggests, featuring generous performances by its four main players. Unfortunately, the plot is too thin to make this a truly great piece of work.

An Officer and a Spy (2019)

André Crous

Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair.

An Officer and a SpyFrance
3*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Robert Harris
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: J’accuse

Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration.

We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him.

One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus.

Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing.

It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. I realise that I no longer recognise France. [Please protect] what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. Polanski also fails to detail how the Dreyfus affair exacerbated feelings of Christian Gallic pride among the general population.

But Picquart goes it alone, persevering despite his inherent antisemitism, driven by a desire for justice. He carries out his investigation without the help of anyone else in his intelligence office. No amount of pushback from the generals above him can douse his passion for the truth, and no one intimidates him. These might be admirable characteristics in a man, but we do not see him emotionally tested. Everything always works out. By the time all sense of justice seems lost, he suddenly meets not only Deputy (and future Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau but also revered novelist of the working class, Émile Zola. Within days, Zola’s famous newspaper article, “J’accuse!”, lays into every powerful individual involved in the Dreyfus conspiracy. And thus begins the final legal brawl.

But despite France being a colonial power, the scenes in court, openly biased in favour of the military, paint the country as little more than a banana republic. What should be the most intense part of the film is staged and edited together as a comedy.

Jean Dujardin stars as Picquart, but despite his amiable demeanour, the character doesn’t undergo any change – a point strikingly made in the film’s final scene. An unrecognisable Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus, whose lack of presence in the film makes him a peripheral character in his own story. But in the scenes where he does appear, he responds to the constant humiliation with brave stoicism that sometimes cracks under the pressure of boiling anger. In other words, like a real human being.

It is well established that in 1977, a 43-year-old Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey. He admitted to this in court. So, while he has said explicitly that he understands Dreyfus’s persecution, their cases are in no way the same. Dreyfus was innocent and was framed because he was Jewish. Polanski was and is still guilty because he committed a criminal act. In this regard, his being Jewish is about as relevant as his being 5’5″. If the director really wanted to make a film about his alleged innocence (despite pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor), let him stage a re-enactment of his starring role in the vile 1977 rape. 

But there is no connective tissue whatsoever between An Officer and a Spy and Polanski. The film isn’t good or bad because of his personal life. It is just mediocre because he couldn’t be bothered to imbue it with the authentic messiness of life.

Venus in Fur (2013)

André Crous

Venus in Fur is a two-character, single-location film by Roman Polanski that is delicious, sexy and gripping.

Venus in FurFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
David Ives
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: La Vénus à la fourrure

The term “masochism”, which refers to the feeling of excitement some people get from being hurt, abused or degraded, comes from the surname of the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz), published in 1869, revolved around a man who willingly lets himself be dominated by the woman of his desires.

The novel has been adapted for the big screen at least five times before and is the source material for Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, which ignores the side plots and focuses like a laser on the central couple. Besides having only two characters, the master filmmaker has gone for even more minimalism by setting the action in a single location, a theatre.

It is the kind of setup Polanski knows well from another film he made, Carnage, which saw four characters stuck in an apartment, determined to solve the problem of the one couple’s son having beaten up the son of the other. Both Carnage and Venus are tightly wound pieces that rely on powerful acting and subtle shifts in the power balance to hold our attention instead of the camera.

Venus in Fur is set inside a small, rather rundown theatre in Paris, where a middle-aged theatre director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is holding auditions for his upcoming play – of course, based on Sacher-Masoch’s book. He is desperate, having seen too many actresses who have absolutely no grasp of the main character and is about to leave when in stumbles Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is wet to the bone; however, the rainstorm outside hasn’t doused her garrulousness in the least, and Thomas wants to get this chatty, slightly overbearing (or intimidating?) woman out of his sight as quickly as possible.

She has her ways to break down his defences, however, and it is only a matter of time before they end up on stage, with Wanda (also – coincidentally? – the name of the main character in the play) gently wresting control from the director after she impresses him with her interpretation of the role.

Films that take place in a single setting are few and far between. The best-known examples are probably Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, both of which starred at least a dozen different characters whose interactions we could follow, which made the director’s job very easy when it came to keeping the viewer interested.

But those two films were from 1957 and 1947, respectively. An equivalent may be found in one of Ingmar Bergman’s last films, After the Rehearsal, from 1984, which is also set in a single space, and moreover takes place on the stage of a theatre and only has a total cast of five. There are a few other examples of note (such as Richard Linklater’s Tape, the overlooked but tense Buried and the modern-day triumph starring Robert Redford, All is Lost). However, this kind of self-imposed minimalism is something directors tend to avoid because the setup doesn’t showcase their dazzling use of the camera or innovative editing or control of a crowd of extras.

It takes an individual with a certain kind of talent to film what is essentially a theatre piece and make it come alive despite the obvious limitations. Polanski, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Ives, infuses his story with sexual tension, comedy and the word that keeps popping up in Thomas’ vocabulary, “ambiguity.” (Wanda keeps confusing it with ambivalence, and with good reason.)

The sexual tension is expected, but the film really earns our admiration through its comedy. Look how the ring tone of Thomas’ mobile phone references Wagner (definitely not a good omen), or the jacket Wanda pulls out of her bag is not only historically accurate but fits Thomas like a glove. This may not sound like comedy, but the actors let the moments sink in just long enough to thoroughly enchant us.

Despite our better judgement, we are constantly aligned with Thomas in the position of victim. We know this Wanda is up to no good, but Polanski’s camera always returns to a spot at the same level as Thomas, who seems to be getting ever more enjoyment out of her game of domination. In terms of content, there is not much going on here – Wanda seems to be omniscient and always in control, and she displays no real signs of character development – but the mystery of who she is very effectively animates the film throughout its 90-minute running time.

Polanski cleverly elides the space between the worlds of the film and that of the text, either by having Wanda respond in character to a question posed by Thomas (rather than the play’s Severin), inserting the name “Thomas” in the play, or even adding sound effects to give invisible objects a measure of existence, exactly as Lars von Trier did in Dogville.

Although we are captivated by the two characters, whoever they are, there are one or two big jumps that spoil the film and seem to come from nowhere. The first takes place right at the beginning when a misunderstanding leads to Wanda taking to the stage and Thomas simply yielding to her brazen informality. The other happens at the end when we are asked to believe Thomas has surrendered his sanity to the point where he would give up everything for a moment longer with his crazy actress.

More bizarre moments follow, and the film ends with some strong, dramatic catharsis that is both powerful and hilarious, answering some of our questions without removing all the ambiguity about Wanda’s identity.

Venus in Fur is a highly entertaining film that, although not as strong or as entertaining as Carnage, proves Polanski’s skills as one who can manipulate his audience’s emotions. Even while he deals with a story as intimate as that of two individuals vying for power, he deftly draws us in with a laugh here and a lingering question there.

Frankenweenie (2012)

André Crous

With Frankenweenie, a remake of his own material, Tim Burton outdoes himself by mostly restraining his creative tendencies.

FrankenweenieUSA
4*

Director:
Tim Burton
Screenwriter:
John August
Director of Photography:
Peter Sorg

Running time: 85 minutes

Frankenweenie is a stop-motion film made by the master of the morbid, Tim Burton. However, while many would readily think of his visually exuberant ventures (Big Fish, Dark Shadows and Alice in Wonderland, among many others, spring to mind), he is also the author of works that are at once comical and reflexive, even moving, like Edward Scissorhands or Corpse Bride.

One of Tim Burton’s first films was a 1984 short titled Frankenweenie, in which a young boy called Victor brings his pet bull terrier, Sparky, back to life by flying a kite during a thunderstorm with Sparky attached at one end. The film was a clever adaptation of the 1931 James Whale–directed horror classic Frankenstein, which centres on the misunderstood loner embodied by Frankenstein’s monster, who comes to a nasty end when he is chased by hordes of rabid townspeople wielding torches and pitchforks and ultimately perishes inside a windmill that’s been set alight.

Burton’s 1984 film was a scream, with violins throughout the score and people in constant hysterics, but it is absolutely worth checking out, even though most viewers tend to shy away from short films while having no problem watching an episode of a television series that is exactly the same length.

This live-action film has now been remade by Burton with numerous changes, some of which are inspired, while others are the almost expected consequences of stretching the same story from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.

In both stories, Victor is a bit of a recluse whose only real connection to the world is his dog, and he suffers terrible guilt and loss when Sparky dies as he crosses the road to fetch a ball Victor either threw or hit, depending on the film you’re talking about. In the new film, equipped with his own editing suite to perfect his short film projects, Victor is more of a nerd, and it’s not difficult to recognise Burton as the young boy.

The first half of the story stays more or less the same, but many formerly peripheral characters have here been given extra weight, with their particular actions expanded to fill the time. Whereas the original film was mostly about Victor’s discovery that electricity can reanimate the dead (incidentally, Victor’s surname is Frankenstein) and Sparky’s subsequent adventures that upset the small-minded townspeople, Burton’s feature-length film has many extra storylines.

The most intriguing of these involves the square old man living next door to the Frankensteins with his soft-spoken niece and her French poodle. He is the mayor of the small town and basically a carbon copy of Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace, except we never have any sympathy for him. Sparky has his eye on the French poodle, Persephone, and the attraction is mutual. In what is bound to be one of the film’s signature moments, a spark of electricity flies from the recently resurrected Sparky to Persephone, producing a white streak in her honeycomb, à la Bride of Frankenstein.

One unexpected improvement on Burton’s original is the personality Sparky now has, which Burton wasn’t able to glean from a real animal in his previous live-action short.

The plot is modestly modelled on Frankenstein, though only the transformation from death to life and the final chase of townsfolk with torches (but without pitchforks) are worth paying attention to.

What is more interesting is Burton’s use of his short film to tease the viewer in a way that is enriched by her having seen the earlier film but for whom such knowledge is not essential: Certain pivotal scenes are deliberately drawn out a little longer, and in the process, we move closer and closer to the edge of our seats, even though we know things will work out they did in the first film. Sparky’s death is one such moment, and so is the film’s final scene.

The director’s creativity is on full display in scenes at the pet cemetery, where gravestones are shaped into peculiar objects that reflect the animals buried below, but the last part of the film, in which a Godzilla-like tortoise, a halfbreed bat-cat and a delirious tribe of sea monkeys terrorize the small town of New Holland, is overkill and feels out of step with the rest of the production. Especially in light of the very touching, intimate shots that are interspersed with the footage, mostly with Sparky the outcast, this detour into mega-monster territory is wholly uncalled for.

With the addition of characters such as the wide-eyed cat, Mr. Wiskers, whose clairvoyance is proved by the form of its faeces, and the long-faced and eerie but misunderstood science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski (voiced by Martin Landau), this Frankenweenie has its eye firmly on the goal of entertaining the viewer. Add to this the central character of Sparky, the coat on his freshly exhumed body barely held together by screws and stitches, the evocative music of Danny Elfman and Burton’s always funny take on small-town America, and you have a film that is mostly as good as it can be given its apparent limitations as an adaptation of a 30-minute film.

Even if you are not a fan of most of Tim Burton’s films, this one is a must.