2010-2019

Hawaii (2013)

André Crous

Hawaii poster2Argentina
4*

Director:
Marco Berger
Screenwriter:
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomás Perez Silva

Running time: 101 minutes

It’s difficult to imagine Marco Berger making a winter movie.

From the beautiful sunset of one of his first short films, The Watch, to the evergreen bubble of lush gardens in rural Argentina that is a constant metaphor for the budding relationship in Hawaii, his films have always been optimistic about the possibility of finding love, or at least of finding someone. That possibility, however, is not without its ups and downs, and one should never make assumptions about anyone else’s interests or intentions.

Hawaii is a refreshing return to form for Berger after his tense and visually frigid second film, Ausente. Having secured more than $22,000 through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter (disclaimer: I also made a contribution of less than one-half of 1 percent), Marco Berger and co-producer Pedro Irusta set about shooting a film they had initially planned to make with twice the budget. The product is surprisingly well-crafted, and perhaps thanks to Berger’s experience on the short-film anthology Sexual Tension: Volatile, he appears to be in complete control even as he tells a story that one expects to take up much less time.

The world of the film almost exclusively belongs to its two central characters, Eugenio and Martin, played by Manuel Vignau and the curious, wide-eyed Uruguayan actor Mateo Chiarino, respectively. With the exception of three brief scenes, they provide the only interaction of the film, and our attention is focused on the flowering of their relationship alone over the course of a few weeks during the summer.

Martin is homeless. He sleeps in the bushes under a small blanket and goes from house to house during the day asking for work. Eventually, he arrives at the gates of a large property, where the slightly bearded Eugenio, two or three years his senior, tells him the house actually belongs to his uncle, but that he needs help around the house. As Martin is about to leave, he realises he knows Eugenio from many years ago, when he spent time in the area before moving to Uruguay.

The rest of the film looks at the gradual shedding of secrets and the intimacy of shared childhood memories, which bring the two closer together.

Hawaii’s simplicity is only illusory, but the questions the viewer has as the action unfolds will be answered – or, at the very least, framed through the prism of humanity – by the end of the film in a way that ties together the loose ends. Berger expertly manages his characters’ secrets, some of which we know from the beginning, and some of which he only lets us in on over time. Almost surprisingly, homosexuality is not really one of these secrets, although it is referenced obliquely, but Berger knows that we would assume these two characters are keeping that secret, and in the process we may see the forest for the trees – in other words, we may miss the more important story, which is the growth of a relationship outside the limits imposed by supposedly keeping sexuality a secret.

Such optimism also illuminated Berger’s début feature, Plan B, in which two straight men realise they have feelings for each other. That is not to say Hawaii is devoid of tension: After a major revelation, we can feel the characters almost unable to speak to each other, and yet we will soon come to realise the source of anxiety is not quite what we think. Berger is not fooling us on purpose as much as he seems to indicate that people have their reasons, and we have to be more patient to fully comprehend them, instead of drawing an all-too-simple conclusion.

His hair styled in a butch cut, Martin at first appears to be a very straightforward role, but over time we recognise the combination of vulnerability and survival that has brought him this far, and he doesn’t want anyone’s pity. He only appears to be slightly naïve, but just because he does not spend his time writing or drawing, like Eugenio, does not mean he is not sensitive.

He, and the viewer, wants questions answered, but he does not blindly rush toward an explanation. Perhaps the viewer is more impatient, trying to figure out what it means when one touches the other lightly on the shoulder, or when Martin puts his hand on Eugenio’s chest to feel his heartbeat. Is this a game? And do they both know what they are feeling themselves, or are they in the dark about their own emotions? How close can the one allow himself to be to the other without causing suspicion?

These questions are central to the experience, and it is impressive to see Berger pose them to us without seeming to tease us, and yet, at the same time, he keeps our attention on the development of the story and of these characters.

Later, when Martin picks up one of Eugenio’s T-shirts and puts it on, we wonder whether he wants to be more like Eugenio or if there is something more intimate to this gesture. Berger keeps us in the dark, but it is not to create some false kind of tension. It is the most natural scene in the world, and yet he has imbued it with an ambiguity that is audacious and spot-on.

The first 15 minutes of the film, almost entirely without dialogue, seem to belong to a different film altogether, but far from being an artistic flaw, we eventually there is some meaning behind this, too: These 15 minutes are used to sketch a world where Eugenio and Martin have not yet met each other as adults. Once they do, it is as if the world they inhabit also changes, and the result is a film that we can savour.

Hawaii contains clever compositions that do not attract attention but demand more attention because they are deceptively simple. One example is when Martin looks at himself in the mirror in Eugenio’s room. A few minutes later, Berger only needs to show us Eugenio looking in front of him to realise he is actually looking at a reflection of Martin behind him, changing his clothes, and no reverse shot is even necessary.

That kind of oblique look, of knowing what the viewer sees and what the character sees without showing him looking, is missing, unfortunately, from a later scene next to the river. That scene in Brokeback Mountain when Jake Gyllenhaal is peeling a potato and refuses to look behind him at Heath Ledger changing his clothes was awe-inspiring because we knew exactly what was going on in Gyllenhaal’s character’s mind. The scene next to the river in Hawaii eschews this subtlety in favour of more explicit leering.

The rest of the film contains a great deal of contemplation, and while we often don’t know what goes through the characters’ minds, we have some idea. An early shot shows Martin filling a water bottle at a tap before the camera focuses on his crotch. It is a subtle hint at the frustration he keeps hidden, but this frustration helps us understand his character rather than the story, which is a good thing, even though it does make Eugenio rather difficult to decipher.

Then again, perhaps that is life. This is the world occupied by the two main characters, and by them alone, and yet we don’t feel like voyeurs but rather like explorers (incidentally, the film cites Jules Verne from time to time) who share some of the joy of their experience.

Just like Plan B, Berger’s Hawaii is a film that will make its many homosexual viewers happy to be gay. It is not political, and it is not about gay guilt or repression or angst about coming out. On the contrary, it shows how wonderful it is to be alive and be with someone who is comfortable around you, and it treats the possibility of finding love as a reality.

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

André Crous

Le gamin au véloBelgium
4.5*

Directors:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Screenwriters:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Director of Photography:
Alain Marcoen

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: Le Gamin au vélo

The young Cyril has a very scientific mind, but this creates plenty of problems when he is faced with real-world problems that involve emotions. He doesn’t trust whatever anyone else says, unless he has seen it with his own eyes. At least, that is the case with the bicycle he assumed his father would never sell. But now, not only the bicycle but his father, too, have disappeared, and it takes a while for him to accept that they are both gone and that it was his father’s own decision to break the promise. It is interesting to note an early scene, however, in which Cyril is asked whether his father told him he was leaving. Cyril, without missing a beat, says he did, but that he can’t remember exactly what he was told.

Cyril is a character of flesh and blood, even though some early scenes may make the viewer shake her head in dismay at his foolhardy refusal to accept what he is told by others. His reaction is often to lash out, or, as in the scene where he lies about his own knowledge of his father’s actions, it seems he finds it easier to lie to himself. His own actions are not easily predictable, and this is exactly what makes him interesting.

In an early scene, he goes to the building where his father used to live but when no one answers the door and he refuses to leave the premises and the guardians from his boarding school come looking for him, he races through the building and ends up at the medical centre, where he latches onto a woman he doesn’t know for dear life. She is a hairdresser named Samantha, and she decides to look after him over weekends since he doesn’t have anyone else.

Why she does this is a mystery, a question Cyril asks her directly but which she answers with “I don’t know.” That would be fine, except that it comes almost immediately after another, slightly creepy scene in which the area’s greasy teenage drug dealer, Wes, invites Cyril to his room to drink and play video games. We don’t know what Wes’s intentions are, not what Samantha’s are beyond what we can assume is her desire to look after someone besides herself. And we can assume that Wes doesn’t want to engage with Cyril except to use him in one of his criminal schemes, but why does he leer at him while Cyril’s not looking?

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who directed The Kid with a Bike, seem to be implying that Wes and Samantha are actually quite similar at first, and may act with the same intention (in this case, perhaps, selfishness), but as both stories develop, we see their trajectories and end games clearly diverge, and maybe that is where the complexity is to be found. 

Cyril’s father, Guy, is cast perfectly and played by Jérémie Renier, who looks more like a young adult than a full-grown adult. He is not a bad guy who has forsaken his son out of ill will; on the contrary, he is scared and we learn it was actually his own mother who had taken care of Cyril. When she died, he didn’t have enough faith in himself and continues to shirk his parental responsibility. He is a nice person and certainly has more in his head than the character Renier played in the Dardennes’ The Child (L’Enfant), but he is still immature, and the moment when he asks Samantha to tell Cyril he won’t see him any more instead of doing it himself is one of the dramatic highlights of the film.

What makes this all the more poignant is that nearly the entire scene leading up to that moment, the three or four minutes that Guy spends with Cyril in the kitchen and during which he is very accommodating and never rude or disrespectful, are shot almost entirely in a single take, heightening the tension and the intimacy of the exchange. 

There are points in the film when we almost want to throw up our hands in despair and exasperation at the hysterical tantrums of the boy who is going through a rough patch in his childhood and has to learn how to cope with his new life. Late in the film, we find ourselves sympathising with him in a scene that recalls Alex DeLarge’s confrontation with the two policemen (and his former gang members) in A Clockwork Orange, when he wants to fight back but finds himself unable to do that because he has changed.

This perspective brings a disturbing twist to our interpretation of the film (Beethoven, DeLarge’s favourite composer, has a piece on the soundtrack of The Kid with a Bike that is repeated at regular intervals, his Piano Concerto, No. 5, Adagio un poco mosso), but while Kubrick and the Dardenne brothers are completely different kinds of filmmakers, neither of them are content with easy answers.

In the end, we cannot know to what extent Cyril has really grown up. He is still quite young, Wes may be looking for him, and he puts enormous pressure on any relationship Samantha may have with other men. Despite these hanging questions, the ending is strong and satisfying but certainly not sentimental. This is a Dardenne brothers film, after all.

Villegas (2012)

André Crous

VillegasArgentina
3*

Director:
Gonzalo Tobal
Screenwriter:
Gonzalo Tobal
Director of Photography:
Lucas Gaynor

Running time: 100 minutes

An odd film with interesting characters who nonetheless leave you cold, Villegas is the début feature of Argentine director Gonzalo Tobal, who always turns away just as his characters are about to become vulnerable and doesn’t give us anything concrete, least of all the storyline.

It opens with two cousins, living very different lives, who receive a phone call that brings bad news. Their grandfather, living in the remote village of Villegas in the Argentine countryside, has died, and although the two young men haven’t seen each other in a while, they leave together from Buenos Aires to attend the funeral.

The more serious of the two, the clean-shaven one with a job and a girlfriend, is Esteban. His cousin is Pipa, a bearded musician whom we meet lying sprawled out on his bed in his underwear, the sun streaming in through the curtains, in a room that needs a serious tidying-up. These two cousins are completely disconnected from each other, and each still harbours ideas about the other from a long time ago when there was still some interaction between them.

Pipa lashes out with sarcasm because he feels vulnerable, and also because he doesn’t want to show his cousin how much he is actually hurting after his band kicked him out. At first, he seems a bit too interested in annoying Esteban, but over time we come to realise he is sincere and still finding his way. Pipa meets Jazmín, a girl at a gas station on the highway, and asks her about a small restaurant he and his cousin used to go to that ought to be nearby. He charms her, although he was actually just looking to hook up with her, and this cute, very unexpected twist takes us by surprise.

It’s too bad the film doesn’t build on this initial moment that reveals some of Pipa’s character. It is true, there are a few other pieces to the puzzle we take notice of, but they are almost always dead-ends. For example, his cousin’s sister, Clara, is a little infatuated with him, but all he wants to do is listen to Marlene Dietrich sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on their late grandfather’s gramophone in the now-empty house.

One small act that does pay off, however, is when Pipa sets up Esteban with a girl because he senses his cousin, deep down and despite what he says, wants to have some fun. This meeting, though purely for pleasure with no possibility of lasting longer than a few hours, does change Esteban, but again we are left to wonder how much or what exactly will happen as a result.

Villegas doesn’t give many answers to our questions, and the story itself is also too minimal, with too few moments of significant narrative weight, to keep us interested in the journey we’re taking. The countryside could have played a much bigger role in this film, especially the scene of the two men getting lost in a field in the middle of the night, but despite a great backdrop, the story in the foreground is badly drawn and ultimately not stimulating enough to keep our attention.

Viewed at the Sarajevo Film Festival 2013.

Flower Buds (2011)

André Crous

PoupataCzech Republic
4.5*

Director:
Zdeněk Jiráský
Screenwriter:
Zdeněk Jiráský
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný

Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Poupata

Misery loves company, and whatever shape that company takes, real or illusory, the happiness, however short-lived, can make for powerful storytelling.

The plot of the Czech film Flower Buds (Poupata) is steeped in distress and hopelessness, but it is a slow-motion car crash from which we cannot turn our eyes away even for a second.

Similar in tone, though not in style, to the despair that seeps through the work of Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Inárritu (especially in 21 Grams and Biutiful), Flower Buds is constructed out of small, well-chosen incidents that sustain each other and never come across as either contrived or superfluous.

Set around Christmastime in and around the small industrial town of Nové Sedlo in the north-west of the country, most of the scenes feature a factory in the background that pumps smoke into the crisp air of the countryside.

In the opening scene, we find Jarda at his post next to a railway crossing, where he receives telephone calls to inform him of approaching trains, as a result of which he has to lower and raise the boom for the odd car that passes by. After work, he heads straight for the local herna bar, or mini-casino, one of those infamous bastions of decadence found almost everywhere in the Czech Republic, where he exchanges yet another heirloom for a shot at the jackpot.

Jarda is, without a doubt, the most tragic character in the film, and Vladimír Javorský plays him without any sugarcoating. Though he is already on a steady downhill slide when we meet him, we quickly realise he has been caught in the web of his gambling addiction for a very long time. His wife, Kamila, knows the family is in dire straits (though she has no idea just how bad the situation actually is, or is about to be) and tries to help out by undressing to pose for a calendar, together with fellow exercise friends, with the goal of earning some extra money. Kamila has dreams of visiting the Amazon and believes her husband is saving up to make that dream come true.

Meanwhile, Jarda’s teenage son, Honza, is smitten with a stripper named Carmen, or Zuzana, who performs at the same herna bar from time to time, and he sets his sights on “saving” her, although he luckily doesn’t have any ambitions of being Travis Bickle.

The characters are all at the end of a slippery rope – we also learn early on that Honza’s sister is pregnant, though the identity of the father is left ambiguous – and have little to no hope of climbing back up. A Vietnamese couple, friends of the family, is also enduring enormous hardship. Despite having spent many years in the Czech Republic, they do not speak the language well and feel completely out of place in this place where it seems, from the look of the film, they have been condemned to an eternal winter.

Jarda tells them to get used to living here, to start thinking in this language and let it be a part of who they are, but it is difficult to consider him a serious model to look up to, given his own spiral of hopelessness. Viewers will find themselves easily sympathising with the Vietnamese couple, though, as their refrain of “Do prdele se sněhem!” (Roughly translated as “This snow can go to hell!”) is both endearing and a very understandable, perhaps even recognisable, cry for help, especially to anyone who has ever suffered from a feeling dépaysement in a new, very different environment.

On the surface, this is a small, character-driven drama set in a small town where the herna bar offers hope of a better tomorrow while at the same time crushing those dreams in front of our very eyes.

It is therefore refreshing to see how director Zdeněk Jiráský discovers surprising lyricism – beauty is too strong a word – in the rough elements that make up his story: a middle-aged woman in a red tracksuit doing her morning exercise outside in the snow with a fuming factory behind her; a drunk teenager dressed up as an angel walking around in the snow at night time, eerily lit up by the lights of the same factory in the distance; a short but agonising track-out from Jarda as he feeds his life insurance to the slot machine, a shot that embodies our desire to flee such a scene of desperation.

Flower Buds is an examination of obsession every bit as potent as Requiem for a Dream, but it is rooted firmly in realism rather than hyperrealism. This is an epically tragic film that is not at all a depressing viewing experience and demands to be seen.

This Must Be the Place (2011)

André Crous

This Must Be the PlaceItaly/Ireland
3.5*

Director:
Paolo Sorrentino
Screenwriters:
Paolo Sorrentino
Umberto Contarello
Director of Photography:
Luca Bigazzi

Running time: 118 minutes

You will be forgiven for thinking This Must Be the Place is a film about a cross-dressing Sean Penn. But if you look past the black nail polish, the lipstick and the eye shadow, not to mention the monotonous high-pitched squeals that pass for his side of a conversation, you come to realize his character, Cheyenne, is a bored former rock star from whom a calmness emanates that can soothe those around him, be they friends of strangers.

He lives in Ireland with his wife of many decades, a fire-fighter played by the always dependably quirky Frances McDormand, but the enormous mansion around him and the estate that extends into a forest-like garden do not thrill him; on the contrary, he seems to be drowning in all the space he owns.

He receives a phone call informing him his father, whom he hasn’t seen since moving to Ireland 35 years before, is on his deathbed; Cheyenne’s fear of flying leads him to take a ship to New York, where he arrives just in time for the wake.

Among the items his father left is a journal filled with pictures and details about his concentration camp warden whom he was tracing and who now lives somewhere deep in the American Midwest. It takes Cheyenne less than a beat to recognize the need to confront this man and take revenge for what he did.

Thus starts a journey filled with strange moments, ranging from a bison grazing on a front porch in Utah and a borrowed SUV spontaneously combusting on the open road to a grown man in a small town called Bad Axe, Michigan, walking around in a superhero costume in the middle of the night, and The Talking Heads’ David Byrne performing their hit “This Must Be the Place” in a New York club while a woman reading a magazine rotates around the stage. The film is filled with these stunningly surreal moments of Americana that all seem to be rooted in reality but are also very removed from our immediate lives; their meaning seems to be very straightforward but at the simultaneously elusive.

Time after time, Cheyenne is right there in the frame to ensure the moment is even stranger. His physique and the sadness behind his facial expressions remind us of Buster Keaton, if only Keaton had donned makeup and styled his hair to look like he had stuck his finger in an electric socket.

The film’s visual style has a distinctly minimalist feeling, though the camera movements are dynamic. Perhaps no film besides The Tree of Life has as many tracking shots for no apparent reason. The shots are certainly meant to be noticed, like when the camera rises up out of a golden wheat field to follow a car passing next to it, and the insistence on camera fluidity becomes irritating as time goes on, because the style is hollow.

This Must Be the Place sets itself up as a road movie of which the inciting incident is Cheyenne’s discovery that his father had uncovered the identity of his former captor. Along the way, schlepping his hand luggage with him everywhere he goes, Cheyenne meets a variety of people that suggest the real reason director Paolo Sorrentino made the film: His focus is the hodgepodge of characters as colourful as the American landscape that produced them, and visually the idea of “a land of contrasts” is hammered home very powerfully with separate scenes in which the television in the background shows Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

There are many times when Sorrentino’s approach is perfectly complemented by Sean Penn’s acting, as a single-take scene with Penn having a near-nervous breakdown in front of David Byrne clearly shows, or when Penn humours a young boy whose father was killed in Iraq by performing the title song on his guitar.

But Sorrentino’s artistic sensibility, which sometimes skirts the edges of Jarmusch territory, tends to get him into trouble: Arvo Pärt’s exquisite “Spiegel im Spiegel” does not belong on the soundtrack when the scene is a lonely, overlit supermarket aisle, and neither does the climax warrant three consecutive, identical tracking shots of a man delivering a monologue. What follows the monologue, however, is exactly what the plot needed to come to a satisfying conclusion.

A refrain from Cheyenne describes the viewer’s impression very well: “Something’s not quite right here. I don’t know what exactly, but something.”

The film has good intentions, the camera makes the picture dynamic, a bit like a music video, and many of the smaller character parts are really touching. Unfortunately, the film never allows us to get close to them.

 

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

André Crous

Great GatsbyUSA
3*

Director:
Baz Luhrmann
Screenwriters:
Baz Luhrmann
Craig Pearce
Director of Photography:
Simon Duggan

Running time: 143 minutes

After the disappointing Australia, Baz Luhrmann marks his return to the world of supersized, kaleidoscopic entertainment with The Great Gatsby. His film is the adaptation of the eponymous 1926 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is as short and compact as this film is long and sprawling, clocking in at nearly two and a half hours.

Set on Long Island in 1922, a stone’s throw from New York City, in the posh villages of West Egg and East Egg, the protagonist and narrator of the story, the 29-year-old Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), moves into a small cottage on the grounds immediately bordering a palatial fortress where there are nightly parties that draw elegant crowds from across the state and beyond partaking in the near-orgiastic celebrations of money and booze.

The host, we learn, is a mysterious man called Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is Nick’s age, and rumours swirl as to the origin of his fortune. When Nick finally meets Gatsby, he is most impressed by his smile, about which Nick waxes lyrical when he describes it as “one of those rare smiles you may come across four or five times in your life.” Alas, despite the faithful (unlike most of the story’s characters, who effortlessly two-time their partners) adaptation of nearly every single line in the novel, this very important character trait does not make its way onto the big screen.

However, Gatsby’s first appearance onscreen certainly presents him as a star worthy of Nick’s ultimate devotion, as we, seemingly from Nick’s point of view, look almost directly at him while fireworks fill the night sky in slow motion behind him. This point-of-view shot obviously seeks to make us identify with Nick, and consequently with his interest in Gatsby, but such appreciation is undercut by the pointless bookend structure of the film that is meant to mirror the writer’s voice in the novel.

The film opens with Nick, at a sanatorium in winter time, a few years after the events; he is struggling to come to terms with his friendship with Gatsby and is urged by his psychiatrist to write out his memories. These notes, typed out just like in Moulin Rouge!, become, as we realise by the end of the film with a sense of dread, the novel itself. It is a jarring structuring device that makes it seem like Fitzgerald could be equated with Nick, although it does illuminate the reason why there are a few scenes in both the novel and the film, related to us by Nick, where he nonetheless wasn’t present.

The Great Gatsby is mostly a story of love and admiration, between the dainty, ditsy Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a distant relative of Nick’s, and Gatsby. Despite his riches, Gatsby is a man who still yearns for the heart of the woman he has loved for many years and because of whom he has become the man he is at present. Nick is a man trying to make ends meet after the Great War and enjoying the life of a bachelor at a time of roaring debauchery. This wasn’t quite the case in the novel, but fortunately, Luhrmann is better at subtlety here than usual.

The set and costume design, as should be expected from a Luhrmann production, is gorgeous (“full of money”, to borrow Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy’s voice), and when late at night during one party the girls splash around the pool at Gatsby’s place with some inflatable zebras, one has a feeling of awe at how many things are going on at once inside the frame. The director was in the mood for indulgence, however, and the party scenes sometimes feel like a bit of a sideshow to the central drama.

The film generally isn’t very visually inventive, with scenes of fast cars shot the same way every time to provoke an impression of confusion, and whereas the director’s digital tracking shots whipped the viewer from Montmartre to an operatic moon in a single movement in Moulin Rouge!, here they seem both irrelevant and less sophisticated as we rush from one side of the bay to the other without a sense of exhilaration. The special effects are sometimes stunningly bad, as it seems the technical team forgot that backgrounds or rear projection don’t always have to be blurred to such an extent it becomes a distracting wasteland of colourful ash. The film has little feeling for place or people, and too many of the scenes feel like they were shot on a sound stage.

The Great Gatsby’s final 10 minutes are a mess and show Luhrmann’s intention was not to reflect on loss but rather to skim over it completely. The final chapter of Fitzgerald’s novel was riveting because it showed how tenuous Gatsby’s connection to the rest of humanity was, while the film nearly glosses over this significant matter entirely.

There are a few references to Sunset Blvd., another film about a longing for the glamour of yesteryear (Nick asks Gatsby “Are you ready for your close-up?” and one character’s death in a swimming pool immediately brings to mind the bookends of Wyler’s film), but Luhrmann is mostly his energetic self, and we realise that while his fingerprints are all over the film, his creativity has more or less run dry. A long sequence of dissolves towards the end of the film is almost sad, and so is the lingering close-up on Nick’s face when he gives Gatsby a heartfelt compliment a few moments later.

Despite the raunchy parties, we all go home at the end feeling little for Luhrmann the host, and while there are a few rare moments of joy to be had, among them the introduction of the many partygoers — transforming the novel’s list into a memorable smorgasbord of characters — the overall impression is one of excess rather than excitement.

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

André Crous

How to Survive a PlagueUSA
4*

Director:
David France
Screenwriters:
David France
T. Woody Richman
Tyler H. Walk
Director of Photography:
Derek Wiesehahn

Running time: 120 minutes

Once, there was a terrible disease in the United States and around the world. It seemed to affect only homosexuals, and the discrimination against this already marginalised community increased as fear gripped the country over the fatality of the human immunodeficiency virus that led to blindness, deafness, sensitivity to the smallest illness, the unsightly Kaposi’s sarcoma, and almost certain death.

The 1980s and the first half of the 1990s were the worst for those suffering from the AIDS epidemic, as first the Reagan government was unwilling to address the epidemic (President Reagan infamously mentioned the word AIDS for the first time in public as late as 1987), the Ed Koch administration of New York City dragged its feet, and then the George H.W. Bush government didn’t push its drug administration and National Institute of Health to pursue research of the disease and of a potential cure with greater urgency.

How to Survive a Plague is a documentary that tells the story of how a group of activists brought down enormous pressure on the government, informed themselves about the virus, worked to raise public awareness and make the influential drug companies aware how their policies were affecting a large swathe of the population.

These activists formed part of a grassroots organisation called ACT UP, and there can be no doubt that it is because of the work of ACT UP that AIDS deaths have drastically decreased and medication is affordable to a very significant amount of people infected with the lethal virus. AIDS has not disappeared, but the AIDS crisis has, and it is because of the protests and the perseverance of ACT UP.

This documentary, comprised almost entirely of footage shot by dozens of individuals at the time of the epidemic that follows some of the main figures in the movement, starts in what is clearly presented as another lifetime: The appearance of the Twin Towers reminds us this was another lifetime. Labelled “Year 6”, the film opens in 1987 at a protest march against the policies of New York City Mayor Ed Koch, whom activist Ann Northrop beseeches to declare a state of emergency, so that those suffering in the emergency rooms, often for days before they are treated, usually assaulted by homophobic assailants right there in the waiting rooms, can be properly treated, with dignity.

There is incredible anger at Koch, and this anger, which extends to the government as a whole, fuels the movement for most of its existence, coupled with a strong urge to find a cure and stop the suffering and the death of thousands upon thousands of people. “It’s like living in a war,” says Peter Staley, a former bond trader on Wall Street, who is one of the main characters in the film. “All around me, friends are dropping dead. And you’re scared for your own life at the same time.”

The fear and the anger translated into many activists throwing caution to the wind and acting out in ways they may not have considered had they been healthy or unaffected, although some of the important individuals, like retired chemist Iris Long or Merck research scientist Emilio Emini, were not activists but participated because they cared, they knew they could make a difference and help all of these people in any way afflicted by HIV and AIDS.

Without a doubt, one of the most engaging figures is Peter Staley, who is good-looking, passionate and eloquent about the message of the movement. He scales government buildings to hang banners that proclaim “Silence = Death”, he appears on television programs to debate politicians about the government’s health policies, and he speaks at AIDS conferences that until then had largely excluded the voices of the movement. This last point is not really dealt with in any detail, however, and the film would have benefited from greater context.

We follow ACT UP’s fight against Burroughs Wellcome Company, the pharmaceutical firm that produced AZT, the first AIDS drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration, at the astronomical cost of $10,000 a year per patient, to getting DHPG approved, which would save the eyesight of tens of thousands of AIDS sufferers. Their actions are not just the result of their anger but also of an enormous amount of research, often by members who studied at Ivy League schools. They help people understand the virus and huddle with everyone else to come up with the best strategy to proceed. They would go on to form the Treatment and Data Committee, which would ultimately become the Treatment Action Group (TAG).

We follow the action as if someone had taken a camera back in time to record everything as it happened. Meetings in basements, interviews with some of the main people, family gatherings… everything is there in the film — even Staley riding his bike.

This film contains incredibly powerful moments, and they are almost always the result of inherent emotion on the faces of characters deeply affected by this epidemic, often the victims of decisions made by bureaucrats who don’t yet understand what ordinary people are going through on a day-to-day basis. And that is why it brings such insight to notice people like Ellen Cooper, who used to be an FDA regulator who had to explain the administration’s decisions to an angry ACT UP crowd, become AIDS activists themselves.

Interestingly, the scene that moved me more than anything else was also the most obviously filmic. It was the protest march against President George H.W. Bush’s apparent inaction on AIDS research. Tens of thousands of protesters flocked to Washington, D.C., and some even dumped the bones and ashes of their loved ones on the front lawn of the White House, their actions set to the eerie sounds of “Happiness” by Jónsi and Alex. This scene is incredibly powerful.

How to Survive a Plague tells a breathtaking story but falters towards the end when it starts using shorthand once Bill Clinton becomes president, skipping from 1993 to 1995, which is when research had picked up and the government agencies and public opinion had finally come around (with the exception of eternally homophobic Senator Jesse Helms) to agreeing that a cure should be sought. We are told these were the worst years, but we don’t know why. That is a terrible omission from the narrative.

However, suddenly seeing Mark Harrington (one of the leaders of TAG) and others appear as a much older man, knowing what that means, and hearing videographer Bill Bahlman confirm that “the dying was stopping,” quickly stuns us into silence.

Although it is only a few years since AIDS decimated entire communities, this film is a very vivid reminder of the trauma that accompanied the disease and shows how activism accelerated the research that eventually led to the cocktail, achieving major triumphs along the way, like getting DHPG approved and highlighting the absurdity of the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition on using condoms.

If you want to know anything about the struggle against AIDS, this is the film to watch.

Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes, when that day has come and gone, there’ll be people alive on this earth — gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white — who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought, and in some cases gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free. — Vito Russo

In a Bedroom (2012)

André Crous

In a BedroomPoland
2.5*

Director:
Tomasz Wasilewski
Screenwriter:
Tomasz Wasilewski
Director of Photography:
Marcin Martinez Swystun

Running time: 72 minutes

Original title: W sypialni

Not to be confused with the striking, New England-set 2002 masterpiece In the Bedroom, directed by Todd Field, the Polish In a Bedroom is a film that seems determined to gives us too little information every step of the way, using jump cuts not to create a sense of energy or rhythm but rather repetitive ellipses that quickly become tiresome and render the action uninvolving.

Edyta is a call girl who finds men over the Internet, but at their homes she drugs them and either takes their money or their food, or uses their out-of-town wife’s face cream. She doesn’t seem to have any particularly villainous intentions, but the reason she behaves this way is left unexplained until late in the film.

In the meantime, her anxious demeanour — which Tomasz Wasilewski conveys well enough and even manages to transfer to the viewer in a minimalistic but well-crafted scene taking place at a supermarket, where Edyta surreptitiously eats and drinks without paying — often makes her seem like she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and yet we know not why. Until she takes her first drag of a joint and immediately spills her secret: She has a son, somewhere, doing something, and she is not a part of his life, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Let’s not say anything important,” she asks Patryk, a very nice young man in whose company she spends the second half of the film. Her involvement with him starts off in a sequence so fragmented and opaque, we simply cannot root for them to be happy together, because so much information has been withheld. We meet Patryk for the first time when he knocks on the bathroom door, where Edyta has taken refuge while waiting for her date-rape drug to take effect.

But this moment comes at the end of a mysterious yet interesting sequence of moments in which we see her — always wearing the same dress — next to or close to men sleeping on their beds next to her, and once, bizarrely, dressed in a towel, next to a woman on a couch in the living room, whom she tries to wake her up. We don’t know whether these moments are real or not, but they end with the brutal intrusion of Patryk.

Such brutal intrusions occur from time to time, and Wasilewski is adept at using them to both utilise an emotion generated by his story and present it in a way we were not expecting. One example is when Patryk is on the phone to a friend who may have located his brother Bartek. He slams down the phone, and when he looks up, he notices Edyta around the corner, who has been eavesdropping. Instead of screaming at her, the cut to him in the rough seas, the camera loudly bobbing up and down in the water to the rhythm of his shortness of breath on the soundtrack, is a very good transition, but the scene lasts only a few seconds, and we don’t know when this takes place or even whether Edyta accompanied him to the beach.

The film is set in Warsaw, though Edyta is from Gdynia, and her being out of place is certainly significant, although we too frequently lack the detail to understand her behaviour or her desires. The camera is handheld but only slightly unsteady, which creates an unease that is difficult to pinpoint at first but a very good decision on the part of Wasilewski and director of photography Marcin Martinez Swystun.

The main problem In a Bedroom has is its presentation: The editing sometimes makes it seem this is only half a film, and all the interesting bits that connect the different shots and would have created a more cohesive narrative have been excised. The uneasiness this creates is, of course, the goal of the director, but for a viewer who knows very little about the central character and is saddled with her compulsive lying, we cannot even guess that what she says when she seems to be honest is in fact the truth, a fact that continues to alienate us until the very end.

This may be one of the most prudish hookers we’ve seen since Fellini’s Cabiria, but while a character arc would have helped us immensely to understand how she feels when she does this job, the disjointed narrative comprising wholly disconnected moments does little to inspire any kind of empathy, especially when she rejects the care of good Samaritans. A moment in an Internet café, when she is speaking to a potential client but we cannot hear the other person, is gorgeous, because it emphasises her utter loneliness, but in the end, the lack of empathy we have for a character whom we cannot understand and who does little to confront the pain and sadness in her own life except to keep running is not interesting at all.

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)

André Crous

The Place Beyond the PinesUSA
4*

Director:
Derek Cianfrance
Screenwriters:
Derek Cianfrance
Ben Coccio
Darius Marder
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 140 minutes

Derek Cianfrance is the unsung hero of contemporary cinema. Despite the grim and outright pessimistic perspective on relationships that he made so visible in his 2010 film Blue Valentine, in which a young man and woman constantly fight, bicker and make up, only to crush each other again — and the viewer, too — his films very realistically accentuate something very few others can boast of: the dark side of love.

The Place Beyond the Pines is a departure from his previous film in the sense that it doesn’t focus narrowly on the ups and many downs of a relationship but rather takes the consequences of fathers’ actions and project them over a generation to examine what happens down the line, although the director has much more interest in the drama of life than in any religious interpretation the viewer may bring to it.

The result, as is to be expected with Cianfrance, is not pretty, and yet life, though always complicated, is not without hope. There is a chance for characters to redeem themselves, but there is a big caveat: provided that other people don’t bring them down in the process. There are no guardian angels here, and even the actions that seem to spark a temporary reprieve for someone in dire need are usually motivated by the so-called protector’s selfish need for self-protection.

In this film, Cianfrance teams up with noted director of photography Sean Bobbitt, who has a background in documentary work (as does the director) and worked with Michael Winterbottom on the marvellous depiction of domestic turmoil in the underrated 1998 film Wonderland.

The collaboration produces a very gritty representation of life that includes drugs and violence. But these are merely props in a story that runs much deeper.

The film tells the story of Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) who earns the bare minimum riding a motorcycle inside a steel “globe of death,” and when he learns he has a son he drops everything to commit his life to being a good father. However, he is stubborn and aggressive and behaves like a real miscreant towards the man whose life he is making miserable: Kofi, the stepfather of his son. Kofi turns out to be one of the most interesting characters in the film, and he is portrayed with a quiet sense of dignity and fatherly love for a child who is not his own by actor Mahershala Ali.

Events transpire that lead to a confrontation with rookie police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), who is about to lose his naiveté about life as a policeman. His actions, as well as those of Glanton, will follow him for years to come and impact his relationship with his son.

The film is set in upstate New York, in the town of Schenectady, which is the approximate Mohawk translation of the film’s title. However, this factoid doesn’t feature anywhere in the story, which will certainly animate many post-screenings discussions at the bar (because, yes, you probably will need a drink after this film).

As we saw in the gorgeous but disturbing Little Children, the green foliage of New England towns can hide terrible secrets (of course, American Beauty had the same message), and The Place Beyond the Pines also seeks to pull the curtain back ever so slightly on the goings-on in the small town where its story takes place. Corruption, drugs and violence are just a few of the issues that the film raises, and they don’t even come close to the emotional violence done to us by these fictional characters.

As bookends, the opening and the closing shot are as magnificent as their meaning seems to be just out of reach. The opening Steadicam shot will make the viewer think of GoodFellas and its famous Copacabana tracking shot through the kitchen as we follow Ray Liotta (who also appears in this film) deeper and deeper into a place where he wields great influence. In Cianfrance’s film, it’s Gosling whose back is turned to the camera as he walks shirtless and supremely confidently through an amusement park in a shot that lasts nearly three and a half minutes from beginning to end; he is serene despite the wild sounds all around him as he heads towards the abovementioned “globe of death”, where — in a seemingly unbroken take — he will mount his motorcycle and perform the deadly stunt for a raucous crowd.

The film’s closing shot shows this same character’s son, many years later, taking up a motorcycle and driving off into the distance, this time across a peaceful autumn landscape that in no way represents his inner turmoil. Where he is headed we do not know (very likely he doesn’t know, either), and it would be incredibly simplistic and presumptuous to assume this scene neatly slots in with the events of the opening shot, but there is an unspoken hint of filiality between the two, and tenuous as the connection may be, we get a feeling of cohesion that is simply gorgeous.

Cianfrance’s films may be bleak, but his work proves the ever greater richness and complexity of life, and he should get more credit as a storyteller and a documenter of human emotion.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

André Crous

We Need to Talk About KevinUK/USA
4*

Director:
Lynne Ramsay
Screenwriters:
Lynne Ramsay
Rory Stewart Kinnear
Director of Photography:
Seamus McGarvey

Running time: 112 minutes

Young Kevin (Ezra Miller) is a monster. From the moment he is born until the night he is arrested at school, a creepy, stomach-turning malice is palpable, and at various points, the viewer will rightly wonder whether the film might unfold as an adaptation of The Omen.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a film about the effect a child’s killing rampage at his school has on his parents, but compared with other films like Beautiful Boy, Gus van Sant’s Elephant or the astonishing The Class (Klass) from Estonia, the focus here is purely on the mother and her very traumatic recollection of her son’s childhood.

The film does not pretend to be interested in the reasons behind Kevin’s actions, and this is an important point to keep in mind. Whether we eventually get any kind of explanation or motivation is quite beside the point — the point being an examination of his mother Eva’s (Tilda Swinton) struggle to make peace with the events of the past 18 years that culminated in the deaths of many innocent children, at the hands of her own flesh and blood.

But this does not mean the film is indifferent toward Kevin’s psychology. It is made evident that Kevin was an unwanted baby and that Eva did not plan on being a mother. It is impossible to tell whether the film assigns the blame to her for Kevin’s unstable character, but we do get a sense she is not blameless and may even be responsible for his ultimate breakdown.

The glimpses we get are all presented as wholly subjective impressions, and perhaps for the first time since Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, we are made aware of the colour red in almost every single scene. But unlike Roeg’s film, which was an effective exercise in making a stylized thriller, We Need to Talk About Kevin uses red as a way to visibly stain the memories of the main character. Such visual intelligence is rarely seen on the big screen.

It is also to the screenplay’s credit that Eva is at the centre of events since this is the only way for the film to present her son and his actions as perplexing without testing our patience and our desire for rational motivation. Kevin has no sense of shame and fearlessly humiliates his mother, who tries to rationalize his behaviour and refuses to discipline him. Often, Eva’s sense of culpability makes her blame herself for the petulance displayed by her son, who forever remains a stranger to her.

Eva’s emotional turmoil, her angst and her frustration at always being the victim are staged very competently, though the constant staring of the people she passes in her small town does become more than a little irritating.

Kevin is not a likeable boy, nor does he reveal any sense of a moral compass. He is allowed to be passive-aggressive throughout his entire childhood and always gets away with this kind of behaviour, perhaps because his family seems to be isolated from the rest of society. Though neither of his parents is particularly quick-witted, Kevin somehow manages to be a genius at social manipulation, and his dark side will send shivers down the spine of any adult viewer. But even if we accept him as just a loose cannon, this aspect of his character comes across as contrived.

With its focus on Eva’s ostracism in society and her stoic acceptance that the days ahead will be as gloomy as the days behind her, We Need to Talk About Kevin is likely to elicit a sense of frustration at this remarkably passive character who never fights against the injustices committed against her and who often remains quiet about her sense of helplessness.

A film about a child who is born unwanted and finally takes his revenge by mowing down his classmates is certainly one way to promote a pro-choice message, one I have no qualms with, but the radical characterization of Kevin as being something close to the Antichrist does not help the cause.

Though far from brilliant, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a potent and haunting depiction of a mother’s conflicted response to being rejected by her own son, made by a filmmaker clearly in control of her craft.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.