2010-2019

A Separation (2011)

André Crous

SeparationIran
4.5*

Director:
Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriter:
Asghar Farhadi
Director of Photography:
Mahmoud Kalari

Running time: 123 minutes

Original title: جدایی نادر از سیمین‎
Transliterated title: Jodaeiye Nader az Simin

A woman anxiously tries to cross a busy road in downtown Tehran to prevent an old man from being hit by oncoming traffic. She stands there, helpless, while cars whizz past her and the man fatefully shuffles closer and closer towards what seems like certain death.

Then, something unusual happens: There is a cut to a few hours later at an apartment, where the old man silently rocks back and forth, seemingly unaffected by the chaotic scene from earlier. This single cut, instead of being a cop-out on the part of director Asghar Farhadi, sets up a mystery that will last the entire running time of A Separation. Filmically, it is also a decision that makes perfect sense, since it immediately compels us, the viewers, to start figuring out what might have happened — and in so doing puts us in the same boat as the lion’s share of the film’s characters.

This incident, as well as another major event in the plot, when this same woman is tossed out of the flat and collapses in the stairwell, besides being a mystery that needs to be resolved by the end of the film, is also indirectly the result of the “separation” in the title. In the opening scene, staged so the viewers take the place of judges who will decide the fate of the couple that looks straight at us, we learn that husband and wife Nader and Simin want to separate so she can move to the United States while her husband stays behind to look after his elderly father, the man who would later seek to cross the road.

Though the situation and the motivations seem clear-cut enough, the film quickly reveals itself to be a very perceptive study of human drama, which puts forward an array of sometimes contradictory actions that cannot easily be understood or pigeonholed for the purposes of entertainment. Many small tragedies unfold along the way, not with melodramatic outbursts or big scenes of betrayal, but in very methodical increments that eventually escalate into a full-blown crisis.

Nader (Peyman Moaadi), who works during the day, cannot take care of his father and therefore enlists the help of a kindly woman named Razieh (Shahab Hosseini) to clean the flat and make sure the father doesn’t hurt himself. But on Razieh’s first day at work, the old man, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and rarely speaks, wets himself. This episode, which puts Razieh in a tough position, because she wants to help him without touching him — for, viewed in religious terms, that might mean she is committing a sin by making herself impure — is presented with genuine sympathy for both characters despite the filmmaker’s unmistakable view that it would be patently absurd for a religion to prevent someone from changing the soiled pants of an invalid.

The film’s focus is on the role of truth and lies in daily life, and it is Razieh who best captures this tension. She is obviously a good person and tells white lies to her husband in an effort to make his own life better, but moreover, her docile attitude is likely the result of her husband’s rigid religious beliefs. While Razieh’s lies finally catch up with her, a lie that Nader’s daughter tells keeps him from going to jail, and this ambiguity of life is what many filmmakers over time have sought to capture.

It is truly admirable for a film to take on such complicated matters and keep them in line with the legal drama that occupies a large part of the plot. Going way beyond the constraints of a film such as Kramer vs. Kramer, A Separation is insightful enough to realize the truth, at times, can make things more difficult rather than easier, and the film is a journey, for the characters and for the viewer, towards discovering the truth behind the lies and the reasons for people’s actions.

The one major flaw of A Separation is the film’s rapid-fire editing that often covers a single scene from multiple angles in quick succession without offering a new perspective on the material. However, against the background of intelligent, understated commentary on Iranian society and with a visible representation of many different kinds of characters, this remains an emotionally satisfying film that is a significant milestone in Iranian filmmaking.

Margaret (2011)

André Crous

Superlative performances make Margaret, director Kenneth Longeran’s gloomy comeback released more than half a decade after shooting, a charm.

MargaretUSA
3.5*

Director:
Kenneth Lonergan
Screenwriter:
Kenneth Lonergan
Director of Photography:
Ryszard Lenczewski

Running time: 150 minutes

By the time Margaret was finally released, it had aged so much it had probably passed its expiration date already.

Shot in 2005, it took a full six years before this film saw the light of day and was finally released for distribution. One of the main reasons for the delay was director Kenneth Lonergan’s insistence on a three-hour running time. Given enormous opposition on the part of the distributors, Lonergan eventually relented, and in the end, his film is 150 minutes long.

Two and a half hours is an ambitious length for a film whose plot can easily be summarised, and although the film evinces much of Lonergan’s skill as a storyteller, it doesn’t do him justice as a filmmaker. One of the best films of the first decade of the 21st century was his début feature, You Can Count On Me, a masterpiece of contemporary cinema that has a small story about infidelity and sibling rivalry and first made critics sit up and notice Mark Ruffalo.

Ruffalo makes a return in Margaret, though his brief presence is a great disappointment: He plays a significant role in the development of the film and yet he appears only in two short scenes — both in which, it must be said, he delivers a performance worthy of enormous praise.

Taking its title from the eponymous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that speaks of grief and a child’s response to the concept of death as it is represented by dead leaves, an emotional reaction as strong as an adult’s reaction to the death of a friend, or of oneself. The poem is very appropriate, as it encapsulates the essence of the film’s plot very accurately.

Lisa (Anna Paquin) is a sharp-tongued teenager living with her mother and younger brother in the Upper West Side in New York City. She will soon join her absent father (played by Lonergan) on a trip to New Mexico and decides to try to find a cowboy hat somewhere in upper Manhattan. She fails, until she notices a bus driver wearing one on the job. She runs after the bus, waving to get the driver’s attention, but the driver only waves back, and not paying attention, he runs a red light and crushes a woman pushing a shopping cart over the road.

When the police ask Lisa whether the light was red at the time of the accident, she looks over at the bus driver (Ruffalo) and when he looks back, she takes it as a sign there is silent complicity between them, and she decides to protect him by saying the light was green. But she is deeply affected by the woman who was run over, a woman who slipped the surly bonds of Earth while lying in Lisa’s arms, and she tracks down the woman’s family.

But Lisa is a piece of work. She is a bit of a stereotypical teenage girl, with all the drama and snotty retorts to her mother that go along with it, and she always tries to ensure she has the upper hand in conversations, even if that upper hand is (usually) gained with sarcasm. She is immature even as she verbally abuses and bullies many people around her, breaking hearts and testing their good will towards her. Over the course of the film, she steamrolls many men in her life, and many women, including her mother, are also terribly hurt. The film is a good companion piece to Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, a film that navigates with an equally despicable but more vulnerable teenage protagonist, though Margaret lacks the latter film’s tight focus.

The film is not always easy to watch, but Lonergan finds raw emotion in the everyday details of New York that are dark but not without hope and presents that emotion with compelling clarity. Sometimes he veers a bit too far toward so-called gritty realism by inserting seemingly random fragments of footage into his scenes — a ferry on the Hudson here, a seagull soaring over Central Park there — but these moments do not contribute as powerfully to the viewer’s impression of realism as the cast’s performances.

Unfortunately, the film’s release puts it at a slight disadvantage, as the obviously significant events of 9/11 and the Iraq War seemed outdated upon its release, though the theme of revenge, for the death of one woman on the street, or thousands in the two World Trade Centre towers or in the Middle East, is obviously very relevant to the plot itself. This objection will certainly fade with time, and perhaps the film can be more fully appreciated after an interval of another six years.

Margaret is, if not a brilliant piece of cinema, at least another affirmation of Lonergan’s talent as a screenwriter and artist of human emotions. Paquin plays her vile character with great passion and supports the equally superlative cast, from J. Smith-Cameron, who plays her mother, a theatre actress, to side characters like the happy-go-lucky Paul (Kieran Culkin).

7 Days in Havana (2012)

André Crous

7 Days in HavanaSpain
3*

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

Original title: 7 días en La Habana

Running time: 129 minutes

Anthology films are often a bad idea. The exceptions to the rule are Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You — although, truth be told, they aren’t all that good, either.

7 Days in Havana is the same as most other anthology films: up and down, but mostly down, with only the city to keep it all from falling apart. Well, that’s not entirely true, but, for the large part, the spectrum of tones and approaches in 7 Days in Havana is as varied as the filmmakers themselves are, with almost no attempt to reconcile the different storylines. The list of filmmakers involved in this production is made up of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Médem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabío and Laurent Cantet.

The title says it all: 7 Days in Havana takes place over a week in the Cuban capital, and each day has been assigned to a different filmmaker, with his own cast and crew, though there is nothing to prevent “Sunday” from being “Tuesday,” except for one or two linking themes or character types. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday have scenes set at the fancy Hotel Nacional de Cuba; Monday and Tuesday have mostly English dialogue, while the rest of the film is in Spanish; Thursday and Friday have almost no dialogue; Monday has an LGBT character, Friday has a gay character, and Saturday has a gay character. One actor playing a taxi driver pops up now and again, and a young singer named Cecilia (Melvis Estévez) has an important role in two stories, but, even as a character, the city of Havana is strangely neglected, and the stories all seem to be sadly disconnected from each other.

Judged on their own, some of the episodes are not uninteresting and have some potential, but others have clearly just been added for the sake of completing the simple-minded theme of “seven days, seven stories, seven directors.”

The film starts off on firm footing, as a young actor from California (Josh Hutcherson), who is taking some classes in Havana and has a rudimentary grasp of Spanish, arrives — and we realize it was his point of view over the city that we shared during the opening credits, as the airplane came in to land. As so many tourists before him, he is in Havana to have fun and eventually gets involved with a girl who isn’t exactly what she seems. It’s a nice story, it has the requisite “secret” that is revealed, and it doesn’t drag.

The second story is equally good, though much thinner. In one of the film’s rare moments of comedy, we can hear someone throwing up while we are shown the black screen that always separates one day (and one story) from the next. When there is a cut to the actual scene, Emir Kusturica looks up at us from an underground bathroom in a Havana bar. He doesn’t look good, but the camera follows him — in a dazzling, unbroken take — upstairs, out of the bar, where his taxi driver finds him, puts him in the car and drives him to the hotel while Kusturica phones up his wife in Serbia and makes a drunken plea to her to listen to him. More action continues at the hotel, and everything is followed by the single camera that stays on him. Kusturica has no pretensions about himself or his image, and what we get is such self-deprecation that it is completely disarming and eventually utterly engaging. Little of note happens, but Kusturica is one of the strongest, most interesting cast members of the entire production and whenever the camera is on him, we are spellbound.

The third film is at times laughable, as Cecilia’s voice constantly features on the soundtrack as she sings in sugary tones about love and romance, while she herself is cheating on her handsome Puerto Rican baseball player boyfriend. However, the actress is charming, and it is a relief to find her again in the sixth story.

In the fourth, filmmaker Elia Suleiman takes his usual Buster Keaton–like tack and endures life around him in this strange city with an expressionless face. This episode pokes gentle fun at Fidel Castro, as the movements of Suleiman are punctuated by him coming back to his hotel at various points during the day to find the president on television, still orating at the same podium.

The fifth film, by Gaspar Noé, is a disaster and could potentially be the point at which most viewers flee from the theatre. When a girl’s parents find her in bed with another girl, they send her to be cleansed, and this process — during which she is ritually smeared with oils and rubbed with leaves and undergoes an immersion baptism by torchlight — is accompanied by a seemingly never-ending deep bass heartbeat on the soundtrack. The film is pointless, monotonous and a total and utter waste of time.

The weekend films (days six and seven) are much lighter than the others and benefit from some great ensemble acting. Juan Carlos Tabío, the only Cuban director on the production, made the sixth film, about a hot day in the kitchen, and on the Sunday an old woman gathers all the people in her building to help make real the dream she had about a Virgin Mary statue in her living room.

Some of the films have no respect for the 24-hour timeline, and there is no transition other than a blank screen. Few of them warrant the 15-minute running time they have, and that film by Noé is enough to make you get up and leave. Overall, 7 Days in Havana doesn’t show many sides of Havana, and the superficial sides it does have are only fragments of a very confused production.

Directors (in chronological order):
Benicio Del Toro
Pablo Trapero
Julio Médem
Elia Suleiman
Gaspar Noé
Juan Carlos Tabío
Laurent Cantet

The Beloved (2011)

André Crous

Les Bien-AimesFrance
1.5*

Director:
Christophe Honoré
Screenwriter:
Christophe Honoré
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Les Bien-aimés

Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it’s any good.

The Beloved (Les Bien-aimés) tries to be everything and nothing at once, incorporating some terribly dramatic events into a film that shrieks with ostentation yet encourages us to forgive its sins because it is set to the melody of so-called love. Over a period of more than four decades, in a globe-trotting tale played out in locales from Paris to Prague to Montreal, we get a look at the world’s oldest profession with many songs that are somehow supposed to lift the mood but only make the viewer roll her eyes at the exasperating ordeal.

In a very promising opening scene that takes place in Paris during the early 1960s and pays homage to François Truffaut, we see plenty of women parading their legs onscreen. These legs are clearly meant to seduce, and they work their charms a little too well: A Frenchman mistakes Madeleine, a young demoiselle leisurely lingering on the sidewalk, for a prostitute. But she has nothing better to do and, seizing the day for a quick buck, unexpectedly finds her calling.

News travels fast, and before long, Madeleine is approached by every Tom, Dick and Harry for a good time. One day, she meets a young Czech doctor called Jaromil — for some confounding reason played by Raša Bukvić, a Franco-Serb actor who speaks Czech with an accent — and elopes with him to Czechoslovakia, shortly before 1968.

Love can make the world turn round, but it makes this film fall flat on its face, and we know things are going pear-shaped when the actors soon start belting out dreadfully dull songs on the street. The songs are too long, too numerous and too boring to make us care about the characters, and while (or, perhaps, because) director Christophe Honoré tries to jazz up his sets by using bright colours or, on one occasion, lighting his characters with an enormous spotlight, the action has a consistently phoney feel to it.

As the young Madeleine, Ludivine Seignier does bring a certain shine to the boggy waters of the plot, but once she disappears, any interest disappears along with her. As an adult, she is played by the grand dame of French acting, Catherine Deneuve, and Madeleine’s daughter Vera is also Deneuve’s real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Perhaps the casting of these two actresses as the film’s mother-daughter duo of nymphos could have provided some wonderful moments of chemistry, but in this event, it brings nothing of note to the production and appears as gratuitous as much else onscreen.

Vera quickly takes centre stage and has an interesting face but fails to be a force strong enough to join the rambling series of plot developments. At one point, it seems we should believe she has magical powers of seduction since she more or less turns a gay man straight, but even this ridiculous development has no pay-off since there are merely hints at complex human emotions without any real engagement of the questions raised.

Furthermore, we get scenes built around narrative threads no less bleak than Prague Spring, AIDS and 9/11, without any attempt to integrate such topics in a less than flippant fashion. Honoré tries to be both courageous and playful but ends up with a very cowardly treatment of his material.

By the time the very Czech Miloš Forman (taking over as the elderly Jaromil from the youthful Bukvić) appears as a bumbling fool halfway through the film, serving as a kind of comic relief, it is with a sense of dread that we realize this is as good as it will get.

At 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Beloved is grossly overweight, and despite the 40 years covered in the script, one has the sense we’ve spent half the time looking at senseless close-ups of the mole on Mastroianni’s face and listening to an excessive amount of second-tier songs. The sight of people like Deneuve prostituting her talents for an awful film like this one makes the viewer plunge into despair. There is nothing to love here, so move along.

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

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

André Crous

Beasts of the Southern WildUSA
4*

Director:
Benh Zeitlin
Screenwriters:
Lucy Alibar
Benh Zeitlin
Director of Photography:
Ben Richardson

Running time: 93 minutes

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a masterfully directed piece of naturalism that puts under the microscope nature and the people who treat it as a friend, even a relative, as it weaves together their daily routines in a way that integrates magical fantasy with hard reality. If you are looking for a strong narrative, you will not find it here, but the power of the film’s intimacy with its characters and their dreams is outstanding.

The film is all the more remarkable for being the début feature of Benh Zeitlin, who co-wrote the screenplay and contributed to the majestic score that often adds a very distinct dash of optimism to the events. Zeitlin’s film, set on the bayou around New Orleans, shows an encouraging affinity to George Washington, David Gordon Green’s strong and perceptive first feature released in 2000, which took place in North Carolina and whose plot was limited to small but meaningful interactions between children. Green’s film generated a lot of critical praise at the time for its honest depiction of children living in poverty and the world they create for themselves to make their physical and social circumstances bearable.

Zeitlin approaches his subjects — a 6-year-old girl called Hushpuppy (played by the astonishing first-time performer Quvenzhané Wallis) and her sickly father, Wink — with understanding and curiosity, and the story never seems contrived or judgmental. Such compassion for the characters is not seen very often on film, but Zeitlin has the gift to evoke our empathy with his interest.

The plot is almost secondary to the cohesive network of very naturalistic overtones onscreen, though the events are certainly significant. Around the time of a hurricane, which may or may not be Katrina, on a bayou around New Orleans called “The Bathtub”, Hushpuppy and Wink do their best to survive the daily turmoil of living in poverty. As Hushpuppy’s mother is no longer with them, the girl speaks to her mother’s clothes, which seem to speak back in very unsentimental tones.

The film contains one of the most tension-laden hurricane scenes I have ever seen. Short though it is, mostly relying on the sound of the constant rush of water from the ceiling of Hushpuppy’s and Wink’s makeshift shack in the forest, it packs a punch and reminds us of the profound effect a strong soundtrack can have on the audience.

The reality of the characters comprises their immediate surroundings but also their fantasies and their memories, and the representation of these is captivating, even hypnotic. We are introduced, early on in the film, to enormous fabled creatures called Aurochs that pique Hushpuppy’s interest in the mythical. Whether they are real, and what exactly they might represent, is open to interpretation, but their presence is a surprising yet wholly justifiable tactic that supports an ever so slight magical-realist ambience. This is strengthened by imagery such as characters constructing a houseboat on the high waters brought by the hurricane, calling to mind Noah’s Ark.

The young Wallis never sets a foot wrong as her character is self-confident and focused without being smart-alecky or playing older than her age. It is a shame, however, that the screenplay doesn’t expand her character so that we may know more about her friendships beyond the confines of the crude quarters Hushpuppy and her father call home.

But the way in which her point of view is communicated to us cannot be faulted. It is her own — rather than a generic “childlike” — perspective, as very intimate details are related with images and sounds that echo her own emotions. When Hushpuppy puts her ear to the chest of a pig or a chicken, she (and we, too) can hear the heartbeat of the animals. And the fragments of memories that she has of her mother, that she either personally witnessed or was told of by her father, are infused with a very openly romanticized sensibility that tells us something about the characters as well as the actual events.

From what we can gather, Hushpuppy’s father tries to raise her as a boy, always calling her “dude” or “man” and engaging in arm-wrestling matches with her. This line of thought isn’t really pursued by the director, but certainly contributes to a feeling that these individuals have more history and complexity to them than films generally tend to demonstrate.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is very moving most of the way and elicits wonder and admiration rather than excitement, especially when the action moves to less gritty locations such as an underground nightclub or a FEMA shelter.

As the ice caps melt, Hushpuppy tells us in voiceover that the world relies on its many parts fitting together just right. The narration is well-executed and effective, but the words don’t cast quite the same spell as those of characters in David Gordon Green’s films.

The film is a remarkable achievement for a first effort, and though a tighter narrative would have helped the viewer latch on more firmly to the events onscreen, this is an auspicious start to a great career in storytelling.

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

Delicacy (2011)

André Crous

La delicatesseFrance
3*

Directors:
David Foenkinos
Stéphane Foenkinos
Screenwriter:
David Foenkinos
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 108 minutes

Original title: La délicatesse

That first half-hour of Delicacy (La Délicatesse) is as gorgeous and as heart-rending as the famous kissing scene in Amélie, whose quirky Audrey Tautou also takes the lead here. It is a gamble the directors, brothers David and Stéphane Foenkinos, bet on big, but even while we are watching it we know deep down they could never keep up with the rhythm, the beauty or the emotion captured in those first few moments of the story.

If only the rest of the film were as delicate as its first 30 minutes.

The moments are all big, and few films — with the notable exception of Mike Nichols’ Closer, a film that alternated the meeting and the breakup scenes in many different relationships — have gone down this road before. The moments certainly evoke feelings of near-ecstasy in the viewer, as the acting is smooth, yet we sense a breathtaking rollercoaster in the lives of these characters we still know so little about.

The film opens at a café, where a young man is sitting alone at a table. Close by, he sees a woman entering, who takes a seat and scans the menu in front of her. He tells himself he will go and talk to her if she settles on … apricot juice. She orders coffee, then corrects herself to order apricot juice instead, and smiles in the direction of the young man. Next, we see them right outside the café as they are leaving arm in arm, celebrating the anniversary of this first encounter.

Many similar moments follow, in which time is gently elided, from first meeting and celebrating the anniversary to getting married and discussing having children, before the young man is suddenly run over by a car. All of this happens in the first 30 minutes, but luckily the rest of the film is not a dreary series of shots that highlight her loss. It is, rather, a look at the difficulty of having a new relationship while her memories continue to affect the way she behaves.

The film is based on a book by one of the directors, David Foenkinos, but the two brothers have beautifully adapted the story for the big screen with spectacular transitions early on and a very thoughtful use of the colour red, a tactic borrowed from a film explicitly featured in the background of an early scene, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

The colour red, manifested either in the clothing worn by main character Nathalie (Tautou), the strong disco lights or the interior of a restaurant she visits with her boss on a disastrous dinner date, clearly refers to love or a bleeding heart, but as time goes by the red mostly disappears, which raises all kinds of questions about the character, who certainly hasn’t forgotten her late husband François.

The directors’ vision becomes a bit muddled as the story progresses. A shy introvert called Markus (François Damiens) who works with Nathalie takes a liking to her, and though he isn’t much to look at, she finds he understands her, and they always have something to talk about. This is, however, an instance where Delicacy would have greatly benefited from those seamless time jumps so frequent at the beginning of the film, as we don’t have any idea what this relationship might look like in a few months or a few years.

One important thing the film gets right is the difficulty of moving on after a relationship, especially one that ended as unexpectedly as the one between Nathalie and François. Scenes where we can see her wondering whether she should delete his number from her phone or toss out his toothbrush are poignant and show an understanding of the underlying pain in her life that can take a very long time to heal.

Nathalie’s interaction with friends is another element that deserves praise, as the friends want the best for her without things changing too much. But that is exactly what happens when she meets Markus. He seems to be perfect for her right now, but her friends don’t agree because he is not as good-looking or as outwardly interesting as François was, and she has to find a compromise.

But the film is rather superficial in its depiction of this dilemma, and we never really get a sense she is struggling to juggle all these new developments in her life.

Delicacy is not another Amélie, but it is certainly charming, and a final scene is particularly honest about the role of memory and pain in relationships, and the place two people must find in each other’s lives in order to make things work.

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

We Have a Pope (2011)

André Crous

Habemus papamItaly
2.5*

Director:
Nanni Moretti
Screenwriters:
Nanni Moretti
Francesco Piccolo
Federica Pontremoli
Director of Photography:
Alessandro Pesci

Running time: 102 minutes

Original title: Habemus papam

The election of a pope is nothing to be flippant about. Even for non-Catholics, the brief period of time that marks the end of one papacy and encompasses the conclave — during which a successor is chosen — and the eventual appearance of the new pope on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square piques interest like few other events.

When the College of Cardinals has chosen a new pope, by secret ballot and with all the cardinals in the running, white smoke rises from the chimney on top of the Sistine Chapel. In Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope (from the Latin “Habemus papam”, the phrase spoken by the protodeacon of the College of Cardinals to announce the election of the new pope), the cardinal who is elected has a panic attack moments before he is to appear on the balcony and flees to his chambers to shun the burden the office brings.

Such anxiety is to be expected, of course, and in fact, it is normal for the elected pontiff to break down in tears upon realizing what he is about to take on, namely dominion over a billion subjects. However, in this film, the cardinal, named Melville (Michel Piccoli), is out of his depth and has such insecurity that his staff seeks out the help of a noted psychoanalyst (Moretti) to help the Holy Father through this difficult time and eventually get him to the balcony.

The rest of the film is a long wait for the big moment. While we wait, we learn very little about the mystical figure that is Cardinal Melville, though it becomes clear he would prefer to act rather than pontificate. The psychoanalyst’s hands are also tied because he cannot use the normal psychoanalytical tools in this case: Questions about Melville’s relationship with his mother, his fantasies and his sexual desires are, naturally, all strictly verboten.

When Melville loses his way in Rome and ends up on a late-night bus, mumbling to himself, we see a very human (not only vulnerable, but frail) side to him, and though he seems to be a gentle soul, the idea of him writing an encyclical is quite absurd. This man cannot be pope. He is not only emotionally and psychologically but also — and this is where the film utterly fails — intellectually ill-equipped for the papacy.

This last piece of information is problematic in light of the fact that the cardinals have spent a great deal of time with him prior to his election, but have elected him nonetheless. Whatever the viewer’s personal beliefs about the possibility of a pope elected by divine guidance, it would seem patently obvious this situation is very unlikely to occur if the cardinals had some sense of their colleague.

Unfortunately, we are not afforded any such look at the man who would be pope and cannot accurately judge whether the cardinals were mistaken or blind. Even if one believes the conclave works according to the will of God, the film remains flawed because the ultimate resolution will be deeply unsatisfactory.

The idea of being pope, of having such immense power, must leave one breathless, and thus there is ample room to empathize with dear Cardinal Melville. In a very powerful moment, during the conclave, the fear the other cardinals have that any one of them will be elected is communicated to the viewer by means of a very effective voiceover that mirrors Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane when he asks his father to let “the cup pass from [him].”

But never again do we see the future pope ask anything of God (he thanks God for even less), and though there may be speculation he has lost his faith, the film provides too little for the viewer to assume anything; on the contrary, We Have a Pope revels in its own timorousness and defies our expectations to get any closer to Melville than the cardinals or the psychoanalyst.

The humanization of the pope is a wonderful starting point, as was Nicos Kazantzakis’ treatment of Christ in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, for example, but no one simply gets dropped inside the College of Cardinals, much less elected pope, if he has not proved some leadership skills. Such leadership, alas, cannot be detected in the role played by Piccoli, and therefore the whole premise of the film is undermined.

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

In Darkness (2011)

André Crous

In Darkness, a story about Jews trapped in a sewer for more than a year during the war, is engaging but mostly offers more of the same.

In DarknessPoland
3.5*

Director:
Agnieszka Holland
Screenwriter:
David F. Shamoon
Director of Photography:
Jolanta Dylewska

Running time: 145 minutes

Original title: W ciemności

Films about the Holocaust are important because they remind us what tragedy is possible when people turn against each other in struggles of religion, power and race. Having firmly established the misery and the hardship of the events that took place, though, many filmmakers are unfortunately tempted by the subject matter to tell stories that are not very distinct from the ones that came before.

Schindler’s List is by far the best-known film about oppression during World War II, but the story about an ethnic German who saved hundreds of Jews by employing them in his factories in Moravia and not letting them be deported to the concentration camps was criticized by Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-hour documentary, Shoah, is filled with interviews of those who suffered through the events of the time.

A major criticism is that such stories of salvation can blind the viewer to the ensemble of despair that hung over the Jewish population across Europe at the time. However, while this is an important point to make, that does not mean the films themselves only have to be doom and gloom from beginning to end.

Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) was very successful in its presentation of a father who, to keep his son entertained and not expose him to the horrors of war, pretended the concentration camp was a theatre and they were all only playing parts.

On the other hand, the extraordinary Hungarian film Fateless (Sorstalanság) had as its central character a teenage boy on the verge of adulthood who doesn’t understand everything that is happening to him, his friends and his family, but for whom the experience of being sent to Buchenwald and spending his time with other prisoners was not at all terrible, despite his near-death, because the enduring support of everyone in the camp was so strong.

The Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland doesn’t bring much new to the screen with In Darkness, her telling of the real-life story of a group of Jews in Lwów in eastern Poland (what is today Lviv in Ukraine) who were saved by a sewer worker called Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) who kept them underground, away from harm, for 14 months during the war.

Holland has churned out impressive films in the past, most notable among them 1990’s Europa Europa, which focused on Nazi-occupied Poland, sometimes with evident irony, and the ordeal of a fair-haired Jewish boy who pretends he is German (or Aryan) in order to survive. She was also behind the formidable 2012 miniseries Burning Bush (Hořící keř), which examined how slowly the wheels of history turned after the 1969 self-immolation of the Czechoslovak Jan Palach in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Prague a few months earlier.

In Darkness’s presentation of a man who starts off demanding money from those he hides deep down in the sewer system, but eventually grows fond of the people and sees it as his duty to protect them from the authorities — some of whom are very good acquaintances from before the war — really doesn’t offer a fresh perspective or a new twist on Oskar Schindler’s story.

Socha is patrolling the sewers with a friend when they find a group of Jews escaping their ghetto shortly before it is razed to the ground. He accepts their bribe and helps them to a safe area inside the vast system of underground tunnels filled with rats and the smell of putrefaction.

The central premise is strong, as viewers will almost certainly ask themselves whether they would do the same thing in such a situation, but the story of people who betray their Jewish neighbours for the sake of a handout — in this film a mere 500 złoty — has been told many times before in as many countries as have made Holocaust films.

Though the viewer can easily respect this man, it remains a bit of a mystery why (despite his objections that the Jews only whine about their circumstances and do not appreciate all that he is doing to protect them) he risks his life to save them.

What Holland and screenwriter David F. Shamoon do succeed in conveying is not the grand spectacle of life under oppression, but the human dimension of people being stuck together in a small space with little food and fresh water and with no certainty about their future. In Darkness contains some beautiful moments of realization on the part of a character who understands that there can be unexpected goodness in another person, and it is these rare glimpses of unadulterated humanity that make the film engaging. There are also a number of scenes that make it clear what the characters feel and how frustrated they are by living in such close quarters with people they either despise or lust after.

This is a film that would have had more power if it had not been so similar to so many others. Shoah’s Lanzmann decried Holocaust stories that had a happy ending, and even though we see dead bodies in this film, it was made to examine the characters themselves rather than the situation above ground. In Darkness is technically accomplished, and it does have moments of real human emotion effectively communicated, but mostly it doesn’t offer any kind of fresh perspective on Jewish hardship under the Nazis, and that means that ultimately the film lacks real punch.

The Assault (2010)

André Crous

assautFrance
2*

Director:
Julien Leclercq
Screenwriters:
Simon Moutairou
Julien Leclercq
Director of Photography:
Thierry Pouget

Original title: L’assaut

Running time: 85 minutes

A very daring assault of a hijacked Air France aircraft took place Dec. 26, 1994, on runway three of Marignane Airport on the outskirts of Marseille. Broadcast live on national television, images of the successful rescue of the passengers onboard and the neutralization of the hijackers, four members of the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), made heroes of the SWAT team that carried out the operation.

It would later be determined that the gunmen wanted to redirect the airplane to Paris and send it on a collision course toward the Eiffel Tower. After the Algerian government had nullified the election victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut) in 1991, the latter’s more militant GIA wing tried for years to overthrow the government and install an Islamic State. Algeria sought the help of their former colonial power, and the GIA targeted France in order to make its displeasure known.

These events show enormous potential for either a straightforward action film with a dimension of human drama (think back to the stories of the passengers in United 93, in which the terrorists’ target eerily resembles the one in this film) or a more subtle evocation of the bickering that unfolded in the corridors of power while people’s lives hung in the balance.

Instead, The Assault opts for an awkward three-legged balancing act that, given its running time — a breezy 85 minutes — provides too little information for the viewer to be involved at any level. In fact, some of the main characters are never even introduced by name, and we get no real motivation for the actions of the fighters. The film simply wants us to infer they are bad because they are Islamic terrorists (or, in the parlance of any U.S. politician, “radical” Islamic terrorists). And yet the passengers also remain a vast mass of individuals with whom we cannot possibly relate, except to infer, once again, they are good, simply because they are not Islamic terrorists.

This lack of sophistication in the screenplay is reflected by the film’s colour palette: The images have been desaturated to the point where all we see are shades of blue, black and grey. These colours would suit a post-apocalyptic movie just fine, but in The Assault, where so much depends on the interaction of real people, all of them involved in a struggle for life and death, such cold, alienating colours drain the life from the story.

While the hijackers are waiting, first on the runway in Algiers, then on the runway in Marseille, a French special operations team is preparing to storm the plane. One of the officers is called Thierry, and we know he will have some special role because his wife is always watching the events on the television screen, seemingly in a state of permanent anguish, her face contorted to express her fears as visibly as possible, while she is either sniffing or sobbing in quiet desperation.

The ringleader of the gang of four on the plane is Yahia, though we have no idea what his plan is or whether he has a plan at all: Throughout the film, he seems oddly confused, his non-stop screaming making him appear to be a hysterical nut job driven by emotion rather than ideology.

The third main character is Carole, the always-confident aid at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, who assures things get done even though she gets none of the recognition she deserves. This political power play could have been fascinating, but sadly the film spends little time mulling over its own story.

None of the characters has a back story, and therefore no one’s actions can really be explained — nor can anyone’s demise elicit feelings of sadness or loss from the viewer. We need not sympathize with the terrorists, but some clear motive for their actions would have gone a long way toward our understanding of their mission, aside from the continual cries of “Allahu akbar” (God is great).

Films about terrorists are usually approached with much more circumspection regarding the characters involved and the political or religious driving force behind their actions, but The Assault doesn’t seem very interested in telling its story in a more than cursory way. This is a shame, since similar incidents from the past, from Munich in 1972 to Waco in 1993 and New York City in 2001, have captivated audiences around the world who watched these events unfold live on television.

But we are not captivated, because the characters are remarkably superficial. The story is inherently interesting, but very little thought has been put into its execution, and the result is this sad excuse for a “based on true events” biopic. It should have been made for television.

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

Only God Forgives (2013)

André Crous

Only God ForgivesDenmark/Thailand
2*

Director:
Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter:
Nicolas Winding Refn
Director of Photography:
Larry Smith

Running time: 90 minutes

Luis Buñuel’s 1929 short film, Un chien andalou, is well-known for one good reason: In a close-up, it shows a human eye sliced by a razor.

In Only God Forgives, cult director Nicolas Winding Refn references this image — in full colour — at the climax of a scene that sees a man lose not only his eyes but also his ears, his arms and his legs as well, all in near-silence, except for the constant, piercing scream of the victim.

Despite a torrent of violence and most scenes bathed in deep red by either blood, red neon lights or both, Refn maintains a curious and alienating distance from his characters, which means we don’t much care for these individuals who are under constant threat of execution by the sadistic blade-wielding policeman Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).

Chang is one of two enigmatic central figures responsible for the many sordid incidents of blood loss. The other is Julian, a big drug smuggler in the Bangkok underworld, played by Ryan Gosling, who also starred in Refn’s widely beloved but overhyped Drive.

At the beginning of the film, Chang is called to the scene when a 16-year-old prostitute is found dead in Bangkok. For some inexplicable reason, her killer, an American named Billy, has decided it would be a good idea to stay behind. The girl’s father seeks revenge, and Chang allows the man to beat Billy to a lifeless pulp.

But then, suddenly, Chang turns on the father and pulls a sword from behind his back (which doesn’t, however, impede his ability to chase a criminal at full speed down the road in another scene later in the film) before slicing the man’s arm clean off.

It turns out Billy is Julian’s elder brother, and when Billy dies, their ice-cold mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) flies into town to demand justice be served.

These early scenes are soaked in red light, which would seem seedy if the visual metaphor of blood wasn’t so ridiculously obvious. The stone-faced Julian, who says little and expresses even less, is unwilling to avenge his brother until his mother forces action from him through emotional manipulation wrought by a personality verging on that of a dominatrix.

The film oozes with style, and the ambience of the opening act is electric thanks to the dozens of crimson-cloaked objects highlighted by the deep shadows that envelop them. There are hints of film noir, for example, the meshwork of shadows that outline the jasmine rays of neon as light is cast through a cement barrier, but without a narrator or a serious femme fatale, the film doesn’t take advantage of the genre.

As he did with Drive, Refn dedicates Only God Forgives to Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose El Topo and The Holy Mountain were Surrealist explorations of spirituality. Refn doesn’t do much with spirituality, but the surreal brutality of his work, amped up even from the grisly acts of Drive, is clearly a point that connects the two filmmakers.

A few moments in the film do stand out as particularly impressive. One is a scene in which Julian points a gun at the man who killed his brother, who emotionally confesses to the crime but does so in complete silence, as the music on the soundtrack is the only sound we hear.

Another scene of spectacular filmmaking is the big fight between the otherwise expressionless leads, Chang and Julian, which is accompanied by a Cliff Martinez composition that mixes music produced by an organ and a synthesizer. Unfortunately, Refn’s insistence on inserting multiple push-ins on a statue of a man fighting is as annoying as the statue is irrelevant.

While the images may suggest artifice, the characters are even worse, with barely a hint of an arc between them. Julian is calm and silent (Gosling has fewer than 10 lines of dialogue in the entire film), even though he is supposed to be an important figure in the drug trade. Crystal could potentially be a source of great amusement, as she verbally decimates an unsuspecting hotel receptionist upon her arrival in Bangkok, but she ultimately doesn’t push back against the dark lord of the narrative, police officer Chang.

Chang seems to be a villain of steel, who dodges bullets and fights like a god. He is simply invincible, and despite the single scene of him and his young, tender wife, we get absolutely no sense of his thinking and have no idea what drives him.

Refn’s visual creativity is not consistent, however, as is made obvious when some menacing characters, killers for hire, arrive on the scene in slow motion — which apparently somehow should accentuate their wickedness.

Only God Forgives tries to seem artistic by composing beautiful images and an interesting soundtrack that at times calls to mind the work of Ligeti, but its story verges on being one-dimensional, and it is difficult to care about any of the characters. It seems to enjoy the scenes of its own brutality, including when a long metal spike is pushed right through someone’s eardrum, but the film has no interest in presenting a story worthy of our attention.

 

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