2010-2019

Whale Valley (2013)

André Crous

Geographical isolation and emotional remoteness go hand in hand in Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s personal short, Whale Valley.

Whale ValleyIceland
3.5*

Director:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Screenwriter:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Director of Photography:
Gunnar Auðunn Jóhannsson

Running time: 15 minutes

Original title: Hvalfjörður

The titular whale is already dead and being sliced up in silence to feed the small community. Meanwhile, taciturn teenage Arnar is still thinking about taking his own life. Or is he?

The 15-minute Whale Valley takes place almost entirely on a farm in rural Iceland. The blustery, barren landscape mirrors Arnar’s unexplained but clearly unbalanced emotional state. This atmospheric resonance with inner turmoil (“nature in sympathy”) is an element that director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson would go on to develop three years later in his feature film début, Heartstone (Hjartasteinn). But the brutality of his later work is much more discreet here. The film’s focus is sharply trained on the climax, which is hard to watch, although not unexpected.

The first time we see Arnar (one can assume the director’s choice of this name, his own middle name, was deliberate), he has a noose around his neck. He is standing on a flimsy wooden crate inside the farm shed, his body rigid with fear but awkwardly twitching. So, will he or won’t he? We don’t have to wonder long, as his younger brother, Ívar, happens upon him. In shock, he runs off into the distance, and out of fear that Ívar would tell their parents, Arnar tears after and quickly catches up to him. This is their secret, but we don’t know much more. Was this Arnar’s first time trying? Was this the first time that Ívar found him? And wouldn’t a noose hanging in the shed draw attention and suspicion from their father?

We don’t get answers to any of these questions. In fact, for all the initial focus on Arnar, he isn’t even the main point of interest. Gradually, we realise that Arnar and the explanations for his eternal melancholy take a backseat to their impact on Ívar. It is a dynamic tension, if such a thing is possible, as Ívar is always aware of his brother’s morbid intentions, but despite their tussles, the uncertainty hangs in the air until the climax. Two short scenes in the brothers’ bedroom also poignantly underline the protective bond between the two here in the outback.

Halfway through the film, the beauty and confusion merge in the wordless scene with a sperm whale. Lying beached on its stomach, the giant mammal is imposing, even in death. It completely dwarfs young Ívar, just like near-death seems to loom over everything here. But the boy stretches out his hand to touch the oily skin and then proceeds to gently stroke the animal. We follow his hands, collecting oil as they slide further, before he puts his head on the animal’s body and listens. For a second, he seems to think it might be alive. It is a beautiful moment rudely interrupted by the arrival of his father and friends with their flensing tools. Although initially stunned, the boy doesn’t run away this time. He looks on, and as the men start cutting the blubber, his gaze turns impassive.

Life and death and love all meet up in the next sequence, which takes us back to the barn before a final coda in the brothers’ bedroom. This is a story of unfledged emotions that try to stand out here in the wilderness but are often blown off-course by life’s unpredictability. 

Like the brothers it depicts, Whale Valley is cold and distant on the outside while hinting at warmth and intimacy. The boys’ father could have been benefitted from a bit more interaction with his children. As it is, he seems to care as little about Arnar’s state of mind or Ívar’s daily routine as he does about the whale. But despite Guðmundur’s reluctance here to engage in robust storytelling, the emotions that he teases out are clear, and his two main characters clearly have inner lives. In a longer film like Heartstone, he would succeed in giving us a true peek into their souls.

A Hidden Life (2019)

André Crous

A Hidden Life may have relatively more substance than most of Terrence Malick’s other films, but the director’s immutable style is lazy at best and incongruous at worst.

A Hidden LifeUSA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
Jörg Widmer

Running time: 170 minutes

Most of us tell ourselves that we would have stood up for justice if we had lived in Germany under Hitler. While it is true that many Germans at the time were unaware of the full extent of the Jewish genocide, they knew enough. But what if your neighbours and friends also went along to get along, regardless of whether they believed in the Nazis’ hysterical nationalism and ideology of Aryan superiority? At what point would you have resisted the march towards groupthink? At what point would you have abandoned your principles?

A Hidden Life doesn’t get close to answering this question for us. However, this is a Terrence Malick film, so the question is not even evident at all. Nothing is, except the audio-visuals: In addition to reams of pages of voice-overs, which is, unfortunately, par for the course in a Malick production, there is also the expected curated selection of classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Dvořák) and other stunning instrumental pieces (Górecki, Pärt), as well as breathtaking emerald-green scenery that is far more complex than the film ever tries to be. 

Based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, a young Austrian farmer who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, the plot is more substantial than many of the director’s other recent films. And yet, because it is Malick, we get very few scenes of genuine drama. Instead, there are plenty of oh-so-serious voice-overs or off-screen monologues to convey romance and struggle. These narrations are delivered in English by German actors. And since Malick has never cared much for the realism of the spoken word, they all fall flat.

We first meet Franz (August Diehl) and his young wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), in 1939, around the time Germany invades Poland. We don’t get to see any of this, however, because the camera is too busy roving the lush green hillsides and calling our attention to the prominent church tower in the small town of St. Radegund, very close to the former border with Germany. (Austria had been annexed by the German Reich in March 1938.) The town’s aggressively nationalistic and often drunk town mayor likes to rant and rave about how “foreigners swarm over our streets – immigrants who don’t care for the past, only for what they can grab”. And the townspeople appear to share these views.

But all the while, the taciturn Franz’s face is sombre. We see his stubborn resistance. We see the wheels turning in his head. And we see his unwillingness to take up arms against Germany’s so-called enemies. But whatever personal, emotional or intellectual motivation he has remains obscured all the way through. Why does he resist when no one else does? What makes him different? Where does he find the resolve to persist despite threats of violence and, ultimately, the certainty that this path leads to an early death?

At first, Franz is called up to do military training. Although he is against the idea of ultimately using this knowledge to fight for the Reich, he heeds the call. A few years later, with the war in full swing, he is called up to serve, but upon arrival at the garrison, he refuses to pledge allegiance to Hitler and is arrested. He says he would be willing to serve in a non-combat capacity, but for this, he also has to take a loyalty oath. Thus begins his incarceration, which quickly leads to a trial and, in short order, his execution.

While he is away, his wife, Fani, becomes the target of the villagers because her husband has a moral compass. On top of taking care of her three young daughters, she also has to plough the field, harvest the crops and draw water from a drying well. But the village turns against her, first with the scowling looks they give her, then by shouting at her in public and finally by shamelessly stealing produce from her field. She is even hounded out of church by the stares of her fellow congregants. She is othered because of her husband’s refusal to kill for their Führer and, more importantly, because of her love of and respect for Franz. But what her own views are is impossible to determine despite the hours we spend with her.

While Franz languishes in Tegel prison in Berlin, the soundtrack continues to be filled with his and Fani’s monotonous voice-over readings of their letters to each other. But because Franz speaks so rarely, at least outside the ethereal sphere of the voice-over, we don’t understand what he is really thinking in real time, and this ponderous approach gets us nowhere close to understanding what brought him to this point. “I can’t do what I believe is wrong”, he says. The Nazis are perplexed as to why he would risk his life to take a stand that is bound to be forgotten by history. Time and again, they tell him that his voice doesn’t matter. However, the question of why they should care if his actions are supposedly so insignificant is never addressed.

It goes without saying that this kind of bravery, especially in retrospect, is absolutely extraordinary. History provides us with very few examples of such men or women. And it is a shame that the film recounting his story is so empty. Over the course of its three-hour running time, we get to know every inch of the farm and the granite mountains but learn very little about the man at the centre. He is religious, but we never see him reading the Bible. He has no real answers to others’ questions, but he has no questions of his own.

Despite the vertiginous use of wide-angle lenses and restless camera movements, not to mention the frames that decapitate its characters, there are also countless beautiful shots. But presenting a film about suffering as if it were a spread in Outdoor Photography is highly questionable, particularly as these images have no discernible purpose other than beauty for the sake of beauty. Unlike The Thin Red Line, in which Malick depicted the Solomon Islands as an exotic utopia ravaged by the horrors of war, A Hidden Life never deviates from portraying Radegund as an aesthetically pleasing wonderland that is always lush and green, no matter the season.

By now, the Malick approach to cinematography has long run its course. A film cannot live off push-ins, pull-outs, jump cuts, low angles, a dazzling colour palette and endless voice-overs alone. Any five-minute extract will contain all of these elements. Sometimes, there is a surprise, but it is never a good one, as when the camera suddenly takes a first-person perspective for no other reason than to show off. The most memorable example is of a prison guard assaulting Franz, causing the camera to flail around violently on the ground. Or when a fade-out elides an expected confrontation before it even starts. Or when a Nazi officer quotes from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

The struggle and the suffering get lost in the poetry of it all. Whatever is going on, there will be a tiresome voice-over intruding on the action or a violin playing in the background. It’s all mesmerising and can lull us into a state of reverie but is completely lacking in immersion or immediacy. 

This is a story worth telling, but A Hidden Life is not the way to tell it.

1917 (2019)

André Crous

As a purely technical exercise in depicting the First World War, 1917 (and its seemingly unbroken single take) is successful but offers no insight into the characters it depicts or the events it recreates.

1917UK
3*

Director:
Sam Mendes
Screenwriters:
Sam Mendes
Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 120 minutes

One of the most infamous examples of a camera movement is the push-in of Kapò, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film about the Second World War. When a young Jewish woman in a concentration camp throws herself on an electrified fence and dies instantaneously, the camera dollies in see her corpse up close. The shot is grotesque and was justly condemned at the time by Jacques Rivette and subsequently by Serge Daney and many others. While showing something that everyone can agree is horrific, the camera seeks to beautify the moment for no purpose whatsoever.

Sam Mendes’s film about a single mission in the First World War, entitled 1917, does not commit quite the same atrocity, but it does use the camera to reach for beauty when that is precisely what a director should avoid if seeking to examine the human cost of war in any serious way. We follow along with two very young British lance corporals, William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (‎Dean-Charles Chapman), when they are sent across no man’s land to warn some 1,600 soldiers they are walking into a trap and should call off a planned attack. The director’s choice of a seemingly unbroken take, whose aim is clearly to immerse the viewer in the experience of war, is not without merit, but the execution makes it clear how shallow his reasoning was.

The single take appears to be the film’s raison d’être because it certainly isn’t the plot. Such a shot is often used to emphasise both the passage of time and the unity of action. We are meant to see development or interaction in a much more personal way as the point of view is generally tied to a single character. While The Lady in the Lake is the well-known but rather unrefined archetype, the best example is unquestionably the close focus of László Nemes’s Son of Saul.

In 1917, the camera starts with the two young men and ultimately settles on just one, who appears to mature over the course of around 18 hours of ominous calm, brutal warfare, bloody injury, a near-death experience and worse. But the camera has no particular point of view. While it starts as a humanlike observer alongside Schofield and Blake, it doesn’t take long before it flies low over a lake or high above a roaring river while the characters have to trudge around it or struggle to keep their head above water.

The notion of being immersed in the action also suggests that the viewer gets to experience the events (more or less, given the relative safety of the movie theatre) in the same way. But 1917 is so chock-full of Thomas Newman’s music, whose volume is dialled up all the way, that it is often impossible to focus on anything other than the mood being communicated: fear, happiness, danger, etc. The climactic battle scene is little more than soldiers running across a field as bombs explode to punctuate the heroic boom of Newman’s score. A scene in a medic’s tent after the battle is filled with bleeding injured soldiers, but they are mostly whimpering, and any loud screaming is drowned out by the music on the soundtrack.

Mendes is not showing us the war as it is. He is showing us the war as a work of art and uses a continuous tracking shot to do so. In addition, the camera and the lens stay squeaky clean for the duration of the running time, despite the explosions, the water, the dust and the mud that at least one of the characters has to wade through. This approach is simply unacceptable. The fact that the shot is, in fact, stitched together from multiple smaller shots, with some of the stitches easily noticeable, does not mitigate this problem, as the film’s ultimate goal is still, quite clearly, to look pretty rather than convey the visceral experience of being down in the tranches, not flying above them. 

But what is particularly irksome is the camera’s inhuman movements, as when Schofield plunges down a waterfall while the camera is not only suspended above him but tracks backwards high up in the air. Or when the same character charges down a trench packed with soldiers, and the camera, instead of following closely behind to show us the chaos at close range, rises up out of the trench and follows smoothly above the soldiers’ heads. These are pretty shots, but they undercut the very role of the camera here, which is to serve as an invisible soldier.

The story itself is as thin as a rail, and the two major characters have little to no complexity. One long scene is wasted in a French town so that 1917 can implicitly hint at Schofield’s past, which is a secret it could have kept to itself until the final moments, when this implicitness is made explicit, in case we had missed the earlier scene.

This was a purely technical exercise aimed at further developing the skills Mendes had already showcased in the opening scene of Spectre. However, unlike, say, Alfonso Cuarón (and, specifically, DoP Emmanuel Lubezki), who has mastered the use of the unbroken take, the result here feels vapid and inconsequential, devoid of significance because it contains so little and says even less.

Les misérables (2017)

André Crous

Although the resolution is surprisingly anticlimactic, Les misérables pulses with a pervasive sense of injustice. It is a masterful time bomb that keeps ticking until close to the end.

Les Misérables (2017)France
4*

Director:
Ladj Ly
Screenwriter:
Ladj Ly
Director of Photography:
Julien Veron

Running time: 16 minutes

For most people (especially for a middle-class white man like me), the low-income suburbs of Paris have a quality of mystery around them similar to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Known as the banlieues, they are filled with expansive but dilapidated high-rise apartment blocks around half a century old. They are widely known as places of poverty and unrest, and in recent years they have been the venue for countless riots directed at the police. Films like City of God (Cidade de deus) and Hate (La haine) draw attention because they offer a glimpse of this eventful but often dangerous other world that is visible from the city centre (of Rio and Paris, respectively). They also make waves because of their politics and their skill at making this world accessible to a viewer who may be too scared to set foot there.

With a few caveats, let’s add Ladj Ly’s 16-minute Les misérables to the two aforementioned masterpieces. In this short film, a trial run for his acclaimed 2019 feature with the same name, the director sets two polar opposites against each other: a group of three policemen patrolling the streets of a notorious banlieue, Clichy-sous-Bois Montfermeil, and a trio of teenage boys, likely the sons or grandsons of immigrants, who are flying a drone over this (their) neighbourhood.

The policemen patrol the streets and harass the locals under the guise of laying down the law. But their approach is both verbally and physically violent, more than likely as a way of pre-emptively defending themselves against any potential enemy in this part of the city where they don’t belong. In an early scene, they drive past a bus stop where they see a young girl smoking. The loudest cop in the group, Chris, (arguably, sexually) assaults her in an effort to uncover any amount of drugs on her person. This confrontation is followed by another arbitrary shakedown and a violent altercation in which the police appear to shoot a defenceless boy.

But it is all captured thanks to the drone, whose owner the policemen do their best to track down and… assault. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Hate also deployed a drone (when the film was shot in the summer of 1994, such a thing didn’t exist, so the 27-year-old fashioned one out of a camera tied to a remote helicopter), and Ly clearly pays homage to his cinematic predecessor. This time, however, the point of view does not belong to God but to the very real technology of today. By 2017, surveillance drones had become commonplace in modern warfare, and while they can kill from far away, they can also record things that would otherwise remain unseen, as Dziga Vertov already made clear nearly a century ago.

Les misérables opens and closes on Laurent, the newest member of the police team. Having recently been transferred from the relatively quiet city of Poitiers, he has to balance the pressure of his peers to quash any alleged wrongdoing with his own moral code, which is more accommodating and less pugilistic. Between those bookends, a firestorm erupts and his life changes.

The best shorts show how quickly things can change. In his rush to string all the parts together, however, Ly botches not only his staging of the critical police assault but also the series of events leading up to the film’s (anti-)climax. It feels like essential contextual tissue was cut in order to bring the film in at a certain length, and we are left with a central scene that appears out of nowhere. The expected clash between the two trios of characters also fizzles out as the teenagers and their lives are all but ignored in the second half, which makes it less easy to empathise with them as people.

With an ominous bass line supporting the minimalist electronic score that builds ever higher, couching the latter’s optimism in a vague sense of dread, the film rises to its climax only to stumble momentarily at the finish line. And yet, this restless short film’s portrayal of the Parisian banlieue and the injustice of living under corrupt police rule in a supposedly democratic society is nothing if not visceral and in-your-face.

Denali (2015)

André Crous

Denali is a love letter that conveys a lifetime with a wave of feeling but without ever reaching for emotion.

Denali

USA
5*

Director:
Ben Knight
Screenwriter:
Ben Knight
Director of Photography:
Skip Armstrong

Running time: 8 minutes

It is rare for voice-overs to be deployed successfully. But Ben Knight’s Denali is rare in many ways.

It may be the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been written on film. All of 8 minutes in length, including credits, it looks back over a lifetime filled with comedy and tragedy. But in large part, it’s an adventure, a shared experience of a bond that is as strong as anything we can imagine. When the identity of the narrator was unexpectedly revealed about a minute into the film, tears started streaming down my face and didn’t stop until the closing credits rolled, at which point I was literally gasping for breath. The voice-over narration belongs to the title character, Denali, who (not which) is a 14-year-old mutt.

Of course, it’s a human being reading the lines. But that is also the point. Most people have animals as pets, but few have them as part of an active life in which they serve as loving companions, fellow adventurers and compassionate co-survivors. Denali’s friend and owner is adventure photographer Ben Moon, who got the dog in his mid-20s and has spent his entire adult life with Denali by his side.

This life includes a great deal of time spent on the beach but also in hospital as Moon struggled with but ultimately survived a bout of cancer, a period during which his insurance company kicked him off his plan (after all, the story takes place in the USA). Denali’s emotional intelligence lies in its knowledge that we want to see what we believe to be true. We believe that our pets – especially our dogs – can sense how we feel, that they understand us without us needing to tell them and that they care for us no matter what happens.

“When someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy”, the narrator tells us. It serves as a reminder that many of us already have this kind of love in our lives and should recognise it more often. It may seem like the act of a simpleton – of someone who cannot remember the past and does not consider a future in which the affection is not returned. But it is as pure an expression as one can imagine of life-giving love that soars the heights of Denali’s namesake, the highest mountain in North America.

Unsurprisingly, given the title and the fact that one of the world’s best-known outdoor clothing brands provided half the budget, every single image looks like a crisp painting and offers a direct link to nature. The voice-over is delivered nearly monotonously and yet, it is deeply moving. Human but different, it stands in perfectly for the quasi-human thoughts of a dog.

Denali is not just a film for those who have lost pets they loved. Nor is it even for those who have ever had pets. It is a film for anyone who has ever had an intimate relationship with anyone or anything. If you have lost that person or that animal, this is for you; if you have ever been scared of losing him or her or it or them, this is for you; if you are human, this film is for you.

Marriage Story (2019)

André Crous

Marriage Story tells the tale of a divorce, but instead of focusing on the protracted heartache, Noah Baumbach shows how entangled two souls can be, especially when they are struggling to uncouple. Marriage Story

USA
4*

Director:
Noah Baumbach
Screenwriter:
Noah Baumbach
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 135 minutes

The devil is in the details, but so is the divine. Two people who have lived together for years, had a child together and worked together suddenly separate to file for divorce, but these details remain embedded in their beings. With every encounter, the two souls are inadvertently drawn back to each other, even as the brains in the two bodies tell them not to. This is the tragic soil of a separation in which the two people who know each other best and can still stand each other try not to be together.

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is not so much an autopsy of a failed marriage as it is a forensic examination of a burgeoning divorce. What is most striking, however, is that things look grim even when the characters have the best intentions. The film opens with an extended montage that is filled with so much love and emotion the viewer may very well burst into tears right at the outset. In voice-over, we hear Charlie (Adam Driver) list all the things he loves about his wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Next, Nicole relates to us everything that makes Charlie so special to her. These are all details, many of them mundane, but they are the accumulated moments and qualities that epitomise their loving perception of their partner in sickness and in health, in love, marriage and life. That is, until it all falls apart.

We are quickly disabused of our fanciful notion that the love we see onscreen is enough, as the sequence ends with the couple at a marriage counsellor. But Nicole has made up her mind: She wants to leave Charlie and his theatre company and her job as actress in his plays and their life in New York – all of it – and move back to Los Angeles to star in a television pilot. And she is taking their young son, Henry, with her. A few days later, when Charlie comes to California to visit, he finds out she is intent on staying and has hired a high-powered kale-eating lawyer (Laura Dern at her absolute best) to defend her interests, just in case.

It should come as no surprise that Marriage Story is most affecting when the two main characters try to work through the rubble of their relationship. Filled with words carved from the flesh of its two leads, these moments are particularly poignant when they play out in an intimate setting. In a pivotal scene halfway through, Baumbach puts Charlie and Nicole in an empty room with nothing on the walls and no other characters to distract us, and he forces the couple to empty their souls. It works brilliantly as drama, and the scene is written in such a way that neither of the two characters consistently has the upper hand. We can easily sympathise with either of them. In fact, our sympathies swing back and forth between the two as the scene unfolds and they glimpse more and more of each other’s (and their own) deepest darkest sides.

It all comes down to the details – sometimes hidden, sometimes out in the open – and how they accumulate over time. Nicole’s reason for leaving Charlie does not have the drama we often associate with break-ups. We never even see the moment it happens. It was one final straw that landed on a decade of detail and broke the marriage carriage. It was as simple as her receiving a script for a pilot and him letting out a chuckle at the idea she would swap off-Broadway for Hollywood.

But that is exactly how these long-term relationships fall apart. Not with a bang, but with a fizz that is long in coming. And after holding their emotions in for long enough, the dam break is a sight to behold, especially in the hands of players as accomplished as Scarlett Johansson and, particularly, the large-of-frame but vulnerable-0f-voice Adam Driver.

In an early post-breakup scene at their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie finds his wife speaking to him like a stranger, but when Nicole says good night and turns the corner and the camera lets us see her unguarded, the true emotions are overwhelming. It is a breathtaking revelation that demonstrates how Baumbach puts his characters through their paces while never letting go of them as fully fledged human beings.

Those details of a relationship remain deep down, even when the people involved tell themselves they have moved on. We are reminded of how embedded they are again and again throughout the film, right to the very end. In so doing, Baumbach stitches his characters together even as their relationship irreparably disintegrates, offering a tragic reminder of the past while the present lurches forward, inexorably, towards a future that appears all but inevitable.

Mustang (2015)

André Crous

Showing five young sisters all seeking to break free from their conservative grandmother’s iron grip, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang has a potentially activist message but delivers it very meekly.

MustangTurkey/France
3.5*

Director:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Screenwriters:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Alice Winocour
Directors of Photography:
David Chizallet
Ersin Gok

Running time: 95 minutes

In Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s delightful Mustang, carefree childhood runs up against the brick wall of tradition as five teenage sisters do all they can to defy their uncompromisingly conservative grandmother. Not without reason, the grandmother serves a mostly symbolic function and has no name.

Although the film takes its sweet time giving them each a barely distinct personality, they are, from eldest to youngest: Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale. In a small Turkish town on the coast of the Black Sea where they have grown up under the iron hand of their grandmother, the girls spend their afternoon on the final day of term frolicking with their school mates in the ocean. When they return home, their grandmother rakes them over the coals for allegedly “pleasuring themselves” on the boys’ necks. In fact, they merely sat on their shoulders. But clearly, the grandmother’s imagination is running wild with sexual fantasies. So, too, does the mind of their live-in uncle, Erol, who assumes the girls have somehow lost their virginity in the process.

Before long, the grandmother starts insisting that the girls get married, lest they spoil themselves as teenagers and no longer suitable marriage material. She turns the house into a “wife factory”, where the sisters are instructed how to do all the work a good wife is expected to perform, from cooking to making the bed. But interaction with boys remains strictly off-limits.

All of this already feels like the dark ages, but things get even more insane about halfway through, when Selma, one of the first sisters to get married, completes her wedding night consummation. Outside the door, the in-laws are waiting impatiently for the bedsheet so that they can see proof of their new daughter-in-law’s ruptured virginity on her wedding night. As well as anything else in the film, this particular scene shows how the girls’ domestic situation is really part of a broader social problem.

There are fleeting moments of freedom, however, like when the girls manage to escape the house to watch a football match or make out with a boy they fancy. But every so often, more burglar bars are added, and the walls get higher. When the eldest girls leave home, we start noticing single Uncle Erol behaving ever more curiously, as does Ece. And when Ece is no longer at home, her younger sister, Nur, bears the brunt of Erol’s attention. This abuse is conveyed in a very fragmented and cursory way, although it does a very good job of exposing the absurd sexual repression he has imposed on his nieces.

But we are particularly attuned to this abuse because it seems to have a moving target – that is, moving ever downward – with Lale, the youngest sister likely being the inevitable ultimate target. Once we realise this, Mustang establishes its ticking clock. (The title is never explained, although the notion of roaming freely like a group of fillies, or the inability to do so, is central to the narrative.) We see most of the action from the perspective of Lale, who even turns up, wholly unnecessarily, to deliver some sporadic voice-over narration.

Her opening words perfectly encapsulate the circumstances: “It’s like everything changed in the blink of an eye. One moment we were fine, then everything turned to shit.” On the same day when Lale’s favourite teacher, Ms Dilek, moves a thousand kilometres away to Istanbul, the five girls’ seemingly nonchalant existence is upended when nosy villagers report on their alleged promiscuity at the beach. Nothing will ever be the same again, even though, presumably, things were already pretty dire before. But this fact makes their surprise at the repercussions (the family’s overreaction) a bit difficult to swallow, given they have lived with these horribly myopic people their whole lives.

It is commendable that the sisters all stick together, more or less, but it makes them a homogenous group without distinct personalities. It would have been infinitely more interesting if one or more showed honest doubts about either following the traditional path or cutting one’s one path. No such struggle is on display, which makes the narrative terribly simplistic in its approach to an issue such as female identity in tradition-oriented Turkey.

In her début feature film, the director mostly sidesteps melodrama, even though the film’s opposition to the traditional roles of women in Turkish society shines through. The assertive girls are rewarded with what they want, while their unassertive counterparts struggle to do the same. Unfortunately, their genuine desires are not always clear because we learn so little about their wants and needs.

This scratching of the surface extends to the treatment of issues that are arguably just as serious as (and complement) women’s rights to control their own lives, like Erol’s sexual abuse of his nieces, which is treated so lightly as to be almost invisible.

On the whole, however, Mustang offers a warm-hearted and hopeful story of and for 21st-century women in Turkey who seek to make their own decisions. 

Matthias & Maxime (2019)

André Crous

In Matthias & Maxime, Xavier Dolan continues his downward trajectory by choosing to keep his two titular characters apart for almost the entire film.

Matthias & MaximeCanada
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 120 minutes

We know the drill: Two straight best friends – more specifically, two guys, stuck somewhere between graduation and responsible adulthood – kiss, and the moment changes their lives forever. At times, Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime is marginally more nuanced than that, but the nuance is actually just long stretches of inertia separated by spasmodic revelations.

As it happens, the kiss is not of their own choosing but merely a result of them agreeing to appear as actors in a short film project about identity. The small-statured, tattooed Maxime (“Max”) volunteers, while his smouldering best friend, Matthias (“Matt”), has to be pressured into accepting the challenge, which he does because of their decades-long friendship. Although initially horrified at the idea of kissing each other (especially because of unverified whispers that this is may not be the first time), the two friends eventually man up and lock lips, which is so momentous the screen turns black.

Almost immediately, Matt has an identity crisis that he takes the entire film to work through. Unfortunately, for the duration of the plot, he appears to be in the closet, emphatically in denial while repeatedly staring at every half-sexy guy moving through his line of sight but without showing any sign of development. Max’s focus is elsewhere. He is about to move to Australia to run away from his problems, the most urgent of which is his mentally ill mother (played to perfection, as usual, with seething resentment and no shortage of verbal abuse by Anne Dorval), but gradually we come to realise he is likely running away because of his sexuality, too. One mesmerising scene with Max on a public bus reveals exactly what we were hoping to learn but then fails to build on this discovery in any meaningful way.

Matthias & Maxime tips its hand early on when Matt’s boss at his law firm, hinting at an upcoming promotion, suggests that many people may be used to doing one thing before discovering much later that they enjoy doing something different. In fact, despite our initial impressions, the kiss did not reveal unexpected inner emotions to the two men but was an expression of feelings they had been struggling with and suppressed for their entire lives, as the film’s final act – and, specifically, a very powerful scene at the house of Matt’s mother, portrayed to emotional perfection by Michelin Bernard – makes so poignantly clear.

And yet, the narrative structure here inhibits (and even undermines) our sympathy in at least two important ways. Firstly, unlike the similar examples of Y Tu Mamá También or Humpday, the kiss comes not towards the end but right at the beginning. This means we don’t know how things were before, and therefore, there is no opportunity for involvement in the awkwardness that follows the physical encounter. This is equivalent to providing a climax without any dramatic build-up.

Secondly, and even worse, the film then proceeds to keep Matt and Max apart for around a full hour. They do not discuss what happened, they do not tell each other (or us) how they feel or what they think, and there is no possibility of a resolution until a brief moment of in vino veritas followed by a narratively contrived final shot and a cut to the end credits. The only thread connecting them for most of the film is their timidity to address this quandary over their friendship and their similar domestic situations: In both households, the only parent around is the mother. 

Despite the amount of dialogue and the admirable delivery by the entire cast, we don’t get close to either of the two M’s. An elaborately staged scene in which Matt tries to rid himself of his existential demons by swimming across an entire lake, getting lost, then swimming back, is mind-numbing because it takes forever, the shots are uninspired, the piano music is monotonous, and we don’t know Matt well enough (or at all) to sympathise with this sudden bout of sexually motivated hysteria.

A film like Marco Berger’s exquisitely paced Hawaii, which focused its energy exclusively on fleshing out its two characters, slowly increased the sexual tension until the point of satisfying release. By contrast, Matthias & Maxime opens with bad foreplay, proceeds straight to the climax and then languishes for more than an hour in a painful refractory period. 

An inordinate amount of time is spent treading water. Throughout the film, Dolan is much more interested in presenting life around the characters rather than focusing on their own lives and inner turmoil. And yet, Matthias & Maxime is at its most captivating when the two titular characters are in the same scene. Max, whose crimson birthmark flows from his right eye across his cheek, is infinitely more interesting than his friend, but despite Dolan playing the role himself, he struggles with the same passivity that hampers Matt’s character from ever becoming more than pitiful. Unspoken desire can be a powerful driver for a story, but at some point, people have to start speaking, and Dolan inexplicably does all he can to avoid this critically important moment.

For all the talk of this Canadian director’s talent, two films continue to stand head and shoulders above the rest in Xavier Dolan’s career: His début feature film as director, I Killed My Mother, released in 2009, showed him at his most creative. And in 2014’s Mommy he reached the zenith of his storytelling prowess with an intimate story told as if it were an epic. But his films since then have been disappointing. Despite its wonderfully recreated tension, It’s Only the End of the World was an annoying powder keg of a chamber drama with another incredibly passive central character. And his subsequent short-lived foray into English-language filmmaking, in the form of The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, produced little more than a full-length dark-toned flashback.

Matthias & Maxime is not unlike Matt himself: While handsome to look at and intent on speaking correctly (Matt’s insistence on using correct grammar is reminiscent of the early films of both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and the screenplay’s own dialogue is flawless), it prefers limbo over taking things to their logical conclusion. 

Viewed at the 2019 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival.

Synonyms (2019)

André Crous

In Synonyms, a former Israeli soldier forsakes his country and its language and turns up in Paris only to find that knowing French is very different from being French.

SynonymsIsrael/France
3*

Director:
Nadav Lapid
Screenwriters:
Nadav Lapid
Haim Lapid
Director of Photography:
Shai Goldman

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Synonymes

The opening shot of Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear–winning Synonyms is one that will be repeated on many occasions throughout the film in a (surprise, surprise, given the title) way that looks different but has essentially the same meaning. Moving forward and sideways with no clear sense of the horizon, we alternate between pavement and sky. In between, we catch brief glimpses of buildings, immediately recognisable as Parisian. It is our point of view, but then and later again and again, it always floats away to show the person whose view it actually is: the twenty-something Yoav (Tom Mercier), a former Israeli soldier who has “escaped”, in his words, to France and shunned his life in Israel.

Somehow, oddly, we never learn exactly what his motivation for leaving was. The film deals almost entirely in the present without recognising the past, which is exactly what Yoav is intent on doing. On his first day, he arrives at an expansive but bare apartment in the French capital, where he spends the night. The next morning, while taking a shower, his backpack disappears, and he is left without a stitch of clothing. Lucky for him, his curious upstairs (and upscale) neighbours find him passed out in the bathtub and take pity on him by dragging him up to their place, laying him down in their bed and covering his naked body with their goose down. One of them notices that Yoav is circumcised.

That “one” is the boyish Émile (Quentin Dolmaire), a struggling writer with perfect skin and an exquisite wardrobe, who also gets under the covers to warm up the stranger’s body by rubbing against him. It turns out Émile runs a factory (somewhere, making something) and likely inherited it from his family, who also pay the rent. The other is the oboe-playing Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who is ostensibly his girlfriend, although there is no apparent affection between the two. Affection is reserved for the newcomer, Yoav, who shares many an intimate moment (though never explicitly sexual) with Émile in the first half before Caroline makes a (sexual) move in the second. The setting may be comparable, but the tension of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Dreamers is completely missing.

Yoav is nothing if not absolutely entrancing. In his feature film acting début, Tom Mercier draws us closer to his character primarily by having the face he has and by utterly devoting himself to his character. Yoav’s chosen uniform of Frenchness is an extravagant orange overcoat, given to him by the extremely French, polo neck–wearing Émile, which he wears almost throughout the entire film. Looking like a Jewish version of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his youth, albeit with the eyes of a zombie, Mercier exudes a sex appeal that is derived not from his body (although the many full-frontal shots will thrill a sizable part of the audience) but from the combination of vulnerability and devil-may-care self-confidence.

And yet, very little of substance actually happens. When it does, it comes up against Yoav’s self-imposed obstacle of language. Whatever happened in Israel was so terrible that he has given up speaking Hebrew, although he gladly engages in accented French with Hebrew-speaking Israelis in his newfound home, including at the Israeli Consulate General in Paris, where he works (!). But when an old girlfriend Skypes him or his father turns up in Paris and somehow tracks him down, his refusal to speak his mother tongue cuts off all avenues to us gaining a better understanding of his motivations. A small scene that shows (unwanted) remnants of his past in the present – even a dream with him speaking Hebrew – would have helped enormously to overcome this linguistic absurdity. 

The film takes nearly two full acts to arrive at anything resembling a raison d’être. While we know all along that Yoav’s integration into French society is limited to his frequent interactions with Émile and Caroline, it is only in the final stretch that he takes his duty to assimilate semi-seriously. This is where the film finally starts to look more earnestly at the drama associated with changing one’s national identity and the struggles one faces while trying to be accepted into the fold.

But the screenplay and the directing fail in many of the scenes where Yoav speaks French. Despite the accent, he speaks the language fluently and even uses multiple complicated constructions. And he relies on an erudite vocabulary to expatiate on everything from his own experience in the military to Hector’s adventures in the Trojan War. Then, suddenly, everyday words, like “chaussette” (sock) or “tiède” (lukewarm), trip him up. Such moments feel completely unrealistic. Besides, we have no idea where or how Yoav learned to speak French so well in the first place. He even seems to understand it almost perfectly, which is a miraculous feat for a non-native speaker who just moved to a new country. These instances remind us that the film is manufactured, and they alienate us from the experience of living the diegesis that Mercier, in so many other respects, fully embodies. 

The wild camerawork out on the street can be nauseating, but director of photography Shai Goldman does an exceptional job of the more intimate moments. In particular, the kissing scene in the tiny apartment where Yoav stays for most of the film is shot in a way that conveys feeling and puts us inside the two actors’ private bubble but leaves us scratching our heads at how he managed to pull off such a show of dexterity.

But dextrous is not a word that can be applied to the screenplay. Besides the structural issues – in particular, the number of scenes that fail to advance the plot – there is also the issue of character development or just presence. Some characters that play a major role in the first half simply fall out of the narrative by the latter part of the film. One memorable example is the roid-brained Yaron, who suspects everyone of being a potential anti-Semite and seeks to smoke them out by loudly humming the Israeli national anthem while invading everyone’s personal space on the metro. His behaviour has us on tenterhooks for a while, but then he disappears in one of the many gaps between scenes.

In a flashback, we see Yoav during his military service shooting a target to smithereens to the beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympathique”. The song’s lyrics continue to resonate in the present, as most of the film consists of Yoav channelling the sentiment that, “Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner, je veux seulement oublier” (“I don’t want to work, I don’t want to have lunch, I just want to forget”). Some viewers may feel the same way.

Synonyms might have been better titled Ellipsis. Or Suspension Point. Or Three Dots…

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

André Crous

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature film as director, Quentin Tarantino reminds us that even when movies are based on very real events, their stories are in the hands of the filmmaker.

Once Upon a Time in HollywoodUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 160 minutes

At the end of his Second World War drama and perhaps his greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino did something shocking: He recast history to give us the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in a movie theatre in 1944. While the viewer often suspends disbelief to follow the story of fictional characters in a recognisable historical setting, there tends to be an assumption that the main events will remain, in large part, intact and unaltered. But Tarantino says (correctly) that the filmmaker is in control of his or her depiction of history: Since a representation is already separate from the original, why not go even further and rewrite history for the purpose of entertainment, especially when there is no risk that anyone would mistake the film for actual history?

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature in the director’s chair, Tarantino is his revisionist self again: He tells a wholly fictional story within a recognisable context (Hollywood in 1969) with all the meticulous attention we would expect from David Fincher before reminding us that he can change the facts of history because the real world is only applicable to the extent he wants it to be. Many of the characters are very close to their real-life counterparts, but only up to a point. And in the tension between real life and representation lies the possibility to create great art.

Released exactly 50 years after the tumultuous year it depicts, Tarantino’s film is set in Tinseltown of the late 1960s, where we find the curious combination of a yearning for the innocence of yore, the hippy rebellion against the status quo and an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over it all because Hollywood in 1969 means only one name: Sharon Tate. Tate, an up-and-coming 20-something actress, had married Polish director Roman Polanski the previous year, a few months before the release of one of the highlights of his career, the classic Rosemary’s Baby. A little more than a year later, eight months into her pregnancy, she and three of her friends were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson.

Sharon Tate is played by Margot Robbie in Tarantino’s film, but the real Sharon Tate does show up onscreen when Robbie’s Tate goes to watch The Wrecking Crew at the cinema, and we see Robbie as Tate watching the real Tate play an awkward Danish blonde named Freya Carlson. And yet, while many viewers might notice these are technically different people, the entire setup is clearly one of make-believe, so the suspension of disbelief holds. What has been more controversial, however, is the clear divergence from historical fact at the film’s climax, even though the entire film is, by definition, covered by a “This is fiction” disclaimer.

So, what is this fiction all about? Despite all this talk about Tate, the film is actually primarily interested in her next-door neighbour on Cielo Drive: a former cowboy television star named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose friendship with his long-time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is by far the most intimate he ever allows himself to get with another human being. Missouri-born Rick’s career has gone downhill since his starring turn in Bounty Law in the 1950s, and he is scared of having to pack up his bags and say goodbye to Hollywood. But Cliff, who lives with his pit bull, Brandy, in a caravan next to a drive-in, is always available as his driver, a shoulder to cry on and a constant companion through thick and thin.

The plot, most of which unfolds over two days (one in February, the other in August), follows Rick and Cliff, together and separately, as well as Sharon, who spends most of her day at the cinema watching herself. Rick, who has all but given up on himself, meets a child actress (although she refers to herself as an “actor“) who will change his life. Meanwhile, Cliff gives a young hippie a lift to Spahn Ranch, where mistrust hangs thick in the air. At the ranch, peopled almost exclusively by young white girls, Cliff seeks out an old friend, the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who has gone blind since Cliff last filmed on the ranch and has shacked up with the most domineering girl in the group.

DiCaprio and Pitt both give some of their best performances ever here. DiCaprio, whose appearance is still strikingly boyish more than two decades after Titanic, conveys the sentiment of being an outsider very well simply by showing up. His character goes through multiple ups and downs, and we can always see the gears grinding behind his eyes during his silences. Pitt, by contrast, is the epitome of cool and easily outshines the character of Steve McQueen, who makes a brief appearance in a very unnecessary late-night party scene at the Playboy Mansion. Channelling the energy (and still sporting the looks) of a man half his age, he is kind to everyone but is not beyond striking a very hard blow, as we find out in a memorable interaction with Bruce Lee and a hilarious flashback with his former wife, whose demise he is very likely responsible for.

A major improvement on Tarantino’s previous film, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood gives itself space to breathe but never meanders. Two of the longest scenes – the one at Spahn Ranch and the wholly immersive production of the television show Lancer, in which the dialogue and the actions run almost indefinitely, without cuts or camera changes – have very good reasons for being there, albeit in retrospect. Spahn Ranch upends our expectations and introduces us to some very important characters, while Lancer marks a major turning point in Rick’s perception of his own potential.

But ultimately, after more than two and a half hours of leisurely comedic drama, most people will only talk about the ending. Those who know the story of the Tate/Manson murders will have a sickening feeling towards the end of the film when we see the eight-month-pregnant Sharon Tate and it appears Tarantino is about to shift from the leisurely fifth gear out on the highway right into first gear. But then, the director intervenes like God to give us a rousing version of history instead. In fact, knowing what really happened to Tate makes the events of the film, by comparison, all the more exhilarating, just as Tarantino had done with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t skimp on the violence but directs it elsewhere and even borrows a flamethrower from his Second World War masterpiece for added showmanship.

The final moments include one of the most acute examples of dramatic irony imaginable, as Jay Sebring, unaware that in a parallel universe (i.e. the real world) he has just been brutally shot and stabbed in a bloodbath, invites Rick over to Sharon’s house after the Manson trio has been taken away by the police. He has no idea what happened to his counterpart in the real world. But we know. And this discrepancy between the real and the fictional is particularly poignant because, in a sense, these characters are real to us, and the fictional murderers have gotten what was coming to them. When they are killed, we feel like they are punished not only for attacking Rick and Cliff but also for murdering the real Tate and her friends.

It is unfortunate, however, that the film does not make the connection with real life more concrete. While he appears on one occasion, Charles Manson’s name is all but left out altogether (his followers refer to him as “Charlie”, but he is never seen in their company). But perhaps Tarantino wanted his film to exist more in the world of make-believe than as a representation of history, which is why an infrequent and incongruous narration (by Kurt Russell, who plays a minor character here) pops up on the soundtrack.

To take the term used by André Bazin, a representation is always at best an “asymptote of reality” and never reality itself. So much focus has been on the closeness of those two lines as the film draws to a close, but few have extolled the artistic tension that results from that intimacy. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would have been entertaining enough without the last 30 minutes, but what happens there reaffirms its director’s capacity to amaze us.