2010-2019

The Painted Bird (2019)

André Crous

The Second World War was a grim time to be in Eastern Europe; The Painted Bird depicts it as the seventh circle of hell, in which episode after episode ends in horror but adds precious little to our understanding of the war or its victims.

The Painted BirdCzech Republic
2.5*

Director:
Václav Marhoul
Screenwriter:
Václav Marhoul
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný

Running time: 165 minutes

Original title: Nabarvené ptáče

Persistent death by gunshot, brutal eye-gouging, paedophilia, skull-pecking, shoving a glass bottle up a woman’s vagina. These are just some of the horrific acts inflicted on the characters of The Painted Bird for no apparent reason. It also features a good-hearted Nazi soldier as one of its lone sympathetic characters, which is almost always a bad idea.

Based on the eponymous novel by Polish writer and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosiński, the plot comprises a string of nine episodes. And each of them tries to top the horrors of the previous one. The story, filmed in gorgeous black and white, takes place during the Second World War in an unnamed East European country where everyone speaks a fictitious Slavic language (Interslavic, an artificial language developed by Vojtěch Merunka).

Everyone, that is, except the main character, who is called Joska but remains anonymous until close to the end. We first lay eyes on him when he is about 10 years old, and over the course of the film, he ages enough for us to notice the passage of time. Played by Czech actor Petr Kotlár, he speaks Czech, is Jewish and lives on a farm with an old lady named Marta. To demonstrate how obscure the storytelling is, it is wholly unclear whether this is just a nice old woman, his grandmother or his aunt, and reviews filed from the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival have come up with different interpretations.

In the very first scene, he is already being terrorised, as a group of young boys pursue him through the forest and eventually catch up to him. They grab his pet ferret, pour gasoline over it and set it alight. Together with Joska, we watch helplessly as the animal twitches in agony before it ultimately stops moving and turns into a pile of soot. But much greater tragedy lies ahead for the poor boy.

Very soon, Marta dies from old age, and when he discovers her, his shock is such that he drops the lantern and burns down the house. This incident sets him on a journey of discovery not so much of himself but of the evil in people. Hell is other people, director Václav Marhoul seems to be saying.

These hellish figures take many forms, but most of the episodes are so superficial that there is no chance to get to know the characters before they inevitably die in a variety of ways or commit atrocious acts that send Joska fleeing their company or, often, both. After his parents have left (or were taken) but before all the other tragedies befall him, he already engages very little with Marta, and he is so emotionally isolated that it takes him a full day to discover she has died.

What follows are episodes of such depravity that it is difficult to view them as anything but gratuitous – flogging a dead horse to give the illusion it is still breathing. In the next village, Joska is taken under the wing of a sorceress named Olga, who buries him upright, leaving only his head exposed and sticking out of the ground. This leads to a gruesome scene in which giant crows descend on him. At first, he scares them away by screaming at them, but when they return he inexplicably falls silent, and they start pecking at his shaved head.

He escapes the crows’ claws and Olga’s clutches, only to face the first truly disgusting setup at a mill, whose miller (played by Udo Kier) is paranoid that his wife, whom he beats all too frequently, is interested in another man and proceeds to gouge out the poor man’s eyes. We get a giant close-up of the eyes lying on the ground. Later, the naïve Joska tries to return the eyes to the man, who now sports giant black holes for sockets.

And so it goes, on and on. Before long, he witnesses a woman being raped with a milk bottle, is forced to eat out a lascivious young widow and is himself raped more than once by a man who buys him from the local priest, played by Harvel Keitel. There is simply no end to the cruelty. And yet, we never get any insight into Joska’s mind, because he is more or less expressionless throughout the ordeal.

The concatenation of horrors offers no point of entry for the viewer but, instead, beats us over the head with some universally loathsome villagers committing unspeakable acts. If Marhoul had wanted to convey to us that the Nazis were not the only bad people fighting the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and that the non-Jewish population was similarly deplorable, he could easily have found a better way.

But arguably as controversial as anything else is a scene in which Stellan Skarsgård makes an appearance as a Nazi called Hans. Soon after a drunk Soviet soldier tells the villagers to deliver Joska to a nearby group of German soldiers, Joska is seen walking the train tracks accompanied by a clearly conflicted Hans. But rather than kill him, Hans, for no real reason other than this is what the screenplay obliges him to do, lets the boy escape. The film contains barely any warfare to speak of, and for the most part, Nazis are wholly absent. Therefore, it is pretty distasteful for the director to insert them here and make one of them the kindly Hans, whom we never get to understand beyond his charitable act.

The Painted Bird‘s one major missed opportunity comes right at the end, when Joska is sitting around a fire under a bridge with fellow war survivors. This scene goes nowhere but would have made sense and packed a serious punch if some of the faces had been shown to belong to some of his erstwhile adversaries. There are certainly more examples of this, but one scene that springs to mind where this is done correctly is the celebration in the streets shortly after the Normandy landings towards the end of Claude Lelouch’s Les Misérables.

There are only three commendable elements here: Firstly, the idea of using Czech as the “outside language” even though it is mutually intelligible with Interslavic is a brilliant metaphor for Joska’s “outsider” status as a Jew among the general population. In addition, the fact that Kotlár himself is a Gypsy gives further depth to this metaphor. Second, the images are beautiful, although they stick in our heads for their grisly content rather than their composition. And third, a scene late in the film when Joska shares a tree with taciturn Soviet soldier Mitka (Barry Pepper) is disarmingly charming, with them finding a moment of real serenity amid the gloom. That is, before Mitka mows down the inhabitants of a small village.

The Painted Bird is an austere account of war. Its sympathies are ambiguous, but its intention is clearly to shock us rather than put us in the shoes of its main character. The shocks are grotesque, and instead of punctuating the plot, they end up being the plot. 

The film’s screenings at the international festivals in Venice and Toronto were followed by sensational reports of people fleeing the cinema, distressed by the events they were forced to witness. It has to be noted here that the implication was always that people can’t handle the truth. Let me offer a counterpoint: Sometimes people simply walk out of a screening because the film is bad.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (2018)

André Crous

In his epic documentary entitled CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur provides a comprehensive and sometimes mind-blowing overview of the Czechoslovak New Wave. 

CzechMateIndia
4*

Director:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Screenwriter:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Director of Photography:
David Čálek

Running time: 430 minutes

Without exception, an entire generation of Czech and Slovak filmmakers made their best films – and arguably some of the best their country ever produced – shortly after leaving film school. A perfectly balanced dose of freedom and oppression, along with powder kegs of talent, made these works possible. Unfortunately, half a century later, only a handful of them have received the recognition they deserve outside Central Europe. But now a new documentary clocking in at more than seven hours goes a long way towards remedying this oversight.

Almost every viewer interested in the history of cinema is aware of the French New Wave. Dating to the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the nouvelle vague basically comprised a handful of male film critics from the monthly Cahiers du cinéma journal who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities and looked up to many of the same filmmakers (“auteurs” like Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks and Robert Bresson). However, despite being even more ambitious in scope and more numerous and diverse in its composition, the Czechoslovak New Wave (Československá nová vlna) is much less known.

The movement’s best-known film is Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), which was released at the end of 1966 and was then-28-year-old Jiří Menzel’s début feature. It was based on the eponymous novel by famed Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, which had been published the year before. The film was screened at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1968 – the first Czech film and only the second Czechoslovak film (after Ján Kadár’s Slovak-language The Shop on Main Street) to do so. This elegant depiction of a young station agent who loses his virginity during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia remains one of the defining films of the era.

And yet, it is but one in a panoply of cinematic masterpieces produced by Czech and Slovak filmmakers under extraordinary political circumstances in the 1960s. To better understand the time and the people involved and to inform the world of the magic that was conjured up between Prague and Bratislava in a very small window of time, Indian filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur travelled to the Czech Republic to interview Menzel. Along with Miloš Forman, he is perhaps the best-known Czech filmmaker outside his own country. What developed from their initial conversations over the course of seven years was the 430-minute CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel.

“Film is my job”, Menzel announces in the opening moments of this massive film. It is a seemingly unremarkable comment but perfectly encapsulates this man’s view of his place in history, and its implications vibrate throughout the rest of the film. He sees himself not only as being at the service of a customer but also as part of a greater network of individuals. Most importantly, in order to get his movies made, he saw (and still sees) compromise as part of the process. Others, most notably Miloš Forman, who had enjoyed wild success with Black Peter (Černý Petr), Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) and The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko), chose to leave the country rather than work out a deal with totalitarians.

The morality of compromise is addressed most directly with the ambiguous case of legendary director and FAMU founder Otakar Vávra. Vávra was a chameleon able to adapt to the regime of the day and has been sharply criticised for his pro-communist films. And yet, many of his film school students subsequently went on to make anti-establishment films. Agnieszka Holland, who studied under him, says the dossier the secret police kept on her revealed how Vávra had falsely vouched for her belief in socialism, presumably in order to keep her from being kicked out of the school. Unfortunately, while writer-director Drahomíra Vihanová, who was banned from making features under communism, touches on Menzel’s apparent willingness to downplay the tragedy of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the film doesn’t push its professed subject on this point.

CzechMate focuses mostly on the 1960s but also spends a good chunk of time on the films the directors (especially Menzel) managed to make after 1968. It is at its best when it drills down into the historical context and the different ways in which political pressure affected or illuminated the character of the young filmmakers. Easily the most attention-grabbing part of the documentary is its account of the events between August 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and January 1969 (the funeral of Jan Palach, a student who had set himself alight in protest against the Soviet occupation). Director Ivan Passer’s description of how he and Miloš Forman escaped the country is also an unforgettable episode packed with adrenaline, incredible luck and white knuckles.

Emir Kusturica notes that Vávra once impressed on him the importance of having strong conflict in a film, as no one could keep still for two or three hours without it. In a surprising self-own on the part of Dungarpur, whose film contains no conflict whatsoever, Kusturica makes this statement around the three-hour mark. Menzel’s incredulousness at what the documentary will ultimately look like also provides some occasional levity, and more than five hours into the running time, he quips: “It will be long, long, long, long film!” Fortunately, the length is mitigated in no small measure by the absolutely stunning imagery from the directors’ films, with almost all of the clips appearing to have been restored to mint condition. 

Jiří Menzel, in his late-70s, cuts a congenial figure who can seemingly talk for hours on end without much prodding. With a lifetime of experience in the director’s chair and counting many of the best-known directors of the time among his friends, he is a font of knowledge about the New Wave. His infatuation with the female body, although infinitely less nuanced than the work of François Truffaut, is also emphasised on multiple occasions and gives a childlike quality to this director, not unlike that of his main character in Closely Watched Trains. However, quirky as he is, there are simply too many scenes with him speaking while lying in an empty bathtub, his dirty feet sticking out at the bottom, and this becomes a distraction in the latter part of the film.

He may well be the most talkative, but it is wholly unclear why Menzel should be the focus of attention and what the “search” in the title refers to. While Dungarpur provides a multifaceted view of Czech and Slovak filmmaking in the 1960s and beyond, thanks in large part to Menzel’s willingness to discuss it at great length, the latter is never challenged in any serious way. The last hour or two of the film does make clear that he is not universally beloved, but the director is not directly confronted with the criticisms his peers have of him and his work.

This brings up another missed opportunity. Perhaps it was just a matter of logistics, but it feels regrettable that almost all the interviews were conducted one on one. One of the film’s only truly emotional scenes is when Menzel talks about a rare group photo showing the luminaries of the New Wave together and goes down the line to point out the rare ones who are still alive. What the film doesn’t make all that clear is that many of the interviewees actually passed away during the seven-year production of CzechMate, including Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Drahomíra Vihanová and renowned cinematographer Miroslav Ondřícek.

Although some thematic montages are stronger than others, the film’s editing consistently ensures smooth transitions between a free-flowing, somewhat heterogeneous mixture of topics. The loose structure also means that a  lot more time is often spent on one film in Menzel’s filmography while another is almost completely ignored (Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut had the same problem, among many others). Thankfully, despite the vast number of interviews with close to 100 people, we never feel like this is all just a sequence of talking heads.

Watching a seven-hour film is physically exhausting, and one has to wonder whether a theatrical release was the best format. Given the lack of a strong thematic thread (sometimes, Menzel and his work all but disappear from the film), it might have been a better idea to rearrange the material as a miniseries according to topic or time period. The screening I attended at Prague’s Ponrepo cinema had no intermissions, so for those wishing to have a snack, relieve themselves or keep their legs from turning to jelly, it was necessary to leave the theatre and, therefore, miss out on part of the film. This situation is far from ideal, and it is up to either the cinema or the filmmaker to solve the problem.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel judiciously positions the Czechoslovak New Wave, brief though it was, as one of the most important movements in the 125-year history of the seventh art. While the highlights include the beautiful first scene of Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání), the amazing three-minute opening shot of Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) and a memorable dream sequence from Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic (Ať žije republika), the list goes on and on, and one can easily feel overwhelmed by just how talented this group of individuals clearly was.

Menzel is on the right track when he says that two of the most unfortunate events of the 20th century were the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the talkie. Seeing what these filmmakers created in the 1960s and knowing that it had all been snuffed out by 1969, when the most interesting works were banned (put in “the safe”) in the name of “normalising” the country is absolutely tragic. Just as cinema would undoubtedly have been better off had silent cinema evolved well past 1927, the global motion picture industry almost certainly would have benefitted from the raw energy and unbridled creativity of the nová vlna continuing long after the Prague Spring. While their counterparts in France were receiving rave reviews for each making one or two convention-busting films, these Central Europeans were churning out one jaw-dropping film after another, often in very different ways. Of course, just like the French films, not all of them were masterpieces, but CzechMate certainly piques our interest, and during the screening, one can’t help but make notes of which of these films to watch (again).

Successful at conveying the mesmerising skill on display in the many, many, many films that can be classified as part of the Czechoslovak New Wave but less exhaustive a portrait of its main protagonist, this documentary hides its minor flaws very well behind an assortment of likeable and very informative individuals and editing that rarely draws attention to itself. Because of its unusual running time, this is not your average film. But then, it was far from your average film movement.

I had two minor quibbles with the onscreen text: Only the English (not the original Czech or Slovak) titles are shown, which is a shame. In addition, we are not reminded very often of the names of the nearly 100 people who are interviewed, and over the course of more than seven hours, it is impossible to remember who is who. More reminders of people’s names would have been very helpful.

Parasite (2019)

André Crous

At times slapstick horror, at other times pitch-black comedy, Parasite pits a poor but very ambitious family against their polar opposites.

ParasiteSouth Korea
4*

Director:
Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriters:
Bong Joon-ho
Han Jin-won
Director of Photography:
Hong Kyung-pyo

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: 기생충
Transliterated title: Gisaengchung

If looks could kill, a wrinkled nose would eviscerate. A stare can be ambiguous as to precisely what the objectionable feature is, but a wince of disgust signalled by a movement of the nose is as clear as day: The smell is simply unbearable. When the stench emanates from an individual who, in turn, notices the nauseated expression on the receiver’s face, shock and embarrassment inevitably follow. And in the case of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, all of this leads to a surprisingly poignant bloodbath.

Loosely referencing his entry in the three-part anthology feature, Tokyo!, Bong starts his film with pizza boxes. The boxes are piled from floor to ceiling in a grimy basement apartment in a South Korean metropolis where the lower-class – and, from the looks of it, blissfully unemployed – Kim family resides. The father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), used to be a chauffeur but is now the one folding most of the boxes, albeit not very well. His post-teenage children, who epitomise the term “parasite singles”, are still living at home. And both the children and the parents, who live together in bug-infested squalor and leave their tiny piss-stained windows open to profit off the free municipal fumigation at street level, rely on proximity to their presumably slightly better-off neighbours to mooch off their Wi-Fi. But such multifaceted parasitism is not enough for them.

Through the fortunes of circumstance, Ki-Taek’s son, baby-faced 20-something Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-shik), is handed a job as an English tutor to a teenage girl at her wealthy family’s mansion. In terms of the relative standards of living, the contrast with his own family home is stark, and he soon spots an opportunity to spread the wealth, as it were, by getting servants fired and replaced with his sister (posing as an arts teacher for gifted children), his father (the driver) and his mother (the housekeeper). Thus, before long, the entire Kim family has all but moved into the perfectly manicured, ultra-modernist and very spacious compound of Mr and Mrs Park, and when the upper-class owners decide to spend the weekend glamping at a retreat, the Kims make themselves at home.

While they work hard to manipulate the elites, the Kims are, above all, interested in having the ability to partake of their employers’ material wealth; to this end, however, they remain dependent on the Parks. They are indeed parasites, gorging themselves on their host, but they can only continue provided that they don’t die, the host doesn’t die, and they are not removed by force.

Around the halfway mark, things turn slightly more serious (and, unfortunately, the plot gets bogged down in meandering conversations) with a revelation about some unexpected previous occupants of the house who may have more cunning and perseverance than the current crop of employees. We are also made ever more acutely aware of how body odour is tied to class. The Kims, who cannot afford the same extravagant treatments as the Parks and do not have the luxury of moving in slow motion to avoid breaking a sweat, may as well have a neon sign above their heads that is constantly flashing “paupers”. There is something appealing about this struggle to rise above one’s circumstances, but the Kims’ increasingly violent ambition to climb the social ladder – and, more importantly, get their competitors booted from the rungs – makes it difficult to root for them.

Not that it was ever easy to be on their side. While the first act is full of energy, and we are constantly surprised by how easy it is for them to wrap the well-to-do but seemingly vapid Parks around their little finger, we do not exactly sympathise with either of the two families. The Kims are devious and scheming but also want a better life for themselves, while the Parks genuinely want to protect what is theirs but are living their life in a bubble isolated from the rest of society. The only true caricature is Mrs Park, whose shopping sprees, white Pomeranian and ennui-driven naps around the house provide ample fodder to view her as privileged and clueless, and each of her scenes is likely to elicit a good chuckle. A juxtaposition late in the film contrasts Mrs Park choosing dresses from her walk-in wardrobe with people at a shelter receiving clothes.

As the narrative unspools, director Bong turns up the dial on his social commentary, which peaks with an astonishing visual tour de force. Just as things seem to reach boiling point, a devastating rainstorm begins to rage. While Mr and Mrs Park lie on their living room couch and have sex as their young son plays in his colourful teepee in the garden, which is so lush it almost resembles a real forest, the lower-lying city, including the Kims’ basement apartment, falls victim to a flood of biblical proportions. As the downtown dwelling (and the screen) fills up with rising water, the perspective dissolves to an innovative divine point-of-view shot slowly floating high above a river of destruction in the heart of the city.

Bong Joon-ho is in full control of proceedings in Parasite, and although it may take a while to warm up to his particular brand of genre-bending hybridisation, the pay-off is deeply satisfying. Some may quibble with the two-hour-plus running time (or, more justifiably, the amount of time spent on the post-climax coda) or the lack of any real texture in the relationships among the members of the Kim family, but this opportunity to indulge in a socially conscious comedy with elements verging on horror should not be missed.

Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

André Crous

Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a photographer whose work was only recognised after her death, takes audience on a voyage of discovery.

Finding Vivian MaierUSA
4*

Directors:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Screenwriters:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Director of Photography:
John Maloof

Running time: 80 minutes

When he bought his first box of Vivian Maier negatives, John Maloof had no idea who the photographer was. At the time, in 2007, Maloof was just a 20-something guy who knew little about photography but sometimes frequented flea markets and auctions, a gift that had been passed down from his father, and to him by his father before him. He says he always had a talent for noticing something worth having, and when he started sorting through the negatives he had bought, he was struck by their consistent quality.

He knew these pictures were the work of a certain Vivian Maier, but searching online did not help him very much, as Maier had never achieved any kind of professional success. Two years later, after posting some of the pictures on the Internet and getting an unrestrained euphoric reaction from commenters, he tried again. This time, he found an obituary, posted only a few weeks earlier, that helped him embark on a journey of discovery into the life of this unknown but obviously talented individual.

There is no question that Maier is a subject worthy of an investigation that runs the length of a feature film, even though the opening sequence, clearly meant to be comical, shows us her acquaintances unable to come up with a word to describe her. They eventually more or less settle on “eccentric”. Although it becomes clear that people did not particularly dislike her, she was generally perceived to be somewhat odd.

There are multiple reasons for this, and whenever Finding Vivian Maier pursues another strand of her story, it always grabs our attention. The first act, however, is by far the most interesting, as Maloof takes us through his early realisation that he was onto someone remarkable. He also waits until just the right time to reveal to us what Maier looked like, and we get a real rush from the small discoveries along the way, from her name and her accent to her photographs and her occupation, and finally, her appearance.

For a long time, there is uncertainty as to whether Maier was French or American, and the interviewees have vastly contradictory statements. Along with Maloof, who has managed to get hold of some very curious individuals to interview for this film and thereby made them and the film especially memorable, we find out when she was born and what she did for most of her life. She started in a factory and eventually worked as a nanny, even though her approach to child-rearing is far from admirable, and late in the story we get to the darker side of her character, which unfortunately is examined rather superficially.

We watch the film, the photos and the person herself develop in front of our eyes from our perch inside the theatre – itself a darkroom of sorts – and ultimately the image we get is one from which we simply cannot turn away. Maier remains elusive to the end, and even though Maloof makes do with little information about her past, except for snippets revealed by a genealogist or those she worked for over the years.

Yet the magnetism of the story lies primarily with the photos, as would Van Gogh’s paintings, Mozart’s music or Kafka’s stories. In contrast with these artists, however, Maier created her pictures as a full-time hobby rather than her occupation, and she never tried to actively sell her work or get it seen by the public. She had taken more than 100,000 negatives over her lifetime, but almost none of them had been developed. Countless pictures are shown onscreen, accompanied by breathtakingly emotive music scored by Academy Award–winning composer Joshua Ralph, who has worked on some of the most widely acclaimed documentaries of the past few years, including Man on Wire and The Cove.

Maier shot hundreds of rolls of photographic film and film stock, but while we get to see an impressive variety of her films, we almost exclusively see her photos in black and white taken in the 1950s and 1970s, and the lack of colour photos, which goes unexplained in the film, is rather peculiar. What we see in these black-and-white pictures, however, takes our breath away, and there are many visual references to pictures by other renowned photographers of the era whom Maier was either consciously emulating or by whom she was influenced. Or perhaps she was doing all this without even knowing about someone like Diane Arbus or Helen Levitt.

It helps that Maloof himself is such a visual filmmaker, and his curious eyes draw us into the story he is telling, but we never get a satisfactory explanation for why he signs the backs of Maier’s prints that go on sale and are shown to great success at art galleries around the world. Another detail that was a bit hard to swallow involved him trying to track down a church steeple in a French town on some of Maier’s pictures: He says he used Google images by typing something like “French church steeples” and somehow found the picture. Perhaps because of a lack of information from the filmmaker, this bit seems mind-blowing at first and then suspicious in retrospect, especially because the village somewhere deep in the Alps only has only a few dozen inhabitants.

Whatever qualms there may be about the investigation itself, the quality of Maier’s images is unassailable, and while the character herself may fade into the background after we have seen the film, the striking compositions of her work will not.

Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel expertly connect details from interviews with the life captured in Maier’s tens of thousands of photographs, and while we cannot retrace the subject’s life exactly or feel like we are following in her footsteps, we do get multiple glimpses of the moments she caught with her camera. She may have been eccentric or even mentally unstable, and she may very well have lacked social tact, but what remains today is her extensive body of work, and everybody who sees Finding Vivian Maier would agree that her pictures have earned her a place alongside some of the greatest photographers of people of the 20th century.

The Missing Picture (2013)

André Crous

The story of the atrocities in Cambodia in the 1970s is one worth telling, but by using static clay figures, The Missing Picture just looks silly.

L'image manquanteFrance/Cambodia
2*

Director:
Rithy Panh
Screenwriters:
Rithy Panh
Christophe Bataille
Director of Photography:
Prum Mesa

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: L’image manquante

“There is no truth, there is only cinema; revolution is cinema”, is a woolly quotation from The Missing Picture, which is a documentary that uses some archive footage but mostly clay figures to depict the terrible events that took place during Cambodia’s re-education programme under the Khmer Rouge in 1975–79.

Made by the Cambodian-born French filmmaker Rithy Panh, the subject’s importance is unquestionable. One of the best-known films of the 1980s was the unforgettable The Killing Fields, which followed one man – who worked as an interpreter for The New York Times – from the moment the capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the communist forces, through the desperate times working in the rice paddies in the countryside with little or no food for long stretches of time, until he finally escaped across the border to Thailand. It was a true story, beautifully brought to life by director Roland Joffe.

Panh’s hundreds of clay figures, which occupy extremely detailed sets, almost never move, except when they are involved in some cinematic process. They are frozen in place, seemingly devoid of spirit, but when Panh shows us a cameraman shooting film or a film director doing his job, these figures start moving.

The quotation at the top sounds like something Jean-Luc Godard would have said, and whatever you think of its poetry, it is important to note how the director contradicts himself only a few moments later, when he observes how films were used as propaganda by the Khmer Rouge to show people smiling while they work in the fields that offer what they would describe in their language of exaggeration as an “extraordinary, glorious” harvest.

Panh also doesn’t dig into the absurdity and hypocrisy of the Khmer Rouge showing films to educate the country’s people about Marxist ideology and reading books by Lenin while they themselves denounce any and all Imperial (i.e. Western) devices and call anyone who deigns to read books a pig. We even get some archive footage of pigs parading around in front of the National Library to sear this idea into our heads.

The Missing Picture is Panh’s story of his own life under the brutal form of communism that turned the country into a mass Gulag camp run by the all-powerful entity called Angkar, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the country’s name under the Khmer Rouge). People were forced to work in the fields, manually transporting dirt and rocks from one place to another throughout the day, every day. They lost their possessions and sense of individuality and were encouraged to act and think collectively.

Panh was 13 years old at the time the Khmer Rouge took over, and the few scenes that compare the bustling markets of Phnom Penh before the invasion with the shots of a completely deserted capital during the years of Khmer rule are absolutely riveting.

At various points throughout the film, he attempts to fuse the archive footage to his clay figures in order to bridge time and create a reconstruction that is tied together across the span of history, and he does this by superimposing the figures on the black-and-white footage from the time. The idea has merit, but don’t expect a Forrest Gump–like experience; sometimes, it is effective, but more often than not it just looks ridiculous.

The worst offence is a scene in the second half of the film in which three children die from malnutrition. At first, we see the clay figures dissolving away to disappear completely from their beds. It is a powerful moment, but this scene is followed immediately by colourful shots of clouds and the clay figures flying like superheroes across the sky as they presumably make their way toward heaven.

The film contains a great deal of information, shared with us via voiceover that pretends to be the director, as the text is written in the first person, but late in the film when someone is interviewed on television and we learn it is Panh himself, we are disorientated because the voice and especially the accent is so pronouncedly different. In fact, the voiceover was done by co-writer, Christophe Bataille.

What may have sounded like an intriguing proposition for a film is actually a frustrating viewing experience that contains many cringeworthy scenes. The Missing Picture was clearly born out of a very personal experience for the filmmaker, but the viewer learns very little and does so in a way that does not rely on the unusual approach to storytelling on display here.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013.

John Wick (2014)

André Crous

There is too much shooting and not enough character in (this first instalment of) John Wick, an action vehicle tailor-made for Keanu Reeves

John WickUSA
3.5*

Director:
Chad Stahelski
Screenwriter:
Derek Kolstad
Director of Photography:
Jonathan Sela

Running time: 100 minutes

Tarantino, by way of Star Trek, taught us that revenge is a dish best served cold. The ice-cold temperament of Keanu Reeves is therefore perfectly suited to a tale of revenge that produces an almost never-ending stream of corpses but is all the more chilling because of its main character’s utterly cool demeanour.

Jonathan “John” Wick (Keanu Reeves) used to be a bad man. Until five years ago, he did astonishingly successful work as a heavy – halfway through the film, someone reminds us, perhaps a tad euphemistically, that Wick used to be the guy you called to “beat people up” – and was an associate of one of the nastiest Russian mobsters in New York City, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist).

A few days after the death of Wick’s wife, a group of young Russians notice his 1969 Boss Mustang at a gas station; that evening, they beat him to within an inch of his life and take the car. By some crazy coincidence, one of the men is Tarasov’s son, Iosef (Alfie Allen), who has no idea yet what he is about to unleash. And we know that some bad things are on the way because his father the strongman goes silent.

Chad Stahelski (David Leitch performed co-director duties, but because of DGA rules, only one person can receive credit as director) reveals very few details about Wick’s past life, either working in the business or living with his now-late wife, whom we only see in flashbacks and in a prominent video on his mobile phone. This lack of information hinders our understanding of the character but it also makes him an enigma whose strength lies demonstrably in the number of people he can kill without breaking a sweat, or a nail.

The first shots of Wick at home show us he is living very comfortably, but we don’t know how this is possible, whether his wife knew anything about the way he used to make his money or whether he has a day job. When a policeman stops by late one night during an altercation, the scene between them is deliberately comical but will baffle the viewer on second thought, because we don’t have enough insight into his life to understand why the cop plays dumb on purpose, albeit much to our enjoyment.

Thankfully, it is Reeves in the role of Wick, and even when he becomes emotional, be it out of sadness or out of anger, his expressions are muted, which in this case is a very good thing. What is not a good thing, however, is the casting of his nemesis. While Michael Nyqvist is a fine actor in his native Swedish (he starred as Mikael Blomkvist in the original TV series adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels), his English is terribly wooden, and he is done no favours by a screenplay that makes him recite dialogue that sounds like it is from more than a century ago. His Russian may very well be better than his English (I couldn’t tell), but the film would have been much better off with a different actor in the role.

The story of a man unwillingly drawn back into his former life in the underworld to avenge a more recent injustice may sound a bit like The History of Violence, but John Wick has nowhere near the same insight or sense of drama as Cronenberg’s stunning 2005 film. Instead, we just get a lot of gunshots, stab wounds and broken bones, often without even knowing anything about the victims.

If you like violence, you will love John Wick. There is little variety, as more than half of the living shuffle off their mortal coil with a shot to the head, and the story is terribly thin, but the film does remind us that Reeves has a place in the action film genre, and sometimes it needs him as much as he needs it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

André Crous

David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo breathes fire over the chilly Swedish countryside.

Girl with the Dragon TattooUSA
4*

Director:
David Fincher
Screenwriter:
Steven Zaillian
Director of Photography:
Jeff Cronenweth

Running time: 160 minutes

At their first meeting, the septuagenarian Henrik Vanger, head of the powerful Vanger Industries, warns an investigative journalist about “thieves, misers, bullies … the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet.” These people, we learn, are his relatives, and in the cold winter air of rural Sweden, the fog that permanently hangs over the quiet desolation is the uncertainty about the intentions of a handful of people on a tiny island: the Vanger family.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, has come to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl, Harriet, which dates back to the summer of 1966. On that day, sumptuously recreated by director David Fincher and his cinematographer in shades of gold, Harriet seemed to be on edge, and by nightfall she had vanished like a dream.

Blomkvist seems to be the perfect man for the job: He is a keen detective and isn’t scared of naming and shaming the guilty parties, no matter how influential they are. He also happens to need some time alone, and the excursion to the remote town of Hedestad seems to be the perfect opportunity for him to regroup after a devastating legal defeat.

He soon realises that he is in over his head, however, with many corpses – all of them girls, which explains the (original) Swedish title of the book on which the film is based: Men Who Hate Women – rearing their heads from beyond the grave, and decides to bring in the goth cyber expert Lisbeth Salander to help him hack his way through the swampland of cold cases. Lisbeth is the girl with the titular tattoo, and has clearly had a very rough life, though presumably the details of her childhood will be dealt with in the sequel(s).

That is a shame, because the 2009 Swedish film, with which Fincher’s version will inevitably be compared, handles Lisbeth’s backstory very cunningly by using a momentary flashback to hint at an extremely violent streak. Furthermore, this American interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling three-part novel differs in one significant respect from the source and the other film version: While the setting, the characters’ names and all newspaper headlines are Swedish, the dialogue is in English, though Swedish interjections for “Hi” or “Thanks” do feature in speech.

Daniel Craig, who plays Blomkvist, overcomes this linguistic mishmash by playing his usual British self, and it works. Christopher Plummer, as Henrik Vanger, is an American who pronounces Swedish names with a Swedish accent. But Rooney Mara, who plays Lisbeth and has the right body gestures for the character, has a face that is too delicate for the role and her attempt at imitating a Swede speaking English fails miserably.

Fincher, who has had ample experience putting information-heavy storylines onscreen, skilfully guides us through the wealth of details from that fateful day in 1966 when Harriet disappeared. In one very effective sequence, while Blomkvist reads a timeline of the events with a yellow highlighter, we get brief glimpses of the day in the same yellow tones.

In contrast with the bright sunbathed images that constitute the past, the present is murky, perfectly anticipated by Fincher’s opening credits sequence – his best since Fight Club – in which a grey, metallic fluid seems to gush over a body that is half-animated, half-decomposing, while Trent Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” pulsates on the soundtrack.

Fincher allows himself one moment of the darkest brand of humour, pulling the kind of stunt Kubrick did when his main character in A Clockwork Orange committed a rape while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain”. Here, under slightly different but similar circumstances, some of Enya’s music is used to the same bloodcurdling effect.

Such effects are the director’s forte, and he uses image and sound both subtly and grippingly to affect the viewer on a subconscious level, often hinting at more ominous details that others have overlooked to their detriment. The film’s focus on Blomkvist and Salander is sharp, but the 2009 adaptation offered an impression of danger despite the family members’ proximity to each other. Then again, Fincher does provide greater detail about the investigation’s many twists and turns, and he does so in a firm and comprehensible way that has less violence than its Swedish counterpart yet is equally effectual.

Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

André Crous

In Searching for Sugar Man, documentary filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul pieces together the unlikely story of how an almost anonymous singer in Detroit became a star in apartheid-era South Africa without his knowledge. 

Searching for Sugar ManSweden
4*

Director:
Malik Bendjelloul
Screenwriter:
Malik Bendjelloul
Director of Photography:
Camilla Skagerström

Running time: 85 minutes

In Searching for Sugar Man, Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul travels the world to track down the major players in a drama that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic starting in the early 1970s. It is a tale almost too tall to be credible.

We hear the story of an unknown singer-songwriter performing in small smoky bars in the rundown centre of the Motor City, where on cold winter nights the lyrics would drift through the noise and the drinking and stick with anyone who bothered to pay attention. The singer wasn’t looking to make an impact on the audience, but one couldn’t help admiring the wisdom and sometimes the pain of the poetry in the lyrics.

This man was Sixto Rodriguez, and when he was discovered by some record producers, they thought they had found the next Bob Dylan. His first album, Cold Fact, was recorded and released in 1970 but sold so poorly that by the time his second record was put out the following year, the label thought it best to relieve him of his contract.

He didn’t give up on performing, but it was never the centre of his life, and he spent most of his time doing what he could get paid for: construction and renovation in the housing industry. He has lived in the same Detroit house for more than 40 years.

Meanwhile, completely unbeknown to him, he was becoming a star in a place he had never been to, and it’s still unclear what the genesis of his foreign fame was: In the 1970s and 1980s, despite no one knowing who Rodriguez was or what had become of him after his two albums, his records had phenomenal sales figures in South Africa, at that time mostly cut off from the international scene because of its racial segregation policy of apartheid.

The South African producers who sold his records in the country said they had either heard the legendary stories of his death – some said he set himself on fire during a performance; others claimed he was so disappointed by the lack of support at another show he blew his brains out onstage – or they thought he would never consider coming to South Africa because of politics and what they considered his “obvious” stardom.

Actually, he never had any idea, because those who made money from his records never told him. A very powerful interview takes place in Hollywood with the erstwhile chairman of Motown Records, Clarence Avant, who states that though Rodriguez was one of the best singers he ever worked with, it is pointless to look for where the money went. Avant is an odious fellow, getting riled up and defensive very quickly, and it is clear where the blame for Rodriguez’s situation lies.

In the meantime, the artist’s popularity surpassed that of Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones in South Africa, and a few music buffs tried to track down the man, or at least piece together his life story as they were more or less convinced that he had died early in his career. What would come of their investigation is something quite remarkable: After decades out of the limelight, Rodriguez went to South Africa in March 1998 to perform six sold-out concerts for people who had grown up listening to his music – most notably, his single, “Sugar Man”.

From the opening scene, in which Stephen Segerman drives along the stunning Chapman’s Peak Drive mountain pass on the western side of the Cape Peninsula, it is made clear what a friendly influence South Africa and its people would be on the story of Rodriguez. Although it is easy to say the weather was merely dependent on the time of year when the documentary was shot, one comes away from watching the film with very strong images of a warm, welcoming South Africa and, by contrast, the icy, desolate cityscape of Detroit, where Rodriguez has toiled all his life without any kind of acclaim.

The beginning of the film does use the snow-swept Detroit in an interesting way: In a few rare instances, black-and-white scenes turn to colour and static shots become mobile when Rodriguez’s songs start playing on the soundtrack.

One shot in the film, however, is particularly irritating: the staged arrival of Rodriguez at Cape Town International Airport in 1998, which consists of silhouettes, starkly contrasted with a painted orange backdrop of Table Mountain, moving toward a horde of waiting paparazzi. It is out of place in a film that draws so much on almost-unreal reality, and it undercuts the power of the facts. Luckily, this scene is complemented by photos of his real arrival at the airport.

The film briefly touches on apartheid and shows footage of anti-government demonstrations and police beatings. This is important in conveying the feeling of oppression that Rodriguez’s music helped people to cope with in some way, but the focus is still mostly on the singer’s lack of knowledge about his fame on the other side of the world.

Searching for Sugar Man is truly inspirational and shows how small gestures can lead to big things. With scenes all around the Cape Town city bowl, the film is also another reminder of the beauty of the city at the bottom of Africa, and it encourages further investigation of the country’s rich (musical) history and its influences.

The Little Man (2015)

André Crous

Czech puppeteer Radek Beran’s The Little Man is an unconventional fairy tale and a lovely adventure for children and adults alike.

The Little ManCzech Republic
4*

Director:
Radek Beran
Screenwriter:
Lumír Tuček
Director of Photography:
Filip Sanders

Running time: 70 minutes

Original title: Malý Pán

With his second feature film, puppeteer Radek Beran sets the bar deceptively low so that we are continually surprised and exhilarated by events, visuals, twists and turns that we do not see coming. The Little Man (Malý Pán) is a film shot on location in a Czech forest but starring puppets (technically, marionettes) that are visibly manipulated, as their movements are somewhat jerky and the strings from which they hang noticeably rise up to the top of the screen.

Based on a children’s book by Lenka Uhlířová and Jiří Stach entitled The Little Man’s Great Journey (Velká cesta Malého pána), the film is an adventure that is primarily aimed at children but offers very funny moments for adults, too.

The titular man, voiced by Saša Rašilov, is youthful and slightly naïve and recently left his parents’ home to build himself a refuge in the middle of the forest, but he is haunted by a recurring nightmare of a door that won’t open while a mysterious voice orders him to open the door. This dream pushes him towards a discovery of his surroundings and eventually to open his eyes to unexpected friendships with those around him.

His first point person on solving the mysteries of existence is Empty Head, a giant disembodied head lying on the ground not far from his house. Empty Head looks rather worse for wear and says it cannot provide any answers before drinking the crystal clear water found in a fortress guarded by the evil Great Strait.

Thus begins Little Man’s journey, during which he has to persuade Fishrew (a kind of gentle half-dodo, half-Nessie that guards the moat around the fortress) to let him through, fight the Cheeky Punk (voiced by the not-dissimilar-looking Pavel Liška), research ways to fight off Great Strait, visit an expert robotic handyman that can repair anything, make friends with a larva named Fida, ask gherkins questions, find talking trees brimming with wisdom that is succinctly expressed, and much more.

The plot is a magical ride that may be light on substance but has enough quirky moments, an easy-to-follow storyline and an eclectic soundtrack by Tata Bojs frontman Milan Cais to keep the viewer fully engaged.

On the technical side, the decision to put puppetry front and centre in the visuals (by showing the strings instead of removing them in post-production) never impedes our suspension of disbelief. The work on location certainly helps the process and perhaps in light of the generally light-hearted tone of the narrative, a character’s sometimes erratic movements frequently succeed in sustaining the levity.

That is not to say that the production appears to have been simple or the product simplistic. On the contrary, the interior shots are beautiful, and director of photography Filip Sanders deserves praise for his lighting in these scenes. The flyover shots, especially the ones from the point of view of a hot air balloon late in the film, are also impressive to behold and truly gives the viewer a feeling of briefly inhabiting the world of the film along with the characters.

Although the target audience is children, Beran adds one or two curiously gruesome moments to his film that will be particularly funny to adults because they are so incongruous with the rest of the approach. One such example is the depiction of a plan conceived by the Cheeky Punk to kill Little Man, and we are shown his fantasy not by means of puppetry but through animation that includes various forms of gory execution. Another striking moment of adult comedy manages to reference Immanuel Kant and Harry Potter in the same sentence.

For the most part, however, the storytelling does little to distinguish itself from that deployed in a fairy tale. The visuals are certainly more interesting here, and since there are no actors, as such, we are spared any overacting. In fact, whenever the voices become hysterical, the effect is comical and clearly intended to elicit that reaction from the viewer.

It would be easy to belittle the film for the uncomplicated progression of its story and that it is merely a life lesson (life is worth little if you don’t have friends) presented as a flimsy adventure story. However, as suggested above, Beran’s creativity comes through on many occasions, and although he does use a handful of special effects, their use can often be explained by pointing out the scene is a dream or a fantasy or (in the case of the “Universal Fixer”) simply unrealistic, even in the world of the film.

This unconventional film may not be the most polished or the most insightful film of the year, but it keeps our attention despite its flaws. Its characters are quirky and unpredictable, and it is always a joy to keep suspending our disbelief, even when what we see is so obviously make-believe.

The Book Thief (2013)

André Crous

The Book Thief, which seems to shift the blame for the atrocities of Nazi Germany to an offscreen character named “Death”, is one of the worst World War II films that have ever seen the light of day.

Book ThiefUSA
1.5*

Director:
Brian Percival
Screenwriter:
Michael Petroni
Director of Photography:
Florian Ballhaus

Running time: 130 minutes

There is something sadistic about the industry inflicting movies on us on a near-annual basis that have to do with Jews hiding from the Nazis. From time to time, these films have undeniable strength and importance – for example, films that are documentaries, like Shoah or The Night and the Fog, or those that veer close to being documentaries, like Schindler’s List or Europa Europa – but just as often, there are movie producers who are interested in the subject more as a moneymaking device than as a historical tragedy.

This is where things usually fall apart. If the subject of fear is used not to teach us about the evil of the past, but merely as a backdrop to a story about a Christian girl who falls in love with a Jewish boy, and who reads him bedtime stories when he is bedridden, it can only be described as abominable. And that is exactly what The Book Thief is.

The Christian girl in question is an orphan named Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). Her brother died recently in the arms of her mother, who has had to flee because she is a communist, leaving Liesel in the care of a parentless couple. Her new “papa” is the kind-hearted, patient and loving Hans Hubermann, played with grace by Geoffrey Rush. Her second “mama,” of course, is the strict and offish Rosa (Emily Watson), who is sharp-tongued, always finds fault with everyone else, and whom we never grow to like.

At her brother’s funeral, Liesel had picked up a book, and with this book her world, which has suddenly shrunk to a small home on a short street in a tiny swastika-emblazoned town in the German countryside, opens up again, and her relationship with her new father blossoms. She falls in love with books, and after the predictable scene of a Nazi-organised book burning in the town square, she can’t help but take one of the books, even as it singes under her coat, making her clothes billow with smoke.

The Book Thief, which is based on a novel by Austrian author Markus Zusak, may have had the best intentions, but when the street on which the girl lives is called Himmelstrasse (Heaven Street), and we constantly have a narration supplied by no one other than Death himself (voiced here by Roger Allam), and everyone speaks as if they’re on the radio, it is truly embarrassing. And the embarrassment is infuriating because of the importance of the historical context.

For a large part of the film, a young Jewish man, Max, hides out in the Hubermanns’ cellar, and Liesel’s fascination with him, mixed with the secret she has to keep – even from her best friend, Rudy, the boy from next door who never leaves her alone and who, from the way he is acting, apparently had decided to fall in love with her even before they met – could have been the source of an interesting story. But because of the terrible acting by almost everyone in the cast and the very one-dimensional characters they all portray, it is difficult to take anything seriously, despite the terrible setting of Nazi Germany.

The only time when the film packs a punch is near the beginning, shortly before the start of the war, when director Brian Percival intercuts the violence of Kristallnacht with a choir of fair-haired German children singing their hearts out, dressed in their Hitlerjugend uniforms with enormous flags of the Nazi Party draped on either side of them. It is a deeply distressing scene for the viewer, which seems to belong to an infinitely more capable film. It is also a scene whose gravity is almost entirely undermined by one a few minutes later in which Liesel and Max make fun of Hitler’s mother.

But the worst is yet to come. Never mind Liesel effortlessly wading into frigid waters halfway through the film and Rudy diving into the ice-cold river to prove his love/friendship, and neither of them so much as get gooseflesh from the cold: The film ends with almost an exact copy of the final scene of Titanic, in which the memories of a lifetime are exhibited on cabinets for our perusal so that we can all have a nice, warm feeling upon leaving the cinema, knowing that Liesel’s post-Holocaust life was beautiful.

The Book Thief is one of the worst World War II films I have ever seen. It is one thing to try to balance humour with the grotesque events that no man or woman – and certainly no child – should ever have to face, but it is quite another to essentially make light of the events by having a director who doesn’t seem to mind his actors sounding like they are reading from a page just out of reach of the camera, and a story that is incompetently vying for our emotions. Having Death narrate the events is silly, if not appalling, beyond belief, and the whole experience leaves the viewer immensely disappointed, with a desire that someone should have set light to the screenplay.