2010-2019

Booksmart (2019)

André Crous

Told from a female perspective but playing like a cheap Netflix fusion of American Graffiti and Superbad, Booksmart hopes (in vain) that we can look past its lead’s impish behaviour because she’s more-studious-than-thou. 

BooksmartUSA
2.5*

Director:
Olivia Wilde
Screenwriters:
Emily Halpern
Sarah Haskins
Susanna Fogel
Katie Silberman
Director of Photography:
Jason McCormick

Running time: 90 minutes

There are few people as annoying as know-it-alls. Now imagine someone like this playing the lead in a feature film and failing to recognise her own deficiencies at any point in the story. It is near impossible to root for such an individual. And yet, this is the main character in Booksmart, a film that takes place over roughly a 24-hour period on the last day of school and seems to pitch itself as a female-driven American Graffiti or Superbad. Unfortunately, it has little more going for it than meagre production values, a forgettable soundtrack and a complete lack of visual creativity.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) is student body president and will be valedictorian at her high school graduation the next day. Seemingly living a life of privilege (we never see her parents, and the implication is that she somehow lives on her own on the top floor of a big duplex apartment unit), she sees herself on a glide path to the Supreme Court bench within a few years. Clearly, there is no shortage of hubris, although it is not rooted in anything except grades.

She and her best friend, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), have spent their entire school career seemingly insulated from any and all social contact, as we soon learn when Molly overhears her classmates maliciously gossiping about her. Confident in her own academic superiority, however, she confronts them by suggesting graduation is the end of the road for them, only to learn that the cool kids have way more layers than she thought: One is going to Harvard, another is headed to Stanford and the most popular guy in school has been accepted at Georgetown, while the resident stoner and long-term school student has been recruited as a programmer for Google. She not only misread the classroom: She has misread the classroom for years and never learnt anything except her school work. By the looks of it, social interaction and life, in general, have completely passed her by.

For Amy, life is somewhat more complicated. An out but introverted lesbian for the past two years, she has focused all her energy on work (and, presumably, the high-maintenance friendship with Molly) and has yet to find an outlet for her teenage hormones like her peers. She has super-religious parents who are fully supportive of their daughter, so getting laid is (as in so many other films) actually the most pressing challenge to her otherwise blissfully elite existence.

Having just realised that they have missed out on being teenagers, and given the symbolic importance of the last night of school, Molly devises a plan to attend the year’s biggest party and rack up some experiences before she graduates to residing inside the law library at Yale. Basically, her big plan is just to go to the party, where she will get to hook up with her uber-popular vice-president, Amy will finally make out with a girl, and they will somehow make up for a youth ensconced in a bubble of superiority. This “plan” is pathetic, but what is even worse is that the film somehow allows most of Molly’s dreams to come true, without her having to change a thing about herself.

The characters’ passivity is mirrored by the film itself, which has little in the way of either physical or audiovisual dynamism. Most scenes feel desperately empty, and shots with more than two characters involved in the action are few and far between. The screenplay’s central focus is on the Molly/Amy duo, and yet, by the end of the film, they are still two-dimensional, at best. The film isn’t interested in doing more than scratch the surface, and in the one big confrontation between the two girls, their dialogue fades out so that we can’t hear them, lest they appear to be more complex than a blank page.

By far the most interesting character is their cool English teacher, Miss Fine, played by the supremely talented Jessica Williams, who belongs in a much better film. The amount of personality, back story and feeling she brings to her character in just a handful of scenes is simply astounding. Jason Sudeikis is another comedian in the cast and turns up at school as the principal, although his talents are much better deployed later on when he pitches up as a Lyft driver. The topical issue of teacher pay is hinted at but probably too serious a subject to address in a film that is clearly more about lip service than thoughtful speech. (Props are given, however, when props are due: Uganda is dinged for its abysmal LGBT record.)

It might be unfair to expect any film about high school seniors to ever equal (never mind surpass) the brilliance of Will Gluck’s Easy A. But Booksmart‘s central characters are nowhere near as dynamic, independent and charismatic as Emma Stone, and the camera, by comparison, looks like it is fixed in place. In addition, while Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in Easy A have rightly been called the best movie parents of all time, Molly’s mother and father are inexplicably absent. Meanwhile, Amy’s very Christian parents (played by Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) only appear once and come across as overwrought caricatures every bit as childish as a baby on a sugar high.

Booksmart touts its feminism by pointing to other strong women (Molly’s room is adorned with pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) instead of infusing its own potentially thought-provoking central duo – a loud feminist and an out lesbian – with any kind of energy or insight beyond juvenile frolicking. They know everything, but they know nothing. Worst of all, it took them their entire young lives to figure out that being self-centred outsiders has its drawbacks.

It is incredible that it took four writers to come up with this shallow narrative headlined by a girl devoid of self-reflection and her omega-female sidekick. All the students change their minds about their peers within a single night and mostly without any serious drama. The scales fall off their eyes as if by magic, and by the end, there is absolute harmony and understanding. One half expects them to burst into a full-on musical number.

This film is often as nauseating as the excessive compliments Molly and Amy give each other and deserves a failing grade.

The Best Offer (2013)

André Crous

In The Best Offer, Giuseppe Tornatore reminds us that while love is blind, the love of art can be blinding.

The Best OfferUK/Italy
3*

Director:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Screenwriter:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Director of Photography:
Fabio Zamarion

Running time 125 minutes

Alternate title: La migliore offerta

Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is a respected auctioneer in Vienna and lives a very lonely life of luxury. He is surrounded by works of art every day at work, and he dines at some of the most expensive restaurants in the city at night. But he does so alone.

At home, he has a special room where his most-prized possessions adorn three very high walls: portraits of women, all staring back at him while he lounges in a comfortable chair in the centre of the room, reads gilded literature and consumes a glass of pricey wine.

He has dedicated his life to his job at the auction house, and he has not let anybody get close to him in all that time (he always wears gloves, because he distrusts other people’s hygiene). However, his frequent sessions at the barbershop, where he dyes his hair, suggest he has not given up looking quite yet.

And then, one day, he gets a call from Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), a woman who wants him to appraise the value of her substantial collection of paintings and antique furniture. She phones him, arranges to meet with him, and he starts appraising the objects in the expansive villa. But there is something a bit off: He never sees her.

It transpires that she has been living alone in the house for many years, and she has an assistant, who has never seen her either but delivers her groceries and cleans up after her. This mystery casts a spell over Oldman, and of course, he slowly gets reeled in by this creature not only because of her sensuous voice but also because of the many items that suggest a great deal of value. Mostly, however, it is because of a few unexplained metal objects he finds lying around the cellar.

He gives these bits and pieces, which he inexplicably finds lying around the cellar every time he visits the villa, to Robert (a very engaging Jim Sturgess), a charming young clocksmith he has become friends with (although, significantly, we do not see how this friendship is struck). Robert puts the pieces together without much trouble, and the two of them quickly realise these are all part of an automaton – the kind of 19th-century robot, perhaps even older, that also made an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Moreover, the supposed inventor is someone Oldman has been studying his whole life. If they manage to put the pieces together, this would be a stunning discovery.

While the relationship between Oldman and Claire becomes more intimate, and he grows more and more fond of her, despite her hysterical outbursts of “I love you! I hate you! Oh, forgive me, I do love you!”, he also confides his feelings – heretofore alien to him – of romantic interest in the young woman to Robert.

But Claire remains an enigma. At some point, the viewer may very well start to suspect she may be an automaton herself, or perhaps the real-life version of one of the portraits on his wall, but the director doesn’t drop enough hints to make us pursue this line of thought, which could have led us down some interesting rabbit holes.

The director is Giuseppe Tornatore, whose 1988 film Cinema Paradiso may very well be the most evocative film about the cinema ever made, but his handling of English material is as mediocre as can be expected. The dialogue is at times silly, and the delivery is far from polished.

The theme of forgery could have been exploited to a much greater degree, and so too Oldman’s statement that there is always something authentic in a fake. Tornatore loses a real opportunity for depth here by not relating it better to his own film. But with Oldman at the centre of every single scene, we obliquely take on his point of view, which is a very good strategy, given the revelations towards the end of the story. 

The cinematography is badly handled and very rough around the edges. Despite a beautiful opening sequence that underlines the exquisite service of the restaurant Oldman frequents, a particularly grating moment occurs halfway through the film when he is given access to a hidden room, but instead of a tracking shot following him into the room, the camera starts to follow him and then abruptly cuts to a position in front of him, inside the room. The reverse tracking shot that ends the film demonstrates what kind of approach Tornatore could have taken here, in a scene that actually needed such a shot.

The music of Ennio Morricone, which is not altogether dissimilar to some of his work on Once Upon a Time in America, suggests a measure of mystery but is never strong enough to make any real impact on our experience of the film.

Far below his marquee Cinema Paradiso, The Best Offer is certainly not the best the director has offered in quite some time.

The Tribe (2014)

André Crous

‘Showing instead of telling’ takes on a whole new meaning in the subtitle-free The Tribe, set in a boarding school for deaf students in Ukraine, which rewards the viewer who is paying attention to detail.

The TribeUkraine
4*

Director:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Screenwriter:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Director of Photography:
Valentyn Vasyanovych

Running time: 125 minutes

Original title: Плем’я
Transliterated title: Plemya

Silence can speak volumes, as long as we keep our eyes peeled and our ears pricked. This is the central conceit of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s unusual feature film, The Tribe (Plemya), which features no spoken dialogue but has a lot of signing going on between its characters, who are mostly high school students at a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf. The only explanatory title card appears before the first shot to inform us that there won’t be any subtitles or voice-over.

This unorthodox approach of limiting the viewer’s ability to understand the dialogue has been used in the past to confuse us, as Michael Haneke did rather pointlessly in the opening scene of his Code Unknown (Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages). Fortunately, in Slaboshpytskiy’s film, the action and the body language play a big part and help us in our quest to make sense of the story behind the gestures. Above all, the film reminds us that life is always happening whether we see or hear it or not. It doesn’t matter whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound or not; it fell nonetheless.   

Although we don’t learn his name until the closing credits, the main character is the teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), whose arrival at the school during the opening moments sets the bar so high that the second and third act, despite some stunning set pieces, never quite seem to live up to it. Dressed in everyday casual clothes, he enters his classroom to find all the boys sporting the same kind of white shirt and business jackets. Nothing has to be said; his peers’ condescension (or revulsion) is immediately apparent. Even – or particularly – in silence, the facial expressions tell a lot. And yet, Sergey seems unfazed. Does he not realise how he is perceived? Or does he not care? And why?

These questions are answered gradually as Sergey reveals himself to be a quaint mix of violence and sensitivity. His ability to protect himself quickly gains him the respect of the most delinquent and industrious guys, as he gets roped into petty crime and is soon promoted to pimping two fellow girls in his class to drivers at the local truck stop at night. At the film’s weakest points, it veers off into territory where Sergey views himself as a saviour to protect a girl he has spent an intimate moment with, and all of this feels like something we’ve seen before in countless other spoken-word stories.

The Tribe finds greatest success in those scenes where we realise the degree to which the characters’ hearing impairment affects their lives in ways hearing viewers may be ignorant of. These are scenes (sometimes dramatic, sometimes tense, sometimes gruesome) that are unique to stories about these kinds of characters. Whether it is their soundless assaults on strangers, their inability to hear approaching danger or to call for help, or the realisation that their pain sounds so much worse when they can’t hear themselves scream, these moments are stripped down to the basics and pack an eerie, visceral punch. 

Sergey’s journey from zero to hero to zero (and possibly – depending on one’s reading of the potent but ontologically dubious final scene – back to hero) is compelling but ultimately undermined by the terribly contrived romanticism that fuels some significant developments in the story’s second half. The film also struggles with coherence, as scenes in the second and third acts feel much more fragmented than those that introduced us to Sergey and presented his integration at school.

In addition, the quality of the acting is also all over the place. While Sergey is seemingly contemplative and not overly emotional (at least, for the most part), Shnyr (Olexandr Sidelnikov), who is his first point of contact with school life and also partakes in the students’ late-night criminal ventures, has persistently wild hand gestures that would seem over-the-top even when viewed with a long shot. The same is true of one of the girls being procured by the truck drivers for a bout of silent intercourse, and these histrionics are incredibly distracting.

For the most part, however, the film commands our full attention as we rely on extra-auditory cues to make sense of the diegesis. There is usually enough happening for us to follow along, even if at times we can only make out the bare outlines and have to take our best shot at figuring out the details. But it was a peculiar decision for the filmmaker to eschew any form of backstory for Sergey and to avoid introducing us by name to any of the characters. And it is equally strange that the soundtrack is already audible (in the form of a car horn being honked) on a black screen before the film proper has even started.

If The Tribe had been as thoughtful in developing its narrative past the first act as it had been up to that point, this might have been a truly breathtaking production. In his role as Sergey, however, Fesenko has a magnetic presence even when the screenplay lets him down and we struggle to empathise with him, and he is a big part of the film’s general impressiveness. 

Sworn Virgin (2015)

André Crous

Sworn Virgin, which tells the story of an Albanian woman who first becomes a man, then a woman again, is sturdy, but the main actress stares too much.

Sworn VirginItaly/Albania
3.5*

Director:
Laura Bispuri
Screenwriter:
Francesca Manieri
Director of Photography:
Vladan Radovic

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Vergine giurata

Although mostly expressionless and saying very little, Mark hopes that the journey away from his homeland will set him free and bring about a life-altering metamorphosis. Mark grew up in the north Albanian countryside as a woman named “Hana,” but because of the strict rules of the area, which include countless restrictions on women’s activities and freedoms, she rejected her womanhood, at least insofar as the term is used in this context.

However, in order to access the traditionally male activities of hunting, smoking, drinking and many others, she had to swear to remain a virgin for eternity and give up any desire to love (it is not clearly stated why this is the case, as most men born as men are presumably allowed to experience this basic human emotion). She has also had to work hard to look like a man and took the name “Mark”.

In the role of Hana/Mark is Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, who speaks Albanian throughout the film. At the beginning of the film, after leaving the homeland, she turns up in Milan at her sister’s place. Her sister, Lila, resisted tradition in her own fashion, as she rejected the idea of being married off by her father and instead left for Italy with the man she chose herself. But any expectations of a kindred spirit are dashed when Mark arrives to find that his niece, Jonida, has never been told of his existence, and Lila also appears uncomfortable that this news has so now come to light.

The film develops at a leisurely pace that remains engaging, as we put the pieces together (many of them provided to us by means of flashbacks to Hana and Lila’s childhood) and attempt to understand why Mark has made the journey to Italy.

The central character is very hesitant to share his reasons for coming, but the opening scenes in Rogam, in the Albanian Alps, where Mark had been living in complete isolation, suggest a longing for companionship, which would obviously require him to break his vow of eternal virginity and surrender his gender pronouns. Slowly, Mark becomes Hana again, and although some activists from the gender police might baulk at this turn of events, début director Laura Bispuri does not rush toward a sudden transformation but rather makes the viewer feel as immersed yet as unsure of the direction of the story as the title character almost certainly does.

Rohrwacher’s appearance also contributes significantly to our understanding of her character’s awkwardness in either gender role: With her gaunt figure here, she barely passes for a man at all, except for the flat, breast-bound chest and the cropped haircut. However, her long-time isolation and apparent lack of social interaction have led her to appear clueless about some very everyday things in Italy, and when she opens cosmetics in a store or stares at a mannequin wearing a bra, one could think of the oafish Crocodile Dundee, which is a very unfortunate point of reference.

The opening scenes are replete with atmosphere and meaning, as we not only get a glimpse of the idyllic, misty landscape of the mountain region, full of lush green mountainsides and deep blue waters, but one exterior shot of Mark’s house also includes a brief moment of a sheet of snow sliding off the roof – an unmistakable metaphor for the veil that is about to drop to reveal the original structure.

But it is the structure of the rest of the film – the gentle back-and-forth shift between the past and the present, which is the trajectory from woman to man and then from man to woman – that most visibly showcases the two hands shaping the character of Mark/Hana, and it is a strategy that works well to make the viewer aware of the struggles and the layers of this person. Her past and present mould and represent her as much as the two gender roles she takes on.

Scenes from Hana’s youth show why she wants to take on male roles, while those in the present focus on the difficulty of adapting to an entirely new context in geographical, social and sexual terms. We do not always have a perfect grasp of her reasons, but the pieces fit together well enough for us to acknowledge her conviction that this re-definition of herself is necessary.

The transition has its fits and starts, but one scene shrewdly and vividly illustrates the shedding of the old and the acceptance of the new. Having found a job as a security guard at a parking garage, Mark sits in front of a pane of glass late one night, removes his name tag and places it in front of him, on the glass, physically at a remove while still visually attached to his slight reflection. The moment is brief, but it has emotional and cerebral resonance for the viewer, which helps to signpost Mark’s transformation.

Unfortunately, the lack of emotion makes Mark/Hana a difficult character to grow close to, and her constant staring at people or things around her is sometimes grating. It is also a little far-fetched that Mark would simply up and leave from half a lifetime in Albania, with nary a belonging, and arrive in Milan to not only turn over a new leaf but write a new story. Nonetheless, Sworn Virgin is an assured first film by Bispuri that provides the viewer with little but never too little information, although a less distant performance by her lead would be welcomed as an improvement in her future projects.

Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Us (2019)

André Crous

Jordan Peele’s second feature film, Us, is a serious horror production that surpasses his début, Get Out, in style if not in substance. 

Us (2019)USA
4*

Director:
Jordan Peele
Screenwriter:
Jordan Peele
Director of Photography:
Mike Gioulakis

Running time: 120 minutes

For the film critic, the problem with twist endings is that it is frowned upon to dwell on that final revelation, despite their importance to the experience. Even just mentioning that there is a last-minute information dump that causes us to rethink the entire film is often too much for the reader to handle. It’s a fine line to walk, but neither the critic nor the reader/potential viewer should be overly sensitive, particularly if it is made clear why such information is included.

Jordan Peele’s Us ends with a labyrinthine flashback that seems to tell us everything before turning our whole notion of the story’s past upside down and then, for good measure, twisting our collective nuts one last time before the credits roll. But while the film does contain traces of this shocking development throughout, most notably in the form of a tune that is whistled, the character concerned simply does not embody the skeleton she has in her closet. The traces seem planted, while the central performance is almost unaffected. The actions do not bespeak a closely held secret, and therefore, the film will not be much more interesting the second time around. And that’s worth a mention in a review such as this.

It all starts out very peculiarly and then gets weirder and weirder until the climax in a subterranean, rabbit-filled lair. In 1986, a young girl named Adelaide visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. At some point when they aren’t paying attention, she wanders off and into a mirror maze (in a dark twist of humour, it entices the customer to “find yourself”). She looks around for a way out but doesn’t find one. Someone appears behind her – a stranger who is as tall as she is, wears the same clothes and has the same hairstyle. But before we can see their face, the film cuts to the opening credits sequence, which involves a multitude of white lab rabbits.

Peele’s second film is a far cry from his first, Get Out, the global smash hit that somehow managed to induce in the viewer the anxiety of a psychological thriller while very clearly poking fun at supposedly liberal white Americans’ racial prejudices. In Us, whose title hints at a link with the United States (a link that is ultimately very weak if not altogether obscure), he is much more interested in making a genre film than in making a statement about contemporary society.

In the present day, an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is just settling in for holiday with her family at a cabin. Husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is happy-go-lucky, seemingly without a care in the world, and is particularly excited about taking his children to the nearby beach in Santa Cruz. This news, a close-up reveals, hits Adelaide like a ton of bricks. But she puts on a brave face for her children, Zora and Jason.

The same night, after the visit to the beach, a mute family of four appear in their driveway. But it’s not just any family – it’s their doppelgängers: four individuals who have features very similar to theirs but are wearing crimson-coloured clothing. In addition, each of them is armed with a golden pair of scissors. Only one of them speaks, albeit with great difficulty and a voice that sounds like someone who is always being strangled: Adelaide’s alter ego, Red, who is quickly revealed to be the mastermind behind an uprising from the underworld.

This underworld consists of underground walkways alluded to in the film’s epigraph, which informs us of “thousands of miles” of tunnels beneath the continental United States. The characters down below mostly behave in a way that mirrors their above-ground counterparts (although, curiously, that is not always the case). This intimate relationship means they are “tethered” to each other. Plato’s cave, but with sentient shadows, would be an eerie but apt comparison.

Except for the epigraph, the first real foreshadowing we get of this tethering is a stunning image at the beach, where the camera hovers straight above the action to capture the family walking in a straight line, barely visible, while seemingly attached to their giant shadows that are lifelike but take on a life of their own as animate shadows. National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz is famous for a similarly striking composition he made with camels in 2005.

Following the initial home invasion, we quickly realise that the uprising is not just limited to the family of four but extends to the entire United States. Somehow, as is all too often the case with disaster movies, the rest of the world is unaffected. The family sticks together, trying to learn from each other how best to kill the impostors, until the final act, when Adelaide races (all alone, for reasons unexplained) into the underworld to find one of her children, who has been abducted.

This is where things take on a real mind-bending dimension as we have to put all the pieces together when the film climaxes in brightly lit hallways that could very well be tethered to the hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peele hits us with the climax, then knocks us off our feet with a bombshell surprise before delivering a second body blow. It’s the Sixth Sense of horror films, but the unexpected double twist vaults the film into a league all its own.

And yet, whereas M. Night Shyamalan’s famous blockbuster both made immediate sense and elicited admiration for blinding us to something that was in plain sight the entire time, Us conceals more and thereby reveals less, even on a repeat viewing. In his effort to shield the truth from us, Peele varnished over all the details that would have contributed to a richer fictional world, even at the risk of unveiling too much.

Even if it seems much more complex than it actually is, this is an original and stunningly crafted horror film.

The Double (2013)

André Crous

In The Double, Richard Ayoade’s stylish thriller set in a futuristic underworld, one plus one does not make two.

The DoubleUK
3.5*

Director:
Richard Ayoade
Screenwriters:
Avi Korine
Richard Ayoade
Director of Photography:
Erik Wilson

Running time: 90 minutes

Not unlike Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, which was released in the same year, Richard Ayoade’s The Double shows signs of noir, with a lot of the action taking place in yellow-hued, toxic-looking daylight (Enemy) or at night time and inside windowless buildings where the rooms are lit with hard yellow lights (The Double). Also, both stories are adaptations of works by renowned novelists – the former from José Saramago and the latter from Dostoyevsky. The two films are surprisingly similar in tone, with very thin storylines enveloped in a sense of utter hopelessness that, especially in The Double, seems positively Kafkaesque.

Set in an anonymous city at an unknown time in what is more a world of nightmares than that of actual reality (thus differing slightly from the recognisable yet alien Toronto landscape presented in Enemy), Ayoade’s film seems to have borrowed its sombre ambience from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with all devices simultaneously appearing to be advancements of and regressions from those of the present day.

The main character here is an awkward, gangly fellow named Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), who loses his briefcase in the subway when he fails to be assertive. This lack of action pervades the film, and at times the viewer will be thoroughly demoralised by how pathetic he is. But when he arrives at the reception desk of the behemoth that is his workplace, where he has been employed for more than seven years, he discovers that the clerk doesn’t recognise him without his ID card. In fact, he slowly realises he is mostly invisible to those around him.

But then, something extraordinary happens. A fellow who looks and dresses exactly like him arrives. This doppelgänger is called James Simon, and he is everything Simon James wishes he was: pro-active, confident, charming, likeable and immediately noticeable.

As in Enemy, we are provided with no reason why the two of them look the same, but here our frustration is compounded by the utter lack of investigation from Simon James’s side. Whenever he wants to say something, he fidgets, clenches his teeth and grunts, but he doesn’t speak up.

It is a thrill to watch Eisenberg in these two roles. The actor alternately draws on both of his strengths – the awkward goody-two-shoes we know from Zombieland and the snake capable of delivering rapid-fire retorts in Social Network – and whenever he is onscreen (which is all the time), he lights up the story and grabs our attention, even when we want to give him a kick up the backside to make him move, or to stop moving.

What is even more thrilling is the interaction between the two characters, especially when the relationship is one built on working together rather than against each other. This collaboration doesn’t last very long, however, and before we know it the two are at each other’s throats again, with James Simon making it clear he will do whatever it takes to dash any hopes his original has of getting the girl or proving his worth to the man at the top, the founder of the mysterious company: the Colonel.

There are bursts of music, mostly from 1960s Japan, and other strange sounds regularly pepper the soundtrack for brief moments before ending just as abruptly as they started. But in terms of sound, nothing is as good as what happens at a restaurant on a date between the girl from the local copy shop (Mia Wasikowska) and Simon (who, she thinks, is James). During a major argument, the volume on the radio is turned up past 11, and other implements start whizzing so loudly we can’t hear anything. It’s the North by Northwest trick of using noise to drown out dialogue for effect, and it is used brilliantly.

Less brilliant, however, is the plot, which is deliberately enigmatic and offers the viewer little opportunity to follow what exactly is going on. We know where things will end up eventually, but just as in Fight Club, whose two main characters are analogous to the ones here, the film doesn’t really explain the eventual demise (or murder) of the more reckless one, except to imply a kind of Pleasantville transformation brought on by choosing action instead of stagnation.

Paddy Considine stars in Simon’s beloved sci-fi television series here as an unnamed laser-gun toter whom he eventually tries to emulate, but even this explanation is fraught with a lack of clarity and doesn’t help us all that much.

The Double is a stylish, surrealist neo-noir that you shouldn’t be watching if you expect all your questions answered, but on top of wonderful casting and a frightening sense of doom throughout, this may be one of the most original films in recent memory.

Buoyancy (2019)

André Crous

Taking as its central character a soft-spoken teenager from Cambodia, Buoyancy is a restrained but effective depiction of the very real machinations of slavery in the 21st century.  

BuoyancyAustralia
4*

Director:
Rodd Rathjen
Screenwriter:
Rodd Rathjen
Director of Photography:
Michael Latham

Running time: 90 minutes

There have never been more slaves in the world than there are at present, in 2019. The final title card of Rodd Rathjen’s strong debut feature, Buoyancy, informs us that some 200,000 of them are trapped in Southeast Asia.

The ones we meet here represent but a drop in the ocean, but their story is simple enough to comprehend. It also clearly represents the broader range of experiences among the region’s workers often held captive in inhumane conditions. Based on the experiences of many real-life (presumably former) slaves in the region, the story follows the journey of a Cambodian teenager named Chakra (newcomer Sarm Heng) facing the grim reality of life as a slave in the 21st century.

The film has beautiful bookmarks: In the opening shot, we see the back of Chakra’s head. He is carrying a heavy bag across his shoulders, and his shirt is drenched with sweat in the tropical heat. He is heading down a road. In the final shot, we see his face as walks down the same road, his life now completely changed. The events that mark this transition, however, are anything but innocuous.

Buoyancy’s opening minutes broadly sketch Chakra’s domestic situation as one that seems like the beginning of a decades-long dead-end. Living with his parents and multiple siblings under one roof is difficult enough, but Chakra knows things will never get better for him out here in the rice fields of Cambodia. He learns from his football buddies that it’s possible to escape the village for a better life in neighbouring Thailand.

Since he doesn’t have the money to pay a smuggler, he agrees to work for free for the first month. But instead of going to a pineapple factory like the others, he ends up on a boat where time stands still. Underscoring their grim social position are the fish they have to sort through, which are destined to be turned into dogfood. The notion of getting paid anything more than a bowl of rice at the end of a gruelling day of work is one his violent Thai captors, led by Captain Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro), clearly do not share.

Chakra shows remarkable maturity, or maybe it is his inscrutability that makes him seem less childlike. Despite the hopelessness of this situation, which drives some of his fellow slaves to despair, he perseveres by working as hard as he can. When he realises there will never be a salary at the end of the month, he seeks any way possible to make life bearable and, especially, to rise through the hierarchy among the workers, many of whom are Burmese and stick together against him – an outsider among outsiders.

His expressionlessness saves him because he is not as easy to read as his countryman, Kea (Mony Ros). Kea has a family and wants to send money back home to his children. He senses the danger early on and does his best to protect Chakra as well as his fatherly instincts can, but he also demonstrates how dreams unfulfilled can lead to tragedy. By contrast, Chakra appears not to daydream. He keeps despair at bay by always remaining focused on the present. And when opportunity comes knocking, he is quick to seize the moment and change the future.

Rathjen mixes a documentary approach, including a very mobile camera, with a more artistic sensibility that can sometimes seem dreamlike. Brief moments of respite from the horror include the camera seemingly suspended from the clouds as it looks down at the ship passing below us, framed by the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Thailand, or when Chakra spends a rare moment floating in the water at sunset.

Although deeply satisfying to viewers wound tight as a drum after more than an hour of Chakra’s harrowing and seemingly hopeless fate, the film’s final act seems like wishful thinking. Despite his lack of experience outside the bubble of his small town, he doesn’t make a single mistake out on the boat. Somehow, the sea gods smile on his predicament and allow him to take control of his destiny without much pushback. He reveals himself to be buoyant, able to rise up from intense turmoil, and he doesn’t even get stained by the dirty froth on top.

The sharp focus on Chakra, who appears in every single scene, draws us into his story regardless of whether we feel we understand him. Although a couple of the scenes are haunting because of their implicit inhumanity (the dismemberment of one of the slaves is particularly tough to watch), Buoyancy does not engage in gratuitous violence. Its mostly taciturn central character stoically confronts the tribulations onboard without contriving a drama that might justify a strong reaction. And as a result, the realisation of injustice dawns all the more forcefully on us as we leave the cinema.

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

André Crous

In this sixth instalment of the famous franchise, Ethan Hunt (rather, let’s face it, Tom Cruise) is as ready as ever to do the hard work himself, but tying up decades-old loose ends can be a messy business.

Mission: Impossible - FalloutUSA
3*

Director:
Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriter:
Christopher McQuarrie
Director of Photography:
Rob Hardy

Running time: 145 minutes

Imagine, for a moment, you’ve reached the climax of a high-energy, globetrotting action film. For most of the past two-and-a-half hours, the characters have been relatively solid, and the story has unspooled at a pretty good clip. On top of the Eiffel Tower, the good guy and the bad guy have been at each other’s throats for what feels like ages. For the umpteenth time, we suspend our disbelief and tell ourselves that the 15-minute countdown to the end of the world is still in effect. Finally, as we catch our breath right after disaster has been averted in the nick of time, the camera zooms out to reveal the Bellagio fountains in the background, and we realise this “Eiffel Tower” is, in fact, the one in Las Vegas. And yet, the film continues to insist that this is Paris, not the Las Vegas our eyes so very plainly see.

That’s basically the stupid stunt Mission: Impossible – Fallout pulls right at the end, when we are told the action takes places in the Himalayas, but down below the fjords are pretty, the hillsides are green, and this rocky outcrop is very clearly not the Roof of the World but rather the world-famous Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock) on Norway’s west coast. Unless we’re to believe that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) somehow helicoptered his way through a wormhole linking Kashmir to Scandinavia, this makes very little sense, particularly because so little effort has gone into hiding the truth. After all, a crucial interaction early on involves a Norwegian nuclear weapons specialist.

In this instalment (the sixth in total), Ethan Hunt again teams up with his long-time computer hacking partner, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who’s been with him for the past two decades, and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg in a welcome low-key appearance), who’s done half the time. Given Hunt’s team’s track record, however, the new CIA director, played by Angela Bassett, insists that someone from the agency’s special division join the team. That individual is the seemingly by-the-book August Walker (Henry Cavill), who, attitude problem aside, appears to be professional enough.

Not unlike a James Bond plot, the film’s villain is bent on having a global reach and is ready to inflict significant pain to achieve his goals. Although his identity is a mystery at first (we can quickly figure it out for ourselves), his nom de guerre is John Lark. He heads up the terror network called The Apostles, whose goal is allegedly world peace, but the price to pay is immense suffering: Chillingly, three of the Abrahamic religions’ holy sites – the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca – are the initial targets of the nuclear devices.

In a film like this, however, our attention is not going to be on the generic details of the narrative but rather on how good or memorable the action scenes are. And while director Christopher McQuarrie’s plot is pretty standard for this kind of production, he does manage to stage one of the most exhilarating scenes of any of the (first) six films in the series: a chase scene on motorcycle through the streets of Paris that rivals anything that has come before and is the most high-octane piece of filmmaking in the City of Lights since Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendez-vous.

The whole scene is sublime, from start to finish. Pursued by police, Ethan steers a truck into a narrow alleyway to force them to climb over the vehicle while he and August escape through the front window and speed off on waiting motorcycles. August speeds off, but for a tense few moments, Ethan can’t get his bike to start. When it does, damn the torpedoes, it’s full speed ahead. Not satisfied with merely weaving in and out of traffic, Ethan also heads straight up against the flow into one-way streets (and even clockwise around the Arc de Triomphe) and races through heavily congested crossroads, all shot with a camera that is as mobile as Ethan and follows him at full tilt as he swerves to evade the French police. In all of two minutes, McQuarrie reinvigorates the whole franchise.

And yet, the whole thing ends with a deus ex machina so preposterous the film takes on shades of that same impossibility-induced hilarity that the recent Fast & Furious films have mined for laughs. Whenever the screenplay writes itself into a corner, it simply paints an exit door through which to escape. Finding himself trapped, Ethan simply cuts some netting, falls through a grate and ends up inside an underwater canal where his buddies are calmly waiting to whisk him off in their speedboat. With these types of films, one will always suspend disbelief, but in light of the (albeit hyperreal) thrill ride of a chase scene, this kind of a twist is just a bridge too flimsy.

The film also relies too heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of, never mind emotional attachment to, characters from previous instalments: Ethan’s former wife, Julia, and former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust are two specific individuals whose presence here seems gratuitous. By contrast, a new character in the form of the mysterious White Widow (played by Vanessa Kirby with a mixture of sensuality and pure cheek) holds our attention in every one of her scenes. If she does make a comeback in the next episode, one hopes that hers would be a big role.

Clearly, this sixth instalment of the now more than 20-year-old big-screen Mission: Impossible franchise is not the best of the series. That distinction will (likely forever) belong to the very first one, directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Koepp and the legendary Robert Towne. That film’s set pieces, from the break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley to the fast-paced climax on top of the Eurostar, might be small in scale compared with those of its successors, but – with the major exception of Fallout‘s chase scene in Paris – they still set our adrenaline pumping faster than anything else the series has offered us since.

Wings (1927)

André Crous

Wings was the first film to receive a Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards, but just maybe the awards show was created especially to honour this remarkable World War I film.

WingsUSA
4.5*

Director:
William Wellman
Screenwriters:
Hope Loring
Louis D. Lighton
Director of Photography:
Harry Perry

Running time: 145 minutes

More than 90 years after it was first released, Wings continues to impress in large part thanks to the majesty of its aerial combat scenes. The film was directed by William Wellman, who turned 31 towards the end of production and had served as a fighter pilot in the French Foreign Legion during World War I a decade earlier. This experience in the air clearly came in very useful during the shoot, as the most exciting moments all take place high above the earth.

In staging and shooting his “dogfights”, Wellman anticipated what Steven Spielberg would do more than 40 years later in Duel: To impress upon the viewer how fast an object is moving, it needs a background against which its velocity can be made visible. In the case of planes, that means a clear blue sky won’t do, and Wellman allegedly waited days – sometimes weeks – for clouds to form. The results speak for themselves as the camera perfectly captures both the speed and the motion, from a soaring take-off to a tumble through the clouds.

We start somewhere in middle America, where the carefree Jack (played by the clean-cut Buddy Rogers), still very much a boy rather than a man, is the connecting tissue between two separate love triangles. His neighbour, Mary (Clara Bow), whom he considers a friend, likes him as more than just a friend. But he only has eyes for Sylvia, who, in turn, is in a secret relationship with the rich, soft-spoken and socially awkward David (Richard Arlen). When Jack and David heed the call to enlist in the army in 1917, they receive training as combat pilots and, before long, are sent off to the battlefields of Europe.

A title card informs us of the “mighty maelstrom of destruction” that the war turned into over its four years of combat, and the film depicts this apocalyptic vision with vivid scenes of violence. Mortality hits home for the two small-town boys at their training camp when an aviator they just met and will be sharing a tent with crashes overhead.

Wings is at its best during the action scenes, while the romance is as shallow as one would expect from a 1920s production. However, the virtuosity of Wellman and cameraman Harry Perry is not limited to the skies. The battle scenes are equally impressive as we can see and feel the enormity of events.

When the French town of Merval is bombed, one of the explosives hits a church, whose bell tower flies straight off and comes crashing down on an automobile. The trench warfare includes explosions all over that make it seem like the earth is opening up and swallowing the armed forces whole. At another point, as reserves are marching across the countryside, another explosion sends the men and their limbs flying over the fields. Elsewhere, a tank drives across soldiers as bombs go off and others are stabbed with rifles. It is all a ghastly sight but brings the horror of war home, even to a viewer a century later.

The film was recently restored to 145 mint-condition minutes that also include orange colouring to add emphasis for fire, including gunfire. One can easily see how it came to be that the Oscars handed out its first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture (then called the award “for Outstanding Picture”) to Wings, but given the scale of the achievement and, especially, its contemporaries, one might start wondering whether, perhaps, the Oscars were established because Wings simply had to receive its due recognition.

The serious drama on the battlefield is counterweighted, however, by the simplistic melodrama of the duelling romances. One particularly egregious scene takes place at a nightclub in Paris, which starts with a famous track-in across (and seemingly through) a series of tables and bar patrons and ends on Jack, who is already hammered. Mary, who is no wallflower and has already survived at least one major bombing raid in France while serving as a wartime ambulance driver, finds him there but almost immediately collapses into an emotional mess. All of this is quite in keeping with the roles assigned to male and female characters at the time but feels at odds with what appears to be an authentic portrayal of real life on the battlefield.

Although struggling with some overly theatrical acting, Wings more than makes up for its melodramatic lapses with stunningly rendered battles scenes both on land and in the air. From spectacular long shots that fill our field of vision with scenes of mayhem in motion to singular moments of grandeur, like the immolation of an airship depicted 10 years before the infamous Hindenburg disaster, this is a film that could reach its ambition because the art of filmmaking had come so far. This production would not have been possible again for a very long time, as the microphone would have greatly hindered the camera’s movements, and even today, it is worth reminding ourselves what was already possible without special effects in 1927.

By the Grace of God (2018)

André Crous

Based on real events, François Ozon’s By the Grace of God recounts the struggles of multiple middle-aged men in Lyon to come to terms with being sexually abused by their local priest in their youth.

By the Grace of GodFrance/Belgium
3.5*

Director:
François Ozon
Screenwriter:
François Ozon
Director of Photography:
Manuel Dacosse

Original title: Grâce à Dieu

Running time: 135 minutes

Religion is theatre, so it comes as little surprise that the opening act of François Ozon’s By the Grace of God, a film dealing with a real-life church abuse scandal in the French city of Lyon, is mostly about people in robes speaking their lines but ultimately just playing roles. And yet, the feeling of despair is ubiquitous and, especially in the film’s first third, close to suffocating.

The story, by now, is a notoriously well-trodden one. However, it bears repeating because it appears the (perhaps tens of) thousands of priests engaged in this abominable, sometimes decades-long behaviour, have not been properly held to account. Columnist Dan Savage has rightly noted that, “If kids got raped by clowns as often as they get raped by pastors, it would be against the law to take your kids to the circus.”

And yet, even some of those who have been raped or otherwise molested continue to take their own children to church, perhaps in the devastatingly naïve belief that their own experience was unique. In the meantime, however, children continue to be exposed to predators who talk about forgiveness as much as they commit sins against the vulnerable children in their care.

Ozon’s film is broadly divided into three parts, although he struggles to connect them and the transitions are often very abrupt. In the first and arguably the best act, Melvil Poupaud stars as Alexandre, a middle-aged actuary and family man from Lyon who has decided to open up to his family and the church about the abuse he suffered at the hands of a local priest, Bernard Preynat, in his youth. He is encouraged by the recent pronouncements of Philippe Barbarin, a cardinal and the archbishop of Lyon, against child abuse, and he divulges everything to a mediator from the church, who writes a report and arranges a meeting between Alexandre and his erstwhile abuser, the paedophile priest.

All of this happens in a tranquillity rife with tension as Alexandre shields himself from an emotional breakdown, but the turmoil is always bubbling beneath the surface. Watching all of this unfold feels like the film is stepping on our chest, slowly asphyxiating us with the knowledge that the Church always, ALWAYS protects its own. Alexandre initially views the church as an ally in the fight instead of an accomplice in the cover-up, but he is slowly disabused of this notion as the facts come to light.

These facts include the realisation that there were multiple victims of Father Preynat’s predatory behaviour, including the leads in the film’s two subsequent acts. The first is François (Denis Ménochet), who has become an outspoken atheist; the second is the slightly younger Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud), who suffers from epileptic seizures and still lives with his mother although he likes to boast that he is a “zebra”, a gifted child. The characters are all scarred in their own ways, and many of them have ended up in relationships with others who have gone through similar experiences, which seems to both soothe and compound the issues stemming from them. To fight back, they form the

Ozon’s decision to tell multiple stories gives a rich insight into the various ways in which people struggle with abuse, and by the end of the film, it has become obvious that there are victims – of Preynat, of the Catholic Church writ large and of other abusers – in many more people than we might have thought.

However, once the first act climaxes with a stomach-churning scene in which Alexandre is forced to hold hands with his abuser while praying for strength, the film’s drama stalls. Unlike Spotlight or the stunning documentary feature Deliver Us from Evil, both of which had narratives that continually revealed more and more of what was hidden and who did the hiding, By the Grace of God lands very few serious body blows in its second and third acts. Instead, it focuses on the affected characters’ domestic lives, which come across as complex but fragmentary and not particularly coherent.

The production is far from polished: The scenes with Alexandre feel like completely removed from those of the much less affluent François and Emmanuel. The latter two also seem more willing to wage a fight against the Church, even if it means exposing themselves and their families to the wagging tongues of their friends, acquaintances and the influential society at large in Lyon, a city whose massive basilica towers over it from the top of Fourvière hill.

While all the men’s stories are given coverage in the flashbacks, the film does not go the whole hog and accuse the Church of complete knowledge or committing a cover-up. In Cardinal Barbarin, we see a man who says the right things in public but stalls behind the scenes and is unwilling to change the way things have always been done. He is a conservative but, as far as we can tell, not engaging full-on in the obstruction of progress. And yet, his plodding is infuriating because it can only be read in the most selfish way possible: No matter what offences his fellow priests have committed, we must forgive them because God forgives us. Ozon leaves some room for us to interpret the events, but both Preynat and the Church are almost certain to be viewed as culpable for serious harm caused to scores of children over decades.

If you are not a believer, you will receive some clear evidence to justify your lack of belief. If you do believe in God, this film ought to make you question, once again, why such unspeakable abuse is allowed to happen day in and day out, seemingly “by the Grace of God”. 

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.