2010-2019

A Russian Youth (2019)

André Crous

A Russian Youth spends much of its time on the front lines of foolishness with a silly central character who shows no development and an experimental format that undermines its own potential seriousness.

Russian Youth / Malchik russkiyRussia
2*

Director:
Alexander Zolotukhin
Screenwriter:
Alexander Zolotukhin
Director of Photography:
Ayrat Yamilov

Original title: Мальчик русский
Transliterated title: Malchik russkiy

Running time: 70 minutes

A Russian Youth takes a promising premise set in a very serious context and turns it into a joke within an embarrassing experiment. Set on the Eastern Front during the carnage of World War I, the Soviet Army is facing off against the German Empire. In its midst is a blond-haired, baby-faced and seemingly very inexperienced 15-year-old soldier named Aleksey (Vladimir Korolev), who soon gets trapped in the trenches as the Imperial German Army closes in. When the Germans’ mustard gas washes over them, the makeshift gas mask that is a bit of gauze over his mouth and goggles over his eyes do little to protect young Aleksey, and he loses his sight.

At the same time, however, there is another intrusion, arguably just as bad as the mustard gas. In an experimental fashion that has a stunningly alienating effect on whatever empathy we might have, the film constantly but irregularly cuts to an orchestra performing the film’s score: Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 30” and his “Symphonic Dances Op. 45”, neither of which dates to World War I.

There is no question that the two parts were directed by the same person because both contain some of the most cringeworthy performances in recent memory. On the one hand, there are the constant close-ups of musicians’ faces as they either watch with pained involvement or tension or giggle at supposedly comical moments in the film – the same scenes we, the audience, had just seen ourselves, but without the emotional investment, the tension or the giggles. On the other hand, there is Aleksey’s performance, which can most charitably be described as histrionic. Not satisfied with merely being blind, he has to scream, stumble and fumble with every breath he takes. It fully appears the mustard gas immediately affected the boy’s mental health because no person in their right mind behaves like this.

For most of the film, I kept hoping for another attack to dispense with Aleksey so that the boy would no longer make a fool of himself. From the moment he wakes up with bandages over his eyes, realises he will never see again and then proceeds to clamber over a dozen or so fellow soldiers, all of whom are injured just as badly as him but behave with infinitely more maturity, we can see this is a hysterical child who does not belong in the army, never mind as the lead in a feature film.

He is taken under the wing of a fellow soldier, a young man called Nazarka (a very patient Mikhail Buturlov, who might be the only saving grace about this production), who manages to put up with his tantrums and tries to protect him against his own buffoonery. Eventually, for whatever reason, Aleksey is noticed by a superior officer, who takes him to a hilltop and introduces him to a new line of work: using a massive war tuba to listen out for attack planes. After making a mess of things on his first try, Aleksey hears planes buzzing overhead almost immediately upon his second attempt and is thanked by another senior officer for his service. The inanity never ceases.

Director Alexander Zolotukhin, who, an opening title card reveals, made the film with assistance from a fund set up by master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, uses sound and image to give an oblique impression of the World War I setting, although we are never directly informed about the story’s time and place. Since the spoken words do not directly correspond to the movement of the actors’ mouths, it is clear the dialogue was added in post-production. In addition, the visuals are quite gritty, and the colour is slightly washed out. At times, it almost looks like a colourised version of footage shot a century ago. But They Shall Not Grow Old this is not.

Whether the graceless performance by the lead, the exaggerated facial expressions by the musicians and the deplorable “German” spoken by the German characters (all of whom speak broken German and have Russian accents) are intentional is an interesting question. Would Sokurov, the man responsible for the sensitive portrayal of God-turned-mortal-Emperor-Hirohito in The Sun, have allowed such a brazen act of seemingly astonishing incompetence to be committed without good reason? One should hope not. Is A Russian Youth the Russian counterpart to Mark Wahlberg’s lamentable acting in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which allegedly sought to reflect the performances in the disaster movies from years gone by? It’s wholly unclear. If it is, then the joke is only funny to those who know the inside story.

Although some care was clearly taken in its formal audiovisual construction, A Russian Youth lacks context for the viewer and refuses to make its real intentions clear. The risible central character does nothing to overcome our objections, while the persistent comments from the conductor about his orchestra’s execution of Rachmaninoff’s compositions and the focus on their reactions to a film we are watching make for very annoying asides.

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

Black Panther (2017)

André Crous

Not Ryan Coogler’s best work, but Black Panther’s mixture of big-budget special effects, intimate mythology and a yearning for what might have been is much needed.

Black PantherUSA
4*

Director:
Ryan Coogler
Screenwriters:
Ryan Coogler
Joe Robert Cole
Director of Photography:
Rachel Morrison

Running time: 135 minutes

Oakland, California, is where the revolutionary Black Panther Party was born in 1966. It is also where Oakland native Ryan Coogler, whose first two features – Fruitvale Station and Creed – are modern-day masterpieces, starts his superhero movie adaptation of the famous Marvel Comics character, in 1992, before moving to the present. But in a majestic, visually striking opening sequence, he tells the story of Wakanda, a nation hidden in the heart of Africa and endowed with limitless sources of the supermetal vibranium that have ensured the country’s financial survival and technological prowess despite its isolation.

The presentation of this history lesson calls to mind the opening minutes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but the work of Coogler’s director of photography, Rachel Morrison, is much more sophisticated, as we appear to swing through time in an unbroken take whilst time unspools in the valleys below. Connecting Wakanda with Oakland is also the job of the camera, as it eventually swoops into the opening scene over a basketball court and settles on a young boy, who looks up and sees a space ship hovering above his apartment block. The links that Cooger and Morrison establish between past and present, poverty and technology, are a continual source of wonder because it is unusual to see this level of care taken in constructing a superhero film.

The titular Black Panther, king of the Wakandans, is played by Chadwick Boseman. Also known as T’Challa, he is the son of the former King T’Chaka, portrayed by South African veteran actor John Kani, and South Africa features everywhere in Black Panther. Not only is Wakandan really the Xhosa language (Nelson Mandela’s mother tongue and the second-most widely spoken language in the country), but one of the story’s main villains, Ulysses Klaue, is a white South African whose speech drips with an Afrikaans accent. Finally, the name T’Chaka is, of course, an unmistakable reference to one of the greatest military leaders the world has ever seen: Shaka, king of the Zulus.

But just as Shaka’s heirs could never match his acumen for waging battle, T’Challa does not do well in a comparison with his father, T’Chaka. This much is evident in his pitiful display of brawn shortly before his investiture: What is expected to be a coronation turns out to be something much more uncertain, as four of Wakanda’s tribes agree to T’Challa’s status as the new sovereign, but one tribe rejects him. This tribe, the Jabari, re-appears after centuries in hiding and have had no part in Wakanda’s development as an ultra-modern civilisation filled with technology that goes far beyond anything else on Earth, never mind the rest of the African continent. They are sceptical of the Wakandans’ talk of unity, particularly when they are themselves hiding out from the rest of the world.

This uneasy unity, of being one while being many, is an issue South Africa has sought for decades to address, even dubbing itself the Rainbow Nation. But for all the utopian idealism such metaphors inspire, it takes hard work for peace to be sustainable, and the tension is evident in Black Panther, too. Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who is a Wakandan spy in Nigeria and helps to save a group of women from an unnamed terrorist group (clearly Boko Haram), continually pushes T’Challa to share Wakanda’s knowledge and riches with the less-developed world instead of hoarding it for itself.

The same thread runs through the film’s most complex vein, as its powerful male characters struggle to decide whether to help the world’s vulnerable or to turn inward and be selfish with the endless vibranium resources. While T’Challa is reluctant to find a solution, the arrival of Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a US war veteran and covert operations specialist who knows how to bring down a foreign government, forces him to face reality.

Although he is clearly the villain, Killmonger’s past (he grew up an orphan), justified feelings of betrayal (his father, N’Jobu, was T’Challa’s uncle, and he was killed by his own brother, King T’Chaka) and sense of purpose (he wants to use Wakanda’s technology to give power to the world’s disadvantaged black populations), not to mention his extraordinary good looks, all make him a complex character whom we empathise with even as we root for his enemies.

Such complexity is a welcome change from the standard big-budget and superhero fare. But it’s a shame T’Challa isn’t seen to be struggling with this issue more seriously. In fact, the ruler of the world’s most technologically advanced nation is surprisingly ill-prepared for the throne and the duties that come with it.

Just like Eddie Murphy’s Akeem Joffer in Coming to America, T’Challa seems to have skipped any and all discussions in the royal household about the road to being a king. His friendly demeanour endears him to most of his people, but he is clearly uncomfortable as regent, and his decision to change Wakanda’s approach to the outside world, well-intentioned though it may be, seems to be made without him realising how difficult it will be.

One of the film’s first scenes take place at the “Museum of Great Britain”, which houses artefacts looted by the British Empire over the centuries. There is a nagging question throughout as to whether things will change for Wakanda once it opens up to the world and its riches are discovered. Will it suffer the fate of fellow African countries whose resources have been plundered through outside meddling? Or will its mixture of tradition and advanced technology (not unlike a religious superpower such as the United States) protect it against the onslaught of an aggressive globalisation?

Although by far one of the best superhero films out there, Black Panther nonetheless never veers too far from the well-beaten path of its predecessors, and the good inevitably triumphs over the bad without much of a scuffle. The film raises many issues that will require a thorough probing in a sequel, however, and if these issues are addressed head-on and in keeping with the rules of the real world instead of those of superhero fiction, it will easily clear the bar set by this first instalment.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)

André Crous

Different than any of its siblings in the canon, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi takes some real chances but seems hesitant to do so and never really manages to soar.

The Last JediUSA
3.5*

Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin

Running time: 150 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Phantom Menace (Episode I)
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)

“The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.

Only General Leia Organa’s band of RESISTANCE fighters stand against the rising tyranny, certain that Jedi Master Luke Skywalker will return and restore a spark of hope to the fight.

But the Resistance has been exposed. As the First Order speeds toward the Rebel base, the brave heroes mount a desperate escape….“

The Last Jedi is unlike any of its predecessors in the Star Wars canon. Not only does it deploy a different visual grammar (except for the limited use of the perfunctory, obligatory wipes that this fictional world’s creator, George Lucas, borrowed from Akira Kurosawa), but it takes the storytelling in a new direction altogether. This refreshing take on a universe that has been with us for four decades infuses it with a new kind of energy but also sets the instalment up as the odd one out.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s previous film, Looper, proved time-travel films could both entertain us and take seriously the existential consequences of their time-hopping characters’ actions. In Episode VIII, he flips the script to bring the Star Wars franchise up to speed with present-day trends while retaining enough of its old charm to make us feel right at home.

After The Force Awakens, which was widely viewed as a safe reboot of the original Star Wars film, speculation was rife that this second film in the third trilogy would be similar to the second film in the original trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back. That was a mouth-watering proposition. The 1980 film is historically the most ambitious of all the films in the series precisely because it takes unexpected risks that pay off in spades. But while The Last Jedi tips its hat in the direction of Episode V, in particular with the reappearance of the AT-ATs, it struggles much more than its counterpart to overcome its position as the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end of a trilogy.

It is always a struggle to fit all the characters’ storylines into a particular instalment while keeping to a normal running time and allowing things to breathe. The Empire Strikes Back alternated between the storylines of two significant groups – Luke, Yoda and R2-D2 and Leia, Han, Chewbacca and C-3PO – and added sporadic glimpses of Darth Vader and the Emperor. By contrast, The Last Jedi divides its narrative into at least three different parts spread out across the universe.

An early skirmish between the First Order and the Resistance produces a pyrrhic victory for the rebels: The former suffers material damage, but many of the Resistance fighters are killed in the process, and because Poe defies Leia’s orders to stand down in the heat of battle, he is demoted for insubordination. Leia and the rebels escape but are somehow tracked through hyperspace by their technologically superior enemy. With fuel supplies running low, Poe sends Finn and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, a maintenance worker whose sister died in the opening fight, to the Monte Carlo of the universe, the ultra-rich city of Canto Bight. Their mission is to find a codebreaker who could get them onto the First Order’s main dreadnought, the Supremacy, and help them deactivate its hyperspace tracker. This part of the story, which features many important characters all too briefly, is the worst developed and executed of the entire film.

Continuing from the previous episode’s cliffhanger on a rocky island on the remote planet of Ahch-To, a major part of the plot involves Rey and Luke, the two characters in the film who are the most adept at using the Force. Luke, having lived the life of a hermit since Ben Solo (now Kylo Ren) turned to the dark side, has shut himself off from the Force and refuses to engage with Rey, who pleads for guidance in the ways of the Jedi. Over time, he realises it would be better for her to know than not to know, but what he sees in her frightens him… and us.

There is a mind bridge that is also a narrative bridge linking Ahch-To with the Supremacy. For the first time since Episode V, Star Wars uses faux raccords (literally, “fake cuts”) to have two characters – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren – interact with each other even though are not physically in the same space. This link, or Force connection, which allows them to grow uncomfortably close, is ultimately revealed to be Snoke’s doing to lure Rey into a trap, but it also exposes Kylo’s vulnerable side, when he tells Rey how he came to feel betrayed by Luke. In the theatrical version, these faux raccords took the form of very short dissolves, but they are near-impossible to spot on the home entertainment versions.

With Leia incapacitated, the remaining Resistance cruiser, the Raddus, has only 18 hours of fuel left. It is commandeered by the purple-haired Vice Admiral Holdo, whose leadership Poe and many of his allies onboard call into question because she is so calm amid imminent disaster. But they (and we, the viewers) have limited information, which leads to people like Poe, well-intentioned though he may be, drawing faulty conclusions and going out over their skis.

The film’s most impressive moment of visual flair occurs on Canto Bight, when the rowdy interior of the casino is presented in a way that, with a striking, seemingly impossible, forward tracking shot, pays homage to the most famous William Wellman’s Wings. But many other moments stand out for their awe-inspiring capacity. Some are nostalgic, like Luke meeting R2-D2 again and being shown Leia’s emergency hologram message from Episode IV, now as relevant as then, or Kylo Ren’s decision to kill Snoke, which is followed by a masterfully crafted lightsaber fight. What the hologram also does is create a parallel between Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who, when we meet him in Episode IV, had been hiding out for years before being called on to help the Resistance once again and teach a young fighter about the Force.

Although Finn still seems too easily flabbergasted by revelations, John Boyega is generally better than he was in Episode VII. Yoda’s appearance could easily have become sentimental, but the old rascal is as insightful and as naughty as ever. But Domhnall Gleeson’s toadyish portrayal of First Order General Hux is just beyond awful, and it’s a real pity the character will continue to stick around for another episode.

The worst of the screenplay’s inventions, however, is the Porgs. Unlike the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi or even the Gungans of The Phantom Menace (groups that actually provided assistance to the main characters), the penguin-like Porgs on Ahch-To may be the most pointless creations across the first eight Star Wars episodes. In fact, they appear to serve no other purpose than as an otherworldly cuteness – one that has no bearing on the film but will be easily marketable as toys to younger viewers outside the movie theatre.

And who is the titular “last Jedi”? Luke firmly states (while seemingly looking straight at us) that it will not be him. Leia is still alive, but, as shown by the parallel cut to the Force being used to lift a pile of stones, it is Rey who assumes the mantle and is expected to continue the tradition of the Jedi Order, which at long last is also called a religion. We even glimpse the sacred Jedi texts in her possession on board the Millennium Falcon – presumably with Yoda’s consent.

The most important question that this particular instalment poses is also the one whose answer remains the most elusive: Can we really trust that Rey will remain as steadfast in her desire to remain on the side of the good as she believes? Or is she as likely to be tempted by the power of the dark side as Kylo Ren’s grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, was?

More than any of its predecessors, Episode VIII is interested in shading its characters. A persistent ambiguity about the central characters fills us with hope and fear – a perfect manifestation of the “balance” so often cited as fundamental to life with the Force. Kylo Ren is far from evil, while Rey’s seeming inexperience, perhaps even naïveté, leads us to believe she may be snatched up by the dark side. We also learn that Luke’s very understandable fears led to the destruction of a Jedi training camp (a parallel to Anakin’s killing of the Jedi younglings in Revenge of the Sith) and the rise of a Kylo Ren enamoured of Darth Vader.

Further compounding our uncertainty is Supreme Leader Snoke’s revelation that Rey and Ren, whose names differ by a single letter, did not really see into each other’s past and future when they touched but only saw what Snoke made them see. Thus, Rey’s confidence that Ren could be turned is based on planted evidence, and in turn, Ren’s vision of Rey’s parents is a similarly manufactured piece of fiction. In a scene on Ahch-To, Rey is confronted with an image that seems to suggest she was born not from any two individuals but from herself – a transcendental peculiarity not unlike Anakin’s midichlorian-orchestrated conception.

Our own alliances are in flux because of the uncertainty regarding Rey and Ren’s intentions and their abilities to withstand the temptations of the darkness and the light. The film concludes on a compassionate note that emphasises the bright future of the Resistance but is really just bizarre to watch in the context of all the other instalments because it chooses a peripheral character to convey its message. In the end, we all know that balance means both good and bad will prevail in some form, and Episode IX is likely to have a few nasty surprises up its sleeve.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

André Crous

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is an artistic recreation of history, whose spotlight on the past also has the intended consequence of illuminating the present in all its whiteness. 

BlacKkKlansmanUSA
4*

Director:
Spike Lee
Screenwriters:
Charlie Wachtel
David Rabinowitz
Kevin Willmott
Spike Lee
Director of Photography:
Chayse Irvin

Running time: 135 minutes

America has always been a deeply racist place. From its founding to the American Civil War through Jim Crow, church bombings and lynchings up to the Charleston church shooting and the Charlottesville protests in the past few years, not to mention redlining, racial profiling and the stunningly disproportionate mass incarceration of the country’s black citizens, many (or most) whites have always struggled to accept the idea of racial integration. Perhaps because, for them, integrating meant not only compromising but surrendering their long-standing power.

And yet, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, even as they conferred a “three-fifths” status upon non-whites via Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution. This tension has underpinned continuous conflict, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did little to quell the social distrust and downright hatred that had already been festering for centuries.

At the beginning of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on a true story, a young black man by the name of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) applies to be the first black police officer at the Colorado Springs station. He gets the job, but racist attitudes don’t just vanish like fog before the sun. He is undeterred, however, and quickly works his way into the intelligence division, where he stirs the pot by making a phone call to the Ku Klux Klan to express his alleged interest in joining the infamous white supremacist organisation.

Now, obviously, a black man is not going to rock up to the KKK and infiltrate it, no matter how talented a policeman he is. This is a real story, after all, not a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle. Stallworth needs a white stand-in, and he finds a willing partner in the form of Flip Zimmerman (mesmerisingly portrayed by Adam Driver), whose Jewish heritage, which would be equally objectionable to the Klan if they ever found out, is luckily less apparent than Stallworth’s blackness.

Zimmerman infiltrates the Klan, which calls itself “the Organization”, by posing as Ron Stallworth, even as the real Stallworth continues to speak unrecognised over the phone with various hardcore white supremacists, including America’s most notorious pro-Aryan celebrity, David Duke. Eventually, Duke and Stallworth strike up such intimate conversations that Duke considers him a friend, little knowing that the colour of their skins is not as he imagines them to be.

Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, who also played a white supremacist in Dome Karukoski’s outstanding 2013 drama Heart of a Lion, stars here as Felix, easily the most ominous KKK character in the cast. Immediately and continuously suspicious of Zimmerman’s/Stallworth’s intentions, Felix also speaks in such an insidious way it is hard to view him as anything other than a villainous piece of filth. The rest of the Organization’s local chapter is filled out by Walter (Ryan Eggold), who might even pass for a regular Joe outside the hate group, and the dim-witted and/or permanently inebriated “Ivanhoe” (Paul Walter Hauser).

But Spike Lee’s re-telling of this 1970s story is not meant purely as a middle finger to the white supremacists of the era. He makes no bones about connecting the story of racism perpetrated by whites against blacks to present-day America, and by hinting at a link between the Black Panther and Black Lives Matter movements, he also makes clear that history, as the saying goes, may not repeat itself but certainly does rhyme. Sometimes this bridge between the past and the present is so chilling it becomes almost hilarious. One example is the moment when the idea that someone like David Duke might one day occupy the White House is shot down as unrealistic – a self-explanatory subtweet of the 45th president.

At other times, the bridge is devastating: BlacKkKlansman‘s final moments underscore its importance as the first Trump-era Hollywood film to take the worst of the present-day political situation and turn it into art, just as George Clooney did by making Good Night, and Good Luck., a film that used the McCarthy era to make a point about patriotism and the importance of a free press in the midst of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Lee all but states outright that Donald Trump – with his “America First” slogan with its antisemitic origins and his “good people on both sides” apology for Nazis and white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” and do much worse – is the new head of the KKK. The final scenes in the film are even more powerful than news footage we have seen because they are suddenly fully contextualised as part of a history of hatred and intolerance.

Despite some unnecessarily long-winded stabs at comedy – including an opening sequence with Alec Baldwin playing an inept narrator of a white supremacists’ propaganda video, as well as a screening of Birth of a Nation, in which the viewers’ behaviour is just as over-the-top and overtly racist as in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously anti-black film – this might very well be Spike Lee’s best film since at least 25th Hour and probably since Do the Right Thing.

Just Friends (2018)

André Crous

In the light-hearted Dutch romance Just Friends, a restless young man is urged on by his grandmother to hook up with her equally dashing carer/surfer.

Just Friends / Gewoon vriendenThe Netherlands
3.5*

Director:
Ellen Smit
Screenwriter:
Henk Burger
Director of Photography:
Tjitte Jan Nieuwkoop

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Gewoon Vrienden

Gay films can’t be all doom and gloom with the odd rainbow all the time. That would be a very short-sighted depiction of life as a non-straight individual. Rainbows aren’t grayscale, and gay drama is not confined to anguish about one’s sexuality. Stories can take shape and flourish outside the conventional lines of LGBT cinema without being any less worthy of our attention.

This has been the case for close to decade thanks to the work of Argentine director Marco Berger, whose films consistently take place amid abundant sunshine – a perfect visual metaphor for the bright demeanours of his characters, for whom life might have its ups and downs, but not because of their sexual identity.

In Dutch director Ellen Smit’s Just Friends (“Gewoon vrienden”), two gobsmackingly adorable young men – the gym-frequenting, energy drink‒chugging skinhead Joris (Josha Stradowski), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Wentworth Miller, and chocolate-eyed, curly-haired, medical student‒turned‒carer/surfing instructor Yad (Majd Mardo) – meet, flirt and fall in love without missing a beat.

Whether from experience in the real world or from years of watching films in which gay characters confront friends and family unwilling to accept them, viewers of LGBT cinema have come to expect conflict at every turn. Perhaps this is what makes the genre of “sunshine gay films”, which includes Smit’s film and Berger’s entire oeuvre to date, so unexpectedly potent despite its mellow core. Our expectations are upended merely by people being tolerant.

In the case of Just Friends, the potential point of conflict comes in the form of Yad’s family, which originally hails from a Muslim Syrian background. But we come to realise that Yad, who has recently returned home from Amsterdam after partying too hard and realising he needs a fresh start, has had boyfriends before. And even though his mother has voiced her disapproval, it is not at all clear that the reason was them being boys instead of girls. When the time comes, his interaction with his father is also absolutely compelling because the discussion turns not around the fact that Yad and Joris are or aren’t dating but around the issue of how Yad is experiencing the relationship.

But even the bright lights of Yad and Joris can’t outshine the latter’s dazzling grandmother, Ans (Jenny Arean). Living alone with her sickly ginger cat, she needs help around the house, and when Yad shows up, the two seem to hit it off immediately. When Ans’s grandson arrives, however, Yad is smouldering so hard he is just about to spontaneously combust. Joris enjoys every moment of this attention so much he feels compelled to remove his shirt immediately and start pruning the hedges in the garden using a trimmer, although his ripped abs arguably would have done the job equally well.

Joris’s family is still coping with the loss of his father a decade ago, which is likely when Joris’s mother started getting plastic surgery and hitting the bottle. And yet, his father is a persistent presence in the film – mostly because his urn features as prominently as any of the lead characters, but also because he appears in flashbacks beautifully rendered with video scan lines and, at a crucial point, in an animated photograph.

The film contains a single instance of homophobia, and it is quickly nipped in the bud. It doesn’t come from the nemesis but a peripheral villain who only appears in this lone scene. His behaviour and existence seem to be relegated to the fringes of society and can in no way be taken seriously. Such random bullies who pose no threat beyond a rhetorical nuisance don’t deserve our attention anyway.

Sunshine gay cinema is what we need in order to balance all the heartache coming from the tragedy aisle of the LGBT celluloid supermarket. Cinema can create the world as it should be, and in the case of Just Friends, the tolerance is so overwhelming as to be inspiring.

Viewed at the 2018 Cape Town Film Market and Festival.

Canary (2018)

André Crous

Canary is a coming-of-age film set in apartheid-era South Africa that also marks the coming of age of contemporary South African cinema.

Kanarie-CanarySouth Africa
4.5*

Director:
Christiaan Olwagen
Screenwriters:
Christiaan Olwagen
Charl-Johan Lingenfelder
Director of Photography:
Chris Vermaak

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Kanarie

Johan Niemand (literally, “John Nobody”) likes fashion, music and Boy George. But he lives in a small town in Christian-heavy apartheid-era South Africa, and it goes without saying that, for someone like him, the road ahead isn’t going to be easy. To make matters worse, we meet him fresh out of high school, just as he is called up to serve in the military.

A bit like its Pied Piper‒inspired opening credits sequence, Christiaan Olwagen’s Canary (Kanarie) is a flaming, mesmerising piece of work that viewers will have a hard time resisting. The film deftly navigates the minefield of recent South African history, littered as it is by racial segregation, religious supremacy and repressed sexuality. And it is the latter that features most prominently, although the film frequently chooses creative and insightful discussion over easy wins.

In that opening scene, two friends bribe Johan to walk down the road of their provincial and presumably conservative neighbourhood decked out in a big white wedding gown. We later find out he’s made a habit of doing whatever he can to earn money in order to buy LPs so that he can escape his surroundings, even just for a moment, by listening to his Walkman. It is a scene that seamlessly combines the fear of being different with the elation of imagining a world where you don’t have to fit in but others will join you in expressing yourself.

But expressing oneself in 1980s South Africa often meant being separated from one’s peers. Johan, played by Schalk Bezuidenhout (who, in what seems like another life entirely, is actually a moustachioed, curly-haired stand-up comic in his native South Africa), is conscripted just as South Africa is about to mark 20 years of ongoing conflict in neighbouring Namibia and Angola. War and manhood, then as now, are perceived as two sides of the same coin. Johan rightly assumes that his only way of surviving the dreaded “national service” is to be selected as a Kanarie – one of two dozen young men who form the South African Defence Force Choir and Concert group. To his utter relief, he makes it through.

Although slightly out of his comfort zone at first, he quickly bonds with two fellow Canaries: the camp but stout Ludolf (Germandt Geldenhuys) and blond, bespectacled fellow country boy, Wolfgang (Hannes Otto). They tease and support each other, particularly when they are verbally abused by their superiors.

One such superior is the young “Corporal Crunchie” (Beer Adriaanse), nicknamed for his copious consumption of the oat-based delicacy Ludolf’s mother packs for her son. Addressing the recruits as “ladies” is the mildest of the insults he hurls at them, which often include an array of ever more creative epithets associated with both male and female genitals. Loquacious and vulgar, the corporal is a slightly out-of-control version of Full Metal Jacket’s infamous Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and easily rises to the challenge of using words as weapons to emasculate his recruits, despite many of them having developed a thick skin after years of being bullied at school.

When the Kanaries go on tour and stay with host families, Johan and Wolfgang often share a room and grow ever closer, which gradually tears the soft-spoken Johan apart. Swinging between exhilaration and despair, he struggles to accept himself as he is convinced God will punish him for what he desires.

From the very first moments, Canary sets itself apart from the rest of the flock. The audacious decision to shoot scenes in single takes (or to give them the appearance of being shot as such) is both a blessing and a curse. Director of photography Chris Vermaak utilises his Steadicam to full effect to have conversations play out in a coherent, inescapable space. During Johan’s audition, the camera makes a seemingly impossible move as it appears to be drawn to the singing by passing through a table – the inverse of a similar shot in Citizen Kane.

However, while there is no question Olwagen gets to show off his talents as a director and the cast gets to flaunt their acting skills, the incredibly mobile camera can become distracting, if not downright repetitive as it pushes in or out on static action while panning and tracking on more mobile actions. The same is true of the recurring breaking of the fourth wall, which would have been more effective had it been used more judiciously.

By contrast, one of the most memorable shots is also one of the simplest: a single minutes-long close-up on Johan’s face that expresses everything we need to know and will strike a deep emotional chord with many a viewer, not unlike Ingmar Bergman’s similar approach to a rape scene in The Virgin Spring. Another devastating moment emerges out of the palpable tension of Johan and his sister trying but failing to address a serious topic as they sit shoulder to shoulder in a doorway and the camera has nowhere to go.

Above all, Canary puts onscreen some of the best acting ever shown in an Afrikaans feature film. For once, the actors don’t sound like they belong on stage and, unlike almost every single Afrikaans television series or feature film out there, no scene opens with people laughing at a non-existent joke. They are immediately recognisable as characters fully rooted in and representative of the real world, with their conversations having the colour and texture to make them both layered and accessible.

Tackling nationalism, religion and sexuality in a single film and doing so without veering off into the territory of self-congratulation or pontification is above most filmmakers’ pay grade, but Olwagen and fellow screenwriter Charl-Johan Lingenfelder stay close enough to Johan to allow us a sense of intimacy while pulling back far enough to take in his immediate context. He is the centre of attention in every single scene, and this first-person perspective, which includes many a music-video-style fantasy, boosts our empathy for him as he comes not only of age but of identity.

Christiaan Olwagen has made his material sing, and it’s as good a harmony as anything his characters belt out.

Viewed at the 2018 Cape Town International Film Market and Festival.

Lady Bird (2017)

André Crous

On the verge of adulthood, 17-year-old Sacramento native Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson confronts the slow dawning of reality.

Lady BirdUSA
4*

Director:
Greta Gerwig
Screenwriter:
Greta Gerwig
Director of Photography:
Sam Levy

Running time: 95 minutes

Widely praised for its sensitive handling of a teenager’s coming of age, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is at its best when it advances our understanding of the titular main character’s parents – in particular, her hot-blooded but sometimes icily passive-aggressive mother, Marion (a stunning portrayal by Laurie Metcalf). Unusually, we gain a compassionate understanding of parents as people who, just like their children, are a volatile mixture of emotions and motivations.

“Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan), a name the 17-year-old Christine McPherson has recently adopted as part of a phase of rebelliousness that her mother looks upon with disdain, is growing restless with life in Sacramento, which she describes, with as much love as hate, as the “Midwest of California”. She wants to move far away for college, preferably the East Coast, where the Twin Towers had come down nearly a year earlier. But Marion’s continual insinuation that her daughter is too immature to cope with life on her own leads to many a bout of screaming, as well as a broken arm, with no clear winner.

The ups and downs of Lady Bird’s final year of high school include not only the boom and bust of losing her virginity and unexpected revelations about her love interest’s sexual awakening but also the consequences of her lies, well-intentioned though they might be.

The high school in question is Immaculate Heart, a co-ed Catholic school run by good-natured nuns who both provide spiritual guidance and make hilarious attempts at discipline (at the prom, one of them tells a couple they should dance six inches apart… “for the Holy Spirit!”). Lady Bird runs a very unconventional campaign for class president, and she and her best friend, Julie, snack on communion wafers when no one is watching. Then, one day, she signs up for the school play, and everything changes.

She meets angel-faced Danny (Lucas Hedges in a role that is the polar opposite of his turn in Manchester by the Sea), who plays the lead, and this meeting leads to a relationship that gives her an opportunity to enlarge her social network, which eventually includes the wealthiest and the weirdest characters around, like Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), the black-haired, porcelain-complexioned quasi-intellectual but cute-as-a-button loner.

Lady Bird’s laugh-out-loud comedy is tightly wound to its insightful and always empathetic glimpses of the jitters just below the surface, as when Lady Bird’s parents find out she tells her friends she comes from the wrong side of the tracks, or when her father and brother meet accidentally while applying for the same job. But nothing comes close to the outwardly straightforward but emotionally intricate screenwriting gem that is the scene at a department store’s changing rooms, where Lady Bird is trying on a dress for prom:

LADY BIRD: I love it.

MARION: (unsure) Is it too pink? (beat) What?

LADY BIRD: Why can’t you say I look nice?

MARION: I thought you didn’t even care what I think.

LADY BIRD: I still want you to think I look good.

MARION: OK. I’m sorry, I was telling you the truth. You want me to lie?

LADY BIRD: No, I just wish… I just… I wish that you liked me.

MARION: Of course I love you.

LADY BIRD: But do you like me?

MARION: (hesitates) I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.

LADY BIRD: What if this is the best version?

This absolutely heartrending interaction – in a public space, no less – is simple but saturated with tension. Both mother and daughter face disappointment while simultaneously digging deep to be honest without hurting each other. They want to be independent but they also want to be accepted. They want to be themselves but don’t want to fall short of the other’s expectations of them. In other words, they accurately reflect flesh-and-blood human beings. And this depth is evident in many of the characters, including Lady Bird’s soft-spoken but ever-supporting father (played by Tracy Letts), her older brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), and the latter’s girlfriend, Shelly (Marielle Scott). Miguel and Shelly’s studded faces belie their sensitivity over their own marginalisation, but the more they speak, despite their small roles, the more they creep into our hearts.

And yet, while the film makes a point of being situated in a rarely depicted locale (Sacramento) in an unusual year (the relatively recent 2002, which is just long enough ago for the music to sound both old and immediately recognisable and the fashion to look ridiculous because it’s dated but not yet retro), it doesn’t make much of its context: It’s good that Sactown gets some love, but we rarely get to see more than the Tower Bridge. And there is no obvious reason why the story is better told in 2002 than in 2016 or 2017, except that flip phones, which are all the rage on this timeline, now just look quaint. One giant blunder is the film’s soundtrack, which is ludicrously packed with “Best of…” tracks from 2002. There is no reason to remind us so aggressively that the film is set in that particular year. It’s not important – this is not American Graffiti. 

Luckily, Gerwig’s direction is flawless, and so is her sense of rhythm: She lets her camera take in an entire emotional realisation, for example, when Lady Bird realises Kyle has lied to her and goes from loving and cuddly to crestfallen, in an unbroken take. But she also recognises the value of cinematic synecdoche, as when one entire scene consists of a very brief shot, not even three seconds long, showing Lady Bird’s toe curled in the bathtub, which we can safely assume indicates a level of self-pleasuring that is self-evident in the context but does not need to be made any more explicit.

Anchored by Ronan’s and Metcalf’s superb performances as flawed but benevolent individuals, Lady Bird is an affectionate portrait of life as a senior whose goal is opaque and whose strategy for reaching it is never much more than a draft – a Plan A without a Plan B. The film is immanently watchable because it brims with optimism while never minimising the stumbles along the way. We get to see rare moments of joy shared by mother and daughter, even as they seem to be fighting non-stop throughout the story, and in the process, we are reminded that parents are people, and that life’s lessons only end when we die.

Looper (2012)

André Crous

Seriously pondering the conundrum of being killed by one’s future self, Rian Johnson’s Looper is almost unique in being both an intelligent and an entertaining time-travel film.

LooperUSA
4*

Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin

Running time: 120 minutes

Looper stands alone among a horde of wannabe-serious science-fiction films dealing with time travel; the inherent contradictions in the premise are taken seriously, but not so seriously that the audience gets lost in long-winded explanations. Besides, most viewers should be familiar with these contradictions already – for an insightful yet entertaining recap, go watch the Back to the Future trilogy again.

Director Rian Johnson’s film delivers on the promise he displayed in Brick, a neo-noir film replete with its own Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue, almost a language unto itself, though set in the present. That film, as does Looper, starred the ever-impressive Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high-school student who gets involved in the underworld when his girlfriend is killed.

The plot of Looper concerns the existential conundrum faced by a number of individuals in the present, which is 2044 in the state of Kansas: The title refers to those who carry out the job of killing people sent back from the future, where it is much more difficult to get rid of bodies.

Recently, however, the people sent back have been the Loopers themselves, 30 years older. This is called “closing the loop”. They arrive bound and gagged, and when the job is done, their present-day versions discover gold strapped around the bodies of their older (and now, late) selves, giving new meaning to the phrase “a golden handshake”.

In this way, the Loopers can live pleasant lives for the next 30 years while they wait to be sent back to the past and be killed by themselves.

Killing oneself is bad enough, but living with that guilt and yet building a life for three decades only to have it taken from you, even if you know it is coming closer every morning you open your eyes, is agony. The emotional turmoil is beautifully presented in a brief sequence that sees Gordon-Levitt turn into Bruce Willis, who is shot, in more ways than one, in a scene about a half-hour into the film.

Both actors play the role of Joe, and when, in the film’s most frequently presented reality, young Joe doesn’t kill old Joe, they are both in danger because news travels quickly between the present and the future, where the Rainmaker, a mystical figure who is closing all the loops and wielding ever-more power, is none too pleased by the way events are unfolding back in 2044.

For this reason, Joe makes it a priority to find the Rainmaker as a child and kill him, what with the latter’s being responsible for the death of a very important person in Joe’s life. It turns out there are three possibilities as to who the baby Rainmaker might be, and while old Joe goes off into the city to track down two of them, young Joe stays behind in rural Kansas to find the third one. Once the child is killed, old Joe should evaporate, as he would never have been sent back here in the first place, and the loop would remain open…

On a Kansan farm, young Joe finds Sara (Emily Blunt), who is raising her young boy, Cid, on her own. Cid seems rather precocious, and we quickly catch on to the likelihood this is the feared overlord of the future. Young Joe, despite himself, strikes up a friendship with Sara while old Joe continues his killing spree in the city, not knowing whether the execution of a young child will make things right or count for collateral damage.

The film itself doesn’t have many narrative possibilities here, but even though we know how things are likely to develop, the scenes on the farm with the young Joe and Cid the toddler have tension that keeps us from second-guessing the actions of the characters or the director.

But Johnson’s vision of the future is not bleak at all – as the wheat fields make abundantly clear – despite the ghastly poverty we are shown in some of the opening scenes. He presents us with a future that is very recognisable, and it even features the mild-mannered Jeff Daniels as the Loopers’ handler in the present.

Don’t discount the small details in the film, as many character traits, minor as they may seem, often have a role to play later on. Admittedly, there are questions to be asked about the wisdom of crime bosses in the future to send someone back only to be killed by their younger selves without any kind of supervision, given the very easily comprehensible moral dilemma. But such questions are negligible because Looper is tight enough to focus your attention in the moment.

Few films can balance a credible treatment of time travel with a narrative that is engaging and thrilling, and whatever you think about the deceptively closed ending, this one deserves great praise.

Profile (2018)

André Crous

Profile, Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller for the 21st century, makes clever and abundant use of everyday technology to replicate immediacy and inspire fear in the viewer. 

ProfileUK
4*

Director:
Timur Bekmambetov
Screenwriters:
Brittany Poulton
Olga Kharina
Timur Bekmambetov
Anna Érelle

Running time: 105 minutes

“Screen live” is the new hand-held. By having the film screen essentially replicate a computer screen, the viewer gets the visceral sensation that things are taking place “for real” without any apparent staging or editing. Of course, in the back of our heads, we know this is all directed (in this case, by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov), but onscreen, we see applications or services that we know – Skype, FaceTime, Gmail – used as we use them, and thus, we sympathise with the main character. But because the lesson of positioning the camera in the physical space of the protagonist failed as far back as the infamous Lady in the Lake, “screen live” films use a much better option: the Web cam.

Obviously, the reason for using “screen live” is to emphasise both the pivotal role that electronic communication plays in the story and to create a novel sense of immediacy and enhance the feeling of realism. The astounding Canadian short film Noah was one of the earliest examples and is still the benchmark, particularly because of its dynamic style of filmmaking that also incorporates a kind of a fast motion to bridge gaps in time, but Bekmambetov’s Profile is another serious and largely successful push for this kind of approach to narrative representation.

Based on the real-life story of French journalist Anna Érelle, who posed as a Muslim girl online to find out more about the recruitment of girls from the West by ISIS fighters and was swept up in a web of trouble, Profile transposes its story to the UK, where Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) is looking for her next big story to break. Constantly behind on her rent and desperate to be taken more seriously in the newsroom, especially by her fast-talking boss, Vicky (a flawless, pirouette-like performance by Christine Adams, who dominates every Skype broadcast in which we see her), she creates a fake Facebook profile as a recent convert to Islam and starts liking and sharing ISIS videos.

She quickly gets noticed by a young man named Abu Bilel Al-Britani (Shazad Latif), a British-born ISIS fighter now living in Syria who asks her about her path to finding Islam and gently quizzes her about one day coming to Syria to join their noble cause. Every conversation with him is a giant lie, and she has to record it all on Skype. At the beginning, an IT employee at the news station, who knows Arabic and whose mother is from Syria, listens in on the conversation and finds the whole thing chilling. So do we, because the full-screen format of the interaction makes us feel we are also implicated in the lie, and we know the punishment for crossing an ISIS fighter – we have seen it in glimpses of the beheading videos that Amy reposts on her profile under the moniker “Melody Nelson”.

To make herself feel more integrated and in order to prevent herself from feeling guilty, helped along by the devastatingly handsome, charming and persuasive Bilel, she gradually cuts off her social interaction with her boyfriend and other friends and focuses on extracting as much information as possible from Bilel. She wants to know how young girls become vulnerable enough to contemplate leaving their community for ISIS-controlled Syria, and the picture Bilel paints is one of a paradise of freedom with ample opportunities to live in luxury for very little money. Compared with the financial difficulty Amy faces in London, we can quickly see how she might be enticed and how she is simulating the conditions for herself to be radicalised, too.

Bekmambetov manages to sustain this constant dread in the pit of our stomachs for a very long time as we see Amy being gripped ever more tightly in the hands of the terrorist, even as she knows better, a bit like the fable of the boiling frog. They spend a great deal of time together, with Bilel doing most of the talking, and she sees him in many different situations, from him playing football with his fellow fighters to cooking at home – an activity they share via Skype that is terrifying precisely because it is so intimate.

The acting from both players is superb, particularly because Kane and Latif are asked to do something quite unusual: always look directly into the (Web) camera. There is almost never any direct physical interaction between the person appearing onscreen and anyone else. And yet, this virtual interaction, nourished mostly by the tension that is generated by all the windows opening and closing as Amy tries to collect information in secret, consistently grabs our attention. Thus, “screen live” is used not only to convey a sense of immediacy and a feeling of familiarity but also to grab our attention and raise our level of anxiety.

On an interesting side note, we see the breathless coverage of ISIS in the media, as Amy locates articles online while she is chatting with Bilel. Most of this coverage is about the atrocities committed by the radical Islamists, complete with videos of their actions. But funnily enough, Profile shows all of this information is usually blared across the website of the Daily Telegraph tabloid, which has the opposite effect on many of its readers than the one that is intended: The sheer volume of videos makes the events feel less distant, and thus, those who are susceptible may just be supported in their radicalisation.

While the last 15 minutes of the film devolve into slight hysteria, and the film does cheat a little by skipping over all of Amy’s offline conversations and interactions, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking that lays out a clear path for other directors looking to profit off of this relatively novel format. Time has to be limited, the focus has to be very clear, and the filmmaker should make every effort to utilise the possibilities of his or her screen, which means switching between programmes and windows for the sake of dynamism, secrecy and revelation. Profile does all of this, and the importance of the real-life origins of the story in framing the events as more than just feasible cannot be underestimated. On top of the message that even the smallest interactions online can have very real-life consequences and that you are never really anonymous in the virtual world, this is a very topical film.

This is Bekmambetov’s first time directing but third time producing a “screen live” film. The other two were the 2014 horror Unfriended and 2018 Sundance thriller Search. 

Film viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.

U – July 22 (2018)

André Crous

The terrorist attack of 22 July 2011 is recreated in meticulous detail by focusing on people’s reactions to the horror rather than explaining the inexplicable.

U - July 22Norway
4*

Director:
Erik Poppe
Screenwriter:
Erik Poppe
Director of Photography:
Martin Otterbeck

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Utøya 22. juli

There is nothing to be done, because all of it has already happened. But for nearly 90 unbroken minutes, we accompany one girl as she flees the attack, hides from the gunfire and struggles to understand what has happened in this idyllic outpost in the Norwegian countryside. This is a depiction of the terror inflicted on a group of youths in July 2011 on the island of Utøya.

Director Erik Poppe’s brave decision to centre his entire film on one character is, without a doubt, the best possible choice he could have made. Not only does it keep the viewer in the dark about the full extent of the carnage, thus keeping us in suspense throughout, but it also anchors the emotions in one place instead of weaving a necessarily incomplete tapestry of various strands. In the film’s opening moments, following an incongruous sequence in the capital where a bomb has exploded, Kaia (Andrea Berntzen), right on the cusp of becoming an adult, looks straight into the camera and says, “You’ll never understand.” It turns out she has an earpiece and is speaking on the phone to her mother, who has called to inquire about her following the explosion in Oslo.

From this moment on, we follow Kaia wherever she goes, though at a slightly less intimate distance than Mátyás Erdély’s camera in the similarly lensed Son of Saul. She has recently fallen out with her younger sister, who made slightly inconsiderate comments in front of their fellow campers, which Kaia considered inappropriate. Thus, they get separated early on, and within a few moments, youths are rushing from the forest as shots ring out.

What follows is persistent confusion about the source of the attack, about whether it is even an attack, about what measures should be taken to elude the gunman and about how much longer this will take. Unlike a conventional work of fiction, there are no clear leaders, and even the villain is a big unknown, as we barely catch of a glimpse of him, with two or three chilling exceptions.

For 72 minutes, the actual length of the attack in 2011, we hear the bone-chilling shots on the soundtrack – sometimes farther away and seemingly duller, at other times up close with booms loudly reverberating enough to shake us in our seats. This is the music of the film, which doesn’t have a musical score and thus relies on the diegetic sound to provide it with the relevant soundscape.

In the foreground, Kaia is trying to deal with something she never expected she would face. After all, this is the calm, peaceful Norwegian countryside, not an American school. We already catch a glimpse of this distance from danger in the first few minutes, when there is some very superficial discussion about the bombing in Oslo. The only person who seems to be clued into the danger of what is going on is Issa (Sorosh Sadat), whose background makes him more sensitive to how others’ actions will shape people’s perception of him.

In retrospect, the Oslo-set opening sequence is wholly at odds with the rest of the film. Geographically, it is separate from the bulk of the film, which takes place on the island of Utøya. Temporally, it takes place a mere two hours before the events on the island but is shown almost exclusively through documentary (including surveillance) footage. Most importantly, however, it is not presented from Kaia’s perspective. Thus, we have two distinct sections in the film, even though both were the result of actions by the same man: the far-right terrorist, who luckily goes unnamed here, with even the actor uncredited. But the film would have been much better had it limited itself to the island. In that way, we would have learned about the bombing in Oslo the same way the children do: from each other, with much remaining opaque.

There is nothing exceptional about Kaia, and that is good. She is not immediately concerned with locating her sister because the adrenaline has overwhelmed her. Her efforts to save her sister and others are not heroic nor complicated: She does what she knows, but she knows as little as everyone else and is mostly functioning on a primal desire for survival by playing a potentially fatal real-life version of hide and seek.

Because we experience the story from Kaia’s perspective, we know almost nothing of the situation in general, except that people are in danger. We see them running, trying to get away; we see them after they have been shot; we see them dying; and we see them when they are already dead. As time passes, the body count increases, and we slowly the gravity of the invisible but very audible danger. Of course, this tight focus poses the director numerous dramatic challenges, including how to keep the story as realistic as possible and not inject unnecessary fictional drama or sugar into the mix.

Poppe appears to take the gamble late in the film that his apparent single-take staging absolves him of criticism that the narrative takes a melodramatic turn, but because of the focus on the single character, it is hard not to take notice. Hiding out with Magnus (Aleksander Holmen), a boy from the west coast city of Stavanger who openly admits the youth camp piqued his interest not because of the politics but because of the potential to meet girls, Kaia strikes up a cute conversation with him that sets up an emotionally manipulative ending to the film. The camera work is very well executed and whatever cuts there are invisible to the naked eye.

This is an ambitious and at times visceral, though not entirely successful, dramatisation of events on that tragic day in July 2011. The direction sometimes draws attention to itself, and beyond Kaia, her unanswered phone calls to her sister and the desperate phone calls between her and her mother, the film doesn’t offer much in the way of characterisation. It emphasises the confusion among the young people by having them ask the same questions over and over again – a natural and entirely logical response to this wholly unnatural event – but, except for the opening minutes, there is little chemistry between the characters, and it feels like a staged 72 minutes of tension rather than an ordeal filled with flesh-and-bone human beings.

That being said, this is a remarkable story told in a fresh way that makes the experience an unforgettable one. But if the director had spent as much time on developing his characters as he clearly did on blocking his actors, this could have been an extraordinary film.

Viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.