2020-present

The Zone of Interest (2023)

André Crous

With the horrors of Auschwitz audibly playing out on the periphery, The Zone of Interest paints a unique portrait of life during the Holocaust, but the director mucks it all up with a ghastly and pointlessly artsy aesthetic.

Zone of InterestUnited States/United Kingdom/Poland
3*

Director:
Jonathan Glazer
Screenwriter:
Jonathan Glazer
Director of Photography:
Łukasz Żal

Running time: 105 minutes

Roger Ebert once wrote that “if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen”. That certainly holds true for Jonathan Glazer’s austere Auschwitz drama, entitled The Zone of Interest, which finds itself teetering between a bloodless horror film and a historical art installation. It includes many a scene or shot that lingers far beyond what it merits while revealing little to nothing at all.

Following the most basic of opening credits, the white title emerges on a black screen in a silly font that calls to mind some horror-inspired WordArt, accompanied by eerie sounds that border on comedic. As the title slowly fades and ultimately vanishes into the black screen (presumably a very gross visual representation of the millions of Jews turned to ash inside the crematoriums at Auschwitz), we anticipate a cut. But none comes. Instead, we are left staring at a black screen that probably only lasts a minute or two, though it feels much longer. When we finally encounter an actual diegetic scene, we see a group of people picnicking among lush greenery next to a river. Again, we remain at a distance, waiting an uncomfortably long time for a cut.

We are not introduced to these characters, and can barely see them, as the camera makes no effort to present them to us. Their actions lack both interest and significance, a trend that persists as the movie meanders through its nearly two-hour runtime set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland’s most infamous locale. Occasionally, Glazer opts for artistic detours that alienate more than they enchant. These include using thermal night vision to craft unsettling visuals of a young girl distributing apples in the countryside – presumably to offer sustenance to prisoners labouring outside the camp walls during daytime, although these scenes don’t go anywhere and add nothing except some colour (in black in white) to the narrative. Moreover, the director experiments with auditory elements, presenting blank screens overlaid with sounds that swing between the ominously bizarre and the comically absurd, reminiscent of a frog belching in bass or a cat being strangled.

The primary zone of interest is the house where Rudolf Höss, the commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife, Hedwig, and their two sons, two daughters and a baby. What’s intriguing about the house, and the main reason the film exists, is its proximity to the camp. With a vast flower bed full of dahlias, sunflowers and marigolds, as well as an admirable vegetable garden, the property shares a wall with the extermination camp, and it is close enough to hear what is happening on the other side of the wall. 

The scenes at the family home are a mixed bag. The mere proximity of Auschwitz and the audible yet always unseen terror imbue every moment at the Höss home with an undercurrent of tension, despite the seemingly eternal summer weather. Yet, at the same time, Glazer, who also wrote the screenplay, fails to create much drama in these scenes. Life at the Germans’ home is carefree but dull. There is very little to maintain our interest, and many a scene leaves the viewer questioning its inclusion at all.

The only real drama unfolds with Höss’s imminent reassignment to Oranienburg. He has learnt about this but hesitates to inform Hedwig. His wife has dedicated three years to transforming their house into a home, notably commanding Auschwitz prisoners loaned out for labour to fulfil her demands on the property. She also relishes her nickname as the “Queen of Auschwitz”. At home, Höss feels particularly vulnerable, and his high-pitched voice and somewhat effeminate demeanour (despite, or perhaps because of, his undercut hairstyle) weaken his position further. This makes him hesitant to share the news with Hedwig. When he eventually does, her aggressive emotional breakdown confirms his fears were justified.

Hedwig, portrayed by the remarkable Sandra Hüller, embodies a chilling blend of banality and malevolence. Her plain appearance conceals a deep-seated cruelty. Early in the film, she nonchalantly distributes silk panties, plundered from Jewish women, to her maids, while she herself has obtained a giant fur coat with red lipstick in the coat pocket. Neither of the items can work miracles on her bland look, however. Her power over the Jewish labourers in her home enables her sudden shifts to vileness, culminating in a disturbing remark that leaves viewers aghast, wishing upon her the very atrocities her husband perpetrates at Auschwitz.

The rest of the time, however, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the “banality of evil”, we observe life proceeding as usual on the family’s side of the wall, with no acknowledgment of the persistent gunshots, blood-curdling screams or plumes of ash rising from the towering chimneys. Most poignantly, people being cremated alive is described with clinical, emotionless precision, while Höss sends dictation after dictation about mundane issues. This is not the life of someone tormented by the genocide he supervises and implements.

And yet, there are glimmers of complexity. While the film thankfully never tries to portray any of the Germans as having genuine concerns about the misery or torture they are inflicting or allowing to be inflicted on the Jews in and around the house, there are hints that these are flesh-and-blood people with flickers of innate humanity that are being suppressed by their decisions to behave in this abominable manner. One is Hedwig’s mother, who arrives for a short visit, and although she is full of praise for and evidently proud of daughter, she also witnesses the giant red flames at night and hears the screams, leading her to a fateful yet understated decision. Even Höss himself, who seems ill at ease in many a social situation, appears to show an inherent and uncontrollable repulsion (one that manifests in an unforgettable, physical way towards the end) to the mass extermination, although he keeps lunging straight into darkness.

The contrast between the banality in the foreground and the horror in the background is silent but shocking. Every time we see fragments of the Auschwitz camp, its watchtower, its row upon row of tightly packed multi-story prison buildings, it is impossible for our imagination not to conjure the worst possible images of what is happening, even as we are never shown a single thing inside the camp while it is operated by the Nazis. But the ever-present clouds of human remains spread everywhere, and there is some solace to be taken that all of this eventually did come to an end.

In its closing frames, The Zone of Interest aims to cast a fresh perspective on the enthusiastic complicity of Germans in the atrocities of the Second World War yet finds itself caught in a web of stylistic excess that detracts from the depth of drama it seeks to portray, especially within the domestic sphere of the Höss family. The concluding sequences, set against the grim backdrop of Berlin’s bureaucratic machinery orchestrating the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, resort to fish-eye aerial shots that aspire to a godlike surveillance of the unfolding horror, a technique that comes across as both superficial and awkwardly incorporated into the overarching narrative. This emphasis on aesthetic over narrative substance, a hallmark of Glazer’s directorial approach, serves more to obscure than illuminate the film’s core themes, diluting its capacity to engage and disturb its audience.

Despite its bold attempt to navigate the Holocaust’s peripheries with an unyielding gaze, the film ultimately falters, presenting a fragmented tale that fails to resonate on an emotional level. The goal of balancing visual innovation with the monumental scale of its historical subject matter ends in a dissonance that leaves viewers more alienated than enlightened, rendering the film a lamentable venture into Holocaust cinema, its potential dimmed by an overzealous commitment to form at the expense of impactful storytelling, mirroring the disquieting aloofness of its protagonists and falling markedly short of its ambitious goal to make a significant contribution to the narrative of one of history’s bleakest periods.

The Beast (2016)

André Crous

Shaka does Shakespeare in The Beast, an excellently staged but very ambiguous, immersive yet enigmatic short film.

The BeastSouth Africa
4*

Directors:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Screenwriters:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Director of Photography:
Nicholas Turvey

Running time: 18 minutes

All the world is a stage, and we are merely watching the other players. Maybe that’s what happens in a comedy. But in a tragedy, we are also (unwitting, perhaps reluctant) players. And anyone who’s familiar with Funny Games will know that it can be frightful for the viewer to realise her implicit involvement in the spectacle.

The Beast is a short film set inside the pheZulu Safari Park, which is a real park in present-day South Africa. Here, tourists can see wildlife, walk around a “cultural village” with indigenous huts and witness traditional Zulu dances. What the (almost uniformly white) visitors find most thrilling, however, is the opportunity to see Shaka, the famous Zulu warrior who never lost a battle. Of course, it’s not the real Shaka, who died nearly 200 years ago. The imposing young man playing him (Khulani Maseko) is an actor who dreams of leaving this life behind and performing in a Shakespeare play at the National Theatre. Or does he?

Writing-directing duo Samantha Nell and Michael Wahrmann make the very clever decision to shoot most of their film in long, unbroken takes, which tends to imply a unity of space and time similar to what we experience in real life. The camera rarely makes itself known. Instead, it lets the action play out in wide shots that allow us to take in the actors and their surroundings. Among others, we get to know the aspirations of “Shaka”, who says he wants more than just to play the Bard’s famous dark-skinned Moor, Othello. Even though everyone we see is dressed up in costumes and moving around inside this Disney-like village, we are led to believe that these are intimate, “real” conversations between the actors.

But then, without warning, the film shatters all our illusions. And no review can do justice to the film without unpacking this multi-layered twist. The performers line up to dance and perform, presumably a traditional Zulu song. Shaka slowly separates from the group and takes up position between them and the audience. When he starts to speak, he speaks in Zulu. But the words that come out of his mouth are those of Shakespeare. More to the point, they belong to Shylock, the Jew, in The Merchant of Venice. 

We don’t see the audience for this performance, but it is because we are the audience. As a drum starts to beat offscreen, the drama increases, and Shaka switches to English to deliver the best-known and most aggressive portion of the monologue.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you offend us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that.
If a Jew offends a Christian, what is his answer? Revenge.
If a Christian offends a Jew, what should his punishment be by Christian example? Revenge.

By this stage, the rest of the group of Zulu performers have joined in, and as they reach the camera, their heads fill the frame. Just like Shaka’s famous bull’s head formation, the viewer is surrounded. Dead centre is Shaka, who now turns to look straight at us before delivering the final blow: “The evil you teach me will be difficult to execute, but in the end, I will better my instructor.”

At long last, we get a reverse shot of the tourists. Their jaws are on the floor. As a destabilisation of the expected boundaries between the spectator and the performers, this staging is very clever. It now seems clear that everything we have been watching – all the “private” conversations we were privy to, all the “behind-the-scenes” activity that we witnessed – was staged for us. We are the tourists visiting the film. Every moment and every action was merely part of a show, and we have not learnt anything about the individuals themselves. Perhaps we should have known better since “Shaka” is always in costume and is never called by any other name.

Unfortunately, those final words, which seem to create fear and provoke total confusion among the tourists clutching their phones like a security blanket, are too disconnected from the story to get a clear sense of what the actor is talking about. We can kind of grasp the metaphor of a struggle for equality. Jew–Christian can be replaced by black–white or indigenous–coloniser, but is this “evil” in the final line? Is the film really implying the possibility of another apartheid – one in reverse, in which blacks will dominate and enslave the whites? Is this merely a historical reminder that Shaka’s tribe, the Zulus, would ultimately take back power over this land? Or does it dovetail with Shaka’s desire to play “deep, ambiguous” characters?

With its series of impressively staged single takes and a powerful but puzzling ending, The Beast certainly stands out from the pack. The four scenes don’t fit neatly together, but with a powerhouse performance by lead actor Khulani Maseko, it almost doesn’t matter. This is Shaka’s show, and he hits the bull’s eye.

Exile (2020)

André Crous

In Exile, a long-term German resident originally from Kosovo appears to be experiencing daily discrimination at work, but is he overreacting and paranoid or is something sinister afoot?

ExileKosovo/Germany
4*

Director:
Visar Morina
Screenwriter:
Visar Morina
Director of Photography:
Matteo Cocco

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Exil

If Franz Kafka had written in anything other than German, perhaps his Josef K. would have been a well-balanced individual and the nameless, overbearing powers that be would have left him in peace.

A bit like Dancer in the Dark, Visar Morina’s Exile is about desperation (for both the central character and the viewer) in the face of injustice, except here, there aren’t any musical numbers to dilute the misery. No, from the very first scene, we have a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs. And it doesn’t get better or go away, not even once, over the course of a full two hours. 

Xhafer Kryeziu (Mišel Matičević) is a man in a country that is not his own and works with people who never accept him. Originally from Kosovo, he works as a pharmaceutical engineer at a big laboratory. His native language may be Albanian, but his life is effectively German: his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his job and everyone working with him. With a name like his, however, it doesn’t matter how well you speak the language. When you introduce yourself and people notice the slight accent, everyone will remind you, often by flashing a quizzical smile, that you are different.

In that opening scene, he finds a rat tied to the fence in front of his middle-class suburban home. The fact that his workplace often uses rats in experiments and that his colleagues know he has a phobia about these rodents is no trivial coincidence. But without any proof, what can he do? What can he accomplish against an invisible enemy?

Xhafer soon realises that he does not receive any group e-mails, which causes him to miss important meetings. He hears others sign up for a weekend trip, but he doesn’t get an invitation. And whenever he wants to speak to the boss, the secretary says there is no way because running the company keeps him so busy.

Does he keep his head down to pretend everything is fine and nothing is getting to him? Or does he confront those he perceives to be the most antagonistic towards him? He opens up to his wife, Nora (Sandra Hüller, playing the same emotionless character here as she did to such great effect in Toni Erdmann, whose director, Maren Ade, co-produces here) about this silent bullying at work, but she comes up with benign excuses for her fellow Germans. Maybe these incidents were all unintentional. Or maybe, she says, he is just an asshole and should try harder to be friends. After all, she says, things could be much harder: “You don’t look like a foreigner. If you were an Arab, it would be different.” Indeed, it might be, but why should it matter?

Understandably, Xhafer’s exclusion leads to loneliness. Without any emotional support, his attention turns to those who are somewhat more similar to him. He strikes up a casual sexual relationship with the film’s only other Albanian speaker, a cleaning lady at his company. But we quickly see that this doesn’t alleviate his problems; it merely pushes them out of his mind for a five-minute quickie in a bathroom stall.

Just like people, the film is much more complicated than it appears at first blush. We gradually come to understand that Morina is not going to offer us any real explanation for the central mystery of what is happening to Xhafer or why. He doesn’t confirm Xhafer’s paranoia but slowly makes us a part of his world. This means we expect other people to behave indifferently towards him because to everyone else, a foreigner is a foreigner is a foreigner. His colleagues all think he’s Croatian. But is this indifference or something darker? Are they behaving from a place of malice or are they just condescending, passive racists?

The film’s inference is that Germans are either racist to your face or racist behind your back. Xhafer says as much during a very well-written and even better-executed altercation with Nora. This may be too harsh a judgment on German society as a whole, but there is an evident, ubiquitous hostility to his mere presence. Because we lack a global understanding of the facts, we empathise with Xhafer, whose point of view we share to the point of witnessing his nightmares. He is far from perfect, but that doesn’t make him any less worthy of respect than anyone else.

But in the film’s final act, a few things happen that seem to contradict Xhafer’s (and our) reading of events. Our precarious explanation slips through our fingers, leaving us with an even more uncertain understanding of what is going on. We cannot read other people’s minds; we can only go by their actions, but these interpretations are almost always tainted by our own perspectives. Do his colleagues really hate him? Does he intimidate them, somehow? Or is their behaviour informed by factors that have nothing to do with him personally? And when they seem to reveal their intentions, can we trust what they say?

The fragmented editing, the hypnotic tracking shots inside his laboratory’s gloomy corridors, the darkness that envelops his marriage bed, the cold blues and nauseating ambers and the eerie music on the soundtrack all make for a disorientating experience as we try but fail, along with Xhafer, to make sense of it all. It all leads to a final shot that – similarly to that of another recent immigrant film, Synonyms – brutally but figuratively conveys the uncertainty of having to wait for acceptance, perhaps indefinitely.

Exile is a film that deserves to be watched a second time, but few in the audience will have the nerve or the stomach to go through this harrowing ordeal again straightaway.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

My Salinger Year (2020)

André Crous

My Salinger Year, about an awkward girl learning the ropes at a literary agency, is as shallow as a glossy magazine.

My Salinger YearCanada/USA
3*

Director:
Philippe Falardeau
Screenwriter:
Philippe Falardeau
Director of Photography:
Sara Mishara

Running time: 100 minutes

She has never read Catcher in the Rye but worships its elusive author, J.D. Salinger. She wants to be a writer but rarely puts pen to paper. She never learns any hard lessons but is constantly on the verge of tears. Her name is Joanna, and she is a mess, a bit like the movie she stars in, called My Salinger Year.

In the mid-1990s, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) is fresh off a degree in English literature and has published two poems in the Paris Review. On the spur of the moment, she decides to put her studies at Berkeley on hold, break up with her boyfriend and move to – rather, stay on in, as she is the kind of person whom things happen to rather than the one who makes them happen – New York City. She wants to become a writer, but in the meantime, she has to pay the bills, so she contacts a recruitment agency.

Like a godsend or just a magnificent manifestation of serendipity, she immediately lands an interview with the serene but mostly expressionless Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), an agent who always seems to be moving in slow motion. Joanna is told that she will spend her days typing out dictation and answering the heaps of fan letters sent to her client, “Jerry” aka J.D. Salinger, by using rather impersonal form letters. Under no circumstances is she to write on her own, at all.

Of course, she ignores this advice, but not in the way we might expect. She doesn’t appear to write much, except a line of poetry here and there, which we never hear or read. No, she is so filled with her own sense of importance and a naïve Messiah complex that she starts writing personal responses to the fan letters. Her own life is a disaster, but she wants to help others, most of whom are obsessed with Holden Caulfield (it seems those who admire Salinger’s other novels are much more balanced individuals), fix theirs.

In the meantime, director Philippe Falardeau spends an inordinate amount of time trying to cram his screenplay full of retrospective comedy about the time period, particularly as far as the then-nascent internet technology is concerned. Somehow, while this is 1995, Margaret is still afraid of bringing a computer into the office. When a PC does appear, everyone is told it should be used to track down Catcher in the Rye facsimiles on the World Wide Web. And people gossip about how silly e-mails are and how they are, fingers crossed, just a passing fad… Har har.

But then, despite her plain incompetence at the job, Joanna receives more and more responsibilities from Margaret, who cannot be a fool because, after all, she represents the mythical Salinger. Joanna even starts chatting to “Jerry” over the phone, who encourages her to write every day. We never see her following his advice, but by the end of the story, she suddenly has a collection of poetry ready to be submitted to that pinnacle of excellence in the realm of the printed word, the New Yorker. She might just be full of herself, but the film appears to be telling us that she has blossomed into a publishable author along the way (perhaps via osmosis through her connection, however tangential, with literary greatness?).

We never figure out what is going on in Joanna’s head because she appears to be a teenage girl trapped in a 20-something wannabe poet’s body. She has told herself that she will be a writer one day, but this film provides no blueprint or development that would allow her to reach that goal. Very little drama is on display. Even when things get heated (for example, when a teenage Salinger fan, much more mature than her, comes to the office and gives her a good dressing down), she simply persists with her juvenile rebellion by continuing to write non-form letters to the fans.

The decision to present Salinger as an enigma (his face is never clearly shown) deserves some praise, as does the long single take at the end of the film that turns out to be a dream, but Qualley never rises to the challenge of infusing her character with more than a deer-lost-in-the-headlights quality.

My Salinger Year, which is lit so brightly that even the night-time scenes feel like they are taking place at high noon, is the ultimate feel-good Hallmark Channel film. At least the similar-in-the-broadest-outlines The Devil Wears Prada had two strong intriguing central characters, but Falardeau’s film has none, despite a last-ditch effort to inject some drama into Weaver’s character, Margaret. And at a major moment towards the end of the film, when Margaret reveals to Joanna that she knew the latter would make a fabulous agent the first time she laid eyes on her, it is difficult not to wonder whether Margaret has lost her marbles.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Persian Lessons (2020)

André Crous

Persian Lessons may not be the most believable film about a Jew’s survival under occupation, but Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s seemingly infinite skills as an actor make this a worthy addition to the genre.

Persian LessonsRussia/Germany
4*

Director:
Vadim Perelman
Screenwriter:
Ilja Zofin
Director of Photography:
Vladislav Opelyants

Running time: 125 minutes

When people talk about the Holocaust as something we should never forget, they are usually referring to the events: the othering, the captivity, the humiliation, the torture and the extermination of human beings. But what is often forgotten is the individuals themselves. Jews were the primary targets, but what were their names? Who were they?

In a surprisingly effective high-wire act that pays off in large part thanks to the discreet but ultimately emotionally overwhelming performance of its lead actor, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons uses its entire cast to construct a truly unique language. The film centres on a dark-featured Belgian Jew named Gilles, who poses as a Persian named Reza in order to avoid being killed in a firing squad by German officers in France during the Second World War. The officers spare him because they know their captain, who wants to open a restaurant in Iran (commonly known as “Persia” at the time) once the war is over, is looking for someone to teach him Farsi. Thus begin the many months, which turn into years, of Reza teaching “Farsi”, when in fact he only knows a single word: “bawbaw” (dad, بابا).

If you can look past this rather improbable plot point and suspend your disbelief for the two-hour running time, you will be well rewarded. There is one reason we are able to do this, and his name is Nahuel Pérez Biscayart. After making waves with a dizzying performance in 120 BPM, this Argentine actor who has quickly learnt to speak the language like a native Frenchman appears to have no problem forming sentences in German either. Although Biscayart and his character, Reza, are obviously two different people, the former’s facility with languages goes a long way toward making us believe the latter might possibly remember the hundreds of fake words he teaches his captor.

It all starts with a German Army truck driving through a forest in Occupied France. It is transporting a new batch of Jews, including Gilles, a rabbi’s son, who has managed to sneak a sandwich with him in his coat. A fellow passenger trades a first-edition book with a handwritten dedication in Farsi for the food. He explains that it was a gift from “bawbaw” to his son, Reza. Moments later, the first dozen of them are gunned down. Gilles, in the second wave, sees what is coming and insists he is not Jewish but Persian.

At the transit camp, which serves as a limbo between Occupation and certain death at a concentration camp, Hauptsturmführer Klaus Koch (played with chilling friendliness by Lars Eidinger) is delighted to meet “Reza”. Over time, we learn that Koch’s brother lives in Teheran and escaped Germany just before the rise of the Nazi Party. However, Captain Koch is a loyal soldier and has no qualms about being a Nazi, but he is clearly a complicated individual; Perelman drops a few incredibly subtle hints that Koch might be gay, but thankfully there is never a reason to empathise with him, and his final scene in the film will be particularly satisfying to the viewer.

Gilles’s continued survival depends on him teaching a fake language and learning to speak it as if it were a second tongue. He does this with astonishing (at times, impossible) adroitness, but our suspense of disbelief is assisted in this regard by other films about the Second World War we may have seen already, like Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella), in which Roberto Benigni shelters his son from the horrors of war by pretending it is all a game, or In Darkness, whose Jewish characters hide out in sewers in the war-torn Polish city of Lviv. Over the decades, we have learnt in the history books, through survivors’ eyewitness accounts and on film how some people managed to find inhuman strength to hang on to life amid the abominable reality of the Shoah. As a result, this story, dissimilar though it might be to our own experience, does not seem entirely unrealistic.

The film generally steers clear of so many of the obvious moments in similar films. There is a single aerial shot that indicates the ongoing massacre of people and their cremation in nondescript buildings across the European countryside. But in this transit camp, people do not inhale gas in the showers, and the number of swastikas is kept to a minimum. There is no need for Nazi pageantry. One small picture of Hitler in the background of a shot suffices to remind us of the ongoing horrors at the next camp, and the next, and the next.

Perelman, who is best known for his 2003 feature, The House of Sand and Fog, has finally delivered another film on the level of that stunning début. Not just because both films refer to their final moments in their opening scenes but also because when their background tension is unexpectedly released, there will be few dry eyes left in the house. This was mostly thanks to Perelman’s staging in his first film, but here our gratitude goes to Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who is simply extraordinary as “Reza”.

Persian Lessons is what a mainstream film about Jewish oppression during the Second World War (as opposed to, say, a more artistically minded film like Son of Saul, which was unconventionally staged for maximum visceral effect) should look like. One can nitpick about the necessity of opening the film by revealing the ending or question the decision to have the main character interact so little with his fellow prisoners, but none of this takes away from what is simply a remarkable production.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Minamata (2020)

André Crous

Jacques Rivette would not be pleased with the tragedy porn that is the dramatisation of the Minamata chemical disaster of the 1970s.

MinamataUSA
2.5*

Director:
Andrew Levitas
Screenwriter:
David Kessler
Director of Photography:
Benoît Delhomme

Running time: 115 minutes

I recently mentioned Gillo Pontecorvo’s notorious Kapò while reviewing a film that appeared to strive for a deliberately artistic depiction of war. This reference, always tied to Jacques Rivette’s review in Cahiers du cinéma, has become commonplace in film criticism. But it is because of the ferocity of the allegation and the clarity of the writer’s moral vision that it continues to pop up in reviews.

Look, however, in Kapo, at the shot where [Emmanuelle] Riva kills herself by throwing herself on an electric barbed-wire fence; the man who decides, at that moment, to have a dolly in to tilt up at the body, while taking care to precisely note the hand raised in the angle of its final framing – this man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.  (Jacques Rivette, “On Abjection”, translated by David Phelps with the assistance of Jeremi Szaniawski; originally published as “De l’abjection” in Cahiers du cinéma 120, June 1961, pp. 54–55)

When atrocities are presented in a way that prioritises our appreciation of the beauty and the composition of the image over the inherent misery that is depicted, then the author of the image deserves our contempt. And it is difficult to argue against having contempt for the way Minamata goes about glamorising the suffering of others. This is tragedy porn writ large.

Based on the real events surrounding the Chisso Corporation’s dumping of mercury in the Japanese town of Minamata, which deformed the town’s population (mostly its children, but also some adults), the plot focuses on acclaimed LIFE photojournalist W. Eugene “Gene” Smith, played by Johnny Depp. Gene, who appears to deal with the post-traumatic stress accumulated over a lifetime on tough assignments by drinking himself into daily stupors, is visited by a young Japanese woman named Aileen. The pictures that she gives him immediately convince him he has to go and witness the horrors for himself.

His editor at LIFE, who can see the writing on the wall for the once prestigious magazine, whose pages are now filling up with ads to make up for the decline in subscriptions, harbours many a doubt that his prize-winning photographer will be able to cope and make the deadline, but as usual, an inebriated Gene somehow wraps him around his little finger and gets the green light. It is tough to stomach that the editor of a publication as illustrious as LIFE could be so easy to manipulate, but before you can say Jack Robinson, he has agreed to Gene’s terms, and the latter is off to the land of the rising sun.

It isn’t long before we see the calamitous effect of mercury on the local population. Gene and Aileen stay with a very friendly couple whose daughter Akiko is one of those suffering as a result of Chisso’s unsafe dumping of its chemicals. The world-renowned Japanese hospitality is on full display as Gene gets his own darkroom kitted out almost exactly the way it looks back home. Where his host found the money (and the time!) to do this remains a mystery, however.

What is not a mystery at all is the physical effect of the chemicals on the people, and especially on the children. Again and again and again, the camera seeks out the stiff and deformed hands and feet, constantly reminding us of the toll this disaster has taken on people’s bodies by directing its gaze at them. In so doing, the film is not showing us these characters as people but as objects to inspect and to pity.

Gene doesn’t speak the language, but Aileen translates for him. However, it is often very challenging to understand the English spoken by the Japanese characters. This is particularly true when the soundtrack contains additional noise or people are speaking over each other. A handful of moments when the characters speak Japanese and the film uses subtitles are very helpful. But it is head-scratching how Gene and Aileen end up together by the end of the film and, according to the end titles, get married around the same time. They are merely two people in the same place more or less sharing an experience or two, although he spends most of the day taking and developing his pictures on his own without her help or support.

But beyond the ludicrous relationship that the film wants to suggest, the most objectionable part is the stylised approach to the objects of suffering, namely the children of Minamata. In particular, the film features an extended take in which the real Gene’s famous Tomoko in Her Bath picture comes alive. Meticulously restaged to be identical to the photograph, albeit initially in colour, we see the mother holding her deformed daughter in the bathtub. The moody lighting perfectly conveys the feeling that this is a moment of significance. When Gene’s editor subsequently receives the picture, the significance is further underlined by him nearly bursting into tears. This is tragedy porn at its most grotesque.

The story of how a Japanese company could get away with deforming people barely 25 years after the Americans’ atomic bomb had created tens of thousands of hibakusha (in fact, Nagasaki is located close by) seems like material for a significant dramatisation. But we mostly get Gene walking around (drunk) with his camera, conspicuously taking pictures of as many of the town’s inhabitants (and their deformities) as he can, which feels very much like an invasion of privacy. In addition, the cinematography is not only all over the place and without a perspective but is sometimes rather crude, as when close-ups on faces go in and out of focus or a tracking shot of one female assistant fills the frame with her skirt-covered bottom as she moves down the corridor.

Minamata feels like it was produced in a rush. The basics of the tragedy are intriguing, and some title cards remind us of similar catastrophes around the world, but the people who are used to tell the story are made to look one-dimensional and uninteresting. Add to that the absolutely immoral decision to artfully depict the victims as freaks, and you get a film that is an abject failure.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.