2 stars

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)

André Crous

Full of whispered narration about nothing and a storyline that is all but non-existent, Two or Three Things I Know About Her is one of Godard’s least interesting films prior to his Dziga Vertov period.

Two or Three Things I Know About HerFrance
2*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle

Made at the height of the housing estate boom across Europe in the mid-1960s, Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her is as bland as the giant concrete buildings it depicts. With an exceptionally flimsy storyline that rehashes some of Godard’s previous films, a longwinded voice-over delivered as a constant whisper, characters who rarely interact (and don’t speak like humans when they do) and too many explicit literary references to mention, this film is another in a long line of formal experiments that the director conducted during the 1960s for an audience of one: himself

Godard is generous enough to indicate very early on that the titular “her” refers to the Paris region. However, the narrow focus on his main character, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady, who had turned down a marriage proposal by the director right before the shoot), makes her an equally plausible candidate. Juliette lives with her husband, a car mechanic, in one of the giant buildings that make up the newly opened Cité des 4000 public housing project in La Courneuve, on the northern outskirts of Paris. Because life is not cheap, Juliette follows in the footsteps of other female characters in Godard’s previous films (A Flirtatious Woman, My Life to Live) and becomes a prostitute.

However, “prostitute” may be the wrong word. Juliette engages in prostitution with about as much zeal as Fellini’s Cabiria, which is none at all. We see her in two scenes with clients. The one is a young man who doesn’t know what he wants and ends up just chatting with her. The other is a comical middle-aged photojournalist covering the Vietnam War. He wears a T-shirt with the US flag and says he is from Arkansas, but his accent is so French that we struggle to understand what he says. He asks Juliette and another girl to walk around naked with airline travel bags over their heads. 

Perhaps this clear misrepresentation (an American clearly played by a Frenchman) is in line with Godard’s work in Made in U.S.A, most of which he had shot immediately before this film. But frankly, who cares? Godard apparently does, because he gives us a close-up of a poster for Made in U.S.A, which was still being edited at the time Two or Three Things… was in production. It may very well be that Godard realised he would have to promote that film – one of his absolute worst – lest no one watched it.

Here, divergence is the name of the game, and nothing is ever quite as it seems; the film’s artifice is front and centre and everywhere we look. In one of the opening scenes, we are introduced to Marina Vlady, the actress playing the lead. In voice-over, Godard tells us she is wearing a midnight-blue sweater with two yellow stripes and has dark chestnut or light brown hair. Moments later, framing Vlady a little differently, he introduces her as Juliette Jeanson, the name of her character, and repeats the (same) clothes she is wearing and the (same) colour of her hair. Of course, she has to look into the camera and quote Brecht, just to top it all off.

Juliette – or Vlady, because the film is not always clear about which is which – constantly speaks to us in a completely alienating way. She doesn’t sound like a human being, and neither does almost anyone else onscreen. Juliette appears to be responding with answers, but we never hear the questions. And when she is not speaking, Godard is almost always whispering nonsense on the soundtrack with his trademark lisp. At one point, he shows us Juliette sitting at a table, looking at a woman flipping through a magazine. Juliette sees the magazine from the side, which is right in front of the other woman. Godard intones:

“At 3:37 p.m., Juliette looks at the pages of this object, which in journalistic parlance is called a magazine. Some 150 frames later, another young woman, her fellow creature, her sister, sees the same object. Where is the truth? In full-face or in profile?”

Such banal pseudo-philosophical drivel is routine in a Godard film, but because the narrative itself is so thin, this waste of time is especially annoying, and Godard sounds even dumber than usual. The same goes for an extended take showing a close-up of a cup of espresso in which the sugar cube creates bubbles rising to the top. There is something vaguely mystical about the image. It is as if we were watching the universe in a coffee cup. But again, the protracted voice-over oration on objects, capitalism, revolution and the limit of language spoils the experience and only leads us deeper into the world of despair and desolation that this particular film affords us.

Godard wants us to believe that he “stud[ies] the projects and their inhabitants and the bonds between them as intensely as the biologist studies the relationship between the individual and race in evolution.” He does this, he says, to “tackle problems of social pathology, nurturing hope for truly new projects.” But that is a laughable assertion. The characters’ speech is almost as contrived as the voice-over, and we often see them only in long shots. The words they speak reveal nothing about them, and by the end of the film, even Juliette remains a complete unknown.

The only positive thing that can be said about the film is that Godard was a master at directing children, even when their scenes are entirely ornamental and irrelevant to the story. Here, Juliette’s son tells her how he dreamt about North and South Vietnam becoming one, and even though his words are injected into the film for a political purpose, he delivers an admirable performance. The same was true of the main character’s young son in A Married Woman.

But it is difficult to overstate how tedious Two or Three Things… is. While the fast-paced life of “métro, boulot, dodo” emerges as a theme and the rising culture of consumerism is fingered as the culprit for the world’s problems (the film’s final shot shows the housing development represented by boxes of laundry detergent), the lack of a story and the constant process of constructing ideas and buildings leaves us frustrated and annoyed. “Two or three things”? One would have sufficed, but we never even get that far.

Contempt (1963)

André Crous

Now she is sad, now she is happy, now she doesn’t care, now she loves him, now she hates him. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Brigitte Bardot plays the tempestuous wife of a screenwriter hired to re-imagine The Odyssey for the big screen.

ContemptFrance
2*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Le mépris

Jean-Luc Godard’s début feature may have left its audience “breathless”, but his only (semi-)serious foray into big-budget cinema shows utter disregard for his audience. In the aptly titled Contempt, the director takes The Odyssey for a spin, but instead of channelling Homer, the film is sullied by Godard’s usual assortment of audiovisual gimmicks. In addition, the director’s personal business subsumes his art as Godard struggles to find a compelling way to express the toll his emotional life is taking on him.

In an opening scene that is far from titillating, Brigitte Bardot (or B.B., as she was known, which is also how the film refers to Bertolt Brecht) lies naked in bed. Her husband sits next to her, constantly reaffirming his devotion to her body when she inquires whether he likes her feet, ankles, knees, thighs and on and on. But while the scene starts with some sensual warm lighting, the lighting is shut off at some point to reveal the actors in natural (white) lighting, before it changes to cold blue lighting. It’s a cute visual metaphor for the development of the narrative, and yes, one can note the colours correspond to the French tricolour, but it is all a bit too on-the-nose to be effective.

Bardot plays Camille, a typist married to a French screenwriter named Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), and the seemingly happy couple is living in a new apartment in Rome. The action soon moves to the famed (but even in 1963 already dilapidated) Cinecittà Studios, where Paul has been summoned to assist on Odysseus. The movie is going off the rails, at least according to the film’s producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). He is a Hollywood bigshot who wants to wow audiences with the epic story of Ulysses’ journey back to his wife, Penelope. But having hired Fritz Lang, who has much more European ideas, he is furious with the eccentric direction of the film. Although Prokosch is a buffoon who gets visibly aroused by the sight of a mermaid onscreen, he does have a point: The rushes mostly just showcase some dreadfully boring close-ups of statues.

It is Paul’s job to make the screenplay accessible to a wider audience, and this is a job that could be very lucrative for him. After their meeting at the studio, Prokosch invites everyone to his villa. He has his eye on Camille, and to her everlasting shock and horror, her husband lets Prokosch get away with inviting her to accompany him in his sports car. From here on until close to the final credits, Camille is a passive-aggressive drama queen who never explains to Paul that she felt used but constantly gives him the evil eye while alternating between mocking indifference and theatrical hatred, like a volatile teenager.

If Camille were interesting or intelligent, that would be one thing, but while she may like to read a book about Fritz Lang in the bathtub, she also explains to a friend that Ulysses was “the guy who travels”. We have no backstory about the two, so when their relationship collapses very early in the film, the subsequent events cannot be compared with what came before. We don’t feel an absence of love, just the presence of a frustrating, festering drama. And a gnawing feeling that Godard had fought with his own wife while drafting the screenplay for this film and thought we should know all about it. For a large part of the film, Bardot wears the same black wig that Karina had worn in My Life to Live. (It wouldn’t be the last time Godard mixes business with personal heartache; La chinoise is notorious for featuring a domestic argument identical to one Godard had had with his girlfriend the night before the shoot.)

The story consists almost entirely of multiple scenes of tension on the domestic front, which are admirably directed but lead nowhere. Emotional development is also sorely lacking, particularly in the taciturn and exceedingly passive Paul. We are fed a ridiculous half-baked theory about Ulysses’ long-suffering wife, Penelope, not being faithful to him and Ulysses not really wanting to return to her – his epic quest to do just that notwithstanding.

Exactly as he did in A Woman is a Woman, Godard sometimes interrupts his own soundtrack to separate dialogue from diegetic music, making sure we notice that they do not overlap and are, in fact, just part of the film’s construction. At other times, the score by Georges Delerue is all-consuming and drowns out the dialogue with its sickly sweet orchestral numbers.

Perhaps the only visual number of note is a horizontal pan between the heads of the couple as they engage in a serious discussion. The film was shot in Cinemascope, which could easily have fit the two heads on opposite sides of the frame, but Godard’s approach here works because we become acutely aware of the gulf that separates them from each other.

Unfortunately, Contempt becomes captive to Camille as she wallows in unbearable self-pity. The behaviour is absolutely realistic, but the tedium increases the longer she persists. She never confides in anyone, she doesn’t share what she really thinks, and she doesn’t change. By the end of the film, when tragedy strikes, it is difficult not to burst out in applause. All the while, the only truly entertaining figure is Lang, who takes all the histrionics in his stride, presumably because he has seen divas like Camille on his sets his entire life.

The picture-postcard images of Capri in the film’s final act are among the most beautiful (and, therefore, the most unexpected) of Godard’s entire oeuvre. But because they frame a rotten relationship and not one (Odysseus) but two (also Contempt) failing movie productions, they become infected, too. The connection between Ulysses/Penelope and Paul/Camille is tenuous at best, and neither of the two relationships is fleshed out in any meaningful way. Godard is no Homer, nor Ulysses, nor Lang. Bardot has no range as an actress, and Palance overacts like a giant ham. These horrendous performances, along with Piccoli’s blank character (a stand-in for Godard) and the boring bits of narrative all work together to produce a terrible piece of cinema that no amount of pretty pictures or domestic squabbling can save.

The Missing Picture (2013)

André Crous

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

L'image manquanteFrance/Cambodia
2*

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

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: L’image manquante

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013.

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.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

André Crous

Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the longest of all the instalments in the franchise, is also by far the worst, as it flounders under the weight of a terrible actor, awful visuals and an all-round lack of chemistry.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the ClonesUSA
2*

Director:
George Lucas
Screenwriters:
George Lucas
Jonathan Hales
Director of Photography:
David Tattersall

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Phantom Menace (Episode I)
– The 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 Last Jedi (Episode VIII)

“There is unrest in the Galactic Senate. Several thousand solar systems have declared their intentions to leave the Republic.
This separatist movement, under the leadership of the mysterious Count Dooku, has made it difficult for the limited number of Jedi Knights to maintain peace and order in the galaxy.
Senator Amidala, the former Queen of Naboo, is returning to the Galactic Senate to vote on the critical issue of creating an ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC to assist the overwhelmed Jedi….”

Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the longest out of all the instalments in the first two Star Wars trilogies, is all about power. Unfortunately, it is also wholly pre-occupied with its main protagonist’s slide into arrogant delusions fuelled by his love for and loss of his mother. The protagonist, of course, is Anakin Skywalker, who even as this episode opens is a petulant little twerp seeking to undermine authority at every turn for the simple reason that he is a prodigy.

In this film and its sequel, Anakin is played by Hayden Christensen, whose performance in the lead is so ham-handed it easily qualifies as the worst acting in any of the Star Wars films, handily beating out the amphibious, high-pitched, super-annoying Jar Jar Binks for this misfortune. He is on the ascent (he first appears in this film in a lift going up), seeking counsel from the Phantom Menace himself, Senator Palpatine, who has become chancellor of the Galactic Senate and is adroitly playing off many parties against each other, staying in control of both realms until the Dark Side triumphs.

A large chunk of the emotional core of this film is wrapped up in Anakin’s desire to see and save his mother, who had been left behind on Tatooine in Episode I. Anakin has nightmares, once conveyed by showing him alone in bed at night, sweating and writhing in anguish as the camera tracks closer on his face before he wakes with a start. No, George Lucas is not the most visually creative filmmaker out there, and this shot goes to show that.

The visual mediocrity continues as the colour palettes in scenes on many different planets comprise yellows, reds and browns. But while the visuals are uninspiring, the plot is packed with details that can sometimes be very dense for the uninitiated and include shifting alliances and the various characters’ opaque motives that make us question whether they can be trusted or not, and whether Anakin’s descent into darkness will sweep anyone else away with him.

The tipping point is Anakin’s mother, whom he tracks down after a long quest only to find her on the verge of death. Her long absence from his life, filled only by longing (both for her and, somewhat creepily, for Senator Amidala), and, ultimately, her passing fill him with enormous rage at his inability to control his own destiny and those close to him. It is plain to see that this anger, as Master Yoda predicted in Episode I, will lead to hate (which he targets at his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is wisely reluctant to let him do whatever he wants), and hate will lead to suffering. Shortly after his mother’s death, Anakin throws one of his frequent temper tantrums and yells, “I will be the most powerful Jedi ever!”

As he did in Episode I, Lucas again places the viewer inside the film at unexpected and inexplicable points by very quickly showing us the points of view of both Anakin (inside the club in Coruscant’s Galactic City) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (upon his arrival at Dex’s Diner, in an industrial area of Galactic City), which means characters look straight into the camera. These moments last a very short amount of time and seem disconnected and at odds with the rest of the visual style. 

The titular Clone Wars, of which this film only shows the first clash, involves a clone army cultivated on a distant planet named Kamino. While the Republic was facing challenges and a potential schism, a former Jedi Council member had started breeding a vast army of clones (made from a prominent bounty hunter, Jango Fett), and now that the separatists were gaining in strength, this army appears to come in handy. However, its existence has remained a mystery to even the Jedi Council, which realises the Dark Side’s strength has managed to blind them to developments in the galaxy.

These developments also include the rise of Chancellor Palpatine, who in this film manages to secure emergency powers that puts him in complete control of the Republic, and his first action upon taking power is to “create” an army (albeit one that already exists in the form of clones and already numbers in the hundreds of thousands) to beat back the separatists, led by Count Dooku. Dooku is perhaps the film’s most complex character but is woefully underdeveloped. He used to be a Jedi and trained as a Padawan under Yoda, but he left the Republic and became a Sith. In other words, Dooku gets his power from the Dark Side. And yet, he tells the truth when he informs a sceptical Obi-Wan that the Republic is falling into the hands of a Sith, although his motivations are unclear because this Sith (Palpatine, also known as Darth Sidious) is also Dooku’s own master.

The film’s highlight, without a doubt, is the lightsaber scene in which Yoda takes on Dooku. It is the first time we see Yoda, the grand Jedi Master, wield the sword of the Jedis, and his quick manoeuvrability is as impressive as it is unexpected for this tiny, slow-speaking creature that usually moves about with a walking stick.

But this is by far the worst Star Wars episode, and the myriad reasons are all tied up in Anakin Skywalker. Christensen does not have a single elegant moment, save when he is lying lifeless after his arm has been severed in a lightsaber duel. His whiny character’s public displays of anger and hysteria are unbecoming of an adult that the viewer can take seriously. He is devoid of self-reflection and stubbornly assumes he will get his way, like a spoilt brat. Also, his relationship with Padmé is based on obsession rather than dialogue, and her pledge of love to him when they are captured rings hollow and reinforces the feeling that we are watching a soap opera powered by lightsabers.

Although rich in detail, the story is poorly told, the images are terribly boring, and the central relationship plays itself out on very implausible terms while one-half of the couple simply cannot connect with the viewer because of his revoltingly ineffective portrayal of a being with human emotions. This is not only an attack by the clones but an attack on the pleasure the Star Wars in its other instalments represents for a world of fans.

Tambylles (2012)

André Crous

By deliberately avoiding all forms of confrontation, this very uneven hourlong graduation film turns its main character’s already undramatic existence into rigid stasis.

TambyllesCzech Republic
2*

Director:
Michal Hogenauer
Screenwriters:
Michal Hogenauer
Markéta Jindřichová
Director of Photography:
Adam Stretti

Running time: 58 minutes

Tambylles (a title that translates as Therewasaforest), a one-hour film that Michal Hogenauer made as his FAMU graduate film, is as uncomfortable to watch as its main character, an anonymous young guy from a small Czech town who has recently been released from a juvenile detention centre. Stripped down to very minimalist scenes and a lead actor who always has to contain his emotions, this film is not particularly viewer-friendly.

At first, we seem to be watching a documentary: An increasingly annoying filmmaker is interviewing people and asking persistent, provocative questions. But slowly, as the credibility of the staging becomes more and more suspicious, we realise this is a film within a film, with the fictional filmmaker presented inside more static, well-composed images. Luckily for us, director Hogenauer’s preoccupation with form is done away with more or less as soon as this fictional filmmaker’s attempts to provoke confrontation fail to deliver and he leaves the central plot.

These well-composed images are certainly one of the highlights of the experience of watching Tambylles, although I found myself tuning out very often because there is so little to tune into. Though the fictional filmmaker tried to construct the first 15 minutes of the film in a way so every interview is interrupted in order to create a cliffhanger, our anticipation constantly heightened, we find out very little about the central character and the events that sent him to the Big House. “Everyone one should know what he did”, says one character. Yes, they should, but what is it?

Given the fact this central character says so very little, becomes more and more isolated from society and from us and isn’t even given a name, he does not represent something universal – rather, he fades out in every scene to which he is supposed to bring some substance, or interest.

Nonetheless, actor Ivan Říha has captivating eyes that pull the viewer toward the screen. Despite his character’s visible solitude, a completely unbelievable domestic situation – not just the lack of chemistry between him and his parents but a lack of any feeling whatsoever – and a lack of much to hold on to in terms of character traits, we certainly want to find out more, and he offers the promise of something more. Unfortunately, he never fulfils that promise.

It is difficult to become involved in the development of a film that is going nowhere. We keep waiting for confrontations that Hogenauer instead chooses to avoid. The confrontation (provoked by the fictional filmmaker) between him and the mother of his victim is wordless and actionless; the confrontation between him and the fictional filmmaker consists of him grabbing the camera and storming off, though this action is elided by means of a cut; the confrontation between him and his boss, who discovers his secret, is avoided when he storms off, again; and a final suicidal confrontation is shown without any sound.

Minimalism is one thing, but deliberate obstinance is another. Říha’s face (the only thing the character has going for him) can only interest us for a limited time, and that time is much shorter than the film’s 58-minute length.

Hogenauer shows great promise with his camera, but the images he creates cannot inspire us to sympathise with a character who encounters resistance everywhere he goes. Moreover, we have no real clue about his past and don’t get an insight into his feelings in the present. Along the way, a character played by Hogenauer himself steals away the girl who might have brought this guy out of his shell. A fitting metaphor.

The Ides of March (2011)

André Crous

Never before has the second-oldest profession seemed quite as dull as it does in George Clooney’s The Ides of March.

ides-of-marchUSA
2*

Director:
George Clooney
Screenwriters:
George Clooney
Beau Willimon
Grant Heslov
Director of Photography:
Phedon Papamichael

Running time: 100 minutes

George Clooney’s The Ides of March is an adaptation of Farragut North, a play by Beau Willimon that focuses on a fictitious Democratic primary in the battleground state of Ohio.

The plot sees Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris running for the office of president of the United States. He has his campaign staff convinced he will be the next great hope for the nation, the one to “take the country back” – a phrase so hackneyed yet used with surprising regularity, and with even more surprising success, by political hopefuls – and he is neck-and-neck with his main Democratic contender, Senator Ted Pullman. When the race reaches the Buckeye State, it’s make-or-break time.

Although the genre of political films is varied, a lack of action is usually a bad thing, and so it is here. There are brief snippets of Morris’s interaction with potential voters along the way, a question or two during a debate or a town hall session, but by and large, his positions and his personality remain a mystery to us.

Keeping in mind the title’s obvious, ominous reference to the fall of Julius Caesar (“Beware, the Ides of March!”), we wait for the storm to break over the head of the powerful Governor Morris. But instead of focusing on him, the film introduces his campaign team, headed by two top strategists: Paul Zara, the veteran campaign staffer and long-time supporter, and Stephen Meyers, the bright-eyed media whiz kid.

As expected in a film based on a play, the performances are all exquisitely modulated – in this case, to fit the dark mood of the narrative – and the actors sparkle in their restricted capacity. For Ryan Gosling, who plays Stephen, it’s a case of having nothing to do, but doing it rather well, while it is unfortunate that Paul Giamatti, who plays Pullman’s campaign manager, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as his counterpart on the Morris campaign, get equally little screen time.

The characters have a lot of potential, but in the end, each has only one big confrontational scene, providing us with a mere taste of what could have been, had Clooney worried less about his gloomy display case and more about the exhibit itself.

There is nothing wrong with a decision to focus on the campaign staffers rather than the candidate they represent: In The War Room, a documentary that traces Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the White House, his strategists James Carville and George Stephanopoulos provided long stretches of electric energy and entertainment. By contrast, Clooney’s film feels positively catatonic.

The first half of the film, a full hour, merely sets up Morris’s political ambitions and his firm shot at the nomination. There is much talk of delegates, primaries and endorsements, but little is of any immediate consequence, and, for much of the film, save an all-too-brief interlude with his wife in a limousine, we only see fragments of the man.

This setup is tepid, and it is easy to lose interest until the revelation, finally, that Morris has been misbehaving with an intern. This discovery leads to major disillusionment on the part of Meyers and an expectation on our side that the film might stake out Lewinsky territory. It doesn’t, and things quickly take a turn for the melodramatic.

By that stage, many in the audience will have fallen asleep. The dialogue is much more directed at a political pundit than the average viewer looking for entertainment at the cinema, and for almost anyone unfamiliar with the American political system, the film may at times seem decidedly foreign. Considering the offhand allusions to donkeys and elephants, talk about primaries and constant references to K Street, the dialogue would likely be too difficult to follow at important moments.

The Ides of March suggests voters will ultimately be let down by their candidate, which is not exactly a novel insight. Clooney, taking up the roles of politician in front of the camera and filmmaker behind it, lets down the viewers by making a film that is much less engaging than political races in the real world.

By the Sea (2015)

André Crous

Intimate story of crumbling relationship, directed by Angelina Jolie (Pitt), is pure self-indulgence for director, not the viewer.

By the SeaUSA
2*

Director:
Angelina Jolie Pitt
Screenwriter:
Angelina Jolie Pitt
Director of Photography:
Christian Berger

Running time: 125 minutes

Do you remember the scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War–set Inglourious Basterds in which U.S. Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, attends a film premiere in Nazi-occupied Paris and pretends to be an Italian? “Bahn-dzhohr-no”, he says, oblivious to the deep Southern accent that escapes his lips and thus turning an otherwise tense moment into comedic gold.

By the Sea, a film set in the 1970s on the French Riviera and directed by Pitt’s wife, Angelina Jolie (who on this production is credited as Angelina Jolie Pitt), poses a similar issue for the actor, but this time his accent is not played for laughs, and that is a big problem. The words leave the mouth of his character, Roland, without a problem, and there is no hint of the accent he played up in Tarantino’s film, but his inarticulate speech is near incomprehensible to the French-speaking viewer. And yet, his French interlocutor, a bar owner named Marcel (Niels Arestrup), does not bat an eye. Perhaps he is used to his clients mumbling.

The rest of the film is also a mess. Angelina Jolie Pitt has never pouted more in any of her roles, and that is saying something. She stars as Vanessa, a former dancer and Roland’s wife of 14 years, who spends all of her time in their hotel room, motionless on the bed, with a tear slowly rolling down her cheek, or looking out onto the cove in front of the villa-esque hotel, or draped over the furniture, or catching some sun on the balcony while sporting obscenely big sunglasses.

The story is way too small for the two-hours-plus running time: Having recently been through a devastating tragedy that the film acknowledges in one of the first scenes and then makes unnecessarily explicit nearly two hours later, the couple temporarily relocates to the South of France so that Roland, a novelist, can write his next big work. No prizes for those who can guess the title in advance. But he spends most of his time getting drunk at Chez Marcel while a depressed and heavily medicated Vanessa fades into the wallpaper.

Luckily for Vanessa, she discovers a peephole in their wall and starts spying on the newlyweds next door, living vicariously through their sexual gymnastics as she misses out on such intimacy in her own life. As time passes, Roland joins her, and they do grow closer, although the painful episode in their lives remains unaddressed until it is almost too late.

The images are absolutely stunning, and so is Jolie Pitt’s wardrobe, but the richness of the physical exteriors cannot make up for the sad emotional interiors that never get properly fleshed out. Instead, Jolie Pitt piles on the visuals, with some striking editing (including a magnificent cut from the couple in bed at night to Roland alone in bed in the morning) and very brief but repetitive and ultimately ludicrous inserts of indefinable liquids that supposedly give a sense of Vanessa’s state of mind.

One of the few good moments occurs almost as an afterthought. While the main contrast is between Roland and Vanessa on the one side and their neighbours, the French couple, on the other, Roland also meets up with an elderly couple on a bench at the water’s edge one day. The conversation is very short, but the affection and understanding these two people have for each other are immediately obvious.

We catch a glimpse of them again later at the bar, where they are holding hands and talking like the good friends they continue to be after decades of marriage. The loquacious but sensitive Marcel also tells Roland how much he misses his wife who recently passed away, and all of these stories serve to isolate Roland in a bubble of melancholia that he resists by ordering drink after drink.

At the heart of the story, however, is the stasis and the decay of Roland and Vanessa’s relationship. Early on, the camera blatantly tells us where the hurt lies, when Vanessa goes grocery shopping and sees a child, whose innocent face we see in close-up … twice. Unfortunately, the tension fades into the background as neither Roland nor Vanessa wants to address the nagging strain on their marriage, and no one ever raises their voice until very late in the final act. Vanessa starts to play a game she does not understand, Roland becomes jealous, and they try to grow closer again by watching a kind of porn: the French couple’s raunchy workouts.

By the Sea is certainly not as bad as Guy Ritchie’s laughable Swept Away, but it is far off the mark. Drowning in stylistic flamboyance and with a narrative that is spread very thin, the film shows that its director, as she made clear with Unbroken, has enormous talent for visual showiness but lacks the skills to keep us interested when the story falls short of its extended running time.

The Bling Ring (2013)

André Crous

Celebrity-obsessed teenagers who seek to emulate their favourite stars by stealing, wearing their stuff, get their comeuppance in terrible Sofia Coppola production.

bling-ringUSA
2*

Director:
Sofia Coppola
Screenwriter:
Sofia Coppola
Directors of Photography:
Christopher Blauvelt
Harris Savides

Running time: 90 minutes

Three of Sofia Coppola’s five films have been about teenagers. The Virgin Suicides, her début feature, was a poetic period drama about five enigmatic sisters who committed suicide; Marie Antoinette was another period drama but also an explosion of colour and exuberance from beginning to end and featured a teenage queen being her own kind of rebel. The Bling Ring is a mindless 90-minute film – one that could have told its story in less than half the time – based on real events about bored teenagers who robbed celebrities, wore their clothes and posted photos of their stylish lifestyle on Facebook.

Even the premise doesn’t sound particularly enticing, and Coppola simply cannot make her own product appear less shallow than the frequent discussions about shoes and dresses in which the vapid characters engage. This is a kind of Sex and the City, but whose protagonists are not yet allowed to drink, apparently have no sex drive and spend their evenings in the Hollywood Hills where they steal a few items from celebrities who live in excess (and don’t even notice the multiple burglaries) before getting coked out of their skulls.

Although the group changes over time, the main characters are Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard), who first break into a friend’s house before ganging up with others to up the stakes and look online for the addresses of celebrities who are currently out of town – like Paris Hilton, most of the time.

A worthy point could have been made about the addiction some people have with following the lives of the rich and the famous to the point where they know when someone’s house will be open for a ransacking. The consequences of such a lack of privacy could have been interesting in a better film, but Coppola is wholly uninterested in the larger ramifications of her story.

In keeping with the omission of their surnames on their Facebook profiles, the director mostly prefers to treat her characters like cardboard, virtually forbidding growth and never focusing on the supposed friendship or camaraderie between the individuals. Right at the beginning, Marc is clearly an outcast at his new school, where he first meets Rebecca, but over time and thanks to a much-improved wardrobe, he gets significantly more attention wherever he goes. Yet such developments are not examined with any kind of a critical eye and may even be irrelevant to the shallow-as-a-puddle storyline.

Some big-name celebrities appear as themselves in the film, including the aforementioned Hilton and the star of Coppola’s other two teenage films, Kirsten Dunst. One would think the presence of such stars would help us identify with the group of teenagers who believe themselves to be entitled to the glamorous lifestyles of the stars whose every move they follow online. But there is a glitch, and that is Emma Watson.

Watson, best known for her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films, is immediately recognisable as a star, which makes it very difficult for the viewer to take her antics very seriously, especially as she is surrounded by cast members we have never seen before.

But all is not lost. Despite a constant feeling of déjà vu, we can also appreciate some very crafty conceptions that suggest the film was indeed made by someone with a filmmaker’s eye. The first example comes one night when the teenagers are driving without paying attention to the road, and a car comes out of nowhere seemingly straight at us from the side, and the vehicle suddenly starts to spin. It is a powerful reminder that these children cannot remain in their fantasy land for too long, but unfortunately (for us and for them) such reminders are too few and far between.

There is also a shot that stands out because of its relative minimalism as compared with the other scenes of housebreaking. Rebecca and Marc arrive at the home of television star Audrina Patridge, run through the house, which has enormous glass windows on all sides, switching lights on and off and finally making off with their loot. The shot is unbroken, taken from far away though shot to zoom in slowly throughout the scene, while the action unspools in near silence, which is something the rest of the film could have benefitted from.

There is also another scene with gunplay that is incredibly tense despite the structural flaw that we know the character of Marc will survive to tell the tale physically unharmed.

One major problem the film has is its inability to make its characters human. In the past, even when her characters were the target of derision, Coppola put them in a certain context that explained their behaviour or at least made us laugh. The Bling Ring rarely makes us break a smile and mostly just bores us to death with a story whose conclusion is revealed in the film’s opening minutes. The friendship between Marc and Rebecca could have been fertile ground for an examination of any number of issues, including betrayal, which is hinted at early on, but we get no human-interest angle.

Frankly, although this is an improvement on her horrendous previous film, Somewhere, we expected much more from Sofia Coppola.

Love (2015)

André Crous

An epic film about obsession, rutting and a lot of fluids (once shooting straight at the viewer), but nothing about love.

love-gaspar-noeFrance/Belgium
2*

Director:
Gaspar Noé
Screenwriter:
Gaspar Noé
Director of Photography:
Benoît Debie

Running time: 135 minutes

An ode to genitalia, vigorous rutting and the release of bodily fluids, Gaspar Noé’s Love is the polar opposite of Michael Haneke’s similarly titled Amour. For one, its two main characters are immensely unlikeable: Instead of two octagenarians who have spent a lifetime together and are reaching the end of their lives, we have here a chronically oversexed American named Murphy and the “love” of his life, Electra, who satisfies him provided he is not already pounding away between someone else’s open legs.

Love has little to do with the intense emotions suggested by its title and is rather an examination (albeit superficial) of sexual obsession, with the filmmaker intent on showing the audience as many graphic details as possible. Murphy’s tool shoots his life essence as often as possible – at one point directly in the direction of the viewer, who might be catching the film at one of its 3-D screenings. If this were exciting and not laughable, it may have qualified as pornography, but as things stand, this is much worse than most kinds of triple-X entertainment.

The poster of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) appears on the wall of the main characters’ apartment, for no particular reason except self-interest (it is one of Noé’s favourite films), and maybe because it serves as a kind of reminder that we should view this material as controversial but worthwhile, too.

That is difficult to do, as the very thin story is barely worth a discussion, except for the inclusion of the hardcore sex scenes, which appear to be unsimulated, and in which full penetration takes place at least some of the time. Unlike a film such as Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, however, there is no underlying interest in seeing these characters growing closer before they grow apart. Noé focuses on the stagnant relationship, held together by bouts of mostly routine sexual intercourse, and he does not allow us to experience any elation or regret at the rare developments we are witness to.

The film’s first shot recalls the heady, steamy days of Catherine Breillat’s Romance X, as we look down vertically onto the naked bodies of Murphy and his wife, Omi, nearly immobile except for them slowly using their hands to bring each other to orgasm. When the moment comes, as it were, Omi laps up Murphy’s juice. This surprisingly explicit action immediately takes the viewer aback, because such a scene is not at all an everyday occurrence in the cinema, at least in theatres without sticky seats.

Noé, perhaps best known for his brutal examination of love, assault and revenge in Irreversible (Irréversible), here intimates, through his main character who is a film school graduate, that movies should be about “blood, sperm and tears”, and this film lives up to the expected trio of fluids.

But even more copious than Murphy’s seed is his use of the dreaded c-word to cuss out Electra, who is right to suspect he is cheating on her with any girl that shows a passing interest in having him inside her. We simply cannot care one little bit about Murphy’s meltdown, even though the film seems to suggest that this is the only story that is of any interest.

The film’s major flaw, and there are many to choose from, is that it does not enable us to empathise with its main character. Even worse, we are not particularly interested in him or his way of thinking, because his actions appear to be primitive, and although far from unexpected, his betrayal of his girlfriend is despicable.

The acting is terrible, and especially the scenes of high melodrama, namely the shouting matches between him and his girlfriend, are laughably amateurish. Contrast them with the break-up scene in Blue is the Warmest Colour, and you will quickly see what these scenes are supposed to look like if they are to have even a shred of credibility.

Noé, whose unconventional use of the cinematic medium in both visual and narrative terms was laudable in Irreversible, here tries to imitate Jean-Luc Godard’s physical manipulation of the medium by adding black-screen flashes to the entire film, which are not only irritating but pointlessly exhibitionist and silly. Early on in the film, we also get a splashy, full-screen-text definition of Murphy’s Law, because, you know, the main character is called “Murphy”.

And then there is director Gaspar Noé’s masturbatory references to himself. Not only is Murphy’s son named “Gaspar”, but Murphy’s ex hooks up with an “artist” named Noé, played by – you guessed it – the director himself. These names are repeated often enough for us to recognise what Noé is up to, but we never get close to understanding why he is behaving like such a neophyte. Who, except the most amateur of filmmakers, would engage in such ill-conceived grandstanding?

Because of their unconventional nature, the unreserved depictions of sex often harm whatever serious intent Noé had with his story, and some of the particularly graphic moments elicit laughter instead of compassion. This film had no reason to be. Its director obviously thought people would get a kick from unsimulated sex, but unlike Lars von Trier’s amazing look at sex in the double-volume modern-day masterpiece Nymphomaniac, Noé’s film is a fluff piece that has as much to do with love as with serious filmmaking, which is almost nothing at all.