3.5 stars

Band of Outsiders (1964)

André Crous

Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders is a rather shallow heist movie that nonetheless keeps our interest thanks to its mostly conventional character, its central tension and at least two delightful scenes of unbridled joy. 

Bande à partFrance
3.5*

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

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Bande à part

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the crime [sic]. In Band of Outsiders, two guys and a girl they both pine for attempt to steal a cupboard full of money with no real preparation to speak of. Usually, the movies get away with pretending that anyone can be a supercriminal, but Godard shows, in his usual light-hearted way, how deceptive such (and other) representations can be.

In what may be one of the director’s most conventional storylines, the film follows two best friends, Franz and Arthur, who both take a fancy to a girl in their English class, Odile. As usual with early Godard, Anna Karina plays Odile, a wide-eyed girl with a hint of a foreign accent but whose origins are never made explicit. Here, she comes close to being a timid damsel in distress who makes the mistake of mentioning to the boys that her uncle is hiding a stash of money in his cupboard. Despite her initial trepidation, she soon relents and joins in hatching a plan to steal what could easily amount to millions of francs.

But instead of spending time planning their first heist, the trio of more or less first-time criminals has too much fun, albeit frequently to the viewer’s amusement since the plot is so thin. “We’ll make a plan!” Arthur tells Odile. “A plan?” asks Odile, suddenly looking straight at the camera. “Why?” This is one of the multiple strategies that the director deploys to destabilise the conventional grammar of film, with varying degrees of success. It is a Godard production, after all.

First, he is the narrator, conveying a few remarks with his trademark lisp and complete lack of emotion. While some of these observations are literary devices and unnecessary (e.g. he describes the state of mind of his characters), others are playful and short enough to be effective (e.g. when, 10 minutes into the film, he briefly recaps the first few scenes for those members of the audience who arrived late to the screening). Second, he cuts the music on the soundtrack while keeping other diegetic sounds and inserts his own thoughts on the voice-over. And third, he removes all sound for a “moment of silence”, which shows how a simple gimmick (like the black page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) can go a long way. But he also goes over the top with his opening credits by replacing the writer-director attribution with a megalomaniacal “JEANLUC CINÉMA GODARD” credit. *groan*

In the English class, which somehow has a teacher who only reads to her students in French, the work being studied is Romeo and Juliet – specifically, the scene where Juliet decides to take her own life after finding her lover poisoned and dead. As with his previous film, Contempt, Godard seems to signal very clearly right at the start where his film is ultimately headed. In Contempt, he sought to compare his characters to the mythical couple of Ulysses and Penelope (with him, presumably, taking the role of Homer). Here, he appears to see himself through Bard-tinted glasses, although as the narrator, he also pretends to be the writer of a pulp novel, with this being one in a series of tales.

But despite its literary aspirations and its alienation devices, like when the characters break the fourth wall, the people we see here are all surprisingly human. The moments we spend with them are full of tenderness and timidity, giddiness and uncertainty, joyousness and spontaneity. Arguably the film’s most famous scene, closely related to Karina’s equally affecting performance in a bar in My Life to Live, has Odile, Franz and Arthur gleefully dance the Madison in an unbroken take over nearly four minutes.

For the most part, however, despite bursts of unbridled joy that include the threesome running through the Louvre and upsetting the guardians of classical art along the way, Band of Outsiders never tries to go deeper than the surface. The relationships between all three characters and, in some cases, their families, go wholly undeveloped. We don’t even see Odile’s uncle, the target of the heist, until one of the final scenes, and the ending itself is protracted and weak. Moreover, the multitude of literary references, from Arthur’s surname being Rimbaud to Franz reading an extraordinarily pointless story by André Breton in full while they’re out driving, will almost certainly lead to eye-rolls from the audience.

But for those who generally find Godard’s style off-putting and self-indulgent, the restraint and adherence to conventional storytelling he shows here, while still far from smooth, will be a pleasant surprise to most viewers.

The Little Soldier (1963)

André Crous

Tackling the immorality of war but doing so from a stable, sterile perch, The Little Soldier points the finger of blame at all sides in France’s War on Algeria.

The Little SoldierFrance
3.5*

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

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Le petit soldat

Made in 1960 but banned until 1963 because of its content, The Little Soldier was Jean-Luc Godard’s first political film. It followed hot on the heels of his wild and massively entertaining début, Breathless, which had made him famous. This, his second film, turned out to be so controversial in his native France that he would release two other films – A Woman is a Woman (1961) and My Life to Live (1962) – before the censors finally permitted it to see the light of day. The reason for the controversy was the film’s tackling of the War in Algeria and, specifically, its depiction of torture scenes involving Algerian fighters who use the French army’s methods of torture on a white French citizen.

And yet, the film is more about the protagonist’s lack of conviction than anything else. Ironically, much of the action is the result of inaction. The main character is Bruno Forestier, a young reporter for the French News Agency who is based in Geneva. At least, that is how we are first introduced to him. It is May 1958, the height of the conflict in Algeria, and he tells us in voice-over that “the time for action is over… the time for reflection has begun.” That does not sound like the start of a very dramatic story, and it won’t be, as the film will have its fair share of self-important “reflection” replete with literary quotations grabbed out of thin air.

Literature is everywhere, and, with one major exception, these references are pure Godardian onanism.  The most ludicrous reference comes early in the story onboard a train ride, when Bruno’s thoughts turn to a story by La Fontaine entitled “The Acorn and the Pumpkin”. The French title, “Le gland et la citrouille”, is repeated over and over on the soundtrack, and slowly the focus shifts only to the first part, “Le gland”. A few moments later, we see the train pass the station of “Gland”, even as a voice on the soundtrack drones on by repeating this word.

The action proper, which will culminate with such drama in the last third of the film, starts out very slowly and rather aimlessly. Bruno is involved in French intelligence-gathering operations and has been tasked with assassinating a pro-Algerian radio host in Geneva. But Bruno is not really interested in following orders – not because he feels particularly strongly one way or the other but because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. In his opinion, you’ll get scolded for not doing something, so it’s preferable to do it even if you don’t want to. But this speaks of stunningly weak character. Bruno has no real opinions and even less passion. His passivity alone, while certainly representative of many young French men at the time, almost sinks the entire film.

Luckily for him, he meets a Danish-born Russian girl named Veronika and can’t stop thinking about her. Here, the film industry makes the first of many obtrusive appearances. Godard pays tribute to the famous Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer by giving Veronika his surname. Later, while taking photos of her, Bruno expresses one of Godard’s most famous phrases of all time: “Photography is truth, and the cinema is the truth 24 times per second.” This saying may have some validity in certain contexts, but so many of Godard’s films would seem to remind us how artificial, constructed most films are, although the truth (of the diegesis? of the world outside the film?) can certainly be a malleable concept.

Unlike Breathless, where the focus was firmly on the romance between the two main characters, A Little Soldier has little to say about the relationship between Bruno and Veronika. However, it is clear that Bruno is besotted with her, and so is the camera. Although he doesn’t look it (the film is very stingy with its emotions), Bruno is in high spirits. “I wondered if I was happy to feel free or free to feel happy”, an improvement over Patricia in Breathless, who had a more melancholy demeanour (“I don’t know if I’m not happy because I’m not free. Or not free because I’m not happy.”)

As an aside, Godard and Karina got married the next year. Following her début here, she would go on to star in another six of his films.

The Little Soldier takes an inordinate amount of time to reel us in, but around the one-hour mark, we finally reach the most dramatic portion of the narrative. And it’s a doozy. After refusing to reveal the telephone number of a close associate, Bruno is kidnapped by members of Algeria’s pro-independence FLN, who handcuff him in a bathtub and gradually escalate the torture. First, it is psychological (they show him a photo of an acquaintance who had his throat slashed), and then it is very physical: They burn him with matches and hold him underwater before wrapping his head in a sheet and waterboarding him with a handheld showerhead.

But this is Godard, so nothing seems straightforward. When he is burnt, there is a cut to a woman in the next room who is reading Mao Zedong and Lenin so that the chairman’s big thoughts (“One spark can set an entire plain ablaze”) are put in relation to the events we witness. But before we can blame the communists for such inhumane punishment, we see the Arabs are reading Henri Alleg’s La Question, which had caused a scandal when it laid out in detail how the French tortured the Algerians. This was clearly the reason the French censors banned the film until after Algeria had gained independence. With both the far right and the far left implicated in war crimes here, seemingly no one leaves unscathed.

Despite this torture, which also involves live current, Bruno doesn’t crack. “I’m not opposed to telling you, but I don’t feel like it, so I won’t”, he tells them. But while some may find his commitment to apathy admirable, Veronika makes an astute (and prescient) observation. She tells him that France will ultimately lose its battle with the Algerians because it lacks the latter’s strong ideal (namely, having an independent nation).

The film’s slow pace, its protagonist’s inscrutability and the alienation induced by the steadfast lack of emotions all make for a frustrating viewing experience. A protracted dialogue towards the end is an absolute mess of topics and sounds like a checklist by the screenwriter-director instead of an organic dialogue to bring the film to a satisfying close. Although eminently watchable, it is a far cry from Godard’s début film and hints at problems to come in his later political works.

The Carabineers (1963)

André Crous

The Carabineers has a thought or two about wars and the people who fight them but is mostly just an excuse for Jean-Luc Godard to separate image and sound from each other.

Les carabiniersFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean Gruault
Roberto Rossellini
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Les carabiniers

There are moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers when it seems the director is about to say something of real importance about the immorality of warfare or the pointlessness of killing one’s fellow men and women. But no. Nine times out of ten, he would rather engage in experimental (mostly audio, sometimes visual) gimmicks. As a result, the film ends up being about as ineffectual as its dimwitted central characters.

The opening screen may be the most important of the entire enterprise. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges in a 1963 interview with Madeleine Chapsal from L’Express, a handwritten title card informs us that “More and more, I’m striving for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. Basically, that’s what is eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes, or death is like sleep.” Given the eccentric behaviour of its characters and the minimalist sets they inhabit, Godard’s film can’t be considered even remotely realistic. This quotation seems the best possible key to understanding the film as a kind of macabre caricature of reality, closer to theatre than cinema.

For one thing, the main characters are two brothers inexplicably called Ulysses and Michelangelo. One of them is married to a vampy but rather dishevelled woman named Cleopatra, the other to a Venus. No one resembles their literary or historical namesake in the slightest. It is possible Godard simply attributed high and mighty names to these floundering fools as a way of extending the film’s attitude toward war in general – an activity that, after all, is often described in undeservedly glowing terms.

Godard, whose The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) – made in 1961 but not released until 1963 – already showcased the director’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to war, disabuses the viewer very quickly of any notion that warfare is heroic. In the opening scene, riflemen arrive at a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere (the surroundings are more barren than the moonscape) to deliver a letter from the king to draft Ulysses and Michelangelo into the army. Importantly, we are never told what country or which ideals they are fighting to protect, nor who the enemy is. But one of the carabineers (riflemen) tells the young men they may do whatever they want because “in war, anything goes”. And this is where Godard lands his most direct blow:

Michelangelo: I got a question.
Carabineer: Go ahead.
M.: In the war, can we take slot machines?
C.: Yes.
M.: No charges if we take old men’s eyeglasses? Can we break a kid’s arm? Both arms? Stab a guy in the back? Rob apartments? Burn towns? Burn women?
C.: Yes.
M.: And steal classy trousers?
C.: Yes.
M.: If we want, we can massacre innocent folks?
C.: Yes.
M.: Denounce folks, too?
C.: Yes.
M.: Eat in restaurants without paying?
C.: Yes, yes. That’s war.

As usual with Godard, the point could have been made much more succinctly, but it still lands. And soon, egged on by Cleopatra and Venus who see dollar signs where others see violence and bloodshed, the two men are off to war. What follows are snippets of life on the front. One of the biggest action scenes involves a lone tank driving around an ashen countryside with fewer than 10 riflemen in tow. We hear a lot of gunfire but see almost nothing. From time to time, a bomb explodes in the fields, but no one is injured. The representation is clearly theatrical and not meant to be taken as a realistic depiction.

Unfortunately, Godard’s distinct brand of alienation continuously prevents us from becoming emotionally involved. Everyone is shot offscreen or shown getting killed very far away. Onscreen excerpts from the soldiers’ letters back home speak of incredible violence (“We rip women’s rings from their fingers and make people undress before shooting them, naked, next to an anti-tank trap”), but we never witness any of this. Perhaps the men are lying, or perhaps Godard is too busy reinventing the war film to realise a fully functional machine (a story told on film) is more interesting than seeing it disassembled, rearranged and barely operational.

Not only is the violence made banal by being presented in its separate audio and visual components, but there is not a single recognisable human soul we can empathise with. Confronted with loud shots of gunfire but rarely seeing guns being fired or people getting killed, we feel nothing. The presentation of a near-rape is so matter-of-fact it is almost comical, and Godard’s willingness to steer us in this direction is monstrous.

Moreover, the film does not contain a shred of everyday humanity. When the men return home at the end of their tour, they are emotionless. Cleopatra and Venus, who have been cheating on them, show no emotion either. For nearly 10 minutes, they throw some postcards around, which appear as stand-ins for the real things, but what exactly Godard is trying to say about this blurry distinction between life and representation is unclear. Earlier in the film, Michelangelo had saluted a Rembrandt self-portrait, and Ulysses was mesmerised by Barnaba da Modena’s painting of “Madonna and Child”, but everything feels terribly ad hoc, not part of a larger, well-developed message.

After an extensive mish-mash of scenes from the “battlefield”, the story comes to an abrupt conclusion, closely following in the footsteps of Godard’s previous feature, My Life to Live. In this respect, the film does tie itself tightly to the fate of its characters: When it ends, their story ends; and thus, they must end, as well. While far from unappealing, The Carabineers lacks characters for us to become attached to, and ultimately, this mostly feels like just another contrarian exercise for the director to amuse himself with.

Knock Knock Knock (2019)

André Crous

Although occasionally unbalanced, the heart-warming, Darjeeling-set Knock Knock Knock mostly sustains our interest thanks to its two leading men.

Knock Knock KnockIndia
3.5*

Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Achyutanand Dwivedi

Running time: 38 minutes

Lines intersect in director Sudhanshu Saria’s first medium-length film, entitled Knock Knock Knock. But the patterns they form and the nature of their content aren’t always apparent. On the heels of his successful début feature, Loev, Saria has crafted another story focused almost solely on the interactions between two men. This time around, however, the contours are much hazier, and the film may well frustrate viewers looking for clear answers.

Their first meeting happens, seemingly by chance, in the opening scene. Sitting alone at a table on the balcony of a café (Keventer’s, whose breathtaking view was made for the big screen) in Darjeeling, a quiet, focused, middle-aged man (Santilal Mukherjee) is designing a crossword puzzle. We see him misspell the word “camouflage”. Maybe it’s because he is distracted by prying eyes at the next table: They belong to a lively young man, whose clothing is conspicuously similar in colour to his own. His name, at least according to the credits, is Keta (Phuden Sherpa). When he realises he’s been noticed, he comes over to start chatting. He says that he designs tattoos, never wears shoes (according to him, they trap his energy) and is 22 years old.  The older man, whom he affectionately calls “Dada” (father), is not that dissimilar after all: For the last 22 years, he has been coming here from Kolkata on vacation to design crosswords.

The meeting, which also involves some bizarre talk about parabolas, ends the way it began, with Dada looking over his shoulder at Keta. The scene’s perfect bookend structure makes us wonder whether the encounter may have been imagined, and it won’t be the last time.

The next day, Dada is jogging when Keta sneaks up behind him to join his knight-like moves through the rolling hills. But we quickly view him with some suspicion because, despite his proclamation to the contrary the day before, he is now wearing shoes. And yet, he is bubbling with spirit and spontaneity and projects a childlike curiosity that is completely irresistible.

Things start to unravel a bit with an extended dream/nightmare sequence that swings between serenity and sudden scares and leads into the least clearly defined part of the story, which is, unfortunately, also the final act. Regrettably, the plot doesn’t turn explicitly into a ghost story, which could have been fun, nor does it work to emphasise a spiritual connection between the two characters until the very last moment. 

When an uptight introvert meets an ebullient extrovert in a film, it is supposed to generate conflict, which gives dramatic energy to the narrative, but Knock Knock Knock has no conflict and, therefore, no real drama to speak of. The opening scene has a wonderful two-minute single take that starts to delve into the two characters a little bit, but some important information is delivered in a rush, almost as an aside, and no other scene elaborates on the details we get here.

For close to 40 minutes, Mukherjee manages to sustain our interest in Dada. By the end, however, we still know too little about him to care about this character, so when the climax comes, it falls flat. Keta, who always appears out of nowhere, is even more of a blank slate: He exists only in relation to Dada, and this relationship never becomes anything more than superficial.

Knock Knock Knock is clearly a personal film for the director (it’s his hands drawing the crossword puzzle in the opening shot). But given the ambiguity and lack of urgency, it does not hold the same emotional sway as Loev and never achieves the balance that its characters refer to. “Nothing is random, right? There’s a pattern in everything”, says Keta, but the pattern here can be hard to decipher. Never awkward enough to thrill us and never intimate enough to really make us care, the clues to this film, itself a kind of crossword puzzle, are too vague and leave us with a few rows unfilled.

There are some interesting ideas here, from the resemblance between a crossword puzzle and a chessboard to a climactic shot showing only one of the characters where we expect to see both. The key to unlocking the central mystery may very well lie in Dada misspelling “camouflage”, which is precisely where the narrative proper starts, but the viewer has to let her imagination do the work to fill in the blanks.

Red River (1948)

André Crous

Thanks to Montgomery Clift, here appearing in his first-ever role on film, Howard Hawks’s classic Red River has more than its fair share of male bonding on the plains.

Red RiverUSA
3.5*

Director:
Howard Hawks
Screenwriters:
Borden Chase
Charles Schnee
Director of Photography:
Russell Harlan

Running time: 130 minutes

Almost everyone has seen that scene where a 25-year-old Montgomery Clift, in his film début, and John Ireland stroke each other’s pistols. “There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun”, the latter tells Clift, “a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.” Clearly aware that Clift’s character has never had a woman, he simply asks, “You ever had a good Swiss watch?” Within seconds, they start shooting their guns to confirm that they do things the same way. It is a moment so playful, friendly and gay (happy) that one can’t help but see it as an example of very intimate male bonding bordering on a sexual metaphor.

At their meeting in the previous scene, Ireland already couldn’t keep his eyes off Clift. But the gunplay, in particular, has been cited countless times as an example of underlying homoeroticism between men in Westerns – and not only because, in fact, one of these actors was gay. But this is far from the only intimate moment between men in Howard Hawks’s classic Red River.

The film’s central relationship – and source of conflict – involves Clift’s character, Matt Garth, and the much older Thomas Dunson, played by John Wayne with his trademark velvet voice but lack of emotion or acting talent. Dunson is like a father to Garth, whom he basically adopts as his own after the latter loses his family in a raid by the Indians. The year is 1851, and white expansion out West is in full swing. In the process, Dunson also loses Fen, the only woman he ever loved, to unnamed and unseen Indians. The only trace of their misdeeds is the plumes of black smoke wafting over the prairie.

Dunson lays his eyes on a beautiful piece of land in Texas, which he colonisingly proclaims as his own, and within 14 years, he has established a ranch boasting thousands of head of cattle. But 14 years after 1851 is 1865, and with the Civil War having just wrapped up, the South is in ruins, so Dunson’s beef needs to travel elsewhere for profit. Thus begins a cattle drive over hundreds of miles to the middle of Missouri. John Ireland’s character, Cherry Valance, accompanies Dunson and Garth and eventually leads to a brutal split in their relationship just as Dunson grows more and more domineering on the journey.

The film delivers spectacular images not only of wide-open vistas and a cowherd stretching as far as the eye can see but also from the position of the covered wagons as they cross a river. Although the shots are strikingly similar to John Ford’s Stagecoach, this perspective is thrilling for the viewer, who is suddenly in the middle of the action.

Not unlike the Mutiny on the Bounty, the protégé takes the side of the crew when their leader’s authoritarian streak becomes unbearable. Together they rebel against the seemingly callous Dunson and leave him behind while they plough on. Red River hints at how exhausting it can be to be a leader, but it chickens out by preserving Garth as a stand-up citizen whose tiredness never interferes with his judgment or social tact. Where parallels are drawn, however, is with the women.

In the opening scene, Dunson leaves his sweetheart behind but tells her that he will send for her. Within hours, the Indians kill her. At the beginning of the third act, Garth meets Tess and immediately saves her from an Indian arrow. The moment she sees him, she falls in love. We can’t blame her, but Garth’s reaction is curious, as he seems to fall for her because he knows that Valance (whose pistol he held so firmly earlier in the film) had his eye on her, too. When he sucks the poison out of her neck or when he kisses her, it is hard not to think of her as a substitute for Valance.

The world of the film is almost entirely devoid of female characters. The two that do feature – Tess and Dunson’s girlfriend, Fen – are either weepy or can’t stop talking or both. Tess could easily have been a strong character, but from the very first moment she spends with Garth, she is overcome with emotion and practically talks herself into a stupor. Meanwhile, for a large part of the film, Garth wears a particular bracelet that Dunson had once given Fen. And then I haven’t even mentioned the love fest that is the long-anticipated climactic shootout between Dunson and Garth… These are small details, but they create very fertile ground for anyone looking to study the bonding between cowboys in the hypermasculine worlds of American Westerns.

The film was shot in 1946 but only released two years later because Hawks initially had issues with the editing job. In addition, Howard Hughes sued Hawks because he claimed the final scene was too similar to one from The Outlaw, which Hughes had directed a few years earlier with assistance from Hawks.

Although Red River lags when Dunson temporarily disappears from the narrative, Montgomery Clift’s soft-spoken performance as a cowboy who is every bit as skilled as the previous generation is mesmerising. Garth is accused of having a soft heart because he treats people with dignity, and his eyes shine so brightly they sparkle with colour despite the black and white of the image. We are always on his side, even though he is a very different kind of cowboy to the ones we know from other films. And this balance between the new and the old, as well as the ultimate compromise in the final scene, is why Red River is one of the most important works in the pantheon of Westerns.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

André Crous

Thirteen years after Peter Jackson’s first Tolkien film, his sixth offers little proof he has matured as a filmmaker.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five ArmiesUSA/New Zealand
3.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Desolation of Smaug

With the release of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, the sixth and hopefully the last film in Peter Jackson’s canon of J.R.R. Tolkien productions, the New Zealand director has proved decisively that he is not so much a storyteller as he is a choreographer, or more particularly an orchestrator of epic spectacle. He trains his focus on presenting and overwhelming the viewer with the larger-than-life world where the magnificent story is set, but the way in which the characters behave or appear is often riddled with clichés that speak of his immaturity as a teller of tales or a director of actors.

Such an assessment may sound harsh and unjustified, especially because Jackson’s name, in connection with the world of Middle-earth, rouses much admiration for his ability to use or create a vast canvas filled with battles and wizards that seem part of a familiar reality rather than a fantasy. This third instalment is the best of the Hobbit trilogy, but as a whole, these three films are surprisingly disappointing in comparison with his work on The Lord of the Rings, released 2001–03.

The reasons for this are legion and range from the quality and scale of the books themselves to the much-criticised approach of breaking the short novel (The Hobbit) into three separate films. But what is particularly irksome is the almost soap-opera acting in the director’s most recent works.

From characters looking off into the distance as they digest bad news (the elves, in particular, are prone to such conduct, and sometimes the camera tracks in on their faces for even greater emphasis) to histrionic displays of emotion (e.g. the face-pulling that Bain, the son of Lake-town’s Bard, engages in), there is plenty of theatrics to undermine our suspension of disbelief. And the less said about the corrupt councillor, Alfrid, who is an odious fellow that ultimately dresses up in women’s clothing and scampers off with gold coins in his voluptuous bosom, supposedly intended as a source of comedy, the better.

As the title indicates, a giant battle is central to this final part of The Hobbit. It takes place at the Lonely Mountain, where the Dwarves, along with the Elves and the humans, have little time to celebrate the departure of the dragon Smaug, as they soon face hordes of Orcs and Wargs that seek to capitalise on the mountain’s strategic position and the riches that remain inside it.

Smaug, which lent its name to the second instalment, is killed off very early on in the film, and this death firmly establishes Bard’s significance and determination. Played by Luke Evans, this character is a mixture of emotion and bravery, but the actor ensures there is never any doubt about the character’s commitment to justice, and unlike some of the others, we can always take him seriously.

One would expect a film with a sub-title like “Battle of the Five Armies” to be about bloodshed and courage, but while there are such moments involving the two main characters, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), it is in fact more about friendship, loyalty and understanding than anything else. More to the point, it is about the necessity of living together in harmony, avoiding the dark side and allowing others to love whomever they choose. The sentiment is sincere, but Jackson’s attempts to make these ideas visible in his story are overblown.

He handles the relationship between Kíli the Dwarf and Tauriel the Elf slightly better than was the case in The Desolation of Smaug, only because these two spend very little time together. However, the back story to Elvenking Thranduil’s objections to Tauriel’s love offers only superficial psychological insights into his character that culminate in embarrassing final heart-to-hearts between him and his son, Legolas, and him and Tauriel. (He acknowledges he was wrong about the purity of her love when he utters the cringeworthy statement, “It hurts because it was real.”)

And for the most part, Jackson is content to keep using the same cinematic language he used in The Lord of the Rings more than a decade ago to render spirits. He also still clearly enjoys employing slow motion as often as possible. His aerial shots are used somewhat more judiciously than in Smaug, but when it comes to the photography of vast vistas framed on either side by steep mountainsides, we get the feeling of déjà vu.

The world the director depicts can be the same without him having to revert to the same shots and same framing he used on previous outings. Jackson’s back projection in some of his scenes is just terrible, and the composition of the shots is generally the same: Gandalf on a horse, or Legolas hanging onto a cave bat, shot from up close and well lit, with the fuzzy and more sombre background in motion behind them. One would never guess this is the most expensive trilogy in motion picture history: This film alone reportedly cost $250 million, or around $1.7 million a minute.

The titular battle, which starts exactly at the halfway mark and lasts for most of the rest of the film, is not nearly as impressively staged as Jackson’s all-time great, the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, because he focuses too strenuously on Thorin’s development from being a power-hungry king to proving his friendship with Bilbo. And despite the 145-minute running time, there are major gaps in the narrative, especially regarding the movements of Bard during this battle.

As with Return of the King, the ending takes a while and could have been much shorter, because the screenplay keeps dropping intertextual references to Jackson’s earlier trilogy that seek to dovetail this story with the other one. Poor Bilbo returns from his adventure a whimpering, stuttering mess filled with emotion, a sight we certainly could have been spared.

While the best (and, thankfully, the shortest) of the trilogy, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies underlines what should have been obvious by now: Peter Jackson has substantial imagination and obviously enough technical know-how to conjure a world of wonder, but he lacks the ability to tell his stories without reverting to the most banal narrative clichés. Moreover, his actors are more or less left to their own (all too often defective) devices. The film will make a generous profit despite its astronomical budget, and filmmakers like James Cameron will likely follow the same path of simplifying their stories while maximising the visuals of the world they offer for the viewer’s consumption.

Atlantics (2019)

André Crous

Migration, an arranged marriage and zombies form the backbone of Atlantics, all under the ominous glow of an unfinished megatower in Dakar.

AtlanticsSenegal
3.5*

Director:
Mati Diop
Screenwriters:
Mati Diop
Olivier Demangel
Director of Photography:
Claire Mathon

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Atlantique

Resembling something straight out of Metropolis, Muejiza reaches into the sky like the Tower of Babel. It is still unfinished, but those working on the construction site are very unhappy – and with good reason. The developer, Mr. N’Diaye, hasn’t paid them in months. They have girlfriends or families to support, but Mr. N’Diaye is out of reach. They can’t wait any longer, and by nightfall, a group of them take a boat out to Spain. Within days, news reaches their community in Dakar that all of them have perished at sea.

One of the people hardest hit by the news is Ada (Mama Sané). Barely out of school, she was secretly seeing the dashing but now-late Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré). Their relationship was a secret because she is promised to Omar, a wealthy young Senegalese man working in Italy. But her mind is clearly elsewhere, and by the time her wedding night rolls around, her white nuptial bed bursts into flames. Not out of passion but, according to one police investigator, because of spontaneous combustion.

The policeman in charge of this apparent case of arson is Issa, who is around the same age as Souleiman. His boss, the commissioner, refers to him as a “young star”, though his investigative techniques leave us wondering whether he ever received any training. For some reason, he quickly suspects Souleiman of having survived, returned to Dakar, infiltrated the wedding party and set his girlfriend’s bed alight, all incognito. He is so adamant about this theory that he goes straight to Souleiman’s parents’ house, where he tells the grieving mother her son is still alive and has likely committed a crime. None of this endears him to the viewer. But there is something else that is weird. He keeps sweating so much that he collapses. This happens very often around sunset.

Soon enough, we see what all of this means. Halfway through the film, a group of women show up at the mansion belonging to Mr. N’Diaye and demand the three months of wages. Their eyes are all white as an oval moon. They are zombies, although we have seen some of them before among the living. Why these women, in particular, are the vessels for those who drowned at sea is left unexplained. Clearly, they represent the tens of thousands of women who are left behind in Senegal while men make the hazardous journey across the ocean to try their luck in Europe. But then, Issa also becomes a zombie and channels the departed Souleiman.

Again, we don’t get any explanation for why Issa serves as a vessel for Souleiman, nor is it evident why he is the only man to take on such a role. Most likely, the director wanted to avoid girl-on-girl intimacy at the film’s climax, but the screenplay suffers mightily because of this inconsistency and lack of a proper explanation. What makes it all the more confusing is that Issa had already started collapsing before his involvement in Ada’s case.

While the film has a certain charm about it, it leaves the viewer with many questions that are never answered. Ada and Souleiman spend very little time together before his fateful departure, and their interaction is limited. Souleiman doesn’t let Ada know when he leaves, so perhaps he didn’t view the relationship as anything substantive. This makes it difficult to empathise with Ada, whose melancholy persists for most of the film. And almost all of her best friends who come to the wedding are shocked to learn that she doesn’t really care for her new husband. Hadn’t she ever spoken to them before? In addition, there is also zero chemistry between her and Omar, and we get no hint of an explanation for their marriage.

Atlantics is full of images of the ocean that remind us again and again of the tide rolling out with boats of migrants and, presumably, rolling back in with the spirits of the dead. And the film does a wonderful lo-fi job with mirrors, while the grotesque, conspicuous tower is very realistically rendered through CGI. But the screenplay is seriously flawed with almost no backstory to the main characters and very little development of some major peripheral characters.

This is a memorable and ambitiously staged (though problematic) depiction of the consequences migration has on those who are left behind. Diop shows herself to be a very able filmmaker, but in the future, she would be wise to wait until the screenplay is ready before starting production. 

Whale Valley (2013)

André Crous

Geographical isolation and emotional remoteness go hand in hand in Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s personal short, Whale Valley.

Whale ValleyIceland
3.5*

Director:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Screenwriter:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Director of Photography:
Gunnar Auðunn Jóhannsson

Running time: 15 minutes

Original title: Hvalfjörður

The titular whale is already dead and being sliced up in silence to feed the small community. Meanwhile, taciturn teenage Arnar is still thinking about taking his own life. Or is he?

The 15-minute Whale Valley takes place almost entirely on a farm in rural Iceland. The blustery, barren landscape mirrors Arnar’s unexplained but clearly unbalanced emotional state. This atmospheric resonance with inner turmoil (“nature in sympathy”) is an element that director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson would go on to develop three years later in his feature film début, Heartstone (Hjartasteinn). But the brutality of his later work is much more discreet here. The film’s focus is sharply trained on the climax, which is hard to watch, although not unexpected.

The first time we see Arnar (one can assume the director’s choice of this name, his own middle name, was deliberate), he has a noose around his neck. He is standing on a flimsy wooden crate inside the farm shed, his body rigid with fear but awkwardly twitching. So, will he or won’t he? We don’t have to wonder long, as his younger brother, Ívar, happens upon him. In shock, he runs off into the distance, and out of fear that Ívar would tell their parents, Arnar tears after and quickly catches up to him. This is their secret, but we don’t know much more. Was this Arnar’s first time trying? Was this the first time that Ívar found him? And wouldn’t a noose hanging in the shed draw attention and suspicion from their father?

We don’t get answers to any of these questions. In fact, for all the initial focus on Arnar, he isn’t even the main point of interest. Gradually, we realise that Arnar and the explanations for his eternal melancholy take a backseat to their impact on Ívar. It is a dynamic tension, if such a thing is possible, as Ívar is always aware of his brother’s morbid intentions, but despite their tussles, the uncertainty hangs in the air until the climax. Two short scenes in the brothers’ bedroom also poignantly underline the protective bond between the two here in the outback.

Halfway through the film, the beauty and confusion merge in the wordless scene with a sperm whale. Lying beached on its stomach, the giant mammal is imposing, even in death. It completely dwarfs young Ívar, just like near-death seems to loom over everything here. But the boy stretches out his hand to touch the oily skin and then proceeds to gently stroke the animal. We follow his hands, collecting oil as they slide further, before he puts his head on the animal’s body and listens. For a second, he seems to think it might be alive. It is a beautiful moment rudely interrupted by the arrival of his father and friends with their flensing tools. Although initially stunned, the boy doesn’t run away this time. He looks on, and as the men start cutting the blubber, his gaze turns impassive.

Life and death and love all meet up in the next sequence, which takes us back to the barn before a final coda in the brothers’ bedroom. This is a story of unfledged emotions that try to stand out here in the wilderness but are often blown off-course by life’s unpredictability. 

Like the brothers it depicts, Whale Valley is cold and distant on the outside while hinting at warmth and intimacy. The boys’ father could have been benefitted from a bit more interaction with his children. As it is, he seems to care as little about Arnar’s state of mind or Ívar’s daily routine as he does about the whale. But despite Guðmundur’s reluctance here to engage in robust storytelling, the emotions that he teases out are clear, and his two main characters clearly have inner lives. In a longer film like Heartstone, he would succeed in giving us a true peek into their souls.

Diamonds of the Night (1964)

André Crous

By mixing the present reality with memories and nightmarish visions and presenting them all as a fragmented whole, Diamonds of the Night offers a personal, often surreal glimpse of the Second World War.

Diamonds of the NightCzechoslovakia
3.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriters:
Arnošt Lustig
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 65 minutes

Original title: Démanty noci

Diamonds of the Night is an unconventional film about two Jews during the Second World War. For one, the two central characters are taciturn to the point of almost being mute. For another, it is unclear what does and what does not happen in the moment. But it brilliantly conveys a nagging sense of being sucked into a world collapsing onto itself.

This one-hour film, Czech director Jan Němec’s début feature, is as full of contrasts as its title suggests. It is drawn from the eponymous book (more specifically, the short story entitled “Darkness Casts No Shadow”) by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig and is filled with fragments of dreamlike memories, nightmarish visions and brutal reality. Following a black screen and the ominous tolling of a bell, the opening sequence is by far the film’s most memorable. Lasting an impressive 137 seconds, it is an exhilarating unbroken tracking shot that follows two young men (Antonín Kumbera and Ladislav Janský) uphill, frequently in close-up, as they run away from a train. Every so often, another round of bullets reminds us that this is life and death.

Finally, albeit temporarily, they reach safety deep in the forest. Because of the jackets, marked with KL, for Konzentrationslager, they were wearing, one can assume they were headed for a death camp. But the darkness they have just escaped has stained their consciousness and begins to penetrate their lived reality, too, as a giant field of rocks in the middle of the forest soon makes very clear. Suddenly, a tram passes Prague’s Municipal House in broad daylight, and we see one of these men, wearing the KL jacket, jumping in, before there is a cut back to the forest.

The film will be filled with such moments, all without any dialogue – in fact, it takes almost a full 15 minutes before either of the two men speaks a word. Many of the inserts are taken through the window of a moving vehicle, presumably a bus or a train. We see life outside continuing as normal, as if nothing is the matter, but the implication is that we share the point of view of the Jews being transported away from this “normality” that is oblivious to them.

This is confirmed when we get an insert showing the inside of a windowless train compartment meant for cargo, but we see a group of people, some dressed in striped pyjamas. The two nameless young men are seated in a corner at the far back. They devour the corn they had snuck in and put on the shoes they had hidden in their jackets. But this is the past from which they had just managed to break free. Or is it? The story unspools in such a fragmented manner that the pieces ultimately fit together so loosely that the big picture escapes us. There is even room for an (admittedly slightly contrived) reading of the ending as a prelude to the opening.

Diamonds of the Night is at its best during those brief moments, created via the inserts, that give us a vivid sense of the fear and confusion inside the mind of the younger man (Kumbera). A few shots, brilliantly captured by director of photography Jaroslav Kučera (who would become one of the most prominent cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave), show tall trees being felled and falling almost straight onto the camera. In another famous composition, ants crawl over an anonymous (either remembered or imagined) young man’s feet, hands and face. And in one of the most action-packed scenes, when he goes to a farmhouse to beg for bread, he imagines himself, over and over again, killing his well-doer out of concern that she will surrender him to the authorities.

But many might view all these interruptions as little more than impressionist smudges on a threadbare storyline, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In particular, there are too many flashbacks (albeit distorted or misremembered, as made clear by the KL coat that Kumbera’s character is already wearing) to brighter days, and they do not appear to contribute substantially to our understanding of the characters or their backgrounds.

The last part of the film is the most interesting because of the tension it evokes through a very simple approach: repetition and little alteration. Having been captured by a group of dimwitted Kraut fogies, members of the so-called Volkssturm militia, the two men are made to stand with their hands in the air and face a blank wall. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, the old Germans merrily gorge themselves on chicken and drink pints of beer. Every so often, there is a cut back to the two men, immobile with fear. This alternation between the two shots, as well as the contrast between the silence and the yack-yack-yacking, creates incredible tension.

But while the film gives an atypical insight into the mind of one of its two central characters, the other (Janský) remains an enigma. Towards the end of the film, an apparent flashback even seems to suggest the possibility that he never made it past the opening scene. And as potent as some of the images are, there are just as many shots whose meaning is not immediately evident or are needlessly repeated. 

Diamonds of the Night is a film of contrasts. It uses an experimental approach to conjure up a world of mental imagery that doesn’t always connect with the viewer. And yet, we do get a glimpse of the main character’s inner struggle to make sense of the senselessness around him.

Mustang (2015)

André Crous

Showing five young sisters all seeking to break free from their conservative grandmother’s iron grip, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang has a potentially activist message but delivers it very meekly.

MustangTurkey/France
3.5*

Director:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Screenwriters:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Alice Winocour
Directors of Photography:
David Chizallet
Ersin Gok

Running time: 95 minutes

In Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s delightful Mustang, carefree childhood runs up against the brick wall of tradition as five teenage sisters do all they can to defy their uncompromisingly conservative grandmother. Not without reason, the grandmother serves a mostly symbolic function and has no name.

Although the film takes its sweet time giving them each a barely distinct personality, they are, from eldest to youngest: Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale. In a small Turkish town on the coast of the Black Sea where they have grown up under the iron hand of their grandmother, the girls spend their afternoon on the final day of term frolicking with their school mates in the ocean. When they return home, their grandmother rakes them over the coals for allegedly “pleasuring themselves” on the boys’ necks. In fact, they merely sat on their shoulders. But clearly, the grandmother’s imagination is running wild with sexual fantasies. So, too, does the mind of their live-in uncle, Erol, who assumes the girls have somehow lost their virginity in the process.

Before long, the grandmother starts insisting that the girls get married, lest they spoil themselves as teenagers and no longer suitable marriage material. She turns the house into a “wife factory”, where the sisters are instructed how to do all the work a good wife is expected to perform, from cooking to making the bed. But interaction with boys remains strictly off-limits.

All of this already feels like the dark ages, but things get even more insane about halfway through, when Selma, one of the first sisters to get married, completes her wedding night consummation. Outside the door, the in-laws are waiting impatiently for the bedsheet so that they can see proof of their new daughter-in-law’s ruptured virginity on her wedding night. As well as anything else in the film, this particular scene shows how the girls’ domestic situation is really part of a broader social problem.

There are fleeting moments of freedom, however, like when the girls manage to escape the house to watch a football match or make out with a boy they fancy. But every so often, more burglar bars are added, and the walls get higher. When the eldest girls leave home, we start noticing single Uncle Erol behaving ever more curiously, as does Ece. And when Ece is no longer at home, her younger sister, Nur, bears the brunt of Erol’s attention. This abuse is conveyed in a very fragmented and cursory way, although it does a very good job of exposing the absurd sexual repression he has imposed on his nieces.

But we are particularly attuned to this abuse because it seems to have a moving target – that is, moving ever downward – with Lale, the youngest sister likely being the inevitable ultimate target. Once we realise this, Mustang establishes its ticking clock. (The title is never explained, although the notion of roaming freely like a group of fillies, or the inability to do so, is central to the narrative.) We see most of the action from the perspective of Lale, who even turns up, wholly unnecessarily, to deliver some sporadic voice-over narration.

Her opening words perfectly encapsulate the circumstances: “It’s like everything changed in the blink of an eye. One moment we were fine, then everything turned to shit.” On the same day when Lale’s favourite teacher, Ms Dilek, moves a thousand kilometres away to Istanbul, the five girls’ seemingly nonchalant existence is upended when nosy villagers report on their alleged promiscuity at the beach. Nothing will ever be the same again, even though, presumably, things were already pretty dire before. But this fact makes their surprise at the repercussions (the family’s overreaction) a bit difficult to swallow, given they have lived with these horribly myopic people their whole lives.

It is commendable that the sisters all stick together, more or less, but it makes them a homogenous group without distinct personalities. It would have been infinitely more interesting if one or more showed honest doubts about either following the traditional path or cutting one’s one path. No such struggle is on display, which makes the narrative terribly simplistic in its approach to an issue such as female identity in tradition-oriented Turkey.

In her début feature film, the director mostly sidesteps melodrama, even though the film’s opposition to the traditional roles of women in Turkish society shines through. The assertive girls are rewarded with what they want, while their unassertive counterparts struggle to do the same. Unfortunately, their genuine desires are not always clear because we learn so little about their wants and needs.

This scratching of the surface extends to the treatment of issues that are arguably just as serious as (and complement) women’s rights to control their own lives, like Erol’s sexual abuse of his nieces, which is treated so lightly as to be almost invisible.

On the whole, however, Mustang offers a warm-hearted and hopeful story of and for 21st-century women in Turkey who seek to make their own decisions.