3.5 stars

Captain Phillips (2013)

André Crous

True story about piracy off the Horn of Africa is tense and showcases the talents of Tom Hanks as the titular skipper.

captain-phillipsUSA
3.5*

Director:
Paul Greengrass
Screenwriter:
Billy Ray
Director of Photography:
Barry Ackroyd

Running time: 135 minutes

What stands out more than anything from Captain Phillips, master director Paul Greengrass’s film about a hostage drama on the high seas, is how ill-equipped the cargo shipping industry was for the wave of piracy around the Horn of Africa in the mid-2000s instead of being prepared to face the very real threat, known to everyone else around the world, of its crews being kidnapped.

The film tells the true story of Richard Phillips, captain of the MV Maersk Alabama container ship, who was kidnapped by pirates, many of them looking like they are mere teenagers, in 2009. This moment marked the first time in more than two centuries that an American ship had been taken by pirates.

Phillips, played by Tom Hanks in a welcome return to form, is a serious man who likes to think he is prepared for all eventualities. He is aware of the dangers that he may be confronted with on the way from Djibouti to Mombasa, and therefore he ensures the crew knows what to do if pirates suddenly decided to attack.

However, there is a bit of a credibility issue here, as it is obvious the fire hoses that the ship uses to repel the pirates’ little boats are not up to the job, and yet Phillips is confident that by pushing his ship to its limits and using the hoses, he and his men will triumph over the greedy Somali pirates.

Common sense prevails, however, and the pirates take the ship, because they have guns and the crewmembers don’t want to risk their lives for cargo that isn’t theirs, which is a completely understandable position. But things take a turn for the worse, as the younger leader of the pack, the gaunt Somali named Muse (Barkhad Abdi), decides to kidnap the captain and demand a ransom more in line with his desires of millions of U.S. dollars.

Greengrass, whose previous project was Green Zone, the best film so far to treat the madness of the Iraq invasion and the subsequent bureaucratic nightmare on the ground, is no stranger to docudrama (he also directed United 93, about the only 9/11 plane that didn’t crash into a government building), and his work here is exemplary.

He keeps the tension by hanging the threat of death over Phillips like a Damoclean sword. We are always aware of the possibility that he may be killed at any moment, but while the tension is dramatically successful, we have to ask ourselves why the pirates don’t know the rules of the game: If Phillips dies, they die.

Greengrass pretends to give us a balanced impression of the pirates, with one even having second thoughts about carrying out aggression against the captain because he seemed to be taking care of his injured foot, which his fellow pirates don’t deem necessary despite the obvious pain he is enduring. He also suggests the pirates have their own bosses who demand their workers to make big money on the open sea, or he will take their heads.

It is a savage business, and although Muse says he would like to go to the United States one day, when given the chance he still decides to take the money back home to his boss rather than flee. That may be the principled decision, but it doesn’t make us like him all that much.

Besides Hanks’ stunning portrayal of the captain, especially in the film’s closing scenes when the events leave him speechless, the film is at its best when it digs deeper into the fight for power among the pirates. Although Muse chose Najee (Faysal Ahmed) to help him, Najee constantly second-guesses the orders of his “captain”, and at many points in the film he almost takes out Phillips. He is scared and hysterical, and he keeps on screaming when everyone else is keeping calm, but while we may question his behavior, it keeps the dynamic between him and Muse interesting and tense.

Captain Phillips is nerve-racking even when the actions (or the lack of actions) don’t always make sense. Greengrass’s use of a hand-held camera is effective and so are the hollow sounds on deck, often only of feet on metal.

It remains a stunning revelation that the shipping industry didn’t see this kind of situation coming, or that the respective shipping lines kept hoping it wouldn’t happen to their ships. Even if just for that reason alone, the director’s use of film to highlight historical (and historic) breakdowns that led to some big and dramatic moments is one that should be seen.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

André Crous

Gorgeous images and rich sounds enrich the Coen brothers’ glum story of folk singer in New York City in the early 1960s.

inside-llewyn-davisUSA
3.5*

Directors:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
Screenwriters:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
Director of Photography:
Bruno Delbonnel

Running time: 105 minutes

Two-thirds into Inside Llewyn Davis, the titular main character, a folk singer with a beautiful voice but no money, finally gets the chance to perform for a major record producer in Chicago, Bud Grossman. Grossman, whom Davis has wanted to impress for a long time, sits calmly just a few short feet away while Davis sings his heart out. The song moves us beyond belief, and we can’t help but expect that Grossman will feel the same. However, in case we still haven’t realised how desperate the situation is for this musician, we will find out very soon.

The question the scene raises, at least on the surface, is whether we want so badly for Davis to succeed because we have got to know him quite well over the first two acts, and we know he is down on his luck despite being a nice guy and an excellent singer. Perhaps Grossman doesn’t feel the same way because he doesn’t see the full picture.

But that is not true. In the film’s opening scene, when Davis performs the traditional folk song “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” in the New York City’s Gaslight Café in the winter of 1961, we are immediately mesmerised by his evident talent and sincere emotional connection to the material despite not knowing anything about him. We would only recognise, towards the end of the film, what had led up to that opening scene, but actor Oscar Isaac is captivating in the role and gets our attention whether we know his story or not.

There are many more songs throughout the film, sometimes complete numbers that Davis performs in clubs or in private, sometimes a recording from the LP he had made with his previous duo partner, Mike Gorfein, who recently committed suicide. In between the many songs, Davis’s circular existence of desperation is slightly modified by his interactions with his kind friends, who allow him to sleep on their couch, and by his not-so-kind friends, like the unsmiling Jean (Carey Mulligan), who tells him she thinks she is carrying his baby and generally behaves like a real cow throughout the story.

Luckily, Davis doesn’t seem to let all this negativity get him down. He is dead broke, doesn’t even own a winter jacket despite the polar temperatures all the way through the film and has no career to speak of except for the odd performance for a small group of nightly revellers at the Gaslight. And yet, he is not depressed, and neither are we. Directors Joel and Ethan Coen are very clever in lulling us into a false sense of security by having the main character cope despite the obstacles, until the very end when we realise this is just the latest round of misery to strike him, and in all likelihood, this will still be his life for some time to come.

His failed performance for Grossman notwithstanding, perhaps the most heartbreaking moment is when he crashes on the couch of Al Cody (Adam Driver), another singer, and is looking to store his box full of unsold records somewhere. Davis looks under a small table, only to find a similar box of Cody’s unsold records. This is a brief but powerful blow to our sense of optimism.

Even the moments that do offer some hope, like a jovial and uplifting performance with Jean’s straitlaced husband, Jim (Justin Timberlake), are deflated by our realisation that, no matter how popular the song is, he will barely see enough money to pay his immediate debts.

The cinematography is some of the best of any Coen brothers film since their 2001 hit O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a suitable comparison given the musical connection between the two and the importance of a character named “Ulysses” in both. Tones of green and grey are central to the palette, and so is the play of light and darkness, sometimes verging on chiaroscuro, most evident in the Chicago scene with Grossman (F. Murray Abraham). The director of photography is Bruno Delbonnel, who has only worked with the brothers once before, on their hilarious short film contribution to the Paris, je t’aime anthology film.

There are many things here that should spell utter gloom for the viewer – mean individuals who feel nothing for others’ feelings, a central character whose best friend is his guitar and a cat whose name he doesn’t even know, the same commuters on the subway day in and day out, and a life slipping more and more quickly downhill – but thanks to the music and a spellbinding performance by Isaac, we remain a captive audience for most of the film.

He steals the show with his renditions of folk songs and, bathed in Delbonnel’s lush cinematography, sometimes with the cat draped over his shoulder to keep him warm, this period film is as beautiful as the story it tells is tragic. We may not get inside his head, but we certainly get a very good impression of the mood of the time and of his life.

August: Osage County (2013)

André Crous

A drugged-up Meryl Streep goes on a two-hour rant, but gradually the onion’s many layers are peeled back.

august-osage-countyUSA
3.5*

Director:
John Wells
Screenwriter:
Tracy Letts
Director of Photography:
Adriano Goldman

Running time: 120 minutes

August in Osage County can be scorching – with temperatures in the 90s (mid-30s in degrees Celsius) – but even in the sweltering heat, there is nothing that is quite as oppressive as the atmosphere around the Weston household.

In August: Osage County, the matriarch is Violet (Meryl Streep), who has been popping pills on a regular basis for a long time and was recently treated for mouth cancer. Her hair is short, and she stumbles from room to room speaking her mind (or “truth”, as she calls it) and lobbing insults at the small group of people one would call her family.

The man who has put up with her the longest is her husband, Beverly (Sam Shepard), whose opening words, “Life is very long”, taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, suggest to us that he has had enough of this and that this will be his last time round the prickly pear. By the time the subsequent opening credits sequence finishes, he will have disappeared forever from this earth.

With the departure of their father, the three daughters arrive at the house deep in the Osage Plains, in north Oklahoma, to pay their respects to an individual who, although a heavy drinker, was also a very good man, especially so because he put up with Violet for so long.

Barbara (Julia Roberts), her father’s favourite – a point that elicits particular scorn from her own mother – arrives with her teenage daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin), and husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), from whom she has unofficially separated.

Ivy (a captivating Julianne Nicholson), a diffident, freckled girl who has recently decided to straighten her hair, is the only daughter who has stayed behind to take care of the elder Westons, for which she has not received any kind of financial or emotional support from anyone.

And then there is Karen (Juliette Lewis), the youngest, who lives in Florida and doesn’t stop talking about her fiancé, the Ferrari-driving Steve (Dermot Mulroney), who will take her to Belize on their honeymoon. Steve is nearing 50, but we notice he has his eye on the 14-year-old Jean.

The film does not have the most original of plots, as this family gathering inevitably leads to countless revelations, the one more stunning than the last, until there is little more to do except to head off into the taboo territory of incest. As is to be expected, Streep sucks all the oxygen out of the room when she speaks, but she accomplishes more than that: In this film, she also sucks all the light out of the room, as her sharp tongue lashes everyone around her. “Nobody slips anything by me”, she says, and she is right, but when she decides to reveal others’ secrets, we cringe because we know she is deliberately stepping over the line to make the point that she is a know-it-all.

Director John Wells’s adaptation of Tracy Letts’s play (Letts also crafted the screenplay) keeps most of the story indoors, and he fashions this space to resemble a cave, with blinds and curtains drawn, and on the day of the funeral with the women dressed all in black, we only see their heads, and therefore their words sting with so much more power.

There are two exemplary scenes around the dining room table. In the first, on the day of the funeral, Violet, at the head of the table, doesn’t so much speak as gush her mind. It is a gamble that churns our stomachs as her words become more and more inappropriate, and we end up cheering when someone eventually wrestles her to the floor. We are not only angry with her, but also with the rest of the family who by their silence enable her to keep going.

The second scene, with Violet and two of her daughters, is much more interesting, as it involves characters that have become infinitely more complex since we last saw them huddled around the table an hour earlier. This time around, there is a struggle for power and truth, but although there is no clear winner, it is just as painful as before.

August: Osage County is filled with moments where the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet in slow motion. People are hurtful, but even if we don’t empathise with many of them, because their behaviour is at times revolting, we do gradually comprehend that there is more to everyone than what we may perceive at first. People can also be secretive to a fault, and many of the secrets we discover here only lead to heartache and misunderstandings.

But even when there is a torrent of emotions and hysteria, there is still hope. Chris Cooper, who plays Violet’s brother-in-law, is nothing less than a prince, and his character’s love for his son, “Little” Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch), is tender and sweet and beautiful. When it seems like all hope is lost, Charles takes to the piano to sing a love song. He makes the world stand still, and that is when we realise that, even in a family as messed-up as this one, all is not lost.

Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013)

André Crous

The first instalment of Lars Von Trier’s sweeping sex film keeps surprising us, and not just in the ways you might expect.

nymphomaniac-vol-iDenmark
3.5*

Director:
Lars von Trier
Screenwriter:
Lars von Trier
Director of Photography:
Manuel Alberto Claro

Running time: 120 minutes

This review complements two other reviews of the film: 
– Nymphomaniac: Vol. II 
– Nymphomaniac: Volumes I and II (director’s cut) 

Vastly overhyped because of its supposedly controversial sex scenes starring famous actors and actresses, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. I delivers a story whose shock value is actually rather toned-down compared with the director’s previous work. It is, however, the best film he has made since Manderlay in 2005.

For theatrical distribution, Von Trier’s opus was cut from a rough cut of 330 minutes to around 240 minutes, neatly spread out over two films.

As with some of his previous filmic outings, most notably Dogville and Manderlay, Nymphomaniac: Vol. I is structured like a novel, with five onscreen chapter heads clearly dividing the film into separate sections. The impetus for this may be the book on angling that sets the story in motion, or it may be a more orderly way of working through the clutter of one woman’s seemingly never-ending sequence of sexual encounters.

The middle-aged woman, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, called Joe, is found bruised and battered in an alleyway one night by the caring stranger Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who takes her home when she asks for tea and milk instead of an ambulance. He puts her to bed and asks her what happened.

She pointedly answers that she is a bad person, but with a little persuasion, she starts recounting her life story, from her childhood through her teens and into young adulthood (in the flashbacks, her role is played by Stacy Martin). In the process, there is talk of masturbation, sexual incantations and hypersexuality, but also of fly-fishing, Fibonacci numbers and Bach.

The film oscillates wildly between the profound and the preposterous, sometimes in the span of a single sentence, as a serious conversation about one’s hesitation to enter a door that has just opened leads to a close-up of a cat suddenly disinterested by the door that has opened in front of it. It is interesting to note, however, the closed-up hole in Seligman’s front door where a cat could have entered in the past.

Nymphomaniac: Vol. I is interested in both showing and telling, as we get seemingly superfluous depictions of concepts – from onscreen math during a sex scene to an illustration of the angle necessary to parallel park successfully while this action is being carried out correctly, seen from God’s point of view – as well as a very extensive discussion of the interconnectedness of sex and more mundane everyday activities.

It often seems like Joe and Seligman are talking past each other, before the connection slowly reveals itself. But we have a nagging feeling that something is not quite right. Kind as Seligman is, he does too many things that remind Joe of past incidents, and his interests in the Fibonacci numbers and in fly-fishing all too quickly help explain Joe’s actions to herself.

Is Seligman real? There is some discussion about delirium tremens, the potentially fatal condition of abstaining from alcohol if one has been addicted to it, which leads to horrifying hallucinations. Could Joe’s abstinence from sex have led to a similar form of delirium tremens in which she discusses her life with a complete stranger who seems so connected to her?

It is not entirely improbable, but we will have to wait for Vol. II to get a clear answer.

In the meantime, let us entertain ourselves with the question whether this is pornography, as some in the media are bound to suggest.

The answer, not resoundingly, but firmly enough, is “no”. Some may find the sex scenes somewhat stimulating, but whatever graphic imagery the film contains is brief and limited in nature. And even when there is nudity, it is usually more scientific than sexy. Compare this with Blue is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1&2), in which lingering takes gave us blow-by-blow accounts of sex scenes between its leading ladies, or with Von Trier’s own, much more explicit The Idiots (Idioterne) from 1998.

While determined not to fall in love, which would mean sex more than once with the same person (an appalling notion to her mind), Joe does eventually have sex, at least twice, with a young man called Jerôme. It must be said here that the man playing the part, Shia LaBeouf, is a charming actor, but his British accent is atrocious and does great damage to our willingness to take him seriously.

What Joe’s uncharacteristic amorousness spells for her future, we will probably learn in Part II, but by the time the film’s end credits roll, and we are treated to snippets from the sequel (which mostly assure us that there will be countless more scenes of her masturbating), we are deliberately left confused as to the meaning and the relevance of all of these stories. Also, Joe says she has a full-time job, but we never see her doing any job except the obvious one.

We do see – and hear – a lot of talking, and although some viewers may nod off during some of the very inexpressive Gainsbourg–Skarsgård interactions, they will be rewarded in good time with some clever application of different fields of interest to the woman’s sex life. These dialogues often seem too overtly written and staged, and Von Trier certainly could have been more succinct, but at least we quickly realise time is not wasted (except for a rather tedious black-and-white chapter with Joe’s dying father).

Lars von Trier, as magnificent as he has proved himself to be in the past, has recently had his head stuck in the clouds in a very public way. His tawdry Antichrist, most famous for its close-up of Gainsbourg cutting off her clitoris with a pair of scissors, concluded with perhaps the most ludicrous and inappropriate dedication in the history of film: to the late Russian filmmaker and master of the sublime, Andrei Tarkovsky. So, too, in Nymphomaniac, Vol. I, he continuously tries to establish a link between his own film and the other big “sex film” of the recent past that was equally vastly overhyped because of its supposedly controversial sex scenes starring a famous actor and actress: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

The director links the two films by making repeated use of the most famous sound bite from Kubrick’s film, the gorgeous “Waltz No. 2” from Shostakovich’s “Suite for Variety Orchestra”. But whereas the music boosted the lush, colourful dinner parties of the former, the music in Von Trier’s mostly desaturated picture only serves to draw on our knowledge of Eyes Wide Shut without digging any deeper.

Despite its awkward transitions and an incomplete storyline, Nymphomaniac: Vol. I is easy to watch, and time passes remarkably quickly. Uma Thurman, who only stars in a single scene, is unforgettable in her role as a cuckquean, and the chemistry between LaBeouf and Martin is awkward, riveting, and sometimes a little humorous – qualities that make their scenes all the more enjoyable.

This is a promising first part of a two-part story, but a unified film would have been much better. However, although that black-and-white chapter seems entirely out of place, the pieces fit together surprisingly well, even if the hype promised more than the film could ever have delivered.

The Good Son (2011)

André Crous

A Scandinavian chamber film that is both a thrilling and (gut-wrenchingly) chilling domestic drama.

good-son-hyva-poikaFinland
3.5*

Director:
Zaida Bergroth
Screenwriters:
Jan Forsström
Zaida Bergroth
Director of Photography:
Anu Keränen

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Hyvä poika

The Finnish The Good Son is a typically Scandinavian affair, its characters and their borderline behaviour not unlike those found in many of Lars von Trier’s films. The story is told in small scenes consisting of very believable actions and reactions, though these are often difficult to look at because of a feeling that evil, at worst, or malice at best, is always just around the corner.

The film’s second scene very effectively sketches the main character of Ilmari, the lanky teenage boy who is always by the side of his actress-mother, Leila: When the eye of a stranger at a café lingers too long on Leila, she cuts down the poor man with a histrionic outburst. When she leaves, Ilmari sits down opposite the man and fidgets approvingly with the man’s mobile phone before dumping it in a soft drink.

The Good Son takes place almost exclusively at the family’s cottage in the middle of the summer in central Finland, where deepest night looks like twilight. But don’t let the illuminated wilderness fool you: Despite the light outside, Ilmari’s protective presence is darker than strangers could know, and when anyone challenges his mother or comes between the two of them, he lashes out in ways that are as cruel as they are easy.

The film comprises several very small and seemingly arbitrarily added moments that in retrospect allow us to see how unhinged many of its characters are, and yet the screenplay doesn’t seem to go for the jugular, instead having plenty of opportunities for the characters to be comforted by outside forces.

One of these forces is a writer, Aimo, still grieving the loss of his wife who tragically drowned a few years earlier. He is drawn to Leila even as her son is getting ready to silently declare war on this impostor whose presence as the only adult male in the household, Ilmari’s father having left years earlier, he sees as a threat to family unity.

At the same time, Ilmari’s aggression, alternately active and passive, is counterbalanced by his innocent young brother, Unto, who spends his days lazing in the forest around the isolated cottage, using his camcorder to record the lives of small insects. Compared with the unit of Ilmari and Leila, who decide to use the fireplace despite the birds nesting inside, Unto clearly serves as an entry point and an anchor for the viewer’s experience in this small but brutal world of cascading emotions.

While these emotions often seem inconsequential, they slowly paint a picture of a family in crisis. Ilmari, in particular, is affected by a series of external factors that, while they certainly don’t excuse his behaviour, provide a good sense of a young man in great need of help, not unlike his mother, whose petulance and pigheadedness is visible in his own actions, as well.

Shot with handheld cameras and producing a very real sense of dread, The Good Son is clearly reminiscent of the Dogme 95 filmmakers, but director Zaida Bergroth’s product is much cleaner, with crisp, sunlit images that make great use of the rural Finnish landscape, and sound design that is intended to work against our expectations.

Despite its intensity, the film often jumps between storylines and not all the characters are given a particularly memorable character arc, yet even though we know so little about the characters, the film can affect the viewer profoundly – the result of very finely managed performances and motivations that seem as human as they seem monstrous.

In creating Ilmari, the acting of Samuli Niittymäki, in particular, is notable for its representation of a young man who seems confident and determined yet has no clear idea what he wants to do with his life except be an enemy of anyone outside the family circle. He is a wrecking ball that hits us in the stomach many times during the film because he seems weak and almost pathetic until he decides to wreak havoc.

Prisoners (2013)

André Crous

Denis Villeneuve’s dark film about obsession is not his best, but story’s complexity makes for a riveting tale.

prisonersUSA
3.5*

Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter:
Aaron Guzikowski
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 155 minutes

The final minutes of Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s sombre Prisoners are as dark and thrilling as anything that precedes them, but their impact could have been infinitely more powerful had Hugh Jackman’s character not been so incredibly thick.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, a manly family man with a remodelling and repairs business who in the film’s opening scene accompanies his son, Ralph, on his first deer hunt and does his best to make the youthful teenage boy feel he is now in some way being initiated into manhood. Keller tells Ralph how his father used to always be prepared for everything, good or bad. In other words, a real Boy Scout. Of course, he will soon face a situation he has no idea how to handle.

But there is something off about Keller. He is intensely serious about everything, his body literally taught with tension, and in a pivotal scene early in the film, when he is searching the house and we get the first glimpse of his basement, the camera lingers just long enough for us to notice a gas mask hanging in the corner.

Halfway through the film, when we return to the basement, we get a better view of the neatly arranged stock on the shelves and have the disturbing impression Keller is a survivalist. Prisoners doesn’t elaborate – the film is more show than tell, and you need some patience for this simple yarn spun out over two and a half hours – but one questions what purpose this information serves our understanding of the plot’s central event, other than to make us increasingly uneasy.

This central event is the abduction of Keller’s and his wife’s young girl, Anna, together with Joy, the young daughter of the Dovers’ friends, the Birches, with whom they spent Thanksgiving when they thought the children could quickly go back home to look for an SOS whistle.

Villeneuve already signals in a scene very early on that we should be suspicious of a caravan that is parked in the neighbourhood. We cannot see who is inside, but we know it is an ominous vehicle because we get at least two shots from the point of view of someone unknown on the inside. Luckily, Ralph sees the caravan, and when his sister disappears, he mentions it to his parents, who inform the police.

The police track down the caravan soon enough, but the driver, the young man Alex Jones, seems to be either on drugs or otherwise handicapped, and as he tries to flee, he rams the vehicle into a tree, obviously making his involvement in the disappearance of the girls seem all the more likely. But with him clamming up, the police thinking he is merely mentally handicapped, and the law requiring either arrest or release after 48 hours of detention, he is let go, which angers Keller to no end.

This is where he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of his daughter’s disappearance. But life is not so simple, and while we have grave suspicions that Alex had anything to do with the abduction, one or two tiny but not insignificant moments make us question what he is thinking, or at least what he has seen and may not want to share because of whatever fear he has.

In the end, the film turns out to be infinitely more complex than we may have anticipated, and there are countless incidents or images that seem to be loose ends – or worse, dead ends – that we may never tie together. But slowly, things fall into place. The theme of a maze, made visible by one particular loony whom we and the police notice once word spreads of Anna’s and Joy’s disappearance, is very appropriate here.

The major investigating officer is Detective Loki, and as played by Jake Gyllenhaal there is some trace of his character in Zodiac, as the normally cool and rational individual becomes very attached to the investigation, to the point where he may very well take the law into his own hands if he feels it is not proving to be effective enough on its own.

As the snow falls in rural Pennsylvania and hope disappears of ever finding the two innocent girls, the action escalates, mostly due to Keller’s and Loki’s growing obsession with finding the perpetrator of the crime. However, Keller’s obviously strained relationship with his wife (we almost never see the two of them together in a scene) and Loki’s past, which we can surmise has been filled with sadness even though we have no idea what is at the root of this sadness, are left unexplored by the film, and ultimately leaves us more unattached to the narrative than we ought to have been.

Villeneuve has made some wonderful films in the past, including the widely acclaimed Incendies and the extraordinary Polytechnique. Both of them were violent films, but they were told with great style and a sense for telling a story in an interesting way. Although Prisoners is far from those highpoints, it is a work most directors would be proud of, and despite the slow pace of the storytelling (we only grasp the meaning of the title almost right at the end thanks to a newspaper headline), it remains a strong presentation of an investigation where leads seem to be in such short supply.

Dheepan (2015)

André Crous

Plight of Sri Lankan refugees in Parisian suburb underlines not only the difficulty of integration but also the risks that sometimes follow people across borders. 

France
3.5*

Director:
Jacques Audiard
Screenwriters:
Noé Debré
Thomas Bidegain
Jacques Audiard
Director of Photography:
Eponine Momenceau

Running time: 110 minutes

Of major topical significance and sketching its characters and those in their lives with compassion and understanding, Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan has the makings of a masterpiece but loses control in the final minutes, which feel rushed and underwhelming, partly because its graphic violence marks such a radical departure from the rest of the film.

A trio of characters pretending to be a family – the titular Dheepan, who is a former Tamil Tiger; Yalini, a woman who is still very much a girl; and the shy, school-aged Illayaal, who lost her mother during the war – in order to use a dead family’s passports and thus escape to Europe and settle in a diverse, low-income neighbourhood simply titled “Le Pré” (the Field), presumably Paris’s Le-Pré-Saint-Germain. They do not speak French, although Illayaal picks it up remarkably quickly at school, but Dheepan quickly finds a job as caretaker of part of the housing estate.

He has to be careful, however, as drug dealers have one part of one building to themselves, and it is better not to cross the always paranoid bunch of young men. Thanks to Youssuf, the municipality liaison, Yalini also secures a job cooking and cleaning for an elderly Arabic gentleman named Mr. Habib, at a rate she considers to be a fortune: 500€/month. Mr. Habib never says a word, which suits Yalini just fine, as she starts speaking to him in Tamil.

The film offers a great many sensitively handled glimpses of the new reality the characters have to confront, from being outsiders (even in an already heterogeneous community) because they do not speak French to coping with their fake setup as a family. Dheepan is still in mourning over the loss of his wife and two daughters, but his proximity to Yalini elicits sexual feelings in her, but at the same time his experience as a father makes him more understanding of the challenges his “daughter”, Illayaal, is facing. Audiard’s use of small incidents to give colour and texture to his characters is very effective and goes a long way towards making the viewer empathise with these three individuals who are technically breaking the law.

The choice of Antonio Vivaldi’s wistful “Cum dederit” during the opening credits is deeply moving and indicates that this will not be a film like most others. A black screen is eventually illuminated by a big, blinking, blue bow tie that Dheepan has attached to his head and uses as a visual device when peddling trinkets to uninterested café-goers around Montmartre. Indeed, there is little drama or anxiety, right up until the end, when two strange things happen. The first is the sudden transformation (or regression) of Dheepan back to the soldier he used to be, filled with rage and determination. He suddenly takes over the drug den and establishes his strength, but this development does not lead anywhere. The second is the climax, during which he wields a machete and an ice pick and murders everyone in his way in order to save a desperate Yalini.

Some have taken this very graphic scene, and the absolutely serene scene that follows, as a dream, which would be possible were it not for one thing. The climax, which shows Dheepan climbing the stairs and killing people on his way up, is shot as a close-up of Dheepan’s legs, surrounded by black smoke, and could easily be read as a reality affected by flashbacks of the war, it ends with Dheepan inside Mr. Habib’s apartment, which he has never seen before. Thus, this has to be happening for real. Whether the final scene, which is a Hollywood ending wholly at odds with the rest of the film, is a dream or a fantasy is, therefore, both unjustified and unlikely, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Dheepan is at its best when it is showing us how the three refugees interact with each other and with the different members of the community, including an old Moroccan lady who speaks Arabic to Dheepan and Mr. Habib’s drug lord son, Brahim, who has to wear an ankle monitor but towards whom Yalini feels an undeniable, childlike attraction. The film’s only serious missteps are the way in which the final sequence is framed (it could have been much better if Dheepan’s “rescue” of Yalini had occurred offscreen) and a peculiar shot from Dheepan’s point of view, through which we see Yalini seducing him one night, guiding him into the bedroom and dropping her towel before the screen fades to black.

The events of the final 30 minutes are jarring when contrasted with the gentle curiosity, though never devoid of intense feelings, that is so apparent in the rest of the story. Seeing the climax and the epilogue as a dream has the benefit of neatly separating two realities, but as the film clearly shows, events continue to inform those that follow, whether we want them to or not.

Madame Courage (2015)

André Crous

Taciturn, troubled Algerian teenager steals necklace from girl to finance his drug habit, but upon seeing her face, he develops a crush that quickly escalates into unwanted devotion.  

madame-courage

Algeria/France
3.5*

Director:
Merzak Allouache
Screenwriter:
Merzak Allouache
Director of Photography:
Olivier Guerbois

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: مدام كوراج
Transliterated title: Mdam Kuraj

The teenager at the heart of Madame Courage is a boy with many troubles, but it is difficult to dislike him. With high cheekbones, a gaunt face, full lips and big eyes that expressionlessly stare straight ahead, Omar lives in a squat with his mother and older sister. Despite the constant stream of religion-based indictment of debauchery broadcast on the family’s television set, his sister Sabrina is involved in prostitution, which their mother appears to sanction for the sake of having food on the table.

The thing the taciturn Omar is most focused on, however, is not food but drugs. The title refers to the name popular among Algerian youth for Artane, which helps Omar to disconnect from reality. He always carries a plastic bag in his pocket filled with these tablets and slides one of them down his throat when the going gets tough, which makes him look like a zombie most of the time, and he buys these pills with money obtained through thievery on the street.

Having established the criminal side of his life in the opening chase scene taking place late at night through deserted streets, the film’s second scene shows him grabbing a necklace from around a high-school girl’s neck before running off. She is devastated, as the piece of jewellery had belonged to her late mother, and her friends comfort her in the relative safety of a café in downtown Mostaganem. By chance, Omar walks past the café a few moments later and is about to enter when he notices her. The rush of the grab having receded by now, he watches her face more intently and is mesmerised, so he decides to follow her home.

The film never offers any real insight into this fascination that Omar has for her (her name is Selma). He doesn’t know she has lost her mother, and she doesn’t know that he has lost his father. However, because of the instability at home, Omar decides to start spending as much time as possible waiting for her next to a rubbish dump in front of the apartment she shares with her senile father and older brother, a policeman. For obvious reasons, the brother makes it clear he doesn’t want Omar around, but there is something about the boy that greatly intrigues Selma, and even though they never speak a word to each other, the teenage sexual tension between them is unmistakable and handled with great sensitivity by director Merzak Allouache.

Small digressions from the storyline, which include a sub-plot with Omar’s sister, Sabrina, and her pimp (who, it appears, is always supposed to marry her) and Omar’s continued life of petty crime are always connected to the main character, who is present in almost every single scene. The hand-held camera further lingers on him to emphasise his presence as the focal point of interest, for example by framing him in the middle of the shot when he is driving his motorcycle. This latter image allows us to see him as being immobile against a mobile background, which is a perfect visual depiction of his life in general.

The relationship, or association, between Omar and Selma is mysterious and beautiful, although one cannot help but wonder whether the chances of them ending up together would ever amount to more than the fantasies Omar likely conjures up when he is high on Madame Courage. This is not exactly Pickpocket, but Selma’s arrival in Omar’s life certainly has a positive effect on him. Her brother, Redouane, is one of the film’s more complex characters, and while he obviously wants to protect his sister and can use the powers afforded to him as an officer of the law to do so, he does not abuse his authority (despite a moment of offscreen violence) but instead seeks to find out what Omar is thinking, which makes him something of a substitute for the viewer.

Although far from comprehensive, Madame Courage offers a striking glimpse of life on the streets of a lower-class teenager in Algeria who has to combat feelings of loneliness, protect himself and his family and deal with the struggles of being a teenage boy infatuated with a girl.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015

 

Beauty (2011)

André Crous

A secret obsession that inevitably leads to tragedy is presented in a film moving at a pace and according to a poetry wholly at odds with the life of its main character.

skoonheidSouth Africa
3.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriter:
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Skoonheid

There is no question that the man at the centre of Oliver Hermanus’s Afrikaans-language Beauty is deserving of the title every bit as much as the director’s previous, début feature, the stunningly executed Shirley Adams, was about its title character. His name is Christian Roodt, and he is a charming law student whose enigmatic aura intensifies as we realise he has a calmness about him that belies his age and his boyish good looks. It is a persona that sets others at ease and unfortunately allows some people to take advantage of his affability.

One man who sees Christian and cannot get him out of his head is François van Heerden, a friend of Roodt’s parents, who first sets eyes on the young man at his own daughter’s wedding. But even though the title refers to Christian, Hermanus gently nudges us, from the very first moment, to take position next to François, whose gaze the camera shares with us in the opening take.

This particular take – long and produced via a slow zoom in – is a masterstroke, as it not only sets up the extended takes that mottle the film’s visual landscape but also gorgeously encapsulates both the distance and the longing of the main character that will inform our understanding of the rest of the story. Unfortunately, the editing spells out whom this perspective belongs to before delivering the gut-punch of having the object of affection unexpectedly look straight into the camera and thus catching François (and us, already) in flagrante delicto.

The film creates some of its tension by deploying moments of lingering silence, and lead actor Deon Lotz is excellent at conveying the frustration and the inhibition of a middle-aged, homophobic man who is married to a woman but engages in sex with other men on what we assume is a regular basis (the farm orgies in which he participates are depicted as emotionless and decidedly ugly). This father of two daughters, who lives in Bloemfontein, deep in the South African heartland, likes to drink beer and watch rugby. He represses his secret until there is no more space, and it ruptures his bubble of existence.

But exactly when there ought to be tension, there is none, as happens in the third act when an inebriated François, sitting opposite Christian at an empty diner, cannot stop babbling. We learn nothing, we feel little for him, and we end up feeling sorry for the expressionless, passive Christian who has to listen to this man. And yet, this scene immediately follows a tour de force tracking shot inside a night club that shows us how ill at ease François is with the world of gay men who have accepted their own sexual orientations.

Visually, Beauty is unimpeachable (although the shots themselves may be questionable, as I explain below), and director of photography Jamie Ramsay deserves much acclaim for his stunning, crisp compositions. The intention behind the film is equally noteworthy, as the story of a man whose secret of homosexual attraction ultimately almost destroys him is one that is absolutely necessary for a generation growing up on a staple of mostly uncritically positive depictions of gay characters and lives.

It is not an easy film to watch, as Hermanus’s view of humanity (and particularly of his main character) is unflinchingly pessimistic, and François does not get a moment to relax and be happy. He is always either delusional or suffering because of his desire to get closer to Christian. He doesn’t know what he wants exactly, but he finds himself drawn like a moth to a flame. A comparison to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, or The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, would not be entirely inappropriate, as the obsession of saving someone who does not wish or need to be saved is central to understanding the character here.

Another reason why Beauty is a difficult experience is because of its contemplative pace, which is not always useful. While the few long takes that project François’s point of view have a clear purpose, others are used less sparingly and are more taxing for the viewer. For example, why do we have to be subjected to a static shot of more than 15 seconds of a dim kitchen, shown in the early morning hours, before a character arrives to do something as captivating as… buttoning his shirt?

Hermanus’s plan to have the viewer slide in and out of François’s position is executed a bit ham-handedly, as Christian sometimes looks straight into the camera (which happens briefly in the opening scene, and at least once more later in the film), but he also looks just past the frame, and at the end, he is replaced by another character who looks straight at us/François. This mishmash signals confusion on the part of the director, who nonetheless handles the rest of his material very assuredly, like an illusionist whose tricks barely engage but still intrigue us because we cannot discern exactly how he performs them so seamlessly, fooling us every time.

In this tragic tale of a man whose unrequited lust leads him to revert to the most primitive of behaviours – fitting the stereotype of the macho guy taking, nay violently grabbing, what he wants with utter disregard for the other party – we are urged to share his point of view, but there is little for us to empathise with. The mood is sombre throughout, and Hermanus’s pitch-black vision of his protagonist’s existence never draws us in through the participatory experiences that small moments of happiness would have brought.

Not a thriller and not really a character study, Beauty’s redeeming characteristic is its director’s firm hand, but a collection of technically flawless pieces does not a great film make. Slow cinema, which this film at times intends to emulate, is the domain of poets whose messages are related to us as dreams that are visionary and not just visual. Beauty, by contrast, has a story with precious little to chew on and that ought to have been told in the most immediate manner possible.

This is a beautiful film that sometimes carefully considers and depicts the life of a man whose secret is slowly devouring him, but the story’s loose ends and the director’s persistent determination to obfuscate instead of answering our questions cannot hide the fact that there is less going on here than there ought to be.

Move (2012)

André Crous

drei zimmer kueche badGermany
3.5*

Director:
Dietrich Brüggemann
Screenwriters:
Anna Brüggemann
Dietrich Brüggemann
Director of Photography:
Alexander Sass

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Drei Zimmer/Küche/Bad

Almost as if he is baiting the critics and the nay-sayers to respond the way he expects them to, director Dietrich Brüggemann repeats one key phrase, or value assessment, or judgment, in the very last scene of his third feature film, Move: “It tries to overwhelm, but it doesn’t transcend.” It is almost too easy to apply this criticism to the 110 minutes that precede it, as a group of 20-something friends learn to deal with growing up, mostly without any abiding success. Their inability to look beyond their common bubble means that their interactions are solipsistic, a cesspool of relationships that develop out of convenience, and the only saving grace — the reason why this film is worth your time — is its comedy, which at times literally had me rolling around with laughter.

Despite the “three” in the original title, which refers to the layout of an apartment as one would find it in the classified section of the newspaper, the film is actually divided into four parts (and a loose fifth) that mirror the seasons and thus allow us a yearlong overview of the eight central characters’ actions and the reactions they produce.

Philipp and Dina have been best friends since forever. Philipp is dating the wildly moody Maria, who is moving to Berlin to be with him. Meanwhile, Philipp’s one sister, the timid Wiedke, is moving in with the popular Dina, while his other sister, Swantje, writes down every conversation at their parents’ home and is dating a Goth. Philipp is also good friends with the expressionless, emotionless Thomas, who has been dating Anna for a while, but the relationship is clearly going nowhere. And then, the handsome Michael arrives on the scene, and most of the girls fall for him, even though he is dealing with issues from childhood. Oh, and then Philipp’s parents non-chalantly break some shocking news over Christmas dinner.

This is just part of the round-robin of relationships and relationship issues that the film offers its viewers, but Brüggemann, who co-wrote the screenplay with his sister Anna (playing the role of Dina, arguably the main female character), is stunningly adept at steering our attention where he wants it to be, without ever seeming heavy-handed. He crams an enormous amount of plot into his film, perhaps too much, by cutting the material very tightly, and it is often at the end of his scenes that one recognises how other films would have lingered or over-explained. Brüggemann’s actors and his editor together create snappy moments whose meaning is immediately obvious, and yet they are as brief as they likely would have been in real life. His use of jump cuts is always well-timed and underscores the subtly comical nature of many of his more dramatic scenes.

Brüggemann’s sense of humour is equally refreshing, from hiding the identity of a peripheral character by only revealing one part of him (and then being open about the approach by having Philipp say he can never remember the guy’s face) to creating dramatically ironic comedy that only the viewers can appreciate because they see both sides of the moment to very judiciously having the same Christian missionaries knock on people’s doors at the worst possible times in their lives.

But despite the director’s masterful combination of sights and sounds (the indie band Guillemots and its frontman Fyfe Dangerfield provide the background music to the film’s most emotionally resonant sequences) and narrative sprints, as well as his playful approach to storytelling (he even goes “meta” by starring as a photographer named Alexander Sass, the name of the actual film’s director of photography), his film reaches a point where the norm is the unexpected, and there is no firm sense of where all of this is headed, or what would bring closure.

The final few seconds are a case in point, as Brüggemann suggests that, despite everything these characters have been through, they are likely to go through it all again, because you never stop growing up and you never stop learning. You keep on falling, like the pots and the pans in the very first scene, or Philipp, whose skills as a cyclist leave much to be desired, but you keep getting back up. Things may be precarious, but they are not entirely hopeless, and that is why we stay tuned.

It’s not easy growing up, but watching other people doing (or trying to do) it can be hilarious. The performances of the cast members all gel together very well, and the casting of Herbert Knaup (whose turn as Lola’s father in the cult film Run Lola Run is unforgettable) as Dina’s slightly hysterical father is a masterstroke. The only minor problem with casting was that Swantje (Philipp’s younger sister) and Maria (Philipp’s girlfriend) look so similar they are difficult to tell apart at first.

Move is a fast-paced look at the angst of becoming an adult and the mistakes that people make again and again as they try to find the balance between pleasure and stability. The Brüggemann brother-and-sister duo is very perceptive about the good and the bad of this period in people’s lives, and their depiction of the turmoil is genuinely engaging, even though they almost exclusively prefer to prioritise the funny sides of their episodes. The story does start to become slightly absurd towards the end, as coincidences seem to spawn more coincidences, but all in all, this is a creative, masterly controlled film about a key point in the characters’ lives and one that most audiences will be enthusiastic about.