3.5 stars

Police, Adjective (2009)

André Crous

Romania
3.5*

Director: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Screenwriter: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 min

Original title: Poliţist, Adjectiv

Cristi is a policeman, but he does not have the kind of life we have come to associate, through the American film industry, with the cop genre. He has been assigned to a case of teenage marijuana consumption, and by the looks of things, this is going to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. The opening scene consists of Cristi following a teenage boy between his school and his home. Perhaps another film would have created some mystery about Cristi’s intentions – I’m thinking of the Dardennes brothers’ The Son (le Fils). But Cristi’s lack of self-consciousness indicates that he has probably done this kind of thing before and that he is very likely a policeman.

Our suspicions are confirmed in the following scene, at a meeting between him and one of his superiors. This is also one of the rare times that Cristi, whose face is generally expressionless, betrays any emotion. He has been following the teenage boy and his friends for a while, and he has dutifully written up and submitted his detailed reports, but he finds the mission rather senseless since no other country in Europe would prosecute anybody for smoking marijuana. He suggests they go after a friend, who might be a dealer, but his superior dismisses his suggestion.

The rest of the film contains many more scenes, often filmed in long takes, of Cristi tailing one of the schoolchildren. Sometimes he is lucky: They smoke something, and he gets to recover the butt, to determine whether it was tobacco or marijuana. But more often than not, he just makes a note of the vehicle registration number or a visitor’s times of arrival and departure.

As far as long takes are concerned, the film seems to have a Tarr-esque obsession with recording the passage of time, and in two scenes director Corneliu Porumboiu films actor Dragoş Bucur, who plays Cristi, eating alone at his small kitchen table. The one takes place in complete silence, the other is accompanied by the very bad music (“Nu te părăsesc iubire” by Mirabela Dauer) played on YouTube by Cristi’s wife, with whom he is clearly not very enamoured. And we are not much taken with her either, given her choice of song and her choice to repeat the song ad nauseam.

The film is ultimately an intellectual exercise about the use of language. It is, by no means, the kind of film one has in mind when thinking of a “police film”, which demonstrates the conventional use of “police” as an adjective, but which this film does not exemplify. So what? The scenes showing Cristi’s anxiety at challenging the status quo, namely his superiors, are infinitely more illuminating and constitute the only real points of dramatic interest in this film.

Vertigo (1958)

André Crous

VertigoUSA
3.5*

Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriters: 
Alec Coppel
Samuel A. Taylor
Director of Photography: 
Robert Burks

Running time: 128 minutes

I’ve always considered Vertigo to be one of those acclaimed works of art that are accessible and even enjoyable from a distance, like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but if you try to approach them from the beginning and have an immersive experience, the effect is often frustration.

I understand the film. It is about obsession. But Hitchcock doesn’t approach his material with the intention of having us share the experience of the main character, Scottie, and obsessing with him; rather, he chooses to subtly warn us of the dangers that lie ahead if Scottie stubbornly proceeds along this path. We know that things won’t end well, because the whole atmosphere of the film is indicative of this inevitability.

Now, I realise that many viewers would disapprove of my slight dissing of one of Hitchcock’s best-known films, a film that even managed to reach the No. 2 spot on the coveted Critics’ Top 10 Poll of the British film magazine, Sight and Sound, in 2002, but let me tell you why the film doesn’t work for me.

In this film about obsession and illusion, Hitchcock’s primary concern should have been the viewer’s identification with Scottie, played by Jimmy Stewart, including his point of view. Unfortunately, the issue of point of view is the film’s big flaw.

Consider the following scenes and the shots out of which they consist:

1) The famous restaurant scene, where Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time. He is seated at the bar and looks to his far right, where Madeleine is seated at a table, her back turned towards him. Hitchcock introduces Madeleine by first focusing on Scottie, then panning to her and physically tracking in onto her. This shot is intercut with a shot of Scottie at the bar, followed by his point of view – a shot that contains Madeleine, filmed from his position. Later in the scene, when Madeleine leaves the restaurant, she pauses behind Scottie, whose face is turned away from her. Her face is framed from the side, we only see the right side of her face against the red backdrop of the wall behind her, but Scottie doesn’t see anything.

2) In the moments before Madeleine’s apparent suicide, Scottie runs after her. At first, he looks up at the Mission’s bell tower and we get a shot that we perceive to be his point of view. Madeleine runs into the church, followed by Scottie. There is a chase up the staircase, but Scottie looks down and is struck by his acrophobia (vertigo). Madeleine leaves through a trapdoor at the top and we see her, through an opening in the wall, falling back down to earth, having supposedly jumped to her death.

The first scene, as I described it, is mostly from an external perspective, except for the one or two brief shots taken from Scottie’s position at the bar, which may be labelled his point-of-view shots. But in a later scene in Scottie’s car, he flips through the museum catalogue and while looking at the painting of Carlotta Valdes, there is a flash, very clearly meant to be subjective, of Madeleine’s face as she stood behind him. This shot is impossible since he could not witness this particular image, having had his face turned away when it happened.

After Scottie’s first visit to Judy, the actress who played Madeleine, Judy, has a flashback to the events at the Mission. She “sees” the same shot that we had attributed to Scottie, namely the bell tower, and there are other external shots that seem altogether inappropriate in a flashback scene that ultimately ought to be very subjective.

Hitchcock’s failure to orientate his film successfully with regard to its presentation of perspective creates fluidity that does not allow the viewer to align himself/herself with the character of Scottie. However, one scene that is successful in this respect is the scene at the cemetery, in which Hitchcock often intercuts a lateral tracking shot, meant to indicate Scottie’s trajectory, with a reverse tracking shot that frames Scottie himself moving forward, towards us.

The film’s obsession with power and death, especially towards the end of the story, becomes a bit tedious, and while Scottie’s intentions are quite clear (he wants to get the woman back whom he loved and for whose death he feels responsible – even though he’s not responsible and calling their relationship “love” is a bit grand), Judy seems masochistically determined to endure Scottie’s near-abusive behaviour when he restricts her choices in clothes, hairstyles, and so on. This aspect of the film alienates the viewer from both characters because the idea of “conditional love” is very unappealing.

I found one particular scene’s editing frustratingly bad, namely the scene in which Scottie, in his car, pursues Madeleine’s car through San Francisco. There is a very clear lack of continuity from one shot to the next and generally feels like a choppy editing job, with the car turning in one direction while the driver is clearly turning the steering wheel in the opposite direction. Jimmy Stewart has a less pathetic character than in many of his other films, but he still seems to be one step behind the viewer. Also, being a former policeman, Scottie should be able to follow someone (in the cemetery, in an art museum) without being spotted. But the only reason he didn’t seem to be spotted is that Madeleine/Judy knew he was there and pretended not to notice. Such bad tailing diminished his value as a character in my eyes.

But the film will be praised for its meticulous attention to detail, and the choice of colour (in particular, the various traces of green) the film is beyond reproach. My favourite scene, in terms of the character’s interaction with the soundtrack, is the scene with the sequoias: Bernard Herrman’s music is almost distressingly calm and quiet, even though Scottie is aggressively interrogating Madeleine. But in a film of this kind, dealing with real and illusory psychological problems, his music is at times unnecessarily loud and screeching – just consider the moment when Madeleine leaps into San Francisco Bay.

Vertigo is cold and analytical; a more immersive approach would have suited the material better, especially as a film. Kim Novak is wonderful, and the design of the film is well-chosen (the many instances of rear projection may be read as another hint at the real/illusory dichotomy of Madeleine’s character). But it is far less enjoyable than Hitchcock’s other great films, and for me, Vertigo will always be more of a cerebral joy than an engaging work of fiction.

The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006)

André Crous

The Way I Spent the End of the WorldRomania
3.5*

Director:
Cătălin Mitulescu
Screenwriters: 
Cătălin Mitulescu
Andreea Valean
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii

By the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decades-long reign, the ruthless Romanian dictator who had inspired fear in his people was a laughing stock, and while most people showed reverence to him in public, he was the object of ridicule in private.

Director Cătălin Mitulescu’s debut film, one of the gems of the Romanian New Wave, gives us a glimpse of life under the bereted leader who, in a hilarious opening scene, snatches a large block of cheese from a schoolboy because he hasn’t teethed yet. This boy, Lali (short for Lalalilu), should have been the focus of the film. If this were the case, this could easily have been one of the finest films of the Romanian New Wave. The boy is cute and curious with a natural acting ability and none of the contrivances of so many performances by child actors.

But we don’t get him in the lead. Instead, what we are left with is a very patchy storyline involving Eva, Lali’s older sister, who in her final year of high school has to choose between Alex, the slightly rebellious but well-intentioned son of a high-ranking Communist Party official, and Andrei, a boy whose ingenuity makes up for his looks. In one of the best scenes of the film, Alex knocks over a bust of Ceaușescu at his and Eva’s school; when they are both discovered at the scene of the crime, they are expelled and sent to a technical school outside the city.

There are interesting bits of narrative here and there – in particular, the plan hatched by Andrei to escape with Eva across the Danube, and their preparations for this adventure – but often the motivations are not well established, and when it transpires that Andrei and Eva are not on the same page when they find themselves halfway across the river in the middle of the night, the change of heart is left unexplained.

The film offers a nice sketch of the last year of Ceaușescan Romania, where regular power cuts and a general lack of rations are the order of the day, and the political situation is not the focus of the film. Fair enough. But Eva’s character arc is difficult to grasp, while her brother Lali’s adventurous spirit (he even has a plan to assassinate the country’s leader, but his plans fall apart when the revolution arrives) makes for arresting viewing but gets too little coverage. I would have liked a more coherent storyline for Eva, but given he is a first-time director, Mitulescu has staged his film very competently.

Cabaret Balkan (1998)

André Crous

Serbia
3.5*

Director:
Goran Paskaljević
Screenwriters: 
Dejan Dukovski
Goran Paskaljević
Filip David
Zoran Andrić
Director of Photography:
Milan Spasić

Running time: 99 minutes

Original title: Bure baruta

I’ve seen a few movies from the Balkans that deal with the violent, volatile period of the 1990s: among others, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Danis Tanović’s majestic No Man’s Land.

However, while Tanović’s film focused on a singular atrocity committed in the midst of (media, political and social) madness, Cabaret Balkan strives to present Belgrade as hell and the Danube as a river of brimstone.

The film consists of many seemingly unrelated vignettes, all containing some kind of suffering: People are beaten up, killed or humiliated, and the one common thread that does run through the film is fear, on the part of the viewer and very often on the part of at least one character in every scene. The scenes are not solidly connected, and while some of the gaps were exasperating, one must not expect every film of this sort to be presented as a neatly packaged product of hyperlink cinema (in the same vein as Magnolia, Syriana and Short Cuts). This film is more like Nashville, but without the celebrities and with much greater suffering.

One character calls Belgrade the haemorrhoids of the world’s ass, and the film makes it easy to see why. All the scenes take place during one night in the capital, but unexpectedly (and as a result, depressingly), there is nothing special about this night: It is just another night in Belgrade, and these are the kinds of things that happen; these are the kinds of things that people do to each other. It is a city fraught with tension, always already on the verge of combustion.

The characters are not well introduced, and I struggled to remember even three names of characters in the film, but separately, the scenes themselves work very well – especially when the director takes his time to really delve into the dementia of the city. My favourite scene takes place inside a bus: A young man, frustrated by the system and the fact that people have to wait while the bus driver drinks coffee, takes the passengers hostage with a mixture of threats and playful rebellion. Another impressive scene features a confrontation between a retired, handicapped policeman and the young man, a taxi driver, who had beaten him up to a pulp a few months earlier. The fact that this taxi driver is one of the most likeable characters in the film demonstrates what kind of a city this is.

Not being East European myself, I couldn’t distinguish between the languages and, therefore, the different ethnicities, which would be pivotal to an understanding of the social dynamics in this part of the world. There were brief mentions of Bosnian and Macedonian culture or sense humour, but I never knew which was which, or when such individuals were in scenes with the local Serbs.

The film works because we know it is Belgrade, but even if we didn’t, the film would still pack a punch with its collection of hellish episodes (always brutal but never alienating) set in an unstable environment where the concepts of law and order are no longer part of the city’s make-up. It is sometimes painful to watch, but it will stay with you.

The Man Who Copied (2003)

André Crous

Brazil
3.5*

Director:
Jorge Furtado
Screenwriter:
Jorge Furtado
Director of Photography:
Alex Sernambi

Running time: 125 minutes

Original title: O homem que copiava

André is a photocopier operator, barely out of his teens, who falls in love with a girl living with her father in the housing block on the other side of the street. He is also a single child living with a single parent – his mother, who spends her evenings in front of the television before shuffling off to bed.

I liked André, and it’s not just because we share a name. He seems genuine, naïve and in love. From time to time, he realises that his prospects don’t seem all that good, but he glimpses bits and pieces of other lives – the lives of the people who come into the shop to have their work photocopied – and wants to work towards a life that provides him with greater opportunities, including the girl, Sylvia.

André makes some impressive illustrations, which we get to see in a handful of animated sequences. But while the film’s first half pulls us in with the main character’s awkward attempts at courtship, the second half loses nearly all credibility with an avalanche of coincidences and a few deaths that easily eliminate the complications resulting from these coincidences.

I wanted to like the film. In the role of André, actor Lázaro Ramos gives a steady performance as a young guy who wants to grow up and leave his impoverished surroundings behind. Although he is much better off than the characters of, say, City of God, he lives with his mother, and his job as a photocopier doesn’t exactly charm the ladies he meets at the nightclub. But the second half, while competently shot and executed, is lazy in its story development and leaves the audience feeling cheated.

Many viewers might find the final reel, in which a secret is revealed that goes a long way towards explaining Sylvia’s tolerance of André’s advances (especially in the early stages when he seems to be stalking her), a bit too romantic at such a late stage of the plot. But while the film is hurt by the incredible sequence of events in its second half, the last 10 minutes are more or less believable and, more importantly, they do represent a state of affairs we want to believe.