3 stars

The Zone of Interest (2023)

André Crous

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

Zone of InterestUnited States/United Kingdom/Poland
3*

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

Running time: 105 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Plus One (1968)

André Crous

By far the best film he made in 1968, One Plus One shows Godard at a crossroads between pure reality (behind the scenes with the Rolling Stones) and fiction allegedly concerned with reality (long stretches of verbalised Black Power literature).

One plus oneUK
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Anthony B. Richmond

Running time: 110 minutes

Alternate titles: Sympathy for the Devil
                           One + One

Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard to film the Rolling Stones but then overlay so much voiceover and spoken readings that it turns the production into an inept love letter to Mao. Godard filmed the band as it developed its hit single “Sympathy for the Devil” at London’s Olympic Studios and collected some magnificent material over time as the song absorbed the band members’ musical input. However, he never interviews them, and we barely ever hear them speak. The focus is on the song, as it should be. The other half of the film is a helter-skelter jumble of the Black Power movement, punny communist graffiti, pornography and Adolf Hitler in scenes that show little regard for the audience’s enjoyment or comprehension.

But then, this is a film (for lack of a better word) made by Godard, who has never shied away from being a terribly shallow intellectual. Entitled One Plus One, this semi-documentary appears to be rooted in the director’s political activism. It is important to note that it was made in the summer of 1968, right after the mass student protests in France. However, any ideas that may be found fluttering around inside it are the words of others: mostly black freedom fighters and thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver.

In theory, the title refers to the two tracks – one reproduction and one very staged production – on which the film advances with starts and stops. The reproduction shows us the (seemingly) unstaged bits of performance by the Rolling Stones, who only ever perform parts of a single song: “Sympathy for the Devil”, which would be released on their 10th studio album, Beggars Banquet, a few months later. The very staged production involves multiple venues where we see people reading aloud from books (sometimes Black Power literature, sometimes proto-Nazi literature) or spraying graffiti in Godard’s dreadfully annoying pun-ridden style: FREUDEMOCRACY; SOVIETCONG; CINEMARXISM. On occasion, these tired puns also spill over into the title cards (e.g. SoCIAty).

The reproduction may just be small doses of the band rehearsing the same song over and over, but the long takes and proximity to the band members bring the viewer back to life after every dull stretch of ideological recitation. And although we often see the boom microphone at the edge of the frame, the song is never stripped of its magic. Perhaps it is because the music is pure bliss and the 25-year-old Mick Jagger is such a delight: Relaxed, often seen smoking a cigarette after the song has started already and before he starts singing, he is the epitome of cool. 

The fragments of the production, by contrast, are far from entertaining. However, thanks to the colourful locations along the Thames in Central London, they are much more interesting than Godard’s comparable but positively unwatchable Joy of Learning (Le gai savoir), produced earlier the same year. The four parts of the production are: random scenes of people spraying graffiti; Black Power supporters reading pages of ideological propaganda out loud in or next to burnt-out cars on the Thames riverbank; a man wearing a purple costume reading from Mein Kampf in an adult bookshop; and a taciturn woman named Eve Democracy (played by Anne Wiazemsky) walking around a lush forest answering a journalist’s increasingly complex questions with only a “yes” or a “no”. 

Eve is a serene but comically shallow figure who is never heard from again until the final metatextual scene, in which she becomes a sacrificial lamb of sorts. Her scene in the forest (labelled, in quintessentially Godardian fashion, “ALL ABOUT EVE“) is presented in an unbroken take just over 9 minutes long, and while it conveys little of substance, Wiazemsky, wearing a faded lemon-coloured peasant dress, holds our attention throughout because of the fuss around her. A man with a handheld television camera films her, another man holds the microphone, one asks a stream of questions, and a fourth is the clapper loader.

But no matter how urgent or how well developed an ideology is, it is worthless in a film if it is not firmly absorbed by the characters, the narrative and/or the landscape of the diegesis. At the pornographic bookstore, two white Maoists sit bloodied against a wall and are slapped across the face by children who visit the shop with their parents (!). In response, they yell out slogans like “Long live Mao!” or “Victory to the NLF!”. The NLF had secured Algerian independence six years earlier. Besides the Black Power literature, we are also bombarded with a disembodied but ever-so-serious voice’s narrativised descriptions of sex acts involving Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin.

To some extent, the mish-mash of approaches – observations alternating with very clearly staged pieces of cinematic theatre – reflects the unstable point in his career at which Godard made One Plus One. Having shot it just a few short months after the landmark events of the 1968 student uprisings, Godard was in the midst of an artistic revolution. His recent films (Masculin féminin, La chinoise, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Joy of Learning) had been explicitly political, and Godard, emulating many a young Paris intellectual at the time, had been seduced by Maoism. He was about to embark on a handful of projects with Jean-Pierre Gorin that would completely bulldoze the foundations of storytelling (and, in all honesty, of entertainment), but when he made One Plus One, he still straddled two worlds: his past and future approaches to film.

Despite 1967’s Weekend proclaiming itself the end of cinema, despite the vapid nonsense that was A Film Like Any Other and despite the scenes with the Rolling Stones containing no story at all, the film almost succeeds in spite of itself. We keep watching because we keep anticipating the next scene, when the film will return to the comfortable confines of the recording studio. The snippets of rehearsal we are privy to contain people who are not shot from the neck down, as Godard was apt to do in his more austere films around this time. No, we get tracking shots and pans and a crane shot or two. It is almost as if the music and the opportunity inspired the director to use the toys at his disposal rather than throw them out of his pram.

It is a shame that Godard is so incurious, though, as he completely misses the behind-the-scenes drama with the band. Brian Jones, who had been a founding member of the band, appears in the opening scene but then is barely heard from again and inexplicably disappears before the final credits. In reality, the rift between him and the other members of the band would lead to him leaving the band by the end of the year. By the following summer, he would be dead. But this is only clear in retrospect and basically absent from the film, despite Godard’s privileged first-person access.

But then, Godard was never much of a director, and it would be unfair to expect him to know the answer to the filmic equivalent of 1 + 1.

Masculin féminin (1966)

André Crous

Few of Godard’s films have aged worse than Masculin féminin, whose enjoyment and appeal firmly depend on the viewer understanding and knowing France’s socio-political context in 1965.

Masculin fémininFrance
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Willy Kurant

Running time: 100 minutes

Alternative title: Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis
Alternative English title: Masculine Feminine

Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin is a hyper-specific product of its time and place and was not made to last. More than 50 years after its release, those with enough knowledge about the context may glean a handful of insights: people’s attitude towards the Vietnam War, encroaching Yankee consumerist imperialism and France’s ban on contraceptives and abortion, among others, although these topics are often only raised in passing. They are never developed, and the film itself has nothing particularly engaging to say about any of them.

Continuing his approach of constructing a film out of purposely rough-edged fragments rather than working to elide the gaps between them, Godard gives us 15 fragments of life in France in 1965. The point of view belongs to Paul, who has just turned 21 and deems himself a writer, although that is very much up for debate. Played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, seen here in his first of many collaborations with Godard, Paul is at times almost indistinguishable from Léaud’s most famous character, the loveable but clownish Antoine Doinel. Léaud here anticipates his later incarnations of Doinel (in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run) by switching between serious reflection and dramatic theatrics at the drop of a hat. At one point, his character even places a phone call to the War Ministry to inform them that “General Doinel” wants them to take a hike.

When we first meet him, Paul is sitting alone in a café, smoking and reading out loud as he writes something so vague it resembles a mixture of free verse poetry and stream-of-consciousness philosophising. Basically, he is Godard, but attractive. He has just completed his military service and is working at a chemical plant, where he likes to observe the working class going about their daily life. But he is looking for a change and soon lands a different job thanks to the girl who is about to enter: Madeleine (played by Chantal Goya), a singer who loves everything American. It is just a matter of time before she and Paul start dating, despite his explicit rejection of America’s capitalism and actions in Vietnam.

But while Paul is vocal about his leftism, his militancy is entirely limited to having spirited conversations and spraying graffiti (where he always finds the material to do the spraying is part of the disbelief we as viewers have to suspend, however). Masculin féminin is set during the heat of the country’s first direct presidential election, and Paul obviously supports the socialist candidate, François Mitterand, against the long-time right-wing, pro-military incumbent, Charles de Gaulle.

His passivity is clear in the many scenes of violence he witnesses without showing any desire to be involved. In the first 20 minutes alone, there are two assassinations within feet of Paul, who does little more than give a shrug of indifference. There are also two suicides, right in his line of sight. Paul is surprisingly placid about the violence in front of him. The lack of conviction and the prevalence of disinterest are in line with the film’s visual style, which is much more grey than black and white, at least if compared with, say, the starkly lit A Married Woman.

This insouciance extends to the film itself, which occupies itself with more or less interesting moments rather than any particular overarching concern. Written in full, the title explicitly states that this is an assemblage of 15 fragments (deceptively called “precise facts”). However, the film’s constituent parts are much more loosely connected than Godard’s previous “fragment” film, My Life to Live, which consisted of 12 “tableaux” but did contain a storyline.

Very generally, Masculin féminin is about Paul’s involvement with Madeleine, whose short-term goal is to release a record, although the one time we see her sing in the recording studio does not inspire much confidence about her talent. She is clearly oriented towards the West, while Paul fixates on resisting it. But the scenes do not build into much of a story, despite a shocking development in the final scene, which is played with extreme nonchalance.

The film’s centrepiece is an uncut, nearly seven-minute scene in which we don’t even see Paul. Entitled “Dialogue with a consumer product”, the scene actually portrays a dialogue with a human being. Perhaps for Godard, the two are interchangeable, all the more so because the human being in question is a young girl who is indifferent to the politics of the moment. Her name is Elsa, and she is a friend of Madeleine’s. The questions Paul poses go in-depth into her views on French society and reveal that she doesn‘t have very strong opinions about the war or anything else.

Perhaps sensing that he struck gold, Godard tries to repeat the scene with another woman later in the film. Unfortunately, the actress is dreadful and the performance nothing short of cringeworthy. This is a senseless attempt to catch lightning in a bottle a second time and shows the director’s lack of ideas. And primarily because it is so time- and place-specific, Masculin féminin has not aged well. Its shallow preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, which is explicitly stated and frequently repeated yet never developed, is particularly irritating. And beyond juxtaposing Paul’s lack of visible activism, the explicit reference to an act of self-immolation, albeit off-screen, is simply crude and pointlessly appropriates the Vietnamese struggle for freedom (Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức had famously set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963).

For his part, Godard is not particularly interested in showing any humility. Early in the film, he plasters an intertitle that all but proclaims him a philosopher because he shares a certain outlook on the world, one allegedly embodied by a whole generation. His grandiose perception of his own relevance will soon lead to his downfall as he would produce some of the worst films of his entire career in the subsequent few years. Masculin féminin has its moments, but it is neither ma—lin (clever) nor f—-in (shrewd) and some time before the end, we just want to see the title card with the word FIN.

Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958)

André Crous

A trial run for one of the most famous scenes in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s Charlotte and Her Boyfriend puts two people in a room but only lets one of them speak (non-stop) for 10 full minutes.

Charlotte et son JulesFrance
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Charlotte et son Jules

After the previous year’s lovely All the Boys Are Called Patrick, which Eric Rohmer, one of his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma, had written, Jean-Luc Godard tried his own hand at writing a short film. The product had a much more narrow focus but clearly never went through many drafts. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is a stream-of-consciousness rant for a full 10 minutes in a confined space, and it loses steam very quickly.

It reunited Godard with Patrick‘s Anne Collette (whose character in that short had the same name) and features Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his very first roles. Unfortunately for the director, Belmondo was called up to serve in the French army in Algeria shortly after the shoot. As a result, Godard filled in for him during post-production, so every time Belmondo speaks, it is Godard’s own voice, immediately recognisable by his higher pitch and slight lisp. It doesn’t fit Belmondo at all, although it does make the character sound fairly pathetic.

Collette plays the titular Charlotte, an aspiring actress who arrives at the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, a writer named Jules. It quickly becomes clear that she had left him, and he is still seething with rage. Serious about giving her a piece of his mind but unable to control his rage, he lashes out in a torrent of half-formed ideas that become more and more ridiculous as he spins out of control. All the while, she smiles, remains perfectly silent and is unaffected by this mood swings. It takes a very long 10 minutes, but ultimately, it is very satisfying to learn exactly why she decided to visit him.

While Jules moves passionately about his own apartment, marching back and forth with determination, Godard delivers the voice-over mechanically, like a robot half-awake. The film is clearly on Charlotte’s side, however. During the opening credits, the music only plays when the camera is on her, which turns to silence when there is a cut to Jules. Later on, when she tilts her head at him to the right or to the left, the camera tilts along with her. This perspective, as well as Jules’s non-stop, gradually less lucid verbal diarrhoea (he wants her to come back to him, but he keeps calling her an idiot), has a devastating effect on our perception of him.

The message almost seems to be that love drives one crazy. The film’s style emphasises this slight disconnect from reality, as we mostly see Charlotte and Jules visually separated by one-shots. This, in addition to Jules’s voice clearly coming from a voice-over that does not belong to the body we see on-screen, produces an odd discontinuity between sight and sound that is wholly appropriate to the story.

And yet, while Charlotte’s happy-go-lucky attitude offers a fresh contrast to Jules’s self-involved but utterly tedious diatribe, the film is mostly a bore and feels much longer than its brief running time. The setup obviously anticipates one of the best scenes in Breathless, in which Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend 20 minutes talking in a small apartment. But whereas Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is basically a monologue, delivered with a dubbed voice that lacks emotion, Breathless features two palpably living and breathing characters interacting with each other like real people. Charlotte and Jules, by contrast, very much remain rather shallow creatures of fiction.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2014)

André Crous

The last instalment of popular Hunger Games series ends on a high note but struggles to arrive at the finish line.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Peter Craig
Danny Strong
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 135 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

Katniss is tired, and so are we. The climax has been awaited far too long, mostly because Suzanne Collins’s three novels have been stretched across four films totalling more than nine hours. Jennifer Lawrence has cemented her status as the archer par excellence whose face, three-finger salute and flaming mockingjay pin became the symbols of a revolution against the smiling but devious President Snow (Donald Sutherland).

The first film’s Hunger Games, an annual reality-show event in which two dozen boys and girls from the dystopian country’s 12 districts participate and slowly get killed off until one survives, showed us the rise of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). She had taken part in order to save her younger sister, Prim, from being forced to compete. She befriended Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a fellow competitor and boy from the same district as her, and the two of them undermined the rules, causing President Snow to lose face. This small act of defiance eventually sparked a wider rebellion, whose progress was marked by the subsequent three films in the series.

In terms of atmosphere, this final instalment is spot-on, but dramatically it feels like we have run a marathon only to arrive at the finish line inside the arena and looking around to see no one in the stands. The climactic siege occurs, would you believe it, during an ellipsis marked by a black screen. This is a deeply unsettling move on the part of the filmmakers but is sadly representative of the many missing sections in a film that otherwise has very little plot.

At its core, the narrative comprises only the penetration of the Capitol, the upper-class zone with its style-conscious inhabitants who look down upon the riff-raff, namely those who make up the districts. This is followed by a surprise public spectacle and the requisite “happy ever after” epilogue that is all too reminiscent of the never-ending final moments of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Katniss, Peeta and about a dozen fighters make their way by land and by underground sewer system to advance ever so steadily towards the palace. Inevitably, some of them die, including quite a few we never got to know at all and, thus, to whom we had absolutely no attachment. It goes without saying that all the major players survive until the very end, making the film (even for those who have not read the novels) a tad too predictable. They also confront some slimy monsters (“mutts”) the likes of which we could not have imagined in a world that, in many respects, is similar to ours. But the battle with these creatures is drawn-out and made silly by an overbearing score, causing the viewer to switch off, particularly because we know (ignoring any glimmer of realism) that almost everyone is likely to survive.

The film’s logic is not always on point, however. In one scene, the team escapes from one side of the building, cross a courtyard and enter another side of the building before the previous hideout is blasted into oblivion. On television, President Snow broadcasts the beginning and the end but somehow manages to miss their escape in broad daylight. It is also way too easy for the team to have access to a “Holo”, a machine that points out exactly where in the Capitol hundreds of booby traps, or “pods”, have been placed and allows them a way to circumvent these traps without mass casualties.

The story’s most exciting developments are saved for late in the film, once there is a false sense of calm. While it has been clear from the outset that the rebel leader, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), is slowly becoming used to being in charge, this final film includes a handful of moments that increase our suspicions about her real intentions. To the screenwriters’ credit, her ambitions remain more or less ambiguous. At the same time, it becomes obvious that Snow was not the mastermind of a corrupt system as much as he was its logical extension.

The final moments, before the atrocious coda, are by far the most interesting, as they allow Katniss to reflect on her actions and the changes that have occurred since she first stepped forward to enter the ring in the first film. Katniss’s determination to make the right decision despite the ambiguity of the facts (“real or not real?” is a game she and Peeta plays throughout the film, and for good reason) signals her as an adult capable of critical reflection and aware of the consequences of her actions. At the end of a revolution, that is exactly what we want, even if the road to get there has been long and taxing.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, director openly mocks the audience with a flat, unresolved storyline, because apparently buying two tickets is better than buying one.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Danny Strong
Peter Craig
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 120 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Besides having a title that is a mouthful, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I will also make very little sense to those unfamiliar with the world of Katniss Everdeen. We start in medias res and have to fill in much of the story for ourselves if we never read the books or saw the two previous instalments of the series.

This hurdle may have been easy to clear if the film itself wasn’t also stretched and contorted to tell a story whose central action only takes place in Part 2. The tactic of splitting the last book of a series into two final films, the first obviously ending on a cliffhanger, is one that was also deployed by Harry Potter and Twilight. If Peter Jackson had made his Lord of the Rings trilogy 10 years later, we likely would have been saddled with a four-parter, too.

A quick recap is in order: Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), co-winner of the annual Hunger Games two films ago, and her mockingjay pin have become the symbols of a brewing revolution against the upper-class bubble, the Capitol, which controls territory as far as the eye can see in a post-apocalyptic world. This fight-to-the-death contest provides entertainment to the masses, and the victor gets lifetime compensation, although this often comes at some cost to their mental health. In the previous two films, Katniss became a warrior and beacon of hope for the downtrodden masses not only of her own district but also of the others. When she caused havoc inside the game world at the end of an evidently rigged game in Catching Fire (she shot a lightning-charged arrow into the arena’s force field), the wrath of the Capitol was brought down on her. She managed to escape, but her Hunger Games partner, Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson), was captured.

The forces of the revolution, comprising generations of marginalised individuals living from hand to mouth outside the Capitol, are slowly gathering on the outskirts of the “heart” of Panem, roughly the dystopian future version of the United States. All the while, however, despite her recent rebelliousness, Katniss remains a reluctant warrior and leader of the obviously imminent uprising. Were it not that Peeta, her fellow competitor and budding romantic interest, had been captured by the government at the end of Catching Fire and her home district razed to the ground, she probably would not have shown much interest in leading the charge against the odious President Snow.

This entire film is just buildup to the inevitable showdown of which we sadly don’t even catch a glimpse. All will be revealed in Part 2. For now, we have to be content with the very slow process of Katniss gathering her inner strength, getting Peeta back into her life and planning the attack on Snow and his power-hungry constituency.

But unlike the first two films, both of which centred on an iteration of the Hunger Games contest, this instalment has no focal event. The narrative is left with little oxygen and has to rely mostly on Jennifer Lawrence’s charisma, albeit undeniable. One particularly bad aspect of the film is the young “director” Cressida (Natalie Dormer), who is supposed to be an up-and-coming filmmaker from the Capitol who has joined the rebellion, but her approach to her craft is laughable and beyond irritating, as it seems she has never worked with actors before and grew up on a staple of propaganda films with transparent metaphors: When she notices Katniss standing in front of the ruins of her district’s Justice Building, she proudly turns to her cameraman and says, “There’s your first shot.” This group of terrible filmmakers who follow Katniss around like puppies often undermines our suspension of disbelief because we ask ourselves whether Katniss’s emotions and speeches are real or put on for show in front of the camera, which we never would have contemplated in the previous films.

Speaking of emotions, the biggest problem resulting from this instalment’s negligible sketching of past events is the character of Katniss’s friend, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), who was clearly pining for her while she was spending so much time with Peeta. Now that Peeta is in the hands of the enemy and Katniss only thinks of him, Gale is a strong but silent mess who only hints at being hurt but never stands up to fight for her. Hemsworth manages not to make Gale seem like too much of a victim, but instead of having the storyline plod along by having no one speak their mind, director Francis Lawrence could have revealed a bit more about this important character’s disposition.

Perhaps The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 will eventually be absolutely riveting when it forms a coherent unit with Part 2. However, because it lacks a major action scene or any kind of story arc that would show development and proper resolution during this particular film, it feels like more of a footnote than a proper page, never mind half a novel. We can usually forgive a film for a slow beginning if the last part takes our breath away, but if that first section suddenly vaults to prominence as its own thing, we have to call a spade a spade.

Lawrence, Hemsworth, Hutchinson and especially Woody Harrelson, who absolutely steals the show, all do excellent work in this film and keep the audience relatively interested, but the story just doesn’t get us worked up the way a film about injustice and revolution ought to.

There had to be a worst one in the Hunger Games tetralogy, and by the looks of it, that dubious title belongs to Mockingjay – Part 1.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

André Crous

Despite the two big names with top billing and some good ideas, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a fragmented mess of a film whose literal golden glow cannot save it from mediocrity.

Reflections in a Golden EyeUSA
3*

Director:
John Huston
Screenwriters:
Gladys Hill
Chapman Mortimer
Director of Photography:
Aldo Tonti

Running time: 105 minutes

Everything that is golden isn’t gold. The visuals of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, which not only has two major stars as a dysfunctional couple in the South but also deals with issues of intensely repressed sexuality, are tinted gold. Every now and again, a pink dress or red streak of blood break through, but the rest is a lifeless olive-gold that is perfectly in tune with the beige of the ubiquitous military uniforms.

The film is a very muddled assortment of lust and betrayal. Everything is tenuously held together by identical bookend quotations from the original novel by Carson McCullers, which read: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” Alright, so there will be a murder, but the film’s six characters show so little development that any one of them could be shot and we’d barely even notice.

Marlon Brando plays Major Penderton, who teaches courses on leadership at the local military post. With one or two notable exceptions, he is expressionless, a block of ice completely resistant to the Southern heat. His wife is Leonora, whom Elizabeth Taylor portrays with the same kind of drunken, free-spirited and emotional callousness as she did in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We never learn what the backstory is to this unlikeliest of couples. We meet them when the marriage is already long over, and Leonora is having daily dalliances with their next-door neighbour, Lieutenant Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith).

Langdon’s wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is still traumatised after losing her baby three years ago but is lucid enough to recognise that her husband is having an affair. However, being the polar opposite of extrovert Leonora, she deliberately ignores the obvious signs. She spends her days mostly in the company of the family’s effeminate Filipino “houseboy”, Anacleto, a dreadful bit of acting by Zorro David. The character has one brilliant scene in which he throws a drink at a group of gossiping officers before fading into the wallpaper again. And then there is the taciturn private Williams (Robert Forster), who notices Leonora walking naked through the house and subsequently returns every night to look at her up close and smell her underwear.

For obvious reasons, Major Penderton has the most potential. After Williams does some work in his garden, Penderton spots him on horseback in his birthday suit. Soon, the staring begins, as Penderton simply cannot control himself in public whenever he spots the young private. But these feelings of confusion and anguish are not developed in any serious way. They merely sketch out some vague explanation for the expected murder. At one lecture, Penderton’s mind seems to wonder when he asks the students, “Is leadership learned, is it taught, [or] is man born with it?” At another point, he waxes lyrical about the military life, which is “immaculate in its hard, young fitness”. But he seems to be stuck for good.

Brando’s best moments come either when he is on his own or when he demolishes his character’s icy exterior. When he is on his own, he gallantly but rather pathetically tries to lift weights, he stares into a mirror to rehearse his witty lines and facial expressions for a social event at his own home. Or he spreads a handful of rejuvenating cream over his face, not unlike a clown before a show. These are sad but intimate moments that allow us a glimpse of Penderton’s melancholy existence as an act that might allow him to blend in. But the scenes in which his well-kept façade disintegrates are equally powerful. The way his face contorts when Leonore taunts him, or when his horse refuses to listen to him, makes for very compelling cinema.

The scene with the horse is absolutely astonishing. When Penderton had earlier gone riding with his wife and her lover, he fell off the horse. Now he takes his wife’s prize stallion, Thunderbird, but when he kicks in the side, it bolts into the forest. The thick foliage scratches and scrapes his face. He holds on for dear life. And Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score kicks into high gear. But it is the low-angle, titled camerawork and the rapid editing, in particular, that draw attention. The confused, all-too-human look of utter desperation on Brando’s face and his violent but futile response are pitiful but make him the most interesting character of all.

The title ostensibly refers to a drawing by Anacleto of a peacock, which has a “tiny and grotesque” golden eye. But as with so much else in the film, this inference also goes nowhere. While some moments are reflected (in gold) in Williams’s left eye, especially when he is leering at Leonore from afar, the metaphor is impenetrable.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a terribly uneven film that unspools in fits and starts. It has enough characters with promising storylines to fit three feature-length films, but it doesn’t dig into any of them. The tensest scenes are the ones between Taylor and Brando, but they are few and far between. The plot ultimately explodes with an unintentionally hilarious final shot (multiple whip pans between murderer and murdered, with a startled bystander sandwiched in between). The film has the makings of a fascinating social study, but its fragments never cohere into anything resembling a whole.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

André Crous

In The Desolation of Smaug, the second Hobbit instalment, Peter Jackson takes an unfortunate page from Spielberg’s book.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of SmaugUSA/New Zealand
3*

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

Running time: 160 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Battle of the Five Armies

When the first film in the Hobbit trilogy was released, everyone kept talking about the disproportionate length of the films (totalling around nine hours) compared with the size of the source text, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 300-page novel. If War and Peace could be made into a three-hour film, what prevented Jackson from producing a film length commensurate with the size of his story?

It doesn’t take an outsized intellect to recognise financial considerations playing an important role here, and one would expect that, if anyone could entertain us for such an extended period of time, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson would be the man for the job. But just as The Hobbit precedes the story contained in The Lord of the Rings, so too does this current batch of films seem to be the work of a much less experienced director.

Because this second instalment of The Hobbit, titled The Desolation of Smaug, is the second film of a three-part series, we cannot have expected there to be much to get excited about, as it functions mostly as a bridge between the first and last parts of the story. But the same was true of the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, and yet Jackson used majestic battle scenes and spectacular locations to his advantage to keep our attention.

Very little happens in Smaug, at least until the very end, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarfs reach the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), where Smaug the dragon has lain in a chamber full of gold ever since he chased out the dwarfs, to whose kingdom he had laid waste. For the most part, we are on a journey with the dozen characters as they travel through Mirkwood Forest, arrive at Lake-town thanks to a complicated and conflicted widower and cross Long Lake to Erebor, where Bilbo is charged with stealing the Arkenstone gem from Smaug. On a parallel track, we see Gandalf the Grey’s realisation that he and his companions are up against something much more evil than they had anticipated.

But our unease with this film has as much to do with the thin storyline – once more spread over some two hours and 40 minutes – as it does with the embarrassingly amateurish presentation of romance onscreen.

We can all remember the weepy relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Return of the King; in Smaug, the focus is on Kíli the Dwarf (Aidan Turner), the nephew of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a female elf from Mirkwood who is the object of Elven Prince Legolas’ affections. In the film, at any rate, Kíli certainly stands out among his band of brothers as he is the only dwarf without a beard, and when he and his fellow dwarfs are taken prisoner by Elvenking Thranduil, Legolas’ father, he immediately hits it off with Tauriel.

This initial attraction, in no way hidden, will quickly lead to the two swooning over each other. Jackson, for all his filmmaking prowess, simply cannot resist the temptation to go melodramatic on us. When Kíli is struck by a poisoned arrow in the thigh, it is up to Tauriel to rub the healing herb into his flesh while intoning a spell, and when Kíli looks up at her, would you believe, she seems to shimmer with a blinding angelic light. It is difficult not to laugh, as we get unfortunate flashbacks to the worst film in the Jackson canon, his calamitous The Lovely Bones from 2009.

Jackson’s camera also flies all over the place, often making us nauseous when a wild helicopter shot is inserted between much calmer visuals. For the director, it would seem that “coverage” implies catapulting his machinery in every direction and using that footage whenever he needs to cut away from someone for a brief moment. Reckless track-ins, especially in one of the opening scenes, in the Prancing Pony inn in Bree, are also tiresome because their use speaks to Jackson’s apparent inability to come up with creative solutions to creating tension – in this case, to suggest the potential dangers around Thorin.

One truly adventurous scene, however, occurs during the dwarfs’ escape from Mirkwood: At one point, the camera seems to be floating on the wild river and pans from side to side as one of the dwarfs rolls around in a barrel, mowing down the Orcs on the riverbank as he careers full-speed across the river bends. It is a breathtakingly choreographed bit of action, all in a single take, thoroughly reminiscent of the epic single-take chase scene in the Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg–directed The Adventures of Tintin.

Smaug may be Bilbo’s tale, but it belongs entirely to the titular dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is much more clever than he appears to be, and while he certainly poses a threat to the existence of all in Middle-earth – and the glint in his eye looks almost exactly like Sauron – we cannot help but respect his intelligence and even his wiliness, and Cumberbatch’s work here is mesmerizing.

While Smaug isn’t at the same level as Jackson’s three films from the beginning of the millennium, and despite the often amateurish representation of romance or infatuation, it is certainly an improvement on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and time goes by more quickly (that might be because the film is nearly 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor).

Unfortunately, Bilbo is not as active as we would like him to be, and he all but completely disappears from view in the Lake-town scenes. After we had lost Gandalf in The Two Towers, he reappeared towards the end with reinforcements at Helm’s Deep and provided one of the most memorable moments of that extraordinary film. But by the end of Smaug, Bilbo has done so little that we forget about him, and the film literally leaves him hanging – in a cage at Dol Guldur, where he discovers the Necromancer.

The Desolation of Smaug showcases little of the imagination we have come to associate with Jackson and his previous depictions of Middle-earth. At times Spielbergian with his sentimentality, here he rarely awes us with the breadth of his vision. The scenes with Bilbo or Smaug – and especially with the two of them – are marvellous, and so is an early scene with giant spiders, but overall it would seem Jackson has lost his Midas touch.

War Horse (2011)

André Crous

The First World War–set War Horse is Steven Spielberg’s formulaic, epic ode to friendship, courage and horses.

War HorseUSA
3*

Director:
Steven Spielberg
Screenwriters:
Lee Hall
Richard Curtis
Director of Photography:
Janusz Kaminski

Running time: 145 minutes

The key to understanding War Horse lies in a shot that occurs about 45 minutes into the film.

What starts as a close-up of a horse lying on the battlefield gradually shifts, as the camera moves backwards and upwards, to reveal an entire field strewn with equine carcasses. The image is a direct copy of the signature shot of the classic Gone with the Wind, in which a city street in downtown Atlanta is filled with hundreds of bloodied bodies of the injured, the dying and the dead – all victims of the Civil War.

The link between the two shots is director Steven Spielberg’s very clear desire to present his central character, the titular war horse named Joey, as he would a human being. If you fail to see this horse as any less human than the individuals who dot the narrative, you will find the experience very frustrating indeed. Though Spielberg stops short of having the animal speak, one has the very firm impression throughout that the horse can understand the humans perfectly.

War Horse starts by making a play for the audience’s emotions immediately. The teenage Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) lives on his parents’ farm in Devon, England, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills. In a drunken stupor, his father – as in most of Spielberg’s films, here too the father is either absent or somehow severely lacking as a parent – buys a show horse for the astronomical price of 30 guineas in an attempt to rile up the other bidder, his landlord. But the family doesn’t have the money, so the landlord gives them an ultimatum: Train the horse to plough the field and earn back the money by next summer or lose the house.

Of course, despite the odds, Joey the horse is trained remarkably easily by young Albert, who by virtue of his combination of sincerity, determination and humility seems to speak to the horse. Actually, he does speak to the horse, and the horse listens. Also, in the matter of a few minutes, Albert and Joey establish their own code of communication: If Albert cups his hands and blows into them to imitate an owl, Joey will come running. When the boy and the horse are tragically separated, we already start imagining what this framing device will look like come the climax.

This listening is one of the baffling aspects of the film that many viewers might find too difficult to swallow. Though it is often noted that Joey is “a remarkable horse”, its reason for being so extraordinary is never explained. To be sure, Joey overcomes some terrible obstacles along the way, most notably the First World War, and accomplishes some daring feats, but mostly it is taken for granted the horse will make it to the end of the film no matter what.

Joey travels between many owners, sometimes because they are killed, sometimes because the horse is captured by someone else. A significant part of the film is made up of these loose threads in which the individual, briefly in possession of the horse but always respectful towards the animal, discovers just how wonderful the young stallion is. In the end, the threads are loosely connected, but by that stage, you might need to have some teeth pulled because of the syrupy storyline you’ve been subjected to already.

Again and again, War Horse portrays Joey as a horse with human qualities, and in the face of the obvious sentimentality that Spielberg conveys with his spotlights and his soft focus, many of these scenes work almost in spite of themselves. A particularly touching moment comes when Joey cares for Topthorn, a companion horse that resembles everyone’s idea of Black Beauty.

Joey is clearly the film’s central attraction, but he is special only because he is the title character and Spielberg’s camera loves him. At one point, in a dazzling moment that will forever be associated with the film, just as the boys riding their bicycles toward the moon is tied to E.T., Joey gallops heroically across a battlefield in a single, unbroken take, while explosions rock the night sky.

For all the galloping and the detailed recreations of battle scenes and the ghastly trenches of the First World War, the film is about a promise Albert made to Joey: “Wherever you are, I will find you, and I will bring you home!” The stench of sentimentality could easily have been worse than the stench of the dugouts on the frontlines, but for the most part, Spielberg’s creativity transcends his material.

Mindwalk (1990)

André Crous

Mindwalk is a philosophical talkathon that promotes a vision of the world as an interconnected whole even as its central trio barely interacts with anyone or anything else.

MindwalkUSA
3*

Director:
Bernt Capra
Screenwriters:
Floyd Byars
Fritjof Capra
Director of Photography:
Karl Kases

Running time: 110 minutes

Mindwalk is a film with talking heads. It engages in deep philosophical discussions about the complexity of life and the shortfalls of the Cartesian way of thinking. But it features very little human drama and completely ignores its spectacular setting, the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey off the coast of France.

Written by Fritjof Capra, a physicist and expert in systems theory, and directed by his brother, Bernt, the film features a politician, a poet and a scientist ruminating at length on whether one can understand life by approaching it piece by piece, like a machine. Actually, it is mostly the scientist, Sonia Hoffman, doing the ruminating. As the clear proxy for the systems theorist who wrote the screenplay, Ingmar Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann takes charge of the conversation and never lets up. Shifting back and forth between physics and philosophy, she elaborates in detail on the two fields and quickly plays the role of wise teacher lecturing to her curious students.

Sam Waterston plays Jack Edwards, a conservative Democratic senator who is fresh off an unsuccessful run for the White House and has come to France for a long weekend to recuperate. His longtime friend and former speechwriter, Thomas Harriman (John Heard), is living in Paris and accompanies him on his trip. No sooner do they land at Mont-Saint-Michel than they come across Sonia, who comes here to think big thoughts. But this is where the action, limited as it is, stops for the next 90-odd minutes. And what follows is scene after scene of Sonia explaining her “ecological” vision of the world that emphasises interconnectedness.

And yet, this intellectual trio is completely cut off. With rare exceptions, they do not interact with anyone but move about in empty spaces in and around the abbey. They resemble the electrons inside the vast expanses of the atom over which Sonia waxes lyrical. She is continuously in a position of power. Seemingly all-knowing, she is the one who teaches but speaks with the force and the tone of someone used to having to speak over people to convince them. Now and then, Waterston and Heard make quick quips or ask a question, but they are like well-read middle-schoolers attending a lecture for PhD students.

But given the setting, namely the famous abbey on an island that is only accessible on foot during low tide, it is astonishing that religion never features in their exchanges. Nor, for that matter, does Jack’s or Thomas’s personal life. And the conversation twists and turns at the whim of the speakers. Very little is based on the actual environment they move through. This is a truly breathtaking lack of imagination and creativity and proves the film’s real purpose: to educate rather than to entertain.

Sonia swings wildly between pure physics and the heavy burden of being connected to (and, therefore, responsible for) everything. She even appears to promote Béchamp’s terrain theory by pointing to the relative difference in cost between maintaining a healthy diet and paying for a medical procedure because of bad eating habits. But what she is talking about is nothing short of a systemic overhaul where the modern world (and politicians, like Jack) prioritise quick fixes and incremental change, if any. She mentions the Native Americans making decisions by considering their impact seven generations down the line. And there are some worthy insights about the impact of our perception on the thing we perceive. 

These are all interesting thoughts, but in a narrative vacuum, they struggle to breathe and ultimately suffocate under their own weight. There is a very meek attempt to show that Sonia does not, in fact, have all the answers. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, who is always in a huff, and seems to live a very solitary life with her books and her theories. But Mindwalk offers us no insight into her life, and she shows no signs of personal development.

Every now and again, Thomas quotes a philosopher (“as Heraclitus once said…”) or a mythical figure (“as Merlin once said to King Arthur…”) or recites an entire poem (Pablo Neruda’s “Enigmas”), however tangentially relevant to the conversation. But no connections are as bad as the filmmaker’s attempts to jump from one scene to another. The cuts are hard and sharp and there is no winding down of a comment, just a realisation that the scene has come to an end, and it’s time for a change of locale.

Although it is unclear how far Jack came in the race for the presidency, his mere presence here should provide a rich opportunity to investigate the potential for implementing Sonia’s ideas in practice. Jack freely admits he is beholden to lobbyists and the whims of his constituents, but his tendency to compromise is at odds with the paradigmatic shift that Sonia desires. And yet, this clash of approaches is never seriously tackled. All three seem to agree that all of this talk of change is hopelessly impractical, at least within the current system. But no one is willing to change the system itself; they would rather be content with merely discussing the benefits of living in a different system.

The film, bereft as it is of narrative development, could easily have been staged as a theatre play instead. What saves it from utter mediocrity is the performances of its three leads, who all do the best they can under the circumstances. Waterston, in particular, conveys a genuine empathy and intellectual curiosity to stand in for those viewers who find this kind of thing more appealing.

Mindwalk is not a work of entertainment, not by a long shot. It is a video with a single purpose: For Capra to have something to screen for his first-year systems theory students on their first day of class. The question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there something when it mostly consists of nothing?” We could easily ask the same of the film.