3 stars

An Officer and a Spy (2019)

André Crous

Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair.

An Officer and a SpyFrance
3*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Robert Harris
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: J’accuse

Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration.

We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him.

One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus.

Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing.

It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. I realise that I no longer recognise France. [Please protect] what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. Polanski also fails to detail how the Dreyfus affair exacerbated feelings of Christian Gallic pride among the general population.

But Picquart goes it alone, persevering despite his inherent antisemitism, driven by a desire for justice. He carries out his investigation without the help of anyone else in his intelligence office. No amount of pushback from the generals above him can douse his passion for the truth, and no one intimidates him. These might be admirable characteristics in a man, but we do not see him emotionally tested. Everything always works out. By the time all sense of justice seems lost, he suddenly meets not only Deputy (and future Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau but also revered novelist of the working class, Émile Zola. Within days, Zola’s famous newspaper article, “J’accuse!”, lays into every powerful individual involved in the Dreyfus conspiracy. And thus begins the final legal brawl.

But despite France being a colonial power, the scenes in court, openly biased in favour of the military, paint the country as little more than a banana republic. What should be the most intense part of the film is staged and edited together as a comedy.

Jean Dujardin stars as Picquart, but despite his amiable demeanour, the character doesn’t undergo any change – a point strikingly made in the film’s final scene. An unrecognisable Louis Garrel plays Dreyfus, whose lack of presence in the film makes him a peripheral character in his own story. But in the scenes where he does appear, he responds to the constant humiliation with brave stoicism that sometimes cracks under the pressure of boiling anger. In other words, like a real human being.

It is well established that in 1977, a 43-year-old Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey. He admitted to this in court. So, while he has said explicitly that he understands Dreyfus’s persecution, their cases are in no way the same. Dreyfus was innocent and was framed because he was Jewish. Polanski was and is still guilty because he committed a criminal act. In this regard, his being Jewish is about as relevant as his being 5’5″. If the director really wanted to make a film about his alleged innocence (despite pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor), let him stage a re-enactment of his starring role in the vile 1977 rape. 

But there is no connective tissue whatsoever between An Officer and a Spy and Polanski. The film isn’t good or bad because of his personal life. It is just mediocre because he couldn’t be bothered to imbue it with the authentic messiness of life.

A Hidden Life (2019)

André Crous

A Hidden Life may have relatively more substance than most of Terrence Malick’s other films, but the director’s immutable style is lazy at best and incongruous at worst.

A Hidden LifeUSA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
Jörg Widmer

Running time: 170 minutes

Most of us tell ourselves that we would have stood up for justice if we had lived in Germany under Hitler. While it is true that many Germans at the time were unaware of the full extent of the Jewish genocide, they knew enough. But what if your neighbours and friends also went along to get along, regardless of whether they believed in the Nazis’ hysterical nationalism and ideology of Aryan superiority? At what point would you have resisted the march towards groupthink? At what point would you have abandoned your principles?

A Hidden Life doesn’t get close to answering this question for us. However, this is a Terrence Malick film, so the question is not even evident at all. Nothing is, except the audio-visuals: In addition to reams of pages of voice-overs, which is, unfortunately, par for the course in a Malick production, there is also the expected curated selection of classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Dvořák) and other stunning instrumental pieces (Górecki, Pärt), as well as breathtaking emerald-green scenery that is far more complex than the film ever tries to be. 

Based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, a young Austrian farmer who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, the plot is more substantial than many of the director’s other recent films. And yet, because it is Malick, we get very few scenes of genuine drama. Instead, there are plenty of oh-so-serious voice-overs or off-screen monologues to convey romance and struggle. These narrations are delivered in English by German actors. And since Malick has never cared much for the realism of the spoken word, they all fall flat.

We first meet Franz (August Diehl) and his young wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), in 1939, around the time Germany invades Poland. We don’t get to see any of this, however, because the camera is too busy roving the lush green hillsides and calling our attention to the prominent church tower in the small town of St. Radegund, very close to the former border with Germany. (Austria had been annexed by the German Reich in March 1938.) The town’s aggressively nationalistic and often drunk town mayor likes to rant and rave about how “foreigners swarm over our streets – immigrants who don’t care for the past, only for what they can grab”. And the townspeople appear to share these views.

But all the while, the taciturn Franz’s face is sombre. We see his stubborn resistance. We see the wheels turning in his head. And we see his unwillingness to take up arms against Germany’s so-called enemies. But whatever personal, emotional or intellectual motivation he has remains obscured all the way through. Why does he resist when no one else does? What makes him different? Where does he find the resolve to persist despite threats of violence and, ultimately, the certainty that this path leads to an early death?

At first, Franz is called up to do military training. Although he is against the idea of ultimately using this knowledge to fight for the Reich, he heeds the call. A few years later, with the war in full swing, he is called up to serve, but upon arrival at the garrison, he refuses to pledge allegiance to Hitler and is arrested. He says he would be willing to serve in a non-combat capacity, but for this, he also has to take a loyalty oath. Thus begins his incarceration, which quickly leads to a trial and, in short order, his execution.

While he is away, his wife, Fani, becomes the target of the villagers because her husband has a moral compass. On top of taking care of her three young daughters, she also has to plough the field, harvest the crops and draw water from a drying well. But the village turns against her, first with the scowling looks they give her, then by shouting at her in public and finally by shamelessly stealing produce from her field. She is even hounded out of church by the stares of her fellow congregants. She is othered because of her husband’s refusal to kill for their Führer and, more importantly, because of her love of and respect for Franz. But what her own views are is impossible to determine despite the hours we spend with her.

While Franz languishes in Tegel prison in Berlin, the soundtrack continues to be filled with his and Fani’s monotonous voice-over readings of their letters to each other. But because Franz speaks so rarely, at least outside the ethereal sphere of the voice-over, we don’t understand what he is really thinking in real time, and this ponderous approach gets us nowhere close to understanding what brought him to this point. “I can’t do what I believe is wrong”, he says. The Nazis are perplexed as to why he would risk his life to take a stand that is bound to be forgotten by history. Time and again, they tell him that his voice doesn’t matter. However, the question of why they should care if his actions are supposedly so insignificant is never addressed.

It goes without saying that this kind of bravery, especially in retrospect, is absolutely extraordinary. History provides us with very few examples of such men or women. And it is a shame that the film recounting his story is so empty. Over the course of its three-hour running time, we get to know every inch of the farm and the granite mountains but learn very little about the man at the centre. He is religious, but we never see him reading the Bible. He has no real answers to others’ questions, but he has no questions of his own.

Despite the vertiginous use of wide-angle lenses and restless camera movements, not to mention the frames that decapitate its characters, there are also countless beautiful shots. But presenting a film about suffering as if it were a spread in Outdoor Photography is highly questionable, particularly as these images have no discernible purpose other than beauty for the sake of beauty. Unlike The Thin Red Line, in which Malick depicted the Solomon Islands as an exotic utopia ravaged by the horrors of war, A Hidden Life never deviates from portraying Radegund as an aesthetically pleasing wonderland that is always lush and green, no matter the season.

By now, the Malick approach to cinematography has long run its course. A film cannot live off push-ins, pull-outs, jump cuts, low angles, a dazzling colour palette and endless voice-overs alone. Any five-minute extract will contain all of these elements. Sometimes, there is a surprise, but it is never a good one, as when the camera suddenly takes a first-person perspective for no other reason than to show off. The most memorable example is of a prison guard assaulting Franz, causing the camera to flail around violently on the ground. Or when a fade-out elides an expected confrontation before it even starts. Or when a Nazi officer quotes from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

The struggle and the suffering get lost in the poetry of it all. Whatever is going on, there will be a tiresome voice-over intruding on the action or a violin playing in the background. It’s all mesmerising and can lull us into a state of reverie but is completely lacking in immersion or immediacy. 

This is a story worth telling, but A Hidden Life is not the way to tell it.

My Salinger Year (2020)

André Crous

My Salinger Year, about an awkward girl learning the ropes at a literary agency, is as shallow as a glossy magazine.

My Salinger YearCanada/USA
3*

Director:
Philippe Falardeau
Screenwriter:
Philippe Falardeau
Director of Photography:
Sara Mishara

Running time: 100 minutes

She has never read Catcher in the Rye but worships its elusive author, J.D. Salinger. She wants to be a writer but rarely puts pen to paper. She never learns any hard lessons but is constantly on the verge of tears. Her name is Joanna, and she is a mess, a bit like the movie she stars in, called My Salinger Year.

In the mid-1990s, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) is fresh off a degree in English literature and has published two poems in the Paris Review. On the spur of the moment, she decides to put her studies at Berkeley on hold, break up with her boyfriend and move to – rather, stay on in, as she is the kind of person whom things happen to rather than the one who makes them happen – New York City. She wants to become a writer, but in the meantime, she has to pay the bills, so she contacts a recruitment agency.

Like a godsend or just a magnificent manifestation of serendipity, she immediately lands an interview with the serene but mostly expressionless Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), an agent who always seems to be moving in slow motion. Joanna is told that she will spend her days typing out dictation and answering the heaps of fan letters sent to her client, “Jerry” aka J.D. Salinger, by using rather impersonal form letters. Under no circumstances is she to write on her own, at all.

Of course, she ignores this advice, but not in the way we might expect. She doesn’t appear to write much, except a line of poetry here and there, which we never hear or read. No, she is so filled with her own sense of importance and a naïve Messiah complex that she starts writing personal responses to the fan letters. Her own life is a disaster, but she wants to help others, most of whom are obsessed with Holden Caulfield (it seems those who admire Salinger’s other novels are much more balanced individuals), fix theirs.

In the meantime, director Philippe Falardeau spends an inordinate amount of time trying to cram his screenplay full of retrospective comedy about the time period, particularly as far as the then-nascent internet technology is concerned. Somehow, while this is 1995, Margaret is still afraid of bringing a computer into the office. When a PC does appear, everyone is told it should be used to track down Catcher in the Rye facsimiles on the World Wide Web. And people gossip about how silly e-mails are and how they are, fingers crossed, just a passing fad… Har har.

But then, despite her plain incompetence at the job, Joanna receives more and more responsibilities from Margaret, who cannot be a fool because, after all, she represents the mythical Salinger. Joanna even starts chatting to “Jerry” over the phone, who encourages her to write every day. We never see her following his advice, but by the end of the story, she suddenly has a collection of poetry ready to be submitted to that pinnacle of excellence in the realm of the printed word, the New Yorker. She might just be full of herself, but the film appears to be telling us that she has blossomed into a publishable author along the way (perhaps via osmosis through her connection, however tangential, with literary greatness?).

We never figure out what is going on in Joanna’s head because she appears to be a teenage girl trapped in a 20-something wannabe poet’s body. She has told herself that she will be a writer one day, but this film provides no blueprint or development that would allow her to reach that goal. Very little drama is on display. Even when things get heated (for example, when a teenage Salinger fan, much more mature than her, comes to the office and gives her a good dressing down), she simply persists with her juvenile rebellion by continuing to write non-form letters to the fans.

The decision to present Salinger as an enigma (his face is never clearly shown) deserves some praise, as does the long single take at the end of the film that turns out to be a dream, but Qualley never rises to the challenge of infusing her character with more than a deer-lost-in-the-headlights quality.

My Salinger Year, which is lit so brightly that even the night-time scenes feel like they are taking place at high noon, is the ultimate feel-good Hallmark Channel film. At least the similar-in-the-broadest-outlines The Devil Wears Prada had two strong intriguing central characters, but Falardeau’s film has none, despite a last-ditch effort to inject some drama into Weaver’s character, Margaret. And at a major moment towards the end of the film, when Margaret reveals to Joanna that she knew the latter would make a fabulous agent the first time she laid eyes on her, it is difficult not to wonder whether Margaret has lost her marbles.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

High-Rise (2009)

André Crous

High-Rise is a documentary feature that exposes (rather than examines) how shallow the people at the top of the Brazilian real estate market really are.

High-RiseBrazil
3*

Director:
Gabriel Mascaro
Screenwriter:
Gabriel Mascaro
Director of Photography:
Pedro Sotero

Running time: 70 minutes

Original title: Um Lugar ao Sol

They live in penthouses atop giant high-rises named “Stradivarius” or “Versailles” or “Rembrandt” in Brazil’s biggest cities.  They are among their country’s elite real estate owners, but their isolation from the rest of society is immediately visible when they open their mouths. And their views expose almost all of them as meritless ignoramuses.

Gabriel Mascaro’s barely feature-length documentary entitled High-Rise (the original Portuguese title translates as A Place in the Sun) contains snippets from eight interviews the director conducted with some very wealthy people. Most of them are single, although we also meet an adult son and his mother, a teenage boy with his parents, and a couple. Unfortunately, we don’t see much of their living quarters, but there are plenty of shots showing how far removed they are from the hustle and bustle of life at street level.

While penthouses are generally thought of as expansive and sometimes do take up an entire floor (or more), most of the interviewees focus on the privacy such a location affords them. They are not disturbed by people one floor up moving furniture around because there is no one above them. They are not disturbed by people in the next building looking at them because many of them live in the highest building around. And one particular individual even cheerfully elaborates on how her two-floor apartment separates her from people inside her own home, especially those working for her.

This part, which lets us peek behind the curtain at the eccentricities (or, less diplomatically, classism and even racism), is easily the most galling. “Living up high, you have the opportunity to experience another reality. It gives you a sense of domination”, says one woman, who may just have the most self-reflection of the lot. Another penthouse owner complains how the people from the favelas have “invaded the hillside” and tells us, without a hint of irony, that they have “shut themselves off from everything and make up their own rules”. This is a breathtaking statement from someone who chooses to live on the top floor of a skyscraper.

But she’s not done yet. She goes on to suggest that the poorest members of society should just learn to behave. “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean that you have to be a bandit.” It gets worse. A French woman, who has lived in Brazil for around half a century but still doesn’t speak Portuguese like a native, refers to a sculpture of a black face in her home as “my slave”. Later on, a businessman, perhaps the film’s most professional individual, refers to economy class on flights as “slave quarters”. For these people, the world is black and white: They are white, and from their high-rise they look down at everyone else; the rest are black slaves invading their view.

It’s a very sad array of people, indeed. We never see them interact with anyone else. They appear not to have any friends, and the film makes a point of showing us that the couple, who lives in a truly gargantuan penthouse, moves around in silence with each doing his own thing. In addition, almost everyone dresses like they are from the lower middle class, with sandals and bad clothes.

Although the subject matter has a great deal of appeal, this High-Rise almost seems unfinished. The individuals are never introduced, so we don’t know who they are, in which cities they are or what they do. Some footage is of the home-video variety and looks absolutely atrocious. Fortunately, from time to time, the camera is used in some creative ways: A long ride up a glass elevator feels like we’re headed to heaven, and the images showing the buildings’ giant shadows on the beach, between which beachgoers have to find a sliver of sunlight, are truly remarkable. But it is regrettable that the director did not allow us to get to know his subjects any better. The interviews zig and zag all over the place, and in the end, there simply isn’t enough material to hold our attention for a full hour.

1917 (2019)

André Crous

As a purely technical exercise in depicting the First World War, 1917 (and its seemingly unbroken single take) is successful but offers no insight into the characters it depicts or the events it recreates.

1917UK
3*

Director:
Sam Mendes
Screenwriters:
Sam Mendes
Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 120 minutes

One of the most infamous examples of a camera movement is the push-in of Kapò, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film about the Second World War. When a young Jewish woman in a concentration camp throws herself on an electrified fence and dies instantaneously, the camera dollies in see her corpse up close. The shot is grotesque and was justly condemned at the time by Jacques Rivette and subsequently by Serge Daney and many others. While showing something that everyone can agree is horrific, the camera seeks to beautify the moment for no purpose whatsoever.

Sam Mendes’s film about a single mission in the First World War, entitled 1917, does not commit quite the same atrocity, but it does use the camera to reach for beauty when that is precisely what a director should avoid if seeking to examine the human cost of war in any serious way. We follow along with two very young British lance corporals, William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (‎Dean-Charles Chapman), when they are sent across no man’s land to warn some 1,600 soldiers they are walking into a trap and should call off a planned attack. The director’s choice of a seemingly unbroken take, whose aim is clearly to immerse the viewer in the experience of war, is not without merit, but the execution makes it clear how shallow his reasoning was.

The single take appears to be the film’s raison d’être because it certainly isn’t the plot. Such a shot is often used to emphasise both the passage of time and the unity of action. We are meant to see development or interaction in a much more personal way as the point of view is generally tied to a single character. While The Lady in the Lake is the well-known but rather unrefined archetype, the best example is unquestionably the close focus of László Nemes’s Son of Saul.

In 1917, the camera starts with the two young men and ultimately settles on just one, who appears to mature over the course of around 18 hours of ominous calm, brutal warfare, bloody injury, a near-death experience and worse. But the camera has no particular point of view. While it starts as a humanlike observer alongside Schofield and Blake, it doesn’t take long before it flies low over a lake or high above a roaring river while the characters have to trudge around it or struggle to keep their head above water.

The notion of being immersed in the action also suggests that the viewer gets to experience the events (more or less, given the relative safety of the movie theatre) in the same way. But 1917 is so chock-full of Thomas Newman’s music, whose volume is dialled up all the way, that it is often impossible to focus on anything other than the mood being communicated: fear, happiness, danger, etc. The climactic battle scene is little more than soldiers running across a field as bombs explode to punctuate the heroic boom of Newman’s score. A scene in a medic’s tent after the battle is filled with bleeding injured soldiers, but they are mostly whimpering, and any loud screaming is drowned out by the music on the soundtrack.

Mendes is not showing us the war as it is. He is showing us the war as a work of art and uses a continuous tracking shot to do so. In addition, the camera and the lens stay squeaky clean for the duration of the running time, despite the explosions, the water, the dust and the mud that at least one of the characters has to wade through. This approach is simply unacceptable. The fact that the shot is, in fact, stitched together from multiple smaller shots, with some of the stitches easily noticeable, does not mitigate this problem, as the film’s ultimate goal is still, quite clearly, to look pretty rather than convey the visceral experience of being down in the tranches, not flying above them. 

But what is particularly irksome is the camera’s inhuman movements, as when Schofield plunges down a waterfall while the camera is not only suspended above him but tracks backwards high up in the air. Or when the same character charges down a trench packed with soldiers, and the camera, instead of following closely behind to show us the chaos at close range, rises up out of the trench and follows smoothly above the soldiers’ heads. These are pretty shots, but they undercut the very role of the camera here, which is to serve as an invisible soldier.

The story itself is as thin as a rail, and the two major characters have little to no complexity. One long scene is wasted in a French town so that 1917 can implicitly hint at Schofield’s past, which is a secret it could have kept to itself until the final moments, when this implicitness is made explicit, in case we had missed the earlier scene.

This was a purely technical exercise aimed at further developing the skills Mendes had already showcased in the opening scene of Spectre. However, unlike, say, Alfonso Cuarón (and, specifically, DoP Emmanuel Lubezki), who has mastered the use of the unbroken take, the result here feels vapid and inconsequential, devoid of significance because it contains so little and says even less.

Matthias & Maxime (2019)

André Crous

In Matthias & Maxime, Xavier Dolan continues his downward trajectory by choosing to keep his two titular characters apart for almost the entire film.

Matthias & MaximeCanada
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 120 minutes

We know the drill: Two straight best friends – more specifically, two guys, stuck somewhere between graduation and responsible adulthood – kiss, and the moment changes their lives forever. At times, Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime is marginally more nuanced than that, but the nuance is actually just long stretches of inertia separated by spasmodic revelations.

As it happens, the kiss is not of their own choosing but merely a result of them agreeing to appear as actors in a short film project about identity. The small-statured, tattooed Maxime (“Max”) volunteers, while his smouldering best friend, Matthias (“Matt”), has to be pressured into accepting the challenge, which he does because of their decades-long friendship. Although initially horrified at the idea of kissing each other (especially because of unverified whispers that this is may not be the first time), the two friends eventually man up and lock lips, which is so momentous the screen turns black.

Almost immediately, Matt has an identity crisis that he takes the entire film to work through. Unfortunately, for the duration of the plot, he appears to be in the closet, emphatically in denial while repeatedly staring at every half-sexy guy moving through his line of sight but without showing any sign of development. Max’s focus is elsewhere. He is about to move to Australia to run away from his problems, the most urgent of which is his mentally ill mother (played to perfection, as usual, with seething resentment and no shortage of verbal abuse by Anne Dorval), but gradually we come to realise he is likely running away because of his sexuality, too. One mesmerising scene with Max on a public bus reveals exactly what we were hoping to learn but then fails to build on this discovery in any meaningful way.

Matthias & Maxime tips its hand early on when Matt’s boss at his law firm, hinting at an upcoming promotion, suggests that many people may be used to doing one thing before discovering much later that they enjoy doing something different. In fact, despite our initial impressions, the kiss did not reveal unexpected inner emotions to the two men but was an expression of feelings they had been struggling with and suppressed for their entire lives, as the film’s final act – and, specifically, a very powerful scene at the house of Matt’s mother, portrayed to emotional perfection by Michelin Bernard – makes so poignantly clear.

And yet, the narrative structure here inhibits (and even undermines) our sympathy in at least two important ways. Firstly, unlike the similar examples of Y Tu Mamá También or Humpday, the kiss comes not towards the end but right at the beginning. This means we don’t know how things were before, and therefore, there is no opportunity for involvement in the awkwardness that follows the physical encounter. This is equivalent to providing a climax without any dramatic build-up.

Secondly, and even worse, the film then proceeds to keep Matt and Max apart for around a full hour. They do not discuss what happened, they do not tell each other (or us) how they feel or what they think, and there is no possibility of a resolution until a brief moment of in vino veritas followed by a narratively contrived final shot and a cut to the end credits. The only thread connecting them for most of the film is their timidity to address this quandary over their friendship and their similar domestic situations: In both households, the only parent around is the mother. 

Despite the amount of dialogue and the admirable delivery by the entire cast, we don’t get close to either of the two M’s. An elaborately staged scene in which Matt tries to rid himself of his existential demons by swimming across an entire lake, getting lost, then swimming back, is mind-numbing because it takes forever, the shots are uninspired, the piano music is monotonous, and we don’t know Matt well enough (or at all) to sympathise with this sudden bout of sexually motivated hysteria.

A film like Marco Berger’s exquisitely paced Hawaii, which focused its energy exclusively on fleshing out its two characters, slowly increased the sexual tension until the point of satisfying release. By contrast, Matthias & Maxime opens with bad foreplay, proceeds straight to the climax and then languishes for more than an hour in a painful refractory period. 

An inordinate amount of time is spent treading water. Throughout the film, Dolan is much more interested in presenting life around the characters rather than focusing on their own lives and inner turmoil. And yet, Matthias & Maxime is at its most captivating when the two titular characters are in the same scene. Max, whose crimson birthmark flows from his right eye across his cheek, is infinitely more interesting than his friend, but despite Dolan playing the role himself, he struggles with the same passivity that hampers Matt’s character from ever becoming more than pitiful. Unspoken desire can be a powerful driver for a story, but at some point, people have to start speaking, and Dolan inexplicably does all he can to avoid this critically important moment.

For all the talk of this Canadian director’s talent, two films continue to stand head and shoulders above the rest in Xavier Dolan’s career: His début feature film as director, I Killed My Mother, released in 2009, showed him at his most creative. And in 2014’s Mommy he reached the zenith of his storytelling prowess with an intimate story told as if it were an epic. But his films since then have been disappointing. Despite its wonderfully recreated tension, It’s Only the End of the World was an annoying powder keg of a chamber drama with another incredibly passive central character. And his subsequent short-lived foray into English-language filmmaking, in the form of The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, produced little more than a full-length dark-toned flashback.

Matthias & Maxime is not unlike Matt himself: While handsome to look at and intent on speaking correctly (Matt’s insistence on using correct grammar is reminiscent of the early films of both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and the screenplay’s own dialogue is flawless), it prefers limbo over taking things to their logical conclusion. 

Viewed at the 2019 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival.

Synonyms (2019)

André Crous

In Synonyms, a former Israeli soldier forsakes his country and its language and turns up in Paris only to find that knowing French is very different from being French.

SynonymsIsrael/France
3*

Director:
Nadav Lapid
Screenwriters:
Nadav Lapid
Haim Lapid
Director of Photography:
Shai Goldman

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Synonymes

The opening shot of Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear–winning Synonyms is one that will be repeated on many occasions throughout the film in a (surprise, surprise, given the title) way that looks different but has essentially the same meaning. Moving forward and sideways with no clear sense of the horizon, we alternate between pavement and sky. In between, we catch brief glimpses of buildings, immediately recognisable as Parisian. It is our point of view, but then and later again and again, it always floats away to show the person whose view it actually is: the twenty-something Yoav (Tom Mercier), a former Israeli soldier who has “escaped”, in his words, to France and shunned his life in Israel.

Somehow, oddly, we never learn exactly what his motivation for leaving was. The film deals almost entirely in the present without recognising the past, which is exactly what Yoav is intent on doing. On his first day, he arrives at an expansive but bare apartment in the French capital, where he spends the night. The next morning, while taking a shower, his backpack disappears, and he is left without a stitch of clothing. Lucky for him, his curious upstairs (and upscale) neighbours find him passed out in the bathtub and take pity on him by dragging him up to their place, laying him down in their bed and covering his naked body with their goose down. One of them notices that Yoav is circumcised.

That “one” is the boyish Émile (Quentin Dolmaire), a struggling writer with perfect skin and an exquisite wardrobe, who also gets under the covers to warm up the stranger’s body by rubbing against him. It turns out Émile runs a factory (somewhere, making something) and likely inherited it from his family, who also pay the rent. The other is the oboe-playing Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who is ostensibly his girlfriend, although there is no apparent affection between the two. Affection is reserved for the newcomer, Yoav, who shares many an intimate moment (though never explicitly sexual) with Émile in the first half before Caroline makes a (sexual) move in the second. The setting may be comparable, but the tension of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Dreamers is completely missing.

Yoav is nothing if not absolutely entrancing. In his feature film acting début, Tom Mercier draws us closer to his character primarily by having the face he has and by utterly devoting himself to his character. Yoav’s chosen uniform of Frenchness is an extravagant orange overcoat, given to him by the extremely French, polo neck–wearing Émile, which he wears almost throughout the entire film. Looking like a Jewish version of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his youth, albeit with the eyes of a zombie, Mercier exudes a sex appeal that is derived not from his body (although the many full-frontal shots will thrill a sizable part of the audience) but from the combination of vulnerability and devil-may-care self-confidence.

And yet, very little of substance actually happens. When it does, it comes up against Yoav’s self-imposed obstacle of language. Whatever happened in Israel was so terrible that he has given up speaking Hebrew, although he gladly engages in accented French with Hebrew-speaking Israelis in his newfound home, including at the Israeli Consulate General in Paris, where he works (!). But when an old girlfriend Skypes him or his father turns up in Paris and somehow tracks him down, his refusal to speak his mother tongue cuts off all avenues to us gaining a better understanding of his motivations. A small scene that shows (unwanted) remnants of his past in the present – even a dream with him speaking Hebrew – would have helped enormously to overcome this linguistic absurdity. 

The film takes nearly two full acts to arrive at anything resembling a raison d’être. While we know all along that Yoav’s integration into French society is limited to his frequent interactions with Émile and Caroline, it is only in the final stretch that he takes his duty to assimilate semi-seriously. This is where the film finally starts to look more earnestly at the drama associated with changing one’s national identity and the struggles one faces while trying to be accepted into the fold.

But the screenplay and the directing fail in many of the scenes where Yoav speaks French. Despite the accent, he speaks the language fluently and even uses multiple complicated constructions. And he relies on an erudite vocabulary to expatiate on everything from his own experience in the military to Hector’s adventures in the Trojan War. Then, suddenly, everyday words, like “chaussette” (sock) or “tiède” (lukewarm), trip him up. Such moments feel completely unrealistic. Besides, we have no idea where or how Yoav learned to speak French so well in the first place. He even seems to understand it almost perfectly, which is a miraculous feat for a non-native speaker who just moved to a new country. These instances remind us that the film is manufactured, and they alienate us from the experience of living the diegesis that Mercier, in so many other respects, fully embodies. 

The wild camerawork out on the street can be nauseating, but director of photography Shai Goldman does an exceptional job of the more intimate moments. In particular, the kissing scene in the tiny apartment where Yoav stays for most of the film is shot in a way that conveys feeling and puts us inside the two actors’ private bubble but leaves us scratching our heads at how he managed to pull off such a show of dexterity.

But dextrous is not a word that can be applied to the screenplay. Besides the structural issues – in particular, the number of scenes that fail to advance the plot – there is also the issue of character development or just presence. Some characters that play a major role in the first half simply fall out of the narrative by the latter part of the film. One memorable example is the roid-brained Yaron, who suspects everyone of being a potential anti-Semite and seeks to smoke them out by loudly humming the Israeli national anthem while invading everyone’s personal space on the metro. His behaviour has us on tenterhooks for a while, but then he disappears in one of the many gaps between scenes.

In a flashback, we see Yoav during his military service shooting a target to smithereens to the beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympathique”. The song’s lyrics continue to resonate in the present, as most of the film consists of Yoav channelling the sentiment that, “Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner, je veux seulement oublier” (“I don’t want to work, I don’t want to have lunch, I just want to forget”). Some viewers may feel the same way.

Synonyms might have been better titled Ellipsis. Or Suspension Point. Or Three Dots…

The Best Offer (2013)

André Crous

In The Best Offer, Giuseppe Tornatore reminds us that while love is blind, the love of art can be blinding.

The Best OfferUK/Italy
3*

Director:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Screenwriter:
Giuseppe Tornatore
Director of Photography:
Fabio Zamarion

Running time 125 minutes

Alternate title: La migliore offerta

Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is a respected auctioneer in Vienna and lives a very lonely life of luxury. He is surrounded by works of art every day at work, and he dines at some of the most expensive restaurants in the city at night. But he does so alone.

At home, he has a special room where his most-prized possessions adorn three very high walls: portraits of women, all staring back at him while he lounges in a comfortable chair in the centre of the room, reads gilded literature and consumes a glass of pricey wine.

He has dedicated his life to his job at the auction house, and he has not let anybody get close to him in all that time (he always wears gloves, because he distrusts other people’s hygiene). However, his frequent sessions at the barbershop, where he dyes his hair, suggest he has not given up looking quite yet.

And then, one day, he gets a call from Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), a woman who wants him to appraise the value of her substantial collection of paintings and antique furniture. She phones him, arranges to meet with him, and he starts appraising the objects in the expansive villa. But there is something a bit off: He never sees her.

It transpires that she has been living alone in the house for many years, and she has an assistant, who has never seen her either but delivers her groceries and cleans up after her. This mystery casts a spell over Oldman, and of course, he slowly gets reeled in by this creature not only because of her sensuous voice but also because of the many items that suggest a great deal of value. Mostly, however, it is because of a few unexplained metal objects he finds lying around the cellar.

He gives these bits and pieces, which he inexplicably finds lying around the cellar every time he visits the villa, to Robert (a very engaging Jim Sturgess), a charming young clocksmith he has become friends with (although, significantly, we do not see how this friendship is struck). Robert puts the pieces together without much trouble, and the two of them quickly realise these are all part of an automaton – the kind of 19th-century robot, perhaps even older, that also made an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Moreover, the supposed inventor is someone Oldman has been studying his whole life. If they manage to put the pieces together, this would be a stunning discovery.

While the relationship between Oldman and Claire becomes more intimate, and he grows more and more fond of her, despite her hysterical outbursts of “I love you! I hate you! Oh, forgive me, I do love you!”, he also confides his feelings – heretofore alien to him – of romantic interest in the young woman to Robert.

But Claire remains an enigma. At some point, the viewer may very well start to suspect she may be an automaton herself, or perhaps the real-life version of one of the portraits on his wall, but the director doesn’t drop enough hints to make us pursue this line of thought, which could have led us down some interesting rabbit holes.

The director is Giuseppe Tornatore, whose 1988 film Cinema Paradiso may very well be the most evocative film about the cinema ever made, but his handling of English material is as mediocre as can be expected. The dialogue is at times silly, and the delivery is far from polished.

The theme of forgery could have been exploited to a much greater degree, and so too Oldman’s statement that there is always something authentic in a fake. Tornatore loses a real opportunity for depth here by not relating it better to his own film. But with Oldman at the centre of every single scene, we obliquely take on his point of view, which is a very good strategy, given the revelations towards the end of the story. 

The cinematography is badly handled and very rough around the edges. Despite a beautiful opening sequence that underlines the exquisite service of the restaurant Oldman frequents, a particularly grating moment occurs halfway through the film when he is given access to a hidden room, but instead of a tracking shot following him into the room, the camera starts to follow him and then abruptly cuts to a position in front of him, inside the room. The reverse tracking shot that ends the film demonstrates what kind of approach Tornatore could have taken here, in a scene that actually needed such a shot.

The music of Ennio Morricone, which is not altogether dissimilar to some of his work on Once Upon a Time in America, suggests a measure of mystery but is never strong enough to make any real impact on our experience of the film.

Far below his marquee Cinema Paradiso, The Best Offer is certainly not the best the director has offered in quite some time.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

André Crous

In this sixth instalment of the famous franchise, Ethan Hunt (rather, let’s face it, Tom Cruise) is as ready as ever to do the hard work himself, but tying up decades-old loose ends can be a messy business.

Mission: Impossible - FalloutUSA
3*

Director:
Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriter:
Christopher McQuarrie
Director of Photography:
Rob Hardy

Running time: 145 minutes

Imagine, for a moment, you’ve reached the climax of a high-energy, globetrotting action film. For most of the past two-and-a-half hours, the characters have been relatively solid, and the story has unspooled at a pretty good clip. On top of the Eiffel Tower, the good guy and the bad guy have been at each other’s throats for what feels like ages. For the umpteenth time, we suspend our disbelief and tell ourselves that the 15-minute countdown to the end of the world is still in effect. Finally, as we catch our breath right after disaster has been averted in the nick of time, the camera zooms out to reveal the Bellagio fountains in the background, and we realise this “Eiffel Tower” is, in fact, the one in Las Vegas. And yet, the film continues to insist that this is Paris, not the Las Vegas our eyes so very plainly see.

That’s basically the stupid stunt Mission: Impossible – Fallout pulls right at the end, when we are told the action takes places in the Himalayas, but down below the fjords are pretty, the hillsides are green, and this rocky outcrop is very clearly not the Roof of the World but rather the world-famous Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock) on Norway’s west coast. Unless we’re to believe that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) somehow helicoptered his way through a wormhole linking Kashmir to Scandinavia, this makes very little sense, particularly because so little effort has gone into hiding the truth. After all, a crucial interaction early on involves a Norwegian nuclear weapons specialist.

In this instalment (the sixth in total), Ethan Hunt again teams up with his long-time computer hacking partner, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who’s been with him for the past two decades, and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg in a welcome low-key appearance), who’s done half the time. Given Hunt’s team’s track record, however, the new CIA director, played by Angela Bassett, insists that someone from the agency’s special division join the team. That individual is the seemingly by-the-book August Walker (Henry Cavill), who, attitude problem aside, appears to be professional enough.

Not unlike a James Bond plot, the film’s villain is bent on having a global reach and is ready to inflict significant pain to achieve his goals. Although his identity is a mystery at first (we can quickly figure it out for ourselves), his nom de guerre is John Lark. He heads up the terror network called The Apostles, whose goal is allegedly world peace, but the price to pay is immense suffering: Chillingly, three of the Abrahamic religions’ holy sites – the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca – are the initial targets of the nuclear devices.

In a film like this, however, our attention is not going to be on the generic details of the narrative but rather on how good or memorable the action scenes are. And while director Christopher McQuarrie’s plot is pretty standard for this kind of production, he does manage to stage one of the most exhilarating scenes of any of the (first) six films in the series: a chase scene on motorcycle through the streets of Paris that rivals anything that has come before and is the most high-octane piece of filmmaking in the City of Lights since Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendez-vous.

The whole scene is sublime, from start to finish. Pursued by police, Ethan steers a truck into a narrow alleyway to force them to climb over the vehicle while he and August escape through the front window and speed off on waiting motorcycles. August speeds off, but for a tense few moments, Ethan can’t get his bike to start. When it does, damn the torpedoes, it’s full speed ahead. Not satisfied with merely weaving in and out of traffic, Ethan also heads straight up against the flow into one-way streets (and even clockwise around the Arc de Triomphe) and races through heavily congested crossroads, all shot with a camera that is as mobile as Ethan and follows him at full tilt as he swerves to evade the French police. In all of two minutes, McQuarrie reinvigorates the whole franchise.

And yet, the whole thing ends with a deus ex machina so preposterous the film takes on shades of that same impossibility-induced hilarity that the recent Fast & Furious films have mined for laughs. Whenever the screenplay writes itself into a corner, it simply paints an exit door through which to escape. Finding himself trapped, Ethan simply cuts some netting, falls through a grate and ends up inside an underwater canal where his buddies are calmly waiting to whisk him off in their speedboat. With these types of films, one will always suspend disbelief, but in light of the (albeit hyperreal) thrill ride of a chase scene, this kind of a twist is just a bridge too flimsy.

The film also relies too heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of, never mind emotional attachment to, characters from previous instalments: Ethan’s former wife, Julia, and former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust are two specific individuals whose presence here seems gratuitous. By contrast, a new character in the form of the mysterious White Widow (played by Vanessa Kirby with a mixture of sensuality and pure cheek) holds our attention in every one of her scenes. If she does make a comeback in the next episode, one hopes that hers would be a big role.

Clearly, this sixth instalment of the now more than 20-year-old big-screen Mission: Impossible franchise is not the best of the series. That distinction will (likely forever) belong to the very first one, directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Koepp and the legendary Robert Towne. That film’s set pieces, from the break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley to the fast-paced climax on top of the Eurostar, might be small in scale compared with those of its successors, but – with the major exception of Fallout‘s chase scene in Paris – they still set our adrenaline pumping faster than anything else the series has offered us since.

Interstellar (2014)

André Crous

Christopher Nolan’s big space epic tries to fly too close to the sun and fails to live up to expectations.

InterstellarUSA
3*

Director:
Christopher Nolan
Screenwriters:
Jonathan Nolan
Christopher Nolan
Director of Photography:
Hoyte van Hoytema

Running time: 170 minutes

Interstellar takes us farther than we’ve ever been before, but it doesn’t take the medium of film quite as far as this production’s marketing department would like to have us believe. Director Christopher Nolan breaks through the final frontier – not space, but time – and delivers a product that has a couple of moments of genius but is bloated and saddled with too much dialogue, not to mention a family drama right out of a freshman course on Steven Spielberg.

The film opens with an image we don’t yet understand: a close-up of a row of dusty book spines. This is followed by interviews with a few elderly individuals reminiscing about their childhood on farms, and then we get to see one of them: a cornfield stretching as far as the eye can see. Perhaps this is a sly wink at Superman’s early years on the Kent family farm in Smallville (an indication that great things lie ahead), but there are no firm geographical markers. That doesn’t matter, anyway, because the film has its sights set much farther afield than the United States.

Primarily a science-fiction film preoccupied with stars, planets, worm and black holes, Interstellar is built on the very credible premise that, one day in the near future, the Earth runs dry, for reasons not explicitly stated, and mankind has to start looking elsewhere for its continued survival. With the help of his scientifically curious daughter, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an engineer who is making a living as a farmer, locates the headquarters of NASA, which ceased operations a long time ago because the country no longer saw the need to invest in science and space exploration.

The agency asks him to go into space and find a suitable planet whither humanity can be transported or where he could restart civilisation with a few hundred fertilised eggs. He gamely takes up the challenge and is accompanied on the journey by Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of his former science teacher, while his own daughter throws a hissy fit because she cannot see the bigger picture and believes her father is abandoning her.

Compare this girl’s tantrums with the quiet determination of the budding scientist in Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 hit Contact, which incidentally also starred McConaughey, and it quickly becomes clear how little experience Nolan has directing children. The dialogue, in general, is also either overly explanatory or superfluous. In one scene, Cooper is told that the last thing people see before they die is their children’s faces, because it gives them a reason to hold on to life, and Nolan wastes no time in getting to us that point: Within five minutes, we have the scene we visualised just moments earlier, and the director doesn’t realise it would have been infinitely more powerful without the setup.

In one of its most effective tactics to speak to our emotions, Interstellar creates a time bomb: The exploration of space has to occur within a specific amount of time, lest Cooper never sees his children again because they would have aged too much. Here, at least, Nolan deploys the different time worlds of his film to great effect by adding a very human dimension to which the viewer can relate. However, why only one of Cooper’s children, and not both, is prioritised will leave many a viewer puzzled, especially when the daughter, Murphy, only has one bag of emotions.

What has been a major topic of discussion has been the film’s imagery, in particular the way in which a black hole is rendered, and Nolan and director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema certainly deserve kudos for their work in this regard. More than one-third of the film was shot on IMAX cameras, and when displayed on an IMAX screen, the size of the frame changes between widescreen (2.40:1) and IMAX’s full-screen (1.43:1) aspect ratios.

Following the example of his imaginative 2010 film Inception, Nolan continues to make visible his fascination with spherical images, as we see here in the wormhole scene and another interesting construction towards the end of the film. However, Nolan’s vision of space is melancholic, and we get nothing that can be compared to the beauty of a 2001: A Space Odyssey Stargate sequence.

On the contrary, the planets the crew finds are desolate, uninhabitable, inhospitable wastelands of nothingness, and it would be up to mankind to make these places home. That is a surprisingly arrogant perspective, but one to which the film constantly returns. If there is any beauty in space, we cannot see it, because Nolan keeps hitting us over the head with talk of man’s indomitable spirit to survive and to explore and to thrive wherever he goes or whatever he faces. This is all mighty close to humanist propaganda.

Furthermore, the story makes some enormous, unexplained jumps across narrative chasms. When Murphy spots tiny dunes on the floorboards in her room after a sandstorm, her father goes to work and finds the sequence corresponds to numbers in code. He somehow immediately realises the numbers refer to latitude and longitude coordinates, and he sets off to the mysterious location. How he makes this deduction, and with such certainty, especially after he had rejected Murphy’s apparently airy-fairy belief that there is a ghost in her room, is completely ignored by the screenplay.

Hans Zimmer’s score relies heavily on the sounds made by the organ, and at times the music is visceral and moving as it conveys a spiritual dimension equal to the grandeur and the mystery of the night sky. However, the silence that was so useful to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is often missing from or spoiled by Interstellar, and at one point Nolan makes the unforgivable mistake of invasively adding some of McConaughey’s dialogue to an otherwise deadly silent shot of the outside of his module floating in outer space.

A particularly annoying aspect of the heavy talk that permeates the film is on full display in a scene in which Dr. Brand gushes about the need for love, as a way of exonerating herself and explaining her selfish decision to pursue a less scientific approach to the mission, which may very well lead to the deaths of her entire crew. This scene is absolutely cringeworthy, even though Nolan is using it to anticipate and perhaps even justify Cooper’s own behaviour in the last act.

Interstellar is no Gravity, and it doesn’t come close to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening interviews remove all suspense from the story by implying it all ends well, and the soppy, uninvolving family angle damages our ability to empathise fully with all the main characters. This may very well be a novel perspective on our place in the universe and our shared ability to survive no matter what, but just because Nolan can literally bend light to suit his needs does not mean his work is done.