3 stars

In Your Arms (2015)

André Crous

A man in his mid-30s, ravaged by disease, decides to end his life while encouraging his nurse to start living her own.

in-your-armsDenmark
3*

Director:
Samanou A. Sahlstrøm
Screenwriter:
Samanou A. Sahlstrøm
Director of Photography:
Brian Curt Petersen

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: I dine hænder

Euthanasia is not an easy topic to wrap one’s head around, particularly because it is so often conflated with murder. When so many people are not even ready to accept suicide as a legitimate action, it is to be expected that euthanasia (the patient sanctions someone to kill him/her), or assisted suicide (the patient kills himself/herself with medication or counselling provided by a second party for this purpose) will be equally challenging notions for an audience. 

The Danish film In Your Arms, co-produced by Lars von Trier, is more of an intimate character study of a man who has decided to end his life than a critical examination of the moral or ethical issues surrounding or arising from this decision. In this respect, the film is a mostly sober representation of one man’s determination to eliminate the suffering that plagues him, instead of a dramatic contrivance that would involve our emotions. But it doesn’t make the audience’s job of empathising with the character easy at all.

One way in which the slight distance between the viewer and the film is achieved is through the use of snow. Symbolising a great number of things (from ephemeral beauty to peace to a state of being untainted by the heartache and the natural shocks that flesh is heir to), snow accompanies a number of scenes, some of them potentially mere mental images, but at least one, which involves a brutal killing by a blubbering killer, is very real.

The film is centred on Niels, a man in his mid-30s whose body has been degenerating of late and is mostly paralysed. At the nursing home where he is experiencing a great deal of self-pity and has asked his family to stop visiting him, he tries to kill himself. “I can no longer walk. I can no longer masturbate. And soon I will no longer be able to breathe”, he says, and it is easy to understand his desire to put an end to this rapid, inexorable regression.

However, to his horror, he is saved by a young nurse, Maria. Anxious and terrible at any social interaction, she cleans herself by washing her armpits at the washbasin, and most of the time her pale face is taut as a drum. Even when she makes spontaneous decisions, there is no visible joy or passion in her expressions. Niels is not impressed, but although he always has sharp words at the ready for those around him, he needs help to get to Switzerland and end his life through an assisted dying organisation titled ASSIST. Having nothing better to do, now or ever, Maria sets off on the trip to accompany him.

This middle stretch of the film, which is a kind of road movie, is the most interesting part of the story, although it is at times very difficult to watch. The reason is right there in the producer’s credit, as the awkwardness Von Trier has long relished and made most palpable in The Idiots is also on display here. Niels gets a thrill by digging into Maria’s personal life and asking her about it, even when he knows that she finds these conversations excruciating. He also is not beneath embarrassing her in public for no good reason other than oblique self-pity.

We gradually realise that, as he approaches the hour of death, Niels is also grabbing on to his last moments of control in the midst of despair and apparent disarray. He tries to pull Maria out of her shell while he kicks up a fuss when she doesn’t do everything exactly as he orders her to, even if such orders are sometimes contradictory. He has good intentions, and Maria, who is afraid to look in the mirror, both literally and figuratively, would certainly be better off if she were socially better connected. Unfortunately, any assumption that these two characters who don’t fit into society would easily communicate all but blows up in our face, even though they rather pathetically hurtle into each other’s arms in the final act.

The big problem with the depiction of Maria is that the character is sobbing in nearly every single scene. She cries when she feels uncomfortable, she cries when she doesn’t have an answer, and she cries when life happens. She shows no sign of maturing or of dealing with her social and personal hang-ups, has very little development to speak of and is wholly incapable of being around people.

In a film that deals with euthanasia, the scene dealing with this topic in particular will illuminate the director’s talent as a storyteller, and here Samanou A. Sahlstrøm chooses to end his story not with lyricism but with extended discomfort. The process of dying by one’s own hand is almost never pretty, and while Sahlstrøm presents the character’s good-byes to his friends and family with great empathy, the act of suicide is filled with unpleasant hesitation, gasping, sniffling and anxious anticipation for the end to arrive sooner rather than later. While tough to watch, this final scene admirably undercuts any notion of this being a straightforward sanctioning of ending one’s own life.

Death very well spells the end to life, but even amidst the beautiful scenery of Switzerland, the transition from animate to inanimate is far from cheerful, and despite the many scenes with the snow that also signals a heavenly bright light, perhaps this example of the end of life pulls us back into the gritty realism that real death commands.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015

Paulina (2015)

André Crous

Rape victim seeks to understand reasons for assailant’s behaviour, but despite creativity, depiction ultimately just skims the surface of complexity.

la-patota-paulina

Argentina
3*

Director:
Santiago Mitre
Screenwriters:
Mariano Llinás
Santiago Mitre
Director of Photography:
Gustavo Biazzi

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: La patota 

There are always at least two sides to a story where more than one person is involved, and in the case of Paulina by Argentine filmmaker Santiago Mitre, looking at and weighing all the sides can be discomfiting to anyone intent on clinging to black-and-white beliefs. The exercise may even produce immense confusion in the viewer looking to reconcile all these points of view.

The film itself is not confusing; on the contrary, even though it sometimes jumps back in time to cover events once more but from a different perspective, the story is very simple: Paulina, who has started her Ph.D. in law and is also the daughter of a judge, has decided to leave Buenos Aires and head back to her hometown in the Northeast of the country, close to the border with Paraguay, to teach human rights and democracy at a small school. The children, most of them of indigenous heritage, are sceptical of her presence, and the first classes get off to a bad start when Paulina seeks to discuss the concept democracy and is quickly confronted with a different outlook from these children who feel that white Argentines do not or cannot represent their needs in the system. 

One night, when Paulina drives back home on her motorcycle, she is attacked. Suddenly, without warning, the film flips back on itself to show us characters we had not seen before. A young man, Ciro (Cristian Salguero), who works at a sawmill, learns that his girlfriend has broken up with him to hook up with a man from outside the community. He is outraged, and when he sees someone driving a motorcycle in the dark, he takes it to be her and encourages his friends to rape the woman.

This is where the film’s path converges with the previous storyline, as we see Paulina mistaken for the girlfriend and her being gang-raped by the group of boys, most of whom attend her class. The tense build-up, covered very competently by the director and his cameraman, who use short takes that positively vibrate with adrenaline, as well as the shocking incident itself, leaves us stunned, but Paulina’s subsequent actions turn the film into an unexpected examination of the different ways in which people can respond to the same events.

At the centre of the story is Paulina, who feels a desperate need not only to teach but to understand the people in this community. This understanding, we come to see, extends to her rapists and their situation, as well as a questioning of the rationale for punishment as meted out by the law. Her personal life takes a major hit, as well, because of her way of dealing with the fall-out of the rape, but she is determined that the cold rules of the law not be applied to people if the judicial outcome is more or less as pointlessly cruel as the act itself.

Such thinking sends her father, who had his hopes pinned on her to follow in his footsteps, flying into a rage, and we can understand his concern for his daughter’s personal and professional situation very well. On the margins, there is also Paulina’s boyfriend, Alberto (Esteban Lamothe from Villegas), who finds her drifting away from him with every new revelation.

At the same time, it becomes clear throughout Paulina’s arguments that she is the one who should decide over her own life, just as the people affected by the government’s decisions should also be allowed to decide on their own rules. The film does not answer the question whether one should intervene if someone makes a “wrong” decision but instead highlights the fact that people have their reasons, and just because we do not understand them does not make them irrelevant.

Paulina is at its best when it shifts the audience’s empathy between the father and the daughter, and the departure from the linear narrative is effective in this regard, although it would have had a greater impact if it had been used more than just a couple of times. As things stand, it seems more like a gimmick, which is unfortunate.

The film handles its difficult material, including the brutal plot elements of a rape and the mulling of an abortion, but also the marginalisation of a community with little formal education, very competently. There is also fertile ground for discussion, especially about Paulina’s decisions along the way, which seem ever more difficult to comprehend, both for those around her and the audience.

In its effort to create ambiguity by showing us the world is more complex than we might like to believe, however, Paulina only skims the surface of a number of important issues. Had any one of them been exploited with greater care, this may have been an engaging film worthy of deep reflection, but instead, its reluctance to dig below the surface rather than merely hint at the turmoil makes this an incomplete production, well-intentioned though it certainly is.

Viewed at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2015

Irrational Man (2015)

André Crous

An alcoholic philosopher decides to try his hand at committing what he believes to be an ethical murder, but the execution is neither comical nor tragic.

irrational manUSA
3*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Darius Khondji

Running time: 95 minutes

Woody Allen likes to play it safe in all of his recent films. This safety, while often peppered with hilarious dialogue or neurotic characters teetering on the brink of hysteria, also makes many of his works, at least those of the past 20 years, mediocre and forgettable. There have been demonstrable exceptions, particularly when his actresses are given free rein to express themselves, or when he takes greater pains to construct a story with both a beating heart and a strong head.

For the former, the examples that come to mind are the hot-blooded whirlwind performance of Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Cate Blanchett’s stunning portrayal of a narcissistic, delusional, alcoholic divorcée in Blue Jasmine; the latter include Mighty Aphrodite, which borrows from both George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and ancient Greek plays, as well as his magnificent Crime and Punishment-inspired Match Point.

Irrational Man is not a comedy and does not elicit a single laugh from the audience. In theme, it is closest to Match Point, replete with Dostoyevsky references (a copy of The Idiot lies next to his bed, he scribbles in a copy of Crime and Punishment, and the Russian novelist’s name is explicitly cited in a discussion with a student), but unlike his 2005 film, there is no thrill and no tension. Even the film’s most dramatic moment – a murder – is devoid of anxiety, and while the homicidal act takes place onscreen, the death occurs off-screen.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Abe Lucas, an alcoholic philosophy professor who has just joined the faculty at Braylin College in the sleepy town of Newport, Rhode Island. He is a nihilist who believes philosophy can do little more but talk about life’s problems. Nonetheless, Allen gives us a CliffsNotes introduction to existentialist philosophers in Lucas’s classes and then proceeds to the much more dramatically satisfying situation that serves as the plot’s turning point: Lucas decides that he can give meaning to his life by helping someone in need, even if this means he would have to commit murder.

One day in a coffee shop, he overhears a woman complaining of a judge who will very likely take custody of her children away from her and give it to her ex-husband, who is friendly with the judge. Lucas, without knowing much more than what he discovers from this one-sided account, makes up his mind to kill the judge.

The other track on which the story advances involves one of Lucas’s students, Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), who has fallen in love with him despite her having a long-term, caring boyfriend. Jill is a terribly disappointing character, as much for Allen as for Stone, who has played much stronger women in the past (her attention-grabbing turn in Easy A immediately comes to mind). In Irrational Man, she starts off as a smart philosophy major who takes on her professor’s worldview head-on but very quickly becomes doe-eyed and infatuated with him, and she tries her best to lull him out of his rudderless existence. When she fails, she flings her body at him.

This is a terrible debasement and does not endear her character to the audience at all, particularly because we feel she has given up control of her life to a man who is tossing and turning in a wasteland of despair.

The mentions of the philosophers are little more than padding and serve little purpose other than to remind us Lucas is philosophically minded. The look of the film, as is usual in an Allen production, is competent without drawing any attention to itself. The single exception, however, is absolutely stunning and underscores the skills of master cinematographer Darius Khondji, for whom this film marks his fifth collaboration with Allen.

Towards the end of the film, when Jill is starting to suspect Lucas has had a hand in the death of the judge, she watches him alone out on a jetty, a silhouette against the radiant sunlight reflecting off the still water. But there is something unusual: Lucas’s silhouette seems to vibrate, even melt, around the edges where it meets the bright luminosity behind it. The shot is breathtaking and catapults the film’s visual language into the stratosphere, albeit momentarily.

This Woody Allen film is about as unfunny a movie as he has ever made. But unlike some of his other films, which at least worked still played with our emotions, this one lacks the vocabulary to get us roaring with laughter or our adrenaline pumping. Despite the intriguing premise of ending a life to infuse your own with meaning and intensity, this work is mostly forgettable, and the weak character portrayed by Emma Stone is very unfortunate.

Tom at the Farm (2013)

André Crous

Tom at the FarmCanada/France
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Michel Marc Bouchard
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Tom à la ferme

Xavier Dolan is an immensely gifted filmmaker. His début, I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère), was experimental, visually stunning and inventive, and it had a grasp of rhythm that belied his age — he was 20 years old when it screened in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2009. Most importantly, it suggested a voice all its own with little recourse to the works of other filmmakers, even if one of the best sequences in the film was very similar to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (le Mystère de Picasso).

But his follow-up, Heartbeats, was infused with slow-motion and repetitive music immediately recognisable as being inspired by Wong Kar-Wai. And his third film, Laurence Anyways, about a man who wishes to transition to a female body, had images that brought to mind the perfectly framed visuals of Stanley Kubrick.

Now comes the Hitchcockian Tom at the Farm, in which a young man is virtually held hostage on a farm by the older, homophobic brother of his late boyfriend. But things are not quite as they seem, and the significance of all of Dolan’s personal touches to the narrative are outweighed by the heavy-handed use of Gabriel Yared’s bombastic music that liberally borrows from Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo and Psycho, in other words: Be prepared to hear a lot of strings played very loudly.

It is a real shame, because Dolan’s story has a lot to work with at the outset. Main character Tom (Dolan) drives to a farm deep in rural Quebec that he clearly has never visited before. He is anxious and upset, and when he arrives at the lonely farmhouse, covered in fog, no one is home. He finds a key on the front porch and enters, but not before we notice the passenger door on his black Volvo is a different colour, obviously recently replaced.

Inside, Tom falls asleep on the kitchen table and is awoken by the elderly woman of the house, Agathe (Lise Roy), asking him what he is doing in her house. Tom was the boyfriend of her late son, Guillaume, whose funeral is the next day. But Tom dare not say anything to her, especially when her eldest son (whom Guillaume, bizarrely, had never mentioned) grabs him during the night and tells him how he will behave if he cares about his own survival, or something like that.

This scene with the brother, whose face is obscured at first and then revealed in a loving close-up as the handsome, bearded Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), is unmistakably homoerotic. But what Dolan wishes to accomplish is far from obvious. The audience will almost certainly expect, because of this confrontation in the dark and many other ambiguous moments, that Tom and Francis will end up together. That is not exactly the case, although because of his physical resemblance to his later brother, Tom forms an attachment to him, and because of Tom’s presence on the otherwise deserted farm, Francis grows closer to him, too. All the while, he continues to bully Tom into fabricating stories about Guillaume’s supposed girlfriend back home in Montreal, which will engender enormous frustration in anyone who values equality and rejects discrimination.

We are taken on wild goose chases, as Dolan seems to suggest Francis is on the verge of revealing some big secret to him before the moment evaporates and we are left with nothing but our imagination. In one bizarre scene, Francis snorts some cocaine and decides to start dancing with Tom in the shed. This is one of the most sexual scenes in the film, but as with all the others, it seems to come out of nowhere and ultimately confuses us more than it answers any questions. Tom’s reluctance to ask some of these basic questions, including the reason for the entire town being openly hostile to Francis, also leaves us shaking our heads.

The worst, however, is a chance encounter right at the end that is almost too ridiculous to stomach and has us wondering how on earth Dolan thought he could get away with having a scene that is so implausible because it neatly ties up a story from an earlier monologue.

Tom at the Farm has some beautiful scenes, and Dolan’s face keeps our interest even when the shots tend to drag on for a very long time, but the film lacks the humour of Hitchcock and the claustrophobia of Polanski to turn his material into gold.

Joe (2013)

André Crous

joe-2013USA
3*

Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
David Gordon Green
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr

Running time: 115 minutes

David Gordon Green is one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation. Sure, he made the slapstick comedies Your Highness and The Sitter and gone to the well of stoner comedy once too often, but he also made the poetic Prince Avalanche, which enveloped Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch in an ambience reminiscent of both his earlier work and of Hayao Miyazaki’s gorgeous animations. His meditative Undertow, starring Dermot Mulroney and Jamie Bell and produced by Terrence Malick, is easily one of the best films of the 2000s.

In Joe, he returns to the Southern Gothic atmosphere many have labelled his early work with, and as with Undertow much of the action takes place deep in a forest. But Green’s latest film just proves how fine the line is between his magic and his mediocrity, especially when the casting process leads to a collaboration, or rather a tribulation, with Nicholas Cage.

Cage did some good work when he was younger, and his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas is well deserved. But that is where his talent ended because his grimaces ever since and his expressions of pain just don’t take us anywhere. In Joe, the reason his emotional outbursts are painful is that they are so embarrassing to watch.

But luckily the casting also yielded the young Tye Sheridan, who made such an impression with his performance in Mud, another film set in the rural South about a flawed man who redeems himself ever so slightly by the end. In both films, Sheridan hits a range of notes that are all wholly credible and keep us rapt. But whereas Mud had Matthew McConaughey to reinforce Sheridan’s character, Joe only has Cage, who as usual can’t act his way out of a paper bag.

Cage stars as the titular Joe, a loner who spends his time at home lying on the couch, clearly dealing with some past torment or afflicted by a demon, at a brothel, and in the woods, where he runs a business poisoning trees so that the owners would have the right to burn them down and develop the area. As one should expect from Green, the metaphor of poisoning trees (or life) is at once straightforward and opaque.

Joe doesn’t have much in the way of family that we know of (in a throwaway comment toward the end, we find out he has a grandchild he has never seen), but then, we know very little about him. The most obvious part of the film is that Joe is positioned as the father figure to a teenage boy, Gary (Sheridan), whose own father is a worthless drunk who takes his money and beats him senseless whenever he gets the chance. One day, Gary comes upon Joe’s business in the forest and proves himself to be a quick learner and a very capable worker. We like him almost immediately, even when he lets himself get beaten up by his ever-intoxicated biological father.

This part of the film is the most frustrating, as we learn very early on that the deceptively scrawny Gary can stand up for himself, that he is a push-over for no one, except his father, whom he can evidently take down if he wanted to. There is some halfhearted explanation that seeks to justify Gary’s passivity, but it is tough to side with him when all we want is for him to stand up for himself against this unnecessary violence.

Joe doesn’t have the same kind of insight as a film like Evil (Ondskan), in which a young man who easily knocks out his school mates is beaten time after time by his father because he is not living up to his expectations. Evil made us ask “Why?” before ultimately delivering a stunning blow that was both physically and intellectually satisfying and put all that came before in a context that may have been carved out for dramatic purposes but made sense and had a powerful impact on the viewer. By contrast, Joe only posits a situation on repeat that never improves and which we can’t quite line up with the immanently likeable Gary. We feel like we are slowly drowning in a presentation, albeit gritty and very likely true to life (Gary’s father, Wade, was played by a real-life homeless man called Gary Poulter), that simply doesn’t give us the answers we are looking for, despite building to what we would expect to be a climactic event.

It should be obvious to everyone by now that Sheridan will be a big star, and one can only hope that he continues to choose his projects as wisely as he has until now, as the characters have suited his abilities perfectly, even when the films themselves have not been consistently good. Joe could have done with a few more female characters, although a comparison with the nearly woman-free Undertow shows just what he can accomplish when he puts his mind to a project and focus on the interesting characters (usually, the children) instead of the supposedly more complex adults, who in the case of Joe are dull as dishwater.

I sincerely hope Green returns to the heights of Undertow because while Joe is far from bad, his films have always benefited from his eye for the beauty in the ordinary and his ability to add a dash of magic to the everyday.

Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)

André Crous

la-vie-d-adeleFrance
3*

Director:
Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenwriter:
Ghalia Lacroix
Director of Photography:
Sofian El Fani

Running time: 175 minutes

Original title: La vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2

There is nothing subtle about Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour. The main character, Adèle, spends most of the film in tears, always desperately clinging to an ideal that is based on very little except naïve lust, and even though at first she is successful, her constant bouts of waterworks never endear her to the audience, who in a three-hour film certainly need more to hold on to.

This winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, centred on the relationship between a high-school girl, Adèle, and a slightly older student at the Academy of Fine Arts with blue hair, Emma, may have been pushing the envelope in France at a time when the issue of same-sex marriage was at its most polarising. But even if you didn’t know the film was directed by a man, it is very obvious from the presentation of the material that he finds the world of lesbians (and women, in general) rather peculiar, and it is a terrible shame that the mere instance of women kissing becomes something of a focal point for the camera, pretending that it is somehow unusual.

The clearest example of this approach is the eventful evening when Adèle meets Emma, as she first goes with her best friend to a gay bar — and in another moment of “revelation”, we see him kissing another man, indicating that (yes!) he is gay — and then strolls around the corner to a lesbian bar, where every second couple is making out in a seemingly orgiastic atmosphere that leaves little to the imagination and suggests that any man or woman hanging out in a gay bar will likely spend most of their time making out with random strangers. This is an incredibly simplistic depiction and may very well support many people’s view that homosexuality is the “other”, as these bars seem to have very little in common with your average “straight” bar. It is not just the background that is teeming with loose-lipped lesbians, but the camera makes a concerted effort to swing around from one couple to the other, its breath taken away by every new make-out session it notices.

This meeting between the two girls is like the realisation of a fantasy: Kechiche, who will eventually present a sex scene in almost its full duration, making sure to show close-ups of genitals being licked and sphincters being penetrated, and later on show Adèle taking a shower for no narrative reason whatsoever, visibly enjoys having all these women make out onscreen. There is little tension, unlike what Adèle must be feeling (this is her first time hooking up with someone who is a complete stranger), and therefore we don’t experience the event through her eyes, which is another shame. But this meeting is also the realisation of Adèle’s fantasy, who had actually noticed Emma on the street once and masturbated very loudly thinking of her one night at home.

“Chapters 1 & 2” in the title can refer to any number of things, as the film covers a lot of time in an unconventional way. There are no fade-outs or dissolves, only cuts, and therefore our usual expectation that time changes are signalled more visibly is not met by Kechiche. The most likely conclusion we can draw is that there was life before and life after Emma. From the outset, we can see that Adèle is not exactly confused about her sexuality. She keeps it a secret, she makes up convoluted excuses when confronted by her circle of friends, and she doesn’t even tell her best friend, Valentin, who is gay, that she likes girls, but she openly stares at Emma when she sees her on the street for the first time. But when Adèle kisses another girl from her class, she becomes so hysterically happy and needy, it’s embarrassing to watch, and we fear the same would eventually be true if she ever met Emma — and it happens exactly as we expect.

Kechiche has to be given credit from the scenes in high school, however. As he showed in his marvellous Games of Love and Chance (L’esquive), he likes the French author Pierre de Marivaux (also discussed here at length), and he knows how to direct teenagers to come across as passionate and extremely engaging. The first hour of Blue is the Warmest Colour has some of the best scenes, including the expected outrage from Adèle’s friends who confront her about her spending time with such the blue-haired Emma who they say looks like a boy. Verbal combat in Kechiche’s films is one of his finest skills as a director.

But the constant skips in time, sometimes a few months, sometimes a few years, does great damage to the development of Adèle’s character, not only because she seems to develop very little, but also because scenes that are required have simply been omitted. The scene of Emma at Adèle’s parents’ house underscores Adèle’s secrecy about her sexuality towards her own parents (in contrast with an earlier scene at the house of Emma’s very accepting parents), and yet Adèle has no “coming out”, which is truly regrettable and makes us wonder whether she ever tells them. As their only child, this silence and the lack of communication leave a very bad taste in the mouth.

The English title, which actually comes from the French title of the graphic novel by Julie Maroh that the film is based on, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude, is made visible in most of the scenes in the film, as they usually contain a blue object, more often than not a piece of clothing. In the French flag, blue is the colour of freedom, but whether or not Adèle ever finds the same kind of freedom Emma clearly has is an open question that the film refuses to answer. As far as we can tell, Adèle remains a desperate, lachrymose mess up until the end.

Not worthy of the hype it has received as a result of its award at Cannes and the much talked-about graphic scenes between actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Colour is flawed because it is made by someone who is more interested in titillating the audience and himself than in telling the compelling story of a woman on the verge, pushed there by her own needs and a refusal to share her life with anyone except Emma, someone who, most significantly, is comfortable in her skin. Were it not for the all-too-rare instance of verbal warfare, handled with aplomb by Kechiche, this may very well have been a completely forgettable film.

Villegas (2012)

André Crous

VillegasArgentina
3*

Director:
Gonzalo Tobal
Screenwriter:
Gonzalo Tobal
Director of Photography:
Lucas Gaynor

Running time: 100 minutes

An odd film with interesting characters who nonetheless leave you cold, Villegas is the début feature of Argentine director Gonzalo Tobal, who always turns away just as his characters are about to become vulnerable and doesn’t give us anything concrete, least of all the storyline.

It opens with two cousins, living very different lives, who receive a phone call that brings bad news. Their grandfather, living in the remote village of Villegas in the Argentine countryside, has died, and although the two young men haven’t seen each other in a while, they leave together from Buenos Aires to attend the funeral.

The more serious of the two, the clean-shaven one with a job and a girlfriend, is Esteban. His cousin is Pipa, a bearded musician whom we meet lying sprawled out on his bed in his underwear, the sun streaming in through the curtains, in a room that needs a serious tidying-up. These two cousins are completely disconnected from each other, and each still harbours ideas about the other from a long time ago when there was still some interaction between them.

Pipa lashes out with sarcasm because he feels vulnerable, and also because he doesn’t want to show his cousin how much he is actually hurting after his band kicked him out. At first, he seems a bit too interested in annoying Esteban, but over time we come to realise he is sincere and still finding his way. Pipa meets Jazmín, a girl at a gas station on the highway, and asks her about a small restaurant he and his cousin used to go to that ought to be nearby. He charms her, although he was actually just looking to hook up with her, and this cute, very unexpected twist takes us by surprise.

It’s too bad the film doesn’t build on this initial moment that reveals some of Pipa’s character. It is true, there are a few other pieces to the puzzle we take notice of, but they are almost always dead-ends. For example, his cousin’s sister, Clara, is a little infatuated with him, but all he wants to do is listen to Marlene Dietrich sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on their late grandfather’s gramophone in the now-empty house.

One small act that does pay off, however, is when Pipa sets up Esteban with a girl because he senses his cousin, deep down and despite what he says, wants to have some fun. This meeting, though purely for pleasure with no possibility of lasting longer than a few hours, does change Esteban, but again we are left to wonder how much or what exactly will happen as a result.

Villegas doesn’t give many answers to our questions, and the story itself is also too minimal, with too few moments of significant narrative weight, to keep us interested in the journey we’re taking. The countryside could have played a much bigger role in this film, especially the scene of the two men getting lost in a field in the middle of the night, but despite a great backdrop, the story in the foreground is badly drawn and ultimately not stimulating enough to keep our attention.

Viewed at the Sarajevo Film Festival 2013.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

André Crous

Great GatsbyUSA
3*

Director:
Baz Luhrmann
Screenwriters:
Baz Luhrmann
Craig Pearce
Director of Photography:
Simon Duggan

Running time: 143 minutes

After the disappointing Australia, Baz Luhrmann marks his return to the world of supersized, kaleidoscopic entertainment with The Great Gatsby. His film is the adaptation of the eponymous 1926 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is as short and compact as this film is long and sprawling, clocking in at nearly two and a half hours.

Set on Long Island in 1922, a stone’s throw from New York City, in the posh villages of West Egg and East Egg, the protagonist and narrator of the story, the 29-year-old Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), moves into a small cottage on the grounds immediately bordering a palatial fortress where there are nightly parties that draw elegant crowds from across the state and beyond partaking in the near-orgiastic celebrations of money and booze.

The host, we learn, is a mysterious man called Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is Nick’s age, and rumours swirl as to the origin of his fortune. When Nick finally meets Gatsby, he is most impressed by his smile, about which Nick waxes lyrical when he describes it as “one of those rare smiles you may come across four or five times in your life.” Alas, despite the faithful (unlike most of the story’s characters, who effortlessly two-time their partners) adaptation of nearly every single line in the novel, this very important character trait does not make its way onto the big screen.

However, Gatsby’s first appearance onscreen certainly presents him as a star worthy of Nick’s ultimate devotion, as we, seemingly from Nick’s point of view, look almost directly at him while fireworks fill the night sky in slow motion behind him. This point-of-view shot obviously seeks to make us identify with Nick, and consequently with his interest in Gatsby, but such appreciation is undercut by the pointless bookend structure of the film that is meant to mirror the writer’s voice in the novel.

The film opens with Nick, at a sanatorium in winter time, a few years after the events; he is struggling to come to terms with his friendship with Gatsby and is urged by his psychiatrist to write out his memories. These notes, typed out just like in Moulin Rouge!, become, as we realise by the end of the film with a sense of dread, the novel itself. It is a jarring structuring device that makes it seem like Fitzgerald could be equated with Nick, although it does illuminate the reason why there are a few scenes in both the novel and the film, related to us by Nick, where he nonetheless wasn’t present.

The Great Gatsby is mostly a story of love and admiration, between the dainty, ditsy Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a distant relative of Nick’s, and Gatsby. Despite his riches, Gatsby is a man who still yearns for the heart of the woman he has loved for many years and because of whom he has become the man he is at present. Nick is a man trying to make ends meet after the Great War and enjoying the life of a bachelor at a time of roaring debauchery. This wasn’t quite the case in the novel, but fortunately, Luhrmann is better at subtlety here than usual.

The set and costume design, as should be expected from a Luhrmann production, is gorgeous (“full of money”, to borrow Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy’s voice), and when late at night during one party the girls splash around the pool at Gatsby’s place with some inflatable zebras, one has a feeling of awe at how many things are going on at once inside the frame. The director was in the mood for indulgence, however, and the party scenes sometimes feel like a bit of a sideshow to the central drama.

The film generally isn’t very visually inventive, with scenes of fast cars shot the same way every time to provoke an impression of confusion, and whereas the director’s digital tracking shots whipped the viewer from Montmartre to an operatic moon in a single movement in Moulin Rouge!, here they seem both irrelevant and less sophisticated as we rush from one side of the bay to the other without a sense of exhilaration. The special effects are sometimes stunningly bad, as it seems the technical team forgot that backgrounds or rear projection don’t always have to be blurred to such an extent it becomes a distracting wasteland of colourful ash. The film has little feeling for place or people, and too many of the scenes feel like they were shot on a sound stage.

The Great Gatsby’s final 10 minutes are a mess and show Luhrmann’s intention was not to reflect on loss but rather to skim over it completely. The final chapter of Fitzgerald’s novel was riveting because it showed how tenuous Gatsby’s connection to the rest of humanity was, while the film nearly glosses over this significant matter entirely.

There are a few references to Sunset Blvd., another film about a longing for the glamour of yesteryear (Nick asks Gatsby “Are you ready for your close-up?” and one character’s death in a swimming pool immediately brings to mind the bookends of Wyler’s film), but Luhrmann is mostly his energetic self, and we realise that while his fingerprints are all over the film, his creativity has more or less run dry. A long sequence of dissolves towards the end of the film is almost sad, and so is the lingering close-up on Nick’s face when he gives Gatsby a heartfelt compliment a few moments later.

Despite the raunchy parties, we all go home at the end feeling little for Luhrmann the host, and while there are a few rare moments of joy to be had, among them the introduction of the many partygoers — transforming the novel’s list into a memorable smorgasbord of characters — the overall impression is one of excess rather than excitement.

7 Days in Havana (2012)

André Crous

7 Days in HavanaSpain
3*

Directors:
Various (see review)
Screenwriters:
Various
Directors of Photography:
Various

Original title: 7 días en La Habana

Running time: 129 minutes

Anthology films are often a bad idea. The exceptions to the rule are Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You — although, truth be told, they aren’t all that good, either.

7 Days in Havana is the same as most other anthology films: up and down, but mostly down, with only the city to keep it all from falling apart. Well, that’s not entirely true, but, for the large part, the spectrum of tones and approaches in 7 Days in Havana is as varied as the filmmakers themselves are, with almost no attempt to reconcile the different storylines. The list of filmmakers involved in this production is made up of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Médem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabío and Laurent Cantet.

The title says it all: 7 Days in Havana takes place over a week in the Cuban capital, and each day has been assigned to a different filmmaker, with his own cast and crew, though there is nothing to prevent “Sunday” from being “Tuesday,” except for one or two linking themes or character types. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday have scenes set at the fancy Hotel Nacional de Cuba; Monday and Tuesday have mostly English dialogue, while the rest of the film is in Spanish; Thursday and Friday have almost no dialogue; Monday has an LGBT character, Friday has a gay character, and Saturday has a gay character. One actor playing a taxi driver pops up now and again, and a young singer named Cecilia (Melvis Estévez) has an important role in two stories, but, even as a character, the city of Havana is strangely neglected, and the stories all seem to be sadly disconnected from each other.

Judged on their own, some of the episodes are not uninteresting and have some potential, but others have clearly just been added for the sake of completing the simple-minded theme of “seven days, seven stories, seven directors.”

The film starts off on firm footing, as a young actor from California (Josh Hutcherson), who is taking some classes in Havana and has a rudimentary grasp of Spanish, arrives — and we realize it was his point of view over the city that we shared during the opening credits, as the airplane came in to land. As so many tourists before him, he is in Havana to have fun and eventually gets involved with a girl who isn’t exactly what she seems. It’s a nice story, it has the requisite “secret” that is revealed, and it doesn’t drag.

The second story is equally good, though much thinner. In one of the film’s rare moments of comedy, we can hear someone throwing up while we are shown the black screen that always separates one day (and one story) from the next. When there is a cut to the actual scene, Emir Kusturica looks up at us from an underground bathroom in a Havana bar. He doesn’t look good, but the camera follows him — in a dazzling, unbroken take — upstairs, out of the bar, where his taxi driver finds him, puts him in the car and drives him to the hotel while Kusturica phones up his wife in Serbia and makes a drunken plea to her to listen to him. More action continues at the hotel, and everything is followed by the single camera that stays on him. Kusturica has no pretensions about himself or his image, and what we get is such self-deprecation that it is completely disarming and eventually utterly engaging. Little of note happens, but Kusturica is one of the strongest, most interesting cast members of the entire production and whenever the camera is on him, we are spellbound.

The third film is at times laughable, as Cecilia’s voice constantly features on the soundtrack as she sings in sugary tones about love and romance, while she herself is cheating on her handsome Puerto Rican baseball player boyfriend. However, the actress is charming, and it is a relief to find her again in the sixth story.

In the fourth, filmmaker Elia Suleiman takes his usual Buster Keaton–like tack and endures life around him in this strange city with an expressionless face. This episode pokes gentle fun at Fidel Castro, as the movements of Suleiman are punctuated by him coming back to his hotel at various points during the day to find the president on television, still orating at the same podium.

The fifth film, by Gaspar Noé, is a disaster and could potentially be the point at which most viewers flee from the theatre. When a girl’s parents find her in bed with another girl, they send her to be cleansed, and this process — during which she is ritually smeared with oils and rubbed with leaves and undergoes an immersion baptism by torchlight — is accompanied by a seemingly never-ending deep bass heartbeat on the soundtrack. The film is pointless, monotonous and a total and utter waste of time.

The weekend films (days six and seven) are much lighter than the others and benefit from some great ensemble acting. Juan Carlos Tabío, the only Cuban director on the production, made the sixth film, about a hot day in the kitchen, and on the Sunday an old woman gathers all the people in her building to help make real the dream she had about a Virgin Mary statue in her living room.

Some of the films have no respect for the 24-hour timeline, and there is no transition other than a blank screen. Few of them warrant the 15-minute running time they have, and that film by Noé is enough to make you get up and leave. Overall, 7 Days in Havana doesn’t show many sides of Havana, and the superficial sides it does have are only fragments of a very confused production.

Directors (in chronological order):
Benicio Del Toro
Pablo Trapero
Julio Médem
Elia Suleiman
Gaspar Noé
Juan Carlos Tabío
Laurent Cantet

Delicacy (2011)

André Crous

La delicatesseFrance
3*

Directors:
David Foenkinos
Stéphane Foenkinos
Screenwriter:
David Foenkinos
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 108 minutes

Original title: La délicatesse

That first half-hour of Delicacy (La Délicatesse) is as gorgeous and as heart-rending as the famous kissing scene in Amélie, whose quirky Audrey Tautou also takes the lead here. It is a gamble the directors, brothers David and Stéphane Foenkinos, bet on big, but even while we are watching it we know deep down they could never keep up with the rhythm, the beauty or the emotion captured in those first few moments of the story.

If only the rest of the film were as delicate as its first 30 minutes.

The moments are all big, and few films — with the notable exception of Mike Nichols’ Closer, a film that alternated the meeting and the breakup scenes in many different relationships — have gone down this road before. The moments certainly evoke feelings of near-ecstasy in the viewer, as the acting is smooth, yet we sense a breathtaking rollercoaster in the lives of these characters we still know so little about.

The film opens at a café, where a young man is sitting alone at a table. Close by, he sees a woman entering, who takes a seat and scans the menu in front of her. He tells himself he will go and talk to her if she settles on … apricot juice. She orders coffee, then corrects herself to order apricot juice instead, and smiles in the direction of the young man. Next, we see them right outside the café as they are leaving arm in arm, celebrating the anniversary of this first encounter.

Many similar moments follow, in which time is gently elided, from first meeting and celebrating the anniversary to getting married and discussing having children, before the young man is suddenly run over by a car. All of this happens in the first 30 minutes, but luckily the rest of the film is not a dreary series of shots that highlight her loss. It is, rather, a look at the difficulty of having a new relationship while her memories continue to affect the way she behaves.

The film is based on a book by one of the directors, David Foenkinos, but the two brothers have beautifully adapted the story for the big screen with spectacular transitions early on and a very thoughtful use of the colour red, a tactic borrowed from a film explicitly featured in the background of an early scene, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

The colour red, manifested either in the clothing worn by main character Nathalie (Tautou), the strong disco lights or the interior of a restaurant she visits with her boss on a disastrous dinner date, clearly refers to love or a bleeding heart, but as time goes by the red mostly disappears, which raises all kinds of questions about the character, who certainly hasn’t forgotten her late husband François.

The directors’ vision becomes a bit muddled as the story progresses. A shy introvert called Markus (François Damiens) who works with Nathalie takes a liking to her, and though he isn’t much to look at, she finds he understands her, and they always have something to talk about. This is, however, an instance where Delicacy would have greatly benefited from those seamless time jumps so frequent at the beginning of the film, as we don’t have any idea what this relationship might look like in a few months or a few years.

One important thing the film gets right is the difficulty of moving on after a relationship, especially one that ended as unexpectedly as the one between Nathalie and François. Scenes where we can see her wondering whether she should delete his number from her phone or toss out his toothbrush are poignant and show an understanding of the underlying pain in her life that can take a very long time to heal.

Nathalie’s interaction with friends is another element that deserves praise, as the friends want the best for her without things changing too much. But that is exactly what happens when she meets Markus. He seems to be perfect for her right now, but her friends don’t agree because he is not as good-looking or as outwardly interesting as François was, and she has to find a compromise.

But the film is rather superficial in its depiction of this dilemma, and we never really get a sense she is struggling to juggle all these new developments in her life.

Delicacy is not another Amélie, but it is certainly charming, and a final scene is particularly honest about the role of memory and pain in relationships, and the place two people must find in each other’s lives in order to make things work.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.