4.5 stars

A Flirtatious Woman (1955)

André Crous

Devoid of the director’s usual pretentiousness, Jean-Luc Godard’s very first fiction short, A Flirtatious Woman, may just be one of the best films he ever created.

Une femme coquetteFrance
4.5*

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

Running time: 9 minutes

Original title: Une femme coquette

Made with just a borrowed 16 mm camera and no money, A Flirtatious Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The 24-year-old had shot a 20-minute documentary, Operation Concrete (Opération béton), the previous year, but intrigued by a Maupassant short story entitled “The Signal”, in which a married woman tries her hand at prostitution, he wrote an adaptation and filmed it without any dialogue on the streets of Geneva.

Except for the use of the voice-over and the primary focus on a female character, this feels nothing like a Godard film, which is precisely why it is so good. Technically, it was directed by “Hans Lucas”, Godard’s chosen pseudonym, which he also used on occasion as a byline for his work in the Cahiers du cinéma. The film is not weighed down by film references or political statements, and there are no silly attempts to re-invent film grammar. The French New Wave’s fascination with Hitchcock and with Bernanos via Bresson subtly infuses the narrative without ever overtaking it, and what we get is a thoroughly enjoyable, tightly focused, well-executed film with a central character who justifies her actions intelligently and with a human voice. This cannot be said of the bulk of Godard’s subsequent films. although the film does anticipate Godard’s fixation on prostitution.

In the first and last scenes, we see a young woman, Agnès (Maria Lysandre), writing a letter to her friend, Françoise. The letter is a full confession of the adultery she has committed, which we see in the flashback constituting the main body of the film. The voice-over is very clearly the words written in the letter, but even though this is a verbalisation of written material, the message is conveyed realistically and compellingly. This does not feel like something written down and read for the benefit of the viewer. Many of Godard’s feature films suffer from the burden of being lectures rather than stories. That is certainly not the case here.

Agnès recounts how she was on her way home one day to prepare lunch for her husband when she noticed a woman on a balcony. The woman was well-dressed and gave a warm smile to every man passing on the street below. Young, old, handsome, ugly… she didn’t discriminate. At one point, a serious young chain-smoker with sunglasses (a 25-year-old-going-on-45-year-old Jean-Luc Godard) noticed her, kept looking towards her and noticed she continued to smile at him. He went up, she went inside, and 15 minutes later, he came back out. Agnès is so thrilled by this overt display of flirtatiousness that she innocently dips her toe into the pool of prostitution, too.

On the Île Rousseau, a small island in the middle of Geneva, she approaches a man reading a newspaper on a bench. He peeks at him, again and again. This sustained series of shots culminates in the man being so taken with her coy glances that rushes towards her with a frenzied lust he can no longer control. After all, men are very simple creatures – if anyone good-looking shows the slightest bit of interest in them, they easily turn to putty. Surprised that her ruse was so successful, and also a little shocked by the passion she managed to rouse, Agnès runs back home. But the man pursues her by car, and when he catches up with her, he offers 50 francs (around $250 today) for the pleasure of her company. She doesn’t say no.

A Flirtatious Woman does not contain any dialogue or diegetic sounds. The soundtrack consists exclusively of Agnès’s voice-over reading of the confessional letter, along with bits and pieces of Bach playing continuously throughout. The narration is compelling not only because it comments on the action but also because it informs us about the narrator’s state of mind. Moreover, the words come across as spoken rather than read, which adds dynamism to this part of the soundtrack. The cinematography and the editing both seem a bit flimsy and thrown together from whatever footage Godard managed to collect, but the film’s appeal comes from its simple story told in a compelling way – largely thanks to the voice work, for which I presume the credit goes to actress Maria Lysandre.

Except for the Bach (mostly the “Brandenburg Concertos”) constantly blaring on the soundtrack, this is a wonderful piece of work. It may lack the formal playfulness and the philosophising we tend to associate with Godard, but the film is all the better for it. If only he had kept this up in his later work, though without appearing in them to the same extent as here (this is not merely a Hitchcockian cameo but a major character role), his motion pictures may have been infinitely more relatable.

Die Kandidaat (1968)

André Crous

More than 50 years after its release at the height of apartheid, Jans Rautenbach’s Die Kandidaat has lost none of its bravery nor any of its razor-sharp comedy.

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Jans Rautenbach
Screenwriters:
Jans Rautenbach
Emil Nofal
Director of Photography:
Vincent G. Cox

Running time: 100 minutes

During the nearly 50 years of apartheid in South Africa, Afrikaans was the language of authority. In terms of power, the country belonged to Afrikaans whites first, then to English whites, then to no one else. When Die Kandidaat (literally “The Candidate”, although the film never had an English title) opened in 1968, the turmoil from abroad broke on the African shores, and the result was a breathtakingly robust manifestation of artistic resistance to the staid and seemingly stern status quo of segregation. All without featuring a single non-white character.

The director, Jans Rautenbach, was all of 31 years old when he directed this, his first film as a solo director. Boiling contemporary Afrikaner society down to nine representatives on the board of a big Afrikaans company, the Adriaan Delport Foundation, he exposes factional infighting and uncertainty with seriousness, insight and generous helpings of comic relief when conservative and progressive viewpoints are pitted against each other. 

These representatives, in whose company we spend most of the film, are:

  • Lourens Niemand, businessman and chairman of the board
  • Paula Neethling, the founder’s daughter (and apparent socialite)
  • Reverend Perholdt from the Dutch Reformed Church
  • Anna Volschenk, head of an Afrikaans women’s organisation
  • Herman Botha, farmer
  • Prof. Hannes van Biljon, proponent of the Afrikaans language
  • Wilhelm Esterhuysen, carpenter
  • HP Greeff, deputy secretary in the civil service
  • Anton du Toit, writer

The nine board members are tasked with protecting and propagating the culture and alleged values of Afrikaans speakers. They are meeting to choose a new CEO, and according to the charter, their decision has to be unanimous. But the boardroom is not a homogeneous entity, and people’s views – however slight the difference between them – easily create divisions. 

The titular final candidate for the position is Dr Jan le Roux (Roelf Jacobs), an outwardly strait-laced member of society who runs Seunsdorp, a reform school for teenage boys who have lost their way. The board’s chairman, Lourens Niemand (Gert van den Bergh, who died on the eve of shooting his final scene), and Paula Neethling (Marié du Toit), who wields extraordinary power even though (or because) she is the late founder’s daughter, are adamant about pushing the nomination through as quickly as possible. Their strategy is to allay their fellow board members’ fears with a mere wave of the hand. But one of them, a writer called Anton du Toit, has done his homework. Not only does he want to undermine Paula’s authority for personal reasons, but as a writer of the Sixties movement, he wants to stir the pot. And stir it he does.

Before long, he recalls that the foundation’s regulations require that the CEO be a “genuine Afrikaner”. This ostensibly innocuous moniker quickly leads the nine decision-makers to discuss the label’s applicability to those who do not fit the stereotype. In a country where “Afrikanerness” rests on so many different pillars, the latter’s various definitions can overlap each other rather imperfectly. Are so-called coloured South Africans (of mixed heritage), most of whom speak Afrikaans as a first language, also Afrikaners? Are white speakers of Afrikaans who do not belong to one of the main Protestant denominations? And those who do not follow the governing National Party? And those who have an English spouse?

These questions quickly create division among the members, thus pointedly indicating an unspoken division within white South Africa, too. In a couple of brilliantly timed moments of levity, the arguments even escalate to fisticuffs. Despite the glossy veneer of the boardroom, with its stained glass windows and statues of Afrikaans heroes (according to the government of the day), these men and women can still grab each other by the throat when they get hot and bothered by a viewpoint they don’t share. But while Du Toit is the one stoking the fire, it is the eloquent albeit slightly uptight Le Roux who serves as the flint.

Rautenbach’s opening credits sequence cleverly depicts this symbolism. A series of static shots showing statues made of stone turns dynamic with the appearance of Le Roux. In fact, his arrival appears to have a material effect on the camera. The initially immobile frame suddenly embarks on a whirlwind of a semi-circle movement. The rest of the sequence consists almost exclusively of shots obtained by either moving (tracking shots) or swivelling the camera (pans). 

The scenes in the boardroom are a bit of a one-man show, with the heterodox writer, Du Toit, asking all the taboo questions. But we know he is right, and therefore, we are always on his side. His anti-establishment streak also clearly targets the board’s two most powerful members, Niemand and Neethling.

Neethling is the one with the most authority, however, and her outfits both emulate and rival those of Cleopatra. By contrast, Niemand, whose surname literally and very appropriately means “nobody”, is a vacuous embarrassment. Throughout the film, he is slow and completely befuddled, loses his train of thought and cuts a pathetic figure when he puffs on his cigar. He is a pushover for whatever Neethling wants, and we realise right at the end that she was blackmailing him all along. As a symbol of the upper echelons of power in Afrikaans society, his character is a devastating indictment of the absence of direction at the top.

The action is set almost exclusively in just two locations, but what Die Kandidaat lacks for in breadth it more than makes up for in depth. And while the scenes in the board room are the most daring, half the story concerns an evolving tragedy at Seunsdorp, and we gradually come to realise how the two tracks fit together both narratively and thematically. One of the boys gets injured while spraying chemicals outside. A troublemaker and hardened criminal, Izak, who instigated the incident, fingers a shy classmate, Kallie (Regardt van den Bergh), as the culprit. There is a diversity of thought and character here among the Afrikaner boys, too, and it is not always easy to label any of them as either good or bad. Once they are branded as a problem, however, as someone who doesn’t belong in society, they carry that label with them for the rest of their lives, like a skin they can’t shed.

In this regard, the discussions at the foundation are fundamentally related to the ups and downs of these boys on the fringes of society. As a former member of a youth gang, Le Roux is the perfect bridge between the two worlds. Far from the modern art and the book-lined walls of this bubble of Afrikaner superiority, he has a much more practical approach to spreading the gospel of Afrikanerness.

But the many skeletons that tumble out of the closet in the board room are a thing to behold. Through their slips of the tongue, naïveté and revelations of closely guarded secrets, we discover many of the supposedly upstanding representatives of Afrikaner society are, in fact, human, after all, and differ from each other, even if that is the last thing the government wants. We learn that Neethling’s late husband, the previous director of the foundation, was a true disaster. We learn that she jilted Du Toit for Le Roux, and he abandoned her for someone else, although the film’s timeline is a bit muddled. Greeff’s wife speaks English. Le Roux is engaged to an English-speaking South African, and she’s Catholic, too. Niemand has the biggest secret of them all, but it is the arch-conservative Mrs Volschenk who gives the film its most priceless moment in an exchange with the controversial Du Toit, whose literary work she considers indecent:

Volschenk: You can’t tell me anything about “life”! My husband and I travel abroad quite often. Last year in Paris, I also encountered your “sex”. All of a sudden, these… girls… started chatting to my husband out on the street. It was terrible. I was so shocked that my husband put his foot down and ordered me to head back to the hotel at once to calm down. The poor man. He didn’t return to the hotel until several hours later.

Du Toit: I bet he was very tired…

Volschenk: Well, naturally.

Rautenbach builds on and vastly surpasses the entertainment of King Hendrik, a political comedy released three years earlier and directed by Emil Nofal, who co-wrote and produced Die Kandidaat. King Hendrik, set in a South African town that was never fully incorporated and, thus, decides to declare independence, trod carefully around (but didn’t completely ignore) hot-button issues like apartheid and Afrikaans–English relations. For Nofal, the drama of division was a source of comedy rather than reflection, but in Die Kandidaat, Rautenbach strikes the right balance by intensifying the drama while letting the lighter moments bubble to the surface when appropriate to reinforce the drama.

More than half a century after its release, Die Kandidaat remains an extraordinary piece of political cinema, especially because the questions it poses about Afrikanerness have never been adequately answered. It never feels like the work of a first-time director with too little life experience or who is trying to say too much. On the surface an inquiry into the slippery definition of an Afrikaner, it offers an honest appraisal of Afrikaans society, warts and all. It is a film that likely would not have received any support from the Adriaan Delport Foundation. But there’s no making a masterpiece by simply playing by the rules, and pushing the envelope can often get the message further.

Harakiri (1962)

André Crous

Two riveting storylines connected by Tatsuya Nakadai’s powerhouse performance turn Harakiri into a deeply affecting examination of human morality and dignity in the face of injustice and deception.

HarakiriJapan
4.5*

Director:
Masaki Kobayashi
Screenwriter: 
Shinobu Hashimoto
Director of Photography:
Yoshio Miyajima

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: 切腹
Transliterated title: Seppuku

Harakiri is not only one of the best samurai films but one of the best films in Japanese cinema. Dealing with issues ranging from loyalty, honour and family to peer pressure and hypocrisy, it advances on two tracks. The first is the present (late afternoon on 13 May 1630), in which a samurai from a former clan has been reduced to living in poverty and asks to commit suicide in the Iyi clan’s forecourt. His name is Hanshiro Tsugumo, and Tatsuya Nakadai’s assured portrayal of the character is mesmerising. The second is the story-within-a-story in which a young man named Motome Chijiwa arrived a few months earlier with the same request but met a harrowing end.

The connective tissue between these two tracks is Hanshiro. He had been best friends with Motome’s father, Jinnai, during their time serving the Fukushima clan in Hiroshima. When the clan collapsed in 1619, Jinnai committed suicide. But to prevent Hanshiro from following his example, he entrusted Motome to his care. Eventually, Motome would become his son-in-law.

Hanshiro subsequently moved to Edo and barely supported himself by making umbrellas with his daughter. Although this was not the life of a samurai, Hanshiro continued to adhere to the values he accrued during his service. That is, until he lost his entire family and realised that the samurai of the Iyi clan were laughing at the misery of the poorer classes.

Harakiri is both mentally and emotionally affecting because it questions the often undisputed moral authority of the samurai. It is no coincidence that the director’s name in the opening credits sequence quite literally impales the revered suit of armour symbolising the glory of the Iyi clan. At many turns – sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes with grave seriousness – Hanshiro speaks some truth about the disparity between the perception of the samurai and how they really behave. They are made of flesh and blood and are not gods; they are fallible, not invincible; they are men and have the same faults as all other men; and they are not monolithic: They are good and bad and can be virtuous or vile.

The fullness of this complexity is gradually laid bare as Hanshiro presents his reasoning for committing suicide. The title refers to the act of disembowelment that the Japanese sword-wielding retainers, in particular, performed for reasons associated with honour. Samurai were expected to plunge their own blades into their stomachs as their weapon is as much a part of the warrior as his soul. Notwithstanding the reason for executing it, seppuku, as the Japanese call it, is a gruesome act. In the case of Motome, however, there is a (grim and sadistic) twist to the self-execution, albeit under the pretence of tradition.

Hanshiro says that samurai honour (bushido) is nothing more than a façade. Initially, we suspect he may be taunting the Iyi clan and all the samurai assembled around him in the courtyard. But when he recounts the circumstances that led to Motome coming to them, as well as their mocking tone upon returning his corpse, we see he has very good reasons for doing so. These reasons appear all the more justified during the climax when the house’s samurai culture is decisively stripped of its veneer. Among the samurai, violence is all too often prioritised over dialogue and understanding, and group pressure can end a life.

The screenplay is the work of Shinobu Hashimoto, who wrote many an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece, including Seven Samurai and Ikiru, during his storied career. But in terms of rhythm, subversiveness and clarity, Harakiri arguably surpasses all of them. Besides the clever links between the two tracks of the narrative, we also get numerous surprises as Hanshiro makes a major revelation almost every time he opens his mouth.

This quick-paced disclosure of context and no shortage of secrets, as well as Nakadai’s perfectly modulated acting – quite the opposite of Toshiro Mifune’s exaggerated kabuki performances in Kurosawa’s films – keep us enthralled throughout the two-hour running time, half of which takes place at a single location. And yet, we have no idea where all of this is leading. The information we receive tells us everything about the present, but the developments remain unwritten. Sustained by an eerie but entrancing biwa on the soundtrack, this tension of possibility continues right to the end, when a surprising string of deaths (in flashback) culminates in an unforgettable climax.

Kageyu Saito, the senior counsellor who oversees the two harakiri ritual ceremonies, exemplifies how strength is often just weakness reinforced by the strict enforcement of rules. Saito is hesitant and uncertain, but he implements the rules he knows. When these prove to be ineffective, he panics. But with no moral foundation of his own and unwilling to get his hands dirty (he never draws his sword), he resorts to underhanded tactics. This includes besmirching a genuine samurai and rewriting history to maintain his clan’s reputation. But we, the audience, know the truth. And as our knowledge increases, our empathy grows for both Hanshiro and Motome.

Kurosawa may be the artist in samurai cinema, but Harakiri leaves no doubt that Kobayashi is the master storyteller. Every line of dialogue in the film is essential and either clearly sets the scene or drives the story forward. We can discern the gravity of the circumstances from the words alone and have no need for histrionic performances. Nakadai is serene but stands strong thanks to his character’s unassailable moral rectitude.

This is the kind of masterpiece that exposes its competitors as vacuous pretenders, regardless of their directors’ pedigree.

Carriage to Vienna (1966)

André Crous

With gorgeous photography and a soundtrack that has religious undertones, Carriage to Vienna reminds us that the terror of the Reich’s occupiers spilled over into horrors committed by the previously occupied Czechs.

Carriage to ViennaCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Kachyňa
Screenwriters:
Jan Procházka
Karel Kachyňa
Director of Photography:
Josef Illík

Running time: 75 minutes

Original title: Kočár do Vídně
Alternate English title: Coach to Vienna

A road movie unlike any other, Karel Kachyňa’s Carriage to Vienna is also a thriller and an absolutely devastating indictment of the Czech nation after the Second World War. Set in the forests of Moravia, close to the Czechoslovakia–Austria border, the story covers roughly 24 tumultuous hours in the life of a young widow named Krista (an enigmatic, quietly brooding Iva Janžurová).

The opening crawl informs us that an anonymous “they” had hanged Krista’s husband the previous night for stealing a few sacks of cement. It’s the first week of Mary 1945, and we can reasonably assume it was Germans who did the killing. A few hours later, as day is breaking, two soldiers (one of them suffering serious injuries) appear on her doorstep and force her to take them to the border. They say they are Austrian, not “Reichsdeutschen”, although in wartime this is a distinction without a difference. Thus begins a daylong horse-drawn carriage ride through the misty forest.

Krista doesn’t speak a word. By contrast, Hans (Jaromír Hanzlík), the young German soldier sitting beside her on the carriage, is positively giddy. He can’t stop talking or moving about. Perhaps it is because the war is at an end and he has survived the ordeal. Maybe because he is going home. Or because this quiet and mysterious but seemingly submissive girl is taking him to freedom. He shows her photos of his family and his home in Vienna.

It has to be said that Hans is portrayed as far more naïve than malicious. Unlike Krista, whose life is in immediate danger, he is high-strung to the point of nearly snapping in half. And although he had been in the service of far-right fascism, he is clearly also human. In post-war Czechoslovak cinema, this was a big shift from the previous representations of German soldiers as uniformly malevolent.

However, all is not quite as it seems. We are constantly aware of the various weapons on board: The Germans have rifles and a pistol, but Krista has an axe concealed underneath the carriage. Slowly but surely, as the second soldier, Günther, loses consciousness and Hans is easily distracted, Krista disposes of the weapons one by one.  These moments are elegantly brought to our attention when the carriage moves on and the camera stays behind to discreetly reveal the items discarded in the bushes.

Beautiful organ music played by Milan Šlechta suffuses the soundtrack as we watch the trees stretching up to the heavens contrast starkly with the fog in black and white. Over time, we come to realise that the trees themselves are, in a way, the organ pipes, and we find ourselves in a sacred space where good and evil have come to do battle. Krista spends the first half of the film in silent contemplation, and it is riveting to behold. But despite the almost ethereal audiovisual atmosphere, we can feel the tension building. Will she or won’t she use the weapons on the Germans? Will they or won’t they discover what she is doing?

Then, things take a sharp turn, and the film ends in a stunning obliteration of sympathy. We had gone most of the film on the side of the underdog, hoping that Krista would escape and perhaps even take revenge for enduring the war and losing her husband hours earlier. But with the front line drawing closer, and Hans’s head is in her lap, she does not kill him. In fact, she makes a decision that can most charitably be described as unexpected, if not downright cuckoo. And yet, while her later actions may seem erratic, the very real impact of the war on her way of life cannot be underestimated.

However, Carriage to Vienna will be best remembered for its powerful final scene, which calls to mind the brutal postwar expulsion of Czech Germans. (The same applied to Hungarians, although they did not have the added burden of their people directly supporting genocide during the war.) For reasons that are easy to guess but morally questionable, anyone who was “ethnically” German was persona non grata in the newly liberated Czechoslovakia. The country’s president, Edvard Beneš, issued decrees to the effect that such individuals, even if they had lived in the Czech lands for generations, would lose their citizenship and be deported to the countries of their forefathers.

Kachyňa’s film requires just a single, well-placed scene to drive its point home about the violent backlash after the war. Its portrayal of German soldiers as people who fought on the wrong side rather than machines of immorality is equally bold. And although the film’s first half is far superior to its second, it may be one of the best and most important works of art the country has ever produced.

Moffie (2019)

André Crous

In Moffie, an English-speaking conscript with an Afrikaans surname has to learn how to navigate the army’s world of machismo as a gay man during apartheid.

MoffieSouth Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Oliver Hermanus
Jack Sidey
Director of Photography:
Jamie D Ramsay

Running time: 100 minutes

Either you fall in line or you suffer the consequences. That is the message of the army and, let’s be honest, of society at large. If a recruit (or any other member of society) is brainwashed to believe that the fatherland should be defended even at the cost of sacrificing their own life, any resistance will seem like the work of the enemy. Those who are different, who cannot (or refuse to) toe the line and, therefore, hamper the development of a strong, homogeneous unit, become targets for removal.

In one of the first scenes of Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, a train the colour of blood is chugging along deep into the South African heartland. On the soundtrack, menacing strings with a Penderecki-like quality evoke a palpable fear. The year is 1981, the country is at war, and this cross-country railway is filled with adolescent flesh and bone – for the moment, still alive. Military service became compulsory for white South African men in June 1967 and was a practice that would last until shortly before the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

In the 1980s, scared of the danger of communism brewing in Angola, South Africa sent its young men to defend the ramparts. It was known as the South African Border War and was waged at the edge of the country’s mandate (colony), which it called South West Africa (Namibia). In many respects, South Africa amounted to a military theocracy whose authorities saw themselves and their purpose in biblical terms, and many of those fighting its war were Afrikaans boys around the age of 18. 

In Afrikaans, “moffie” means “faggot”. Incidentally, those two f’s in the middle, which here emphasise the condition of being (in the eyes of the speaker) effeminate and therefore afflicted, also pop up in the Afrikaans equivalent of the n-word. For whites in apartheid South Africa, being in control while being a minority meant standing up to the majority. To do this required (white) machismo, and to prove one’s mettle, war – often considered the manly activity par excellence – was the perfect testing ground. Being a moffie, by contrast, was regarded as unmanly. These two characteristics came head to head during the war on the border.

More than half the film is set at a training camp outside the town of Middelburg, in the middle of nowhere. Upon arrival, the conscripts are (and continue to be) mistreated and humiliated to the point of being dehumanised. Most strikingly, they are called various epithets rooted in the titular insult and told that they have to transform into real men. In charge of this sadistic torture is Sergeant Brand (“blaze” in Afrikaans), who appears to take glee in the youngsters’ despair and exhaustion.

One of them is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He is an outsider twice over: Among these dozens of Afrikaans boys, who speak the country’s language of power and authority, he is one of the only ones from an English family. He is also gay, as we can surmise from the opening scene when his father gives him a saucy present and he responds with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Lucky for him, he quickly finds Michael (Matthew Vey), another English boy, and the two bond over “Sugar Man” and, more superficially, being outsiders in this environment that values and promotes not only ethnic but also linguistic nationalism.

Before long, two young men with bloody faces are publicly paraded in front of their fellow soldiers. Nicholas hears they were caught kissing and then beaten up by a whole mob inside the camp. Now they are being sent off to the dreaded Ward 22. For the duration of the film, he lives in fear that this could happen to him, too. Meanwhile, everywhere he looks, he sees the straight guys touching each other and joking about their genitalia.

In the army, as in life, to be considered a man often means having to take part in a dick-measuring contest. And yet, this contest, by its very nature, vibrates with homoeroticism, as the Top Gun–inspired volleyball match reminds us. Hermanus adroitly conveys the confusion all of this creates in the young Nicholas, whose world becomes ever more complicated the closer he moves to what he desires.

At the same time, the training camp and its activities are designed to make the privates feel like children while scolding them for not behaving like men. This contradiction can only lead to conflict and combustion that many of these adolescent men simply cannot handle.

Hermanus’s debut feature, Shirley Adams, had a suicide. His sophomore film featured a rape in near silence. His third film had a triple murder followed by another murder. Although Moffie, his fourth film, also follows this trend (after all, it is a film about soldiers during wartime), even the moments of relative calm are rife with tension and the nauseating fear that such violence can erupt again at any time. The constant drumbeat of male-on-male violence and brutal macho aggression suffuses the narrative and thoroughly unsettles our experience of watching it.

The film proves the saying correct that mediocre books tend to make the best movies. The eponymous 2006 novel by André Carl van der Merwe has been completely overhauled, and the resulting adaptation is a vast improvement over the original text. Not only because the focus is much stronger but also because all the characters onscreen – even the most contemptible ones – have more nuance than their literary counterparts.

However, when choosing between showing too little or showing too much, Hermanus has consistently preferred the former. Unfortunately, this means that we get to know very little about Nicholas and his aspirations beyond his otherness. The intention may well be that he serves as a stand-in onto which the viewer can project their own stories, but this inscrutability does not always help to elicit our sympathy.

Apart from a peculiarly staged flashback (this is a memory, and there is no reason to highlight the continuity of time and space), we get no real insight into Nicholas’s life outside the army. It was a wise decision to forgo the novel’s multiple interludes into the past. However, the film is still stuck with this flashback that, clever as its depiction of a domineering but anonymous threat is, the director could have easily done away with altogether.

The film is a much more austere and melancholy portrayal of a white gay soldier in apartheid-era South Africa than Canary, which used camaraderie to alleviate the terror its characters experienced. In Moffie, there are no escape hatches. The flawless camerawork and the exquisite soundtrack (including Schubert’s “Piano Trio in E-flat major”, most famously used in Barry Lyndon but here countering the visuals in a jarring yet poetic way that would make Stanley Kubrick proud) do not portend a happy ending. In Hermanus’s films, the characters always end up having to negotiate a truce with disappointment. To survive, Nicholas will have to learn that, in the words of one Nobel Prize laureate who is cited in the film, “All I can be is me, whoever that is.”

With Moffie, Oliver Hermanus has seamlessly welded his stylistic ambitions to his raw material, shaping it to form – by far – the most elegant and coherently visceral film he has made to date. 

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Wings (1927)

André Crous

Wings was the first film to receive a Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards, but just maybe the awards show was created especially to honour this remarkable World War I film.

WingsUSA
4.5*

Director:
William Wellman
Screenwriters:
Hope Loring
Louis D. Lighton
Director of Photography:
Harry Perry

Running time: 145 minutes

More than 90 years after it was first released, Wings continues to impress in large part thanks to the majesty of its aerial combat scenes. The film was directed by William Wellman, who turned 31 towards the end of production and had served as a fighter pilot in the French Foreign Legion during World War I a decade earlier. This experience in the air clearly came in very useful during the shoot, as the most exciting moments all take place high above the earth.

In staging and shooting his “dogfights”, Wellman anticipated what Steven Spielberg would do more than 40 years later in Duel: To impress upon the viewer how fast an object is moving, it needs a background against which its velocity can be made visible. In the case of planes, that means a clear blue sky won’t do, and Wellman allegedly waited days – sometimes weeks – for clouds to form. The results speak for themselves as the camera perfectly captures both the speed and the motion, from a soaring take-off to a tumble through the clouds.

We start somewhere in middle America, where the carefree Jack (played by the clean-cut Buddy Rogers), still very much a boy rather than a man, is the connecting tissue between two separate love triangles. His neighbour, Mary (Clara Bow), whom he considers a friend, likes him as more than just a friend. But he only has eyes for Sylvia, who, in turn, is in a secret relationship with the rich, soft-spoken and socially awkward David (Richard Arlen). When Jack and David heed the call to enlist in the army in 1917, they receive training as combat pilots and, before long, are sent off to the battlefields of Europe.

A title card informs us of the “mighty maelstrom of destruction” that the war turned into over its four years of combat, and the film depicts this apocalyptic vision with vivid scenes of violence. Mortality hits home for the two small-town boys at their training camp when an aviator they just met and will be sharing a tent with crashes overhead.

Wings is at its best during the action scenes, while the romance is as shallow as one would expect from a 1920s production. However, the virtuosity of Wellman and cameraman Harry Perry is not limited to the skies. The battle scenes are equally impressive as we can see and feel the enormity of events.

When the French town of Merval is bombed, one of the explosives hits a church, whose bell tower flies straight off and comes crashing down on an automobile. The trench warfare includes explosions all over that make it seem like the earth is opening up and swallowing the armed forces whole. At another point, as reserves are marching across the countryside, another explosion sends the men and their limbs flying over the fields. Elsewhere, a tank drives across soldiers as bombs go off and others are stabbed with rifles. It is all a ghastly sight but brings the horror of war home, even to a viewer a century later.

The film was recently restored to 145 mint-condition minutes that also include orange colouring to add emphasis for fire, including gunfire. One can easily see how it came to be that the Oscars handed out its first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture (then called the award “for Outstanding Picture”) to Wings, but given the scale of the achievement and, especially, its contemporaries, one might start wondering whether, perhaps, the Oscars were established because Wings simply had to receive its due recognition.

The serious drama on the battlefield is counterweighted, however, by the simplistic melodrama of the duelling romances. One particularly egregious scene takes place at a nightclub in Paris, which starts with a famous track-in across (and seemingly through) a series of tables and bar patrons and ends on Jack, who is already hammered. Mary, who is no wallflower and has already survived at least one major bombing raid in France while serving as a wartime ambulance driver, finds him there but almost immediately collapses into an emotional mess. All of this is quite in keeping with the roles assigned to male and female characters at the time but feels at odds with what appears to be an authentic portrayal of real life on the battlefield.

Although struggling with some overly theatrical acting, Wings more than makes up for its melodramatic lapses with stunningly rendered battles scenes both on land and in the air. From spectacular long shots that fill our field of vision with scenes of mayhem in motion to singular moments of grandeur, like the immolation of an airship depicted 10 years before the infamous Hindenburg disaster, this is a film that could reach its ambition because the art of filmmaking had come so far. This production would not have been possible again for a very long time, as the microphone would have greatly hindered the camera’s movements, and even today, it is worth reminding ourselves what was already possible without special effects in 1927.

Canary (2018)

André Crous

Canary is a coming-of-age film set in apartheid-era South Africa that also marks the coming of age of contemporary South African cinema.

Kanarie-CanarySouth Africa
4.5*

Director:
Christiaan Olwagen
Screenwriters:
Christiaan Olwagen
Charl-Johan Lingenfelder
Director of Photography:
Chris Vermaak

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Kanarie

Johan Niemand (literally, “John Nobody”) likes fashion, music and Boy George. But he lives in a small town in Christian-heavy apartheid-era South Africa, and it goes without saying that, for someone like him, the road ahead isn’t going to be easy. To make matters worse, we meet him fresh out of high school, just as he is called up to serve in the military.

A bit like its Pied Piper‒inspired opening credits sequence, Christiaan Olwagen’s Canary (Kanarie) is a flaming, mesmerising piece of work that viewers will have a hard time resisting. The film deftly navigates the minefield of recent South African history, littered as it is by racial segregation, religious supremacy and repressed sexuality. And it is the latter that features most prominently, although the film frequently chooses creative and insightful discussion over easy wins.

In that opening scene, two friends bribe Johan to walk down the road of their provincial and presumably conservative neighbourhood decked out in a big white wedding gown. We later find out he’s made a habit of doing whatever he can to earn money in order to buy LPs so that he can escape his surroundings, even just for a moment, by listening to his Walkman. It is a scene that seamlessly combines the fear of being different with the elation of imagining a world where you don’t have to fit in but others will join you in expressing yourself.

But expressing oneself in 1980s South Africa often meant being separated from one’s peers. Johan, played by Schalk Bezuidenhout (who, in what seems like another life entirely, is actually a moustachioed, curly-haired stand-up comic in his native South Africa), is conscripted just as South Africa is about to mark 20 years of ongoing conflict in neighbouring Namibia and Angola. War and manhood, then as now, are perceived as two sides of the same coin. Johan rightly assumes that his only way of surviving the dreaded “national service” is to be selected as a Kanarie – one of two dozen young men who form the South African Defence Force Choir and Concert group. To his utter relief, he makes it through.

Although slightly out of his comfort zone at first, he quickly bonds with two fellow Canaries: the camp but stout Ludolf (Germandt Geldenhuys) and blond, bespectacled fellow country boy, Wolfgang (Hannes Otto). They tease and support each other, particularly when they are verbally abused by their superiors.

One such superior is the young “Corporal Crunchie” (Beer Adriaanse), nicknamed for his copious consumption of the oat-based delicacy Ludolf’s mother packs for her son. Addressing the recruits as “ladies” is the mildest of the insults he hurls at them, which often include an array of ever more creative epithets associated with both male and female genitals. Loquacious and vulgar, the corporal is a slightly out-of-control version of Full Metal Jacket’s infamous Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and easily rises to the challenge of using words as weapons to emasculate his recruits, despite many of them having developed a thick skin after years of being bullied at school.

When the Kanaries go on tour and stay with host families, Johan and Wolfgang often share a room and grow ever closer, which gradually tears the soft-spoken Johan apart. Swinging between exhilaration and despair, he struggles to accept himself as he is convinced God will punish him for what he desires.

From the very first moments, Canary sets itself apart from the rest of the flock. The audacious decision to shoot scenes in single takes (or to give them the appearance of being shot as such) is both a blessing and a curse. Director of photography Chris Vermaak utilises his Steadicam to full effect to have conversations play out in a coherent, inescapable space. During Johan’s audition, the camera makes a seemingly impossible move as it appears to be drawn to the singing by passing through a table – the inverse of a similar shot in Citizen Kane.

However, while there is no question Olwagen gets to show off his talents as a director and the cast gets to flaunt their acting skills, the incredibly mobile camera can become distracting, if not downright repetitive as it pushes in or out on static action while panning and tracking on more mobile actions. The same is true of the recurring breaking of the fourth wall, which would have been more effective had it been used more judiciously.

By contrast, one of the most memorable shots is also one of the simplest: a single minutes-long close-up on Johan’s face that expresses everything we need to know and will strike a deep emotional chord with many a viewer, not unlike Ingmar Bergman’s similar approach to a rape scene in The Virgin Spring. Another devastating moment emerges out of the palpable tension of Johan and his sister trying but failing to address a serious topic as they sit shoulder to shoulder in a doorway and the camera has nowhere to go.

Above all, Canary puts onscreen some of the best acting ever shown in an Afrikaans feature film. For once, the actors don’t sound like they belong on stage and, unlike almost every single Afrikaans television series or feature film out there, no scene opens with people laughing at a non-existent joke. They are immediately recognisable as characters fully rooted in and representative of the real world, with their conversations having the colour and texture to make them both layered and accessible.

Tackling nationalism, religion and sexuality in a single film and doing so without veering off into the territory of self-congratulation or pontification is above most filmmakers’ pay grade, but Olwagen and fellow screenwriter Charl-Johan Lingenfelder stay close enough to Johan to allow us a sense of intimacy while pulling back far enough to take in his immediate context. He is the centre of attention in every single scene, and this first-person perspective, which includes many a music-video-style fantasy, boosts our empathy for him as he comes not only of age but of identity.

Christiaan Olwagen has made his material sing, and it’s as good a harmony as anything his characters belt out.

Viewed at the 2018 Cape Town International Film Market and Festival.

The Little Prince (2015)

André Crous

This unusual adaptation of French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s widely read and beloved The Little Prince is intelligent, funny and deeply moving.

Little PrinceFrance
4.5*

Director:
Mark Osborne
Screenwriters:
Irena Brignull
Bob Persichetti
Directors of Photography:
Adel Abada
Kris Kapp

Running time: 110 minutes

Stories about father figures are nothing new, nor are stories about father figures who teach young girls about the world (just consider Jostein Gaarder’s masterful compendium of 3,000 years of philosophy in the novel Sophie’s World). However, when such a story is obliquely infused with critical insights about culture, religion and the magic of childhood thanks to a beloved novella that is equally accessible to children and adults, the result can be overwhelming.

Director Mark Osborne took up the burden of adapting the 70-year-old, 100-page-long novella, which continues to rank among the most-read and bestselling works in the world, for the big screen. An added challenge, beyond merely adding movement to the pictures and breathing physical life (and voice) into the words of the author, the late Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was that the original work would only comprise half of the final film’s narrative. Overcoming the sceptics, the director of Kung Fu Panda and a handful of SpongeBob SquarePants episodes has produced a stirring glimpse of childhood and of growing up that will amuse younger viewers and captivate elder viewers alike with light-hearted entertainment informed by the melancholia-tinged savvy of the original text.

Unexpectedly, the main character is not a young prince nor a mature aviator but a little girl who fittingly resembles Dora the Explorer. Following Saint-Exupéry’s lead, none of the characters have names (except for the all-important “Mr. Prince” in the final act) and instead bear descriptive titles such as “Little Girl”, “Mother”, “Fox”, “Aviator” and, of course, “The Little Prince”.

The Little Girl (voiced by Mackenzie Foy, who starred as the daughter of Matthew McConaughey’s character in Interstellar, another star-struck feature) lives with her mother, a very serious auditor, in a nondescript city. Her father sends her the same snow globe containing a skyscraper for her birthday every single year. We can assume that both parents want their daughter to end up in some capacity as a successful worker, and therefore Little Girl is on the road to join the prestigious, strait-laced Werth Academy, where everyone is asked to work toward being “essential”. After a disastrous enrolment interview, Little Girl’s mother lays out a stringent plan for the summer holiday, during which any of her daughter’s free time will be minimal and limited to essential activities, such as eating and exercise.

Mother and daughter move in next to a dilapidated house, the scourge of the planned community where everyone wears the same greyscale-coloured outfits, whispers in very hushed tones about their neighbours and seem to be about as far removed from the exuberance and spontaneity of childhood as possible. The house, it turns out, belongs to the Aviator (voiced by Jeff Bridges), an eccentric, old man who represents both Saint-Exupéry and his alter ego creation, the aviator of his novella, and also calls to mind the grumpy but lovable Carl Fredricksen of the magnificent animation film Up.

Before long, just like philosopher Alberto Knox in Sophie’s World, the Aviator starts sending the Little Girl pages of text containing the aphorisms and adventures of the Little Prince, and thus begins a subversive but thrilling adventure that helps the child, quickly on her way to becoming an “adult”, reconnect with and hang on to her childhood impulses as long as possible.

From time to time, these pages turn into animations, and the effect of seeing a formerly static character come to life in front of our eyes will certainly bring a shiver to most viewers familiar with the novella. We see the Little Prince cleaning his tiny planet, trying to rid it of invasive baobab seeds and falling in love with a rose, here perfectly voiced by Marion Cotillard. He flees Rose’s ever-increasing demands on his time and ends up on Earth, where he meets the aviator and learns valuable nuggets of wisdom from the fox, including the famous quotation, “It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important”.

This story with the Little Prince is interwoven with the story of the Little Girl, and by using one text to inform another, Osborne also suggests that tales from many decades ago can continue to educate us about ourselves and inspire us to see the beauty of life instead of letting the rat race consume our energy and destroy our imagination. The focus throughout the story is that, as the smiling Aviator reminds us, “Growing up is not the problem; forgetting is”.

Although ostensibly created for children, animated films have developed to the point where something like The Little Prince can be entertaining for young ones and deeply moving for their parents, or anyone scared they might no longer be a child. There are multiple layers to this story, and those who know Saint-Exupéry’s tale well are just as likely to enjoy it as those who come to the film without any knowledge about the prince, the fox, the rose or the aviator. There is a beautiful message about religion (in the form of the rose), a melancholy background of absence, a rousing theme of friendship and a dramatic struggle against forgetting, which is a struggle for remembering.

We should always see the world through the eyes of a child, but more importantly, we should view life with the same sense of curiosity and fascination, perhaps even naiveté, that reconnects us with our younger selves, just like this film connects the old with the new in a tidy package that is an invigorating, inspirational and intrepid depiction of a story we thought we knew, but which hits us twice as hard when the characters start to speak and the drawings start to move.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

André Crous

The best instalment of the entire franchise reaches beyond the stars to bring us giant revelations, confrontations and set pieces that firmly establish Star Wars as an unrivalled space epic. 

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes BackUSA
4.5*

Director:
Irvin Kershner
Screenwriters:
Leigh Brackett
Lawrence Kasdan
Director of Photography:
Peter Suschitzky

Running time: 125 minutes

Alternate title: Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Phantom Menace (Episode I)
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– The Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)
– The Last Jedi (Episode VIII)

“It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy.
Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of freedom fighters led by Luke Skywalker has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Hoth.
The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of space….”

Wholly unexpectedly for a franchise’s second film, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is better than its predecessor. But there is more to its greatness: This instalment is also a very strong contender for the best film overall in all three Star Wars trilogies. Not only does it contain one of the biggest plot twists, but it introduces us to Yoda, shows the meaty part of Luke’s development as a Jedi, interweaves three major storylines, builds on and improves Harrison Ford’s already superlative comedic performance in the role of Han Solo and shows us an unforgettable city in the clouds.

And yet, the start is far from promising. On the ice planet of Hoth, where the rebel Alliance is hiding from the Empire, the décor looks wildly underfunded and makes us wonder for a moment whether we are watching a ground-breaking space epic or a cheap studio-bound production with people walking around inside stuffed animals. For a moment, the latter is true: The stalagmites and the stalactites look ludicrously plasticky, and when Luke is attacked by a snow monster called a wampa, it might as well be a child’s version of a white woolly mammoth/yeti/polar bear monster – not as imagined by a child, but as built by one.

Fortunately, things quickly pick up from there, and in the first act, in particular, we have Han Solo and Princess Leia to thank for the entertainment. The sexual tension between them, lightly veiled in a cloak of insults, is just about thick enough to cut with a lightsaber, and it becomes ever clearer their verbal altercations are in fact merely attempts to persuade themselves they don’t really like each other.

The film is tightly wound around the stories of three characters or groups of characters: Darth Vader, Luke and the crew on-board the Millennium Falcon. This is the first time we get a proper look at the full reach of Vader’s power, and the scenes in which he kills incompetent underlings simply by raising his arm inspire real fear. At the same time, however, Vader gradually reveals his obsession with tracking down Luke, and it is only late in the film that we realise (at least, without the foreknowledge provided by the origin trilogy) why this is. Meanwhile, Luke is on the swamp planet of Dagobah training as a Jedi, while Han, Leia, Chewbacca, who fled Hoth along with the Rebels after a violent attack, make their way through an asteroid field, where the fireworks between the smuggler and princess finally go off.

Out of these three storylines, the one with Luke and Yoda is absolutely mesmerising. Not only are we seeing a young fighter come into his own by trial and error, but we learn a great deal from the tiny and wise green man with the funny ears who speaks with the very unusual speech object-subject-verb pattern. Perhaps the most important sentences in all of the Star Wars films come from Yoda, strapped to Luke’s back while he is running through the Dagobah jungle:

“A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger… fear… aggression. The dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.” 

This tension between light and dark is, of course, the major theme throughout the prequels, and while Yoda may at first appear to be a playful jester, his words are saturated with the wisdom of his 900 years. He is a delightful creature, especially for anyone who hasn’t seen him before, and much of this instalment’s greatness is a direct result of the interaction between him and the young Skywalker.

But these scenes on Dagobah are also profound for another reason: They contain the only instance of slow-motion used in any of the Star Wars films, when Vader appears to Luke in a dream. This moment comes shortly before Luke sees his own face inside Vader’s mask. In a way, this scene is not far removed from Jesus Christ being tempted in the desert, and the second half of the film is a remarkable depiction of Luke’s resistance to the power that the dark side promises to offer those who yield to it.

The reason Episode V is one of the major narrative accomplishments of the franchise, however, is the big revelation that Darth Vader is, in fact, Luke Skywalker’s father. As Luke hangs on for dear life after losing his right hand to Vader’s lightsaber, dangling above a seemingly bottomless reactor shaft, and receives the shattering news of his heritage, the moment marks the culmination of the first meeting between father and son. Although this is not the full story (the second penny drops at the start of Episode VI), the impact is enormous.

Added to this development, there is also the first kiss that Han and Leia share, even as they continue to taunt each other and thus create, by a long way, the funniest instalment of the franchise. My personal favourite swipe comes from Han, who has no time for Leia’s cautious rationality in the midst of a crisis and shuts her down with: “No time to discuss this in committee”. Simultaneously, Luke and Leia are (for the moment) inexplicably growing closer as well, and the princess’s ability to sense that Luke is in danger proves to be one of the film’s instances of emotional magic.

And lastly, this episode is notable for its inclusion of the all-terrain armoured transports, or AT-ATs, which look like giant metallic chameleons with four legs and no tail. Used by the Empire, they appear on the planet of Hoth and inspire another biblical comparison – to Goliath. And of course, David (the rebels) wins because Goliath cannot see properly and moves about too awkwardly to gain much of an advantage in a battle.

Episode IV may have laid the groundwork, but Episode V builds a mighty palace full of details, drama, comedy and the deeply credible development of its characters. It is not a mere bridge between the beginning and the end of the overarching narratives: It gives us plenty of connections between people and shows us things we never thought possible, including the first glimpse of Darth Vader without his helmet. Yoda’s famous command to Luke – “You must unlearn what you have learned” – applies to us, too. This is a brand-new world, and it is so gratifying to have Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca and the droids be our guides on this journey.