4.5 stars

Flower Buds (2011)

André Crous

PoupataCzech Republic
4.5*

Director:
Zdeněk Jiráský
Screenwriter:
Zdeněk Jiráský
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný

Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Poupata

Misery loves company, and whatever shape that company takes, real or illusory, the happiness, however short-lived, can make for powerful storytelling.

The plot of the Czech film Flower Buds (Poupata) is steeped in distress and hopelessness, but it is a slow-motion car crash from which we cannot turn our eyes away even for a second.

Similar in tone, though not in style, to the despair that seeps through the work of Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Inárritu (especially in 21 Grams and Biutiful), Flower Buds is constructed out of small, well-chosen incidents that sustain each other and never come across as either contrived or superfluous.

Set around Christmastime in and around the small industrial town of Nové Sedlo in the north-west of the country, most of the scenes feature a factory in the background that pumps smoke into the crisp air of the countryside.

In the opening scene, we find Jarda at his post next to a railway crossing, where he receives telephone calls to inform him of approaching trains, as a result of which he has to lower and raise the boom for the odd car that passes by. After work, he heads straight for the local herna bar, or mini-casino, one of those infamous bastions of decadence found almost everywhere in the Czech Republic, where he exchanges yet another heirloom for a shot at the jackpot.

Jarda is, without a doubt, the most tragic character in the film, and Vladimír Javorský plays him without any sugarcoating. Though he is already on a steady downhill slide when we meet him, we quickly realise he has been caught in the web of his gambling addiction for a very long time. His wife, Kamila, knows the family is in dire straits (though she has no idea just how bad the situation actually is, or is about to be) and tries to help out by undressing to pose for a calendar, together with fellow exercise friends, with the goal of earning some extra money. Kamila has dreams of visiting the Amazon and believes her husband is saving up to make that dream come true.

Meanwhile, Jarda’s teenage son, Honza, is smitten with a stripper named Carmen, or Zuzana, who performs at the same herna bar from time to time, and he sets his sights on “saving” her, although he luckily doesn’t have any ambitions of being Travis Bickle.

The characters are all at the end of a slippery rope – we also learn early on that Honza’s sister is pregnant, though the identity of the father is left ambiguous – and have little to no hope of climbing back up. A Vietnamese couple, friends of the family, is also enduring enormous hardship. Despite having spent many years in the Czech Republic, they do not speak the language well and feel completely out of place in this place where it seems, from the look of the film, they have been condemned to an eternal winter.

Jarda tells them to get used to living here, to start thinking in this language and let it be a part of who they are, but it is difficult to consider him a serious model to look up to, given his own spiral of hopelessness. Viewers will find themselves easily sympathising with the Vietnamese couple, though, as their refrain of “Do prdele se sněhem!” (Roughly translated as “This snow can go to hell!”) is both endearing and a very understandable, perhaps even recognisable, cry for help, especially to anyone who has ever suffered from a feeling dépaysement in a new, very different environment.

On the surface, this is a small, character-driven drama set in a small town where the herna bar offers hope of a better tomorrow while at the same time crushing those dreams in front of our very eyes.

It is therefore refreshing to see how director Zdeněk Jiráský discovers surprising lyricism – beauty is too strong a word – in the rough elements that make up his story: a middle-aged woman in a red tracksuit doing her morning exercise outside in the snow with a fuming factory behind her; a drunk teenager dressed up as an angel walking around in the snow at night time, eerily lit up by the lights of the same factory in the distance; a short but agonising track-out from Jarda as he feeds his life insurance to the slot machine, a shot that embodies our desire to flee such a scene of desperation.

Flower Buds is an examination of obsession every bit as potent as Requiem for a Dream, but it is rooted firmly in realism rather than hyperrealism. This is an epically tragic film that is not at all a depressing viewing experience and demands to be seen.

A Separation (2011)

André Crous

SeparationIran
4.5*

Director:
Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriter:
Asghar Farhadi
Director of Photography:
Mahmoud Kalari

Running time: 123 minutes

Original title: جدایی نادر از سیمین‎
Transliterated title: Jodaeiye Nader az Simin

A woman anxiously tries to cross a busy road in downtown Tehran to prevent an old man from being hit by oncoming traffic. She stands there, helpless, while cars whizz past her and the man fatefully shuffles closer and closer towards what seems like certain death.

Then, something unusual happens: There is a cut to a few hours later at an apartment, where the old man silently rocks back and forth, seemingly unaffected by the chaotic scene from earlier. This single cut, instead of being a cop-out on the part of director Asghar Farhadi, sets up a mystery that will last the entire running time of A Separation. Filmically, it is also a decision that makes perfect sense, since it immediately compels us, the viewers, to start figuring out what might have happened — and in so doing puts us in the same boat as the lion’s share of the film’s characters.

This incident, as well as another major event in the plot, when this same woman is tossed out of the flat and collapses in the stairwell, besides being a mystery that needs to be resolved by the end of the film, is also indirectly the result of the “separation” in the title. In the opening scene, staged so the viewers take the place of judges who will decide the fate of the couple that looks straight at us, we learn that husband and wife Nader and Simin want to separate so she can move to the United States while her husband stays behind to look after his elderly father, the man who would later seek to cross the road.

Though the situation and the motivations seem clear-cut enough, the film quickly reveals itself to be a very perceptive study of human drama, which puts forward an array of sometimes contradictory actions that cannot easily be understood or pigeonholed for the purposes of entertainment. Many small tragedies unfold along the way, not with melodramatic outbursts or big scenes of betrayal, but in very methodical increments that eventually escalate into a full-blown crisis.

Nader (Peyman Moaadi), who works during the day, cannot take care of his father and therefore enlists the help of a kindly woman named Razieh (Shahab Hosseini) to clean the flat and make sure the father doesn’t hurt himself. But on Razieh’s first day at work, the old man, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and rarely speaks, wets himself. This episode, which puts Razieh in a tough position, because she wants to help him without touching him — for, viewed in religious terms, that might mean she is committing a sin by making herself impure — is presented with genuine sympathy for both characters despite the filmmaker’s unmistakable view that it would be patently absurd for a religion to prevent someone from changing the soiled pants of an invalid.

The film’s focus is on the role of truth and lies in daily life, and it is Razieh who best captures this tension. She is obviously a good person and tells white lies to her husband in an effort to make his own life better, but moreover, her docile attitude is likely the result of her husband’s rigid religious beliefs. While Razieh’s lies finally catch up with her, a lie that Nader’s daughter tells keeps him from going to jail, and this ambiguity of life is what many filmmakers over time have sought to capture.

It is truly admirable for a film to take on such complicated matters and keep them in line with the legal drama that occupies a large part of the plot. Going way beyond the constraints of a film such as Kramer vs. Kramer, A Separation is insightful enough to realize the truth, at times, can make things more difficult rather than easier, and the film is a journey, for the characters and for the viewer, towards discovering the truth behind the lies and the reasons for people’s actions.

The one major flaw of A Separation is the film’s rapid-fire editing that often covers a single scene from multiple angles in quick succession without offering a new perspective on the material. However, against the background of intelligent, understated commentary on Iranian society and with a visible representation of many different kinds of characters, this remains an emotionally satisfying film that is a significant milestone in Iranian filmmaking.

In the Shadow of the Horse (2012)

André Crous

Ve stinuCzech Republic
4.5*

Director:
David Ondříček
Screenwriter:
Marek Epstein
Director of Photography:
Adam Sikora

Running time: 101 minutes

Original title: Ve stínu
Alternate English title: In the Shadow

Ve stínu (In the Shadow of the Horse) is a perfectly controlled work of historical significance that is coherent and approachable even for those who know very little about the history of the present-day Czech Republic.

With the tragedy of history in the background, the film is more interested in the human dimension and takes as its centrepiece an honest policeman and his family who are all struggling under the burden of living in a society that is gradually becoming more oppressive and where the walls will soon have ears.

The policeman’s name is Captain Hakl, and, as played by Ivan Trojan, he is compassionate, especially in the moments when he lets his guard down around his wife and young son — and sensitive to the dangers they might face as a result of the government’s desire to hold on to power, even if it means stealing their own people’s money to do that.

The year is 1953, and rumours are rife the government is planning a monetary reform, which would mean that the currency loses its value overnight and the country’s citizens are left with a fraction of their former wealth.

But high-level government officials, including newly chosen President Antonín Zápotocký, deny they are considering a reform of the Czechoslovak crown, and even Captain Hakl believes he would know if such a big project were really underway. But his wife doesn’t have the same faith in the authorities as her husband and tells him they should draw all their money and invest it in art for the sake of their son.

The horse in the English title seems to be connected to a radio broadcast early in the film, in which the country’s finance minister, Jaroslav Kabeš, laughs off the implication that his office is making places to reform the currency, and states that this idea is a dead horse gossipmongers should bury instead of continuing to beat.

With whispers about monetary reform in the background, on the radio, from the newspaper vendor at the famous former tram stop on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, and most importantly, coming from Hakl’s own wife, Jitka, there is a palpable sense that the characters all know where things are headed but consider themselves unable to ask tough questions for fear of discovering they might be right.

There are many parts to this film, though it all appears to be deceptively simple. When a jewellery store is burgled in the middle of the night and a safe robbed of its contents, the police detectives track down the most likely suspect, a Jewish man called Kirsch, who Hakl soon realizes is innocent.

But innocence has no place in the machinations of the Communist Party’s police investigations and, soon enough, State Security, supported by an East German detective named Zenke (Sebastian Koch), makes it clear Kirsch is the man, even linking him with a bloody shoot-out at the post office, though here, too, Hakl has uncovered evidence that contradicts the official position.

The film is drenched from beginning to end, as director David Ondříček (perhaps best-known for his film Loners, or Samotáři, in 2000) makes it clear that in this world of gloom good men often cannot save themselves through their struggles. But, despite Ondříček’s sombre-toned images and the almost constant rainfall, the film never makes style a priority to the detriment of its story. The focus on character rather than form means this is a much more intimate take on the events surrounding the monetary reform, rather than merely a historical document.

Slowly, the real substance of the film comes into view, and what we get is a view of an honest man, a wife who feels loved but somewhat neglected and fearful, and a boy who will be his father’s age when the revolution eventually rolls around in 1989. The scenes between Hakl and his wife and son are devoid of sentiment yet deeply touching, thanks in large part to Trojan’s very measured performance as a man who knows it’s not easy to do the right thing but wants to be the father his son can be proud of, yet has to be mindful of the safety of everyone close to him. Trojan’s powerful depiction of a policeman in 1969 Czechoslovakia in the breathtaking HBO miniseries Burning Bush (Hořící keř) is very similar to his role here.

In the end, the scenes most often associated with this terrible era in Czechoslovak history — the show trials and the uprising in Plzeň — are either missing or downplayed. But instead of highlighting misery, Ondříček’s film has tender scenes with complex characters that reveal great humanity in the midst of such a thoughtful, poetic treatment of past injustices.

 

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

Prince Avalanche (2013)

André Crous

Prince AvalancheUSA
4.5*

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

Running time: 94 minutes

Prince Avalanche marks a triumphant return for David Gordon Green. Rumours had been making the rounds for a while that the director had all but committed artistic hara-kiri when he started making big-budget films, first with Pineapple Express (which was quite enjoyable, but already a far cry from his previous film, Snow Angels). The broad comedy of the latter was in direct contrast with his gentler approach to the human condition in his early films, especially the crown jewel of his career so far, his 2004 film Undertow.

What sets Green’s filmmaking apart from that of all of his peers, especially when he behaves like a serious filmmaker, is the quality of the writing, and in particular the beauty of his dialogue. While Green has ditched the voiceover that aligned some of his films very closely with those of Terrence Malick (who served as executive producer on Undertow), he still very clearly demonstrates his skill as a writer and a fine observer of human emotion and thinking with some beautifully wrought lines about love and loss.

In an early scene with an old woman who has lost her house to a wildfire and is digging through the white ash of her former possessions, we share road worker Alvin’s (Paul Rudd) astonishment as she says, “Sometimes, I feel like I’m digging through my own ashes.” The woman’s words are expressed with a combination of truth and sincerity, yet they also have a powerful aftertaste that we cannot ignore. This comes after she relates a story of such simplicity and pride we cannot help but well up with tears at her predicament, and yet she is by no means presented as any kind of a victim.

Prince Avalanche is a remake of the Icelandic Either Way (Á annan veg) but has fleshed out some of the characters a bit more than the original, including that of the lady mentioned above, making her more human without taking away any of the mystery she had in the earlier film.

The two main characters of the film, in whose company we spend most of the running time, Alvin and Lance (Emile Hirsch), are out in the Texas countryside in 1987 repainting the yellow traffic lines on the road that leads through a forest, devastated by a wildfire a few months earlier (there was no such fire in Texas in 1987) and now reduced to a wasteland of charcoal.

Lance, who is Alvin’s sister’s boyfriend, got Alvin the job in part because he wanted the young man to make something with his life instead of wasting away at home. Alvin is not focused much, and Lance, who himself is on prescription medication, opines that Alvin ought to be, too. Alvin spends his time reading Lance’s comic books and only half-heartedly participates in the task of repairing the road cutting through the forest. Recently out of school, he is exceptionally horny and spends his nights masturbating in his tent.

Although Green no longer has the lush backdrop of Georgia to work with, as he did in Undertow, he and his DP, fellow University of North Carolina School of the Arts graduate Tim Orr, nevertheless present us with rich visuals that radiate with the green of the fresh foliage, the sparkle of water drops, the yellow of the lines, the orange of the sunsets, the red of the pickup truck and the blue of the boys’ jumpsuits. Despite there only being two characters, the vibrant colours and equally colourful dialogue produce a broad tableau to draw us in and keep us interested.

With multiple shots showing us the forest and its smaller inhabitants, Green emphasizes the peace of the space regardless of the burned pieces of wood that never let us forget a more brutal past. We can understand both of the young men’s desire, at various points, to have the silence to think, to pick up the pieces and reassess the direction of their lives.

Prince Avalanche, whose title fits in very well with the comic-book / superhero element, heavily depends on dialogue, and the back-and-forth between Alvin and Lance is perfectly suited to the talents and facial expressions of Rudd and Hirsch. But Green also adds some excellent visual gimmicks along the way that alternate between gag and poetry. At one point, the lines painted on trees suddenly serve as a line for writing, and Green proceeds to write. It is a gorgeous and unexpected moment that seems not at all like showing off but rather affirms the courage and the skill of the filmmaker, whose Undertow also benefited from several moments of visual experimentation.

In the end, it seems like Green wants to show us dynamic life is possible even amid apparent destruction. Although he never really puts much despair onscreen, his characters certainly have their fair share of difficulties to confront, and they rise to the task — even if it means they have to chug the vodka an old truck driver has given them and dance around in slow motion like fools in the wilderness.

Green shows again why he was called one of the most promising directors of his generation when his début feature, George Washington, was released in 2000. While his worst films make us shake our heads in dismay, his finest films enrich our lives like very few others out there.

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

Amour (2012)

André Crous

Amour, a film about death, is all about hanging on to one’s better half and reminds us what intimate cinema is capable of.

AmourFrance
4.5*

Director:
Michael Haneke
Screenwriter:
Michael Haneke
Director of Photography:
Darius Khondji

Running time: 127 minutes

For most of Amour, the viewer feels absolutely confident she is in the presence of greatness. This is what a film looks like that takes its subject seriously and tries to present it in all its complexity through small moments that all have a very human dimension to them. The human dimension is born out of an intimacy that depends on the chemistry between and very likely also the life experience of the lead actors. And yet, these moments are immediately accessible to those of us who have only had a taste of the life depicted onscreen.

Jean-Louis Trintignant basically came out of retirement to take the role of the octogenarian Georges, whose wife, Anne, played by Emmanuelle Riva, has had a stroke but refuses to be hospitalised. They are both former music teachers and live in a comfortable apartment in the middle of Paris. In one of their first conversations, after attending a music concert, they speak passionately and with erudition about the music they heard.

At first, Georges cares for her and helps her to get into her wheelchair. But gradually her condition worsens, until she has another stroke and becomes nearly incapacitated.

How does a lifelong partner deal with this sudden change? The question is made all the more urgent and unnerving by Haneke’s sudden acceleration of the timeline in unannounced fashion. There are no supertitles to indicate the passage of time: Again and again, Anne’s condition has suddenly deteriorated again, and we are shocked every single time we become aware how much farther down the slope of mortality she has slid once more, and that there is no way back up.

Haneke shoots many of his scenes in single takes and all but eschews the use of close-ups. The film’s characters are thoroughly respected, with two small exceptions. In one of the film’s first scenes, at the breakfast table in the kitchen, at the moment when we realise what will be the beginning of the end, Haneke is a little too rough in his treatment of Anne. The moment itself, the first revelation that something is wrong (we later learn something was obstructing her carotid artery, causing her to switch off for a moment), is perfectly controlled, balanced between tenderness and tension, but the scene could have done without a final pouring of the tea into the saucer rather than the cup — something that emphasises without a shadow of a doubt that things will soon go downhill very quickly.

There is also the matter of a character not properly developed, only to serve as a vessel to elicit our emotion for Anne and her plight: the second nurse who comes to take care of her. She quickly shows her true colours as an arrogant uncaring little snip; her brief appearance and a particularly hurtful exchange with Georges feels like a typical Haneke moment in which evil is revealed to be embedded in society, and he obviously enjoys pushing the knife just that little bit more into our stomachs, though frankly, this was quite unnecessary. His subject matter is already powerful enough.

But the film is magnificent. It is a restrained piece of work that is set almost entirely inside the old couple’s flat and unwinds at Haneke’s leisurely pace inside scenes but frighteningly quickly from one scene to the next. Despite a feeling the film may at times be slightly jumpy, there is no disputing that it is consistently effective.

Amour does not venture into the generalities of the care of the elderly, but it does address a number of pertinent issues, including the unspoken pity the world has for this kind of situation, a pity that Haneke himself was probably banking on while making this film.

But there is a complete lack of cheap tricks to tug at our heartstrings. Trintignant and Riva bring with them many decades of experience not only in acting but in living; their characters’ gentle interaction, their frustration with the limitations of old age and the steadfast determination to still have a say in their own lives despite the intervention of different kinds of unexpected forces on their lives make them both strong and fragile at the same time. This kind of complexity is what the cinema often lacks, and what Haneke, Trintignant and Riva have brought to the screen with care and commitment.

Only towards the end does Haneke’s evident fear of a straightforward conclusion or an easy explanation strain the experience a little, but it is a very minor flaw in an otherwise first-rate film about perseverance in love and coping with the inevitability of death

Amour is personal, intimate and, together with The White Ribbon, one of Haneke’s least intellectual and most accessible films to date.

 

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

Games of Love and Chance (2003)

André Crous

L'esquiveFrance
4.5*

Director:
Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenwriter:
Ghalia Lacroix
Director of Photography:
Lubomir Bakchev

Running time: 119 minutes

Original title: L‘esquive

Taking a place among the most moving and insightful films about the lower-income suburbs, known as la banlieue, that surround the French capital, together with Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film la Haine and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs from 2008, this is a remarkable film shot on a very small budget with few if any professional actors.

Thematically close to Games of Love and Chance, the three-act play by Marivaux that is explicitly cited at many turns in the film, the story is set among a group of teenagers who come face to face with very real emotions as friendships are tested and they deal with the problems that separate them from the innocence of childhood. 

Abdelkrim (“Krimo”) is a quiet boy around 15 years old. His father is in prison, and he lives alone in a small apartment with his mother. In one of the first scenes of the film, his girlfriend Magali breaks up with him because she says he isn’t paying enough attention to her. Not one with words, Krimo stays mute in the face of this rejection and focuses on one of his longtime friends instead: Lydia, who has the starring role in a school production of Marivaux’s play.

Lydia, played by Sara Forestier, is a girl who has the gift for the gab, and the talented cast, without whom this project would have been impossible, engage in a number of lengthy verbal exchanges that will test the skills of even the most fluent of French speakers. With a rapid-fire delivery of combinations of swear words and verlan (the “inverted” speech of the suburbs) that is as colourful and creative as it is offensive to whomever it is directed at, the aggressive interactions keep our exchange by virtue of the passion of the actors and actresses alone.

Lydia is one who often engages in this kind of behaviour, and an early scene between her and her good friend Frida, who feels threatened by Krimo’s presence at an outdoor but private rehearsal of the play, is the first of many similar scenes that nonetheless never lose their tension. We keep wondering whether acting out with words will lead to more violent reactions.

Although not single takes, the takes in these scenes are sometimes shot in a way that the camera has to constantly pan between two faces, each taking up the whole screen in close-up, which emphasises the speakers’ importance and fully directs our attention towards the particular speaker instead of the (temporarily) silent party.

The audience cannot escape these shouting matches, and although we get a false sense of security sometimes that things won’t get worse than words, the threat of violence and the assumption of authority that goes along with it sometimes pops up to ensure some stomach-churning moments — including one that involves the police patrolling the low-income suburbs constantly on the lookout for trouble they assume to be ubiquitous. While La haine treated the threat of the police much more aggressively, Games of Love and Chance uses it with great success to underline the potential for one’s life to suddenly be turned upside down, simply because of living in one of these neighbourhoods.

Although there is little development in Krimo’s character (as opposed to the crises faced by Lydia and Frida — of whom the latter arguably has the hardest job confronting not only a threat on her life but also theft, as well as some personal issues she has to resolve), we are glued to him perhaps because he says so little yet is not inscrutable. As Krimo, Osman Elkharraz delivers a wonderful performance that, like his interpretation of the character of Arlequin, which he plays when he decides to get closer to Lydia, says too little to be fully engaging, and never really seems to enjoy his life or the emotions that go along with being alive.

The film is edited together so there is no padding: Everything that happens is necessary and we get no dead space in between the important points.

A work of immense interest for anyone who wishes to see the Parisian suburbs as a vibrant hub of emotions rather than simply la banlieue, Games of Love and Chance benefits from the talented cast, including theatre actress Carole Franck as the teacher who tries her best to get Krimo to crawl out of his shell, express his emotions and enjoy the feeling of being in love. The language of the characters is one of the most interesting and impressive aspects of the production, as it becomes a part of the very fabric of the film. But while it admirably refuses to develop in the same way a film with a bigger budget would, it doesn’t thoroughly take advantage of some themes it raises through its intertextual use of Marivaux’s play either.

*The original title, L’esquive, refers to a line in the play and translates as the action of shying away from something, or dodging it, instead of submitting to it. The connection with the material should be obvious.

Polytechnique (2009)

André Crous

PolytechniqueCanada
4.5*

Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter:
Jacques Davidts
Director of Photography:
Pierre Gill

Running time: 77 minutes

It would be inappropriate to call a film about a mass shooting “lyrical”, but Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique comes as close as possible to such a description without undercutting the horror and the human impact of the events it depicts.

A recreation of the 1989 shooting at the Montréal Polytechnique university that left 14 students dead, another 14 injured, and a dead gunman, the film is shot in black and white and is intimate in its portrayal of three individuals deeply affected by the events.

At first, it’s unclear what the filmmaker’s approach is to the telling of his story. The opening scene shows a very immediately recognisable university environment: the copy room, where students are making photocopies of notes. Suddenly, piercing shots ring out from a hunting rifle and the two girls in the foreground fall to the floor, before the rest of the students in the room realise what has happened and start to panic.

We then cut to that same morning, in the apartment of the killer, where he is packing up his gun and bullets. He is behaving lifelessly, stares off into space and speaks but one word to his housemate. On the voiceover, we hear him speak his suicide note, in which he rants about women and the rights they demand and how they should be at home rather than stealing jobs that belong to men.

We don’t get a clear sense of this man, who doesn’t have a name in the film but whose real-life counterpart was Marc Lépine. But as the film plays out, it becomes clear how cleverly it was put together, as the film’s “present” (the shooting) seeps into its past and its future, not firmly connecting the threads but leaving us with a sense of coherence that is at once satisfactory and poignant.

There are many brief instances of the killer shooting the girls on campus, but there are even more moments of silence, almost never for the sake of tension (with the exception of the moment when the killer waits, rifle in hand, outside the first classroom where the victims would be his first), but because it is in tune with our minds going blank at the shock of the events unfolding before our eyes. When there is chaos, during a shooting or when a student named Jean-François rushes to inform security of the massacre, we are in the moment, but every second of silence makes us acutely aware of the spectre of death that hangs over this institution of higher learning on that snowy day in early December.

The killer’s actions are treated mostly as senseless, and his suicide note is the only insight we get into his act and his personality. Rather than focus on the events that brought him to this point, as done by the best film ever about a school shooting, the Estonian Klass, this film looks at two characters — one boy, Jean-François, and one girl, Valérie, both engineering students — whose lives changed forever on that day. Polytechnique is much more similar to Elephant, although Gus van Sant’s film spends more time with the killers, hinting at their reasons for feeling excluded by their peers; on the other hand, Villeneuve directs with a firm hand that produces a stylish work of art that is intellectually and emotionally mature. Jean-François’s consideration of Picasso’s Guernica in the copy room is proof of Villeneuve’s mastery of the medium of film, as this moment has nothing exaggerated or self-conscious about it.

But then, Villeneuve is one of Canada’s best directors. In his short film Next Floor, a group of people eat an impossibly rich meal until they are so heavy that the floor gives way and they fall onto the floor below, only to continue eating until the floor crumbles and they fall onto the next one. It is a surreal, heavily metaphoric work that is incredibly stylish and is both ominous and funny, using only visuals and minute audio cues. 

And in the widely acclaimed Incendies, his characters travel back to the country their mother came from — Lebanon — to eventually uncover a terrible tragedy that haunts them and us right until the very end.

Polytechnique has numerous seemingly insignificant moments that are later revealed from a different angle to give emotional resonance to the journey of the characters, especially Jean-François, and they are all well spaced out and never feel rushed or contrived. At key moments, Villeneuve cuts away from the massacre to show us an empty apartment or a snow-covered landscape that break the tension but, in retrospect, add a great deal of depth to the events in the present.

The killings are senseless to those who have to live with the consequences of such a tragedy, and this message is the most important reference point for the viewer of this remarkable film.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

André Crous

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Czechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Zeman
Screenwriters:
Karel Zeman
Josef Antonín Novotný
Directors of Photography:
Václav Pazderník
Antonín Horák

Running time: 84 minutes

Original title: Cesta do pravěku

The fossils of prehistoric creatures housed at the National Museum are just a collection of bones, either spread out or assembled in a skeletal structure or set in stone as a result of petrification over millennia. They are not alive, and they only hint at the original. Sometimes, a museum may have an exhibit that is a representation of what one of these animals from long, long ago looked like. Usually, it’s a mammoth.

What the luminary Czechoslovak special effects director Karel Zeman realised, was exactly the same motivating force that must have compelled Steven Spielberg to shoot Jurassic Park in the early 1990s: The ability of the cinema, and of skilled filmmakers, to bring to life what until now we could only imagine and to make the past almost physically present.

Journey to the Beginning of Time was released in 1955, but as the country was isolated internationally at the time and would only open up a few months after Zeman’s death in 1989, his fame and magic were confined to the borders of the landlocked country in Eastern Europe.

What we realise more and more, however, is how far ahead of his time Zeman was. Inspired by Georges Méliès and explicitly referencing Jules Verne, whose work is the obvious forebear of both these artists, Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time is a beloved classic in the Czech Republic and deserves widespread recognition, even though its visual effects have by now, more than half a century later, been surpassed by computer-generated effects.

Three teenagers, Petr, Jenda and Toník, and a younger boy named Jirka set off on a journey through the ages. Having read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, they consider themselves explorers and set off on a canoe upstream from the present day all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, where the fossil of a trilobite that Jirka found in stone will be seen for real.

It is a journey that obviously boggles the mind, and we are left wanting for an explanation of how the children go about skipping from one time period to the other (the film does employ some mist to cover the transitions, though), but what is obvious is that these machinations of the fiction are not what we should be focused on. The real reason we watch the film is to see the prehistoric animals come to life, and do so in the presence (and in the same frame!) as the children.

Petr, the de facto leader of the group, obliquely speaks for the viewer, too, when he observes:

We haven’t made this journey just for fun; we came to study what prehistoric life really looked like. We are so lucky to have the opportunity to do just that, to see everything with our own eyes.

Indeed, this is a privilege, and as the children travel back from the time of the cavemen to the time of the dinosaurs and beyond, we find ourselves constantly aware of the fact that while the events are about as possible as time travel, the thrill of seeing creatures from these two very different times in one place is extraordinary, and Zeman assembles and stages the actions with a very firm and steady hand.

While the special effects are not on the more or less seamless technical level of Jurassic Park, they are breathtaking considering the film was made in the early 1950s, in a country that had a few months earlier been racked by its infamous currency reform that cut the worth of everyone’s money by 90% while prices remained the same (a tale told in great detail by the remarkable 2012 film, Ve stínu). Often, the stop-motion animal movements would seem to be too fast or too slow, or when the mammoth stands still but raises its trunk, the bushes around it move without reason with jerky movements.

But Zeman achieves some impressive results during the staging of a nighttime fight between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while many animals don’t have a reflection in the water because they were not shot next to the river, but separately, the Brontosaurus’s appearance in the river, reflection included, is gorgeous.

At another point, the camera follows the enormous dragonflies called Meganeura as they fly between the trees, the camera apparently tracking down below while looking up at them. The effect is powerful and this technically ambitious sequence is very rewarding.

In some ways, the film can be called superficial, but covering the various life forms of 5 billion years in 80 minutes is no small feat. From time to time, mention is made of life in the present, and the juxtaposition is worthwhile, for example when club mosses were the size of trees, their eventual stratification would give rise to coal mining in the 20th century.

The four boys, with the exception of the inquisitive Jirka, don’t get up to much trouble and have a surprisingly easy time of all this travelling through the ages, so we ultimately learn little about them, but their awe at being able to see all these creatures is something the viewer understands all too well, as Zeman’s film awakens a curiosity in us for the life of things we may never really have considered beyond the bare bones of a museum exhibit.

H-8… (1958)

André Crous

Yugoslavia
4.5*

Director:
Nikola Tanhofer
Screenwriters:
Zvonimir Berković
Tomislav Butorac
Director of Photography:
Slavko Zalar

Running time: 105 minutes

In the glorious tradition of Stagecoach, the 1958 Yugoslavian film H-8… takes a very heterogeneous group of individuals, puts them in a car, lets us slowly come to grips with their stories and their character traits, and before we know it, we know them all and the end credits start to roll. However, with some clever narration, by competing narrators, and a revelation in the very first scene that the characters are rushing together to their doom, this particular film has a core of profound suspense that draws us closer despite us knowing it will all end in a gruesome accident.

The film is based on a real story of a driver who overtook a bus while his car’s high-beam headlamps were turned on and who subsequently blinded the driver of the oncoming truck, causing a horrific accident from which this driver escaped and drove off without anybody ever knowing his or her identity. The only hint was the car’s license plate, which started with H (indicating Hrvatska, or Croatia) and the number 8, which a surviving passenger noticed as the car sped past the bus.

H-8… takes place on the night of April 14, 1957, along the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb, and in a terrifically energetic opening sequence, lasting a full seven minutes, we are shown the highlights of the evening’s events, though little makes sense to us because we don’t yet know the individuals concerned. However, the small snippets are memorable enough for us to realise, all through the film, that we can slowly start to put the pieces together.

The tension isn’t only derived from the fact we know what will happen, in a general way, at the end of the film, but the more we get to know the characters, and the more the narrators teasingly relate the seat numbers fatally affected by the upcoming crash, the more interested we become. Like the best Hitchcock films, the dramatic suspense of knowing the bomb is going to explode usually surpasses the surprise of having a bomb explode while we (and the characters) are focusing on other things.

Nikola Tanhofer, who directed this film around the time his début feature Nije bilo uzalud was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, finds many small moments of tension in this main setting. And most of the time, these moments are not overplayed. There is the odd sudden backward tracking shot from or forward tracking shot onto a face, usually underscored by a violent thud on the soundtrack, to highlight the fact death has understood (and so has the viewer) that the intended victim has taken his or her spot in the hot seat.

One scene, in particular, is as short as it is powerful. The parents, clearly unhappily married, are taking care of their daughter at the back of the bus. She has a nosebleed that doesn’t seem to go away, and when one of the drivers eventually asks the girl to come and sit in the front to take her mind off the blood, the parents engage in a very frank conversation, which they themselves shamefully admit is inappropriate, in which they reveal they’ve thought about life without their daughter. When she is taken to the front seat, one of the designated death seats, according to the narrators, one can’t help but admire the director’s skill at infusing the film with a sense of dread, even as we rejoice that the girl is finally relieved of her parents’ petty quarrels.

There are too many characters to mention, but it is remarkable how the director takes his time to slowly reveal the many different angles to the individuals, and very often we come to realise that we have mistakenly judged a book by its cover, as the real intentions or some hidden secret is brought to light.

The other car, the truck with a father back from prison and his son, does not provide anything near the kind of entertainment we get from the characters on the bus, and that is a real disappointment. At a petrol station, the father and son meet up with one of the father’s former fellow prisoners, a man who is working as a con artist, and he ends up hitching a ride with them and shooting his mouth off the whole time. There is a reason for him being included in this storyline, and perhaps the director underplays his importance, but the scenes themselves are rather uninteresting and monotonous.

However, this is an absolute treasure of a film. Dark and ominous though full of life, H-8… must be seen to recognise what depth there can be in the flimsiest of storylines and how tension and suspense can be established very easily merely by pointing the camera at someone eyeing something or, conversely, by setting the camera in a way that makes us see something the character doesn’t. Or, of course, by having two narrators tell us the death seats have not been filled yet, and have us wait for someone to make a move.

Within Our Gates (1920)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director: 
Oscar Micheaux
Screenwriter:
Oscar Micheaux
Director of Photography:
Oscar Micheaux

Running time: 78 minutes

A landmark film, Within Our Gates is not the oldest film made by a black director, but it is the oldest one that has survived. It was Oscar Micheaux’s second film, made one year after his début, The Homesteader, but more importantly five years after D.W. Griffith’s racist epic Birth of a Nation. Within Our Gates does not merely try to redress Griffith’s depiction of blacks in the United States: The film is edited in a way clearly influenced by Griffith, but in terms of its narrative, Micheaux’s film is vastly superior to most films of the era, demonstrating a storytelling skill that is particularly suited to the cinema. In one instance, he even anticipates the revolution of Kurosawa’s Rashomon by more than 30 years.

In 1920, Sylvia Landry, who hails from the South, is visiting her cousin Alma in the North, where “the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro.” Sylvia is an educated young woman, who is romantically involved with Conrad Drebert, a soldier stationed in Canada who has asked for her hand in marriage.

However, Alma, a divorcée, has her eyes set on Conrad and through a series of events Conrad discovers Sylvia in a compromising position and has an outburst full of rage. Sylvia returns to the South – Vicksburg, Mississippi, to be precise – where she briefly helps out at a school that educates black children, but when the school’s money runs out, she goes to Boston to secure additional funds. At this point, the film really picks up speed, because it becomes clear Micheaux has no intention of neatly distinguishing between black and white characters as good and bad, respectively.

A charismatic black preacher, Ned, and a servant in the South, Efrem, are represented as backstabbers who would do anything to retain the ear of the white man. In other words, Uncle Toms. On the other hand, while many white characters are violently opposed to any kind of equality for blacks, there are a number of educated people, most importantly a Boston sociologist named Dr Vivian, who are sympathetic to Sylvia, in particular.

Dr Vivian is the only character whose development is problematic. We are shown a number of scenes, revealed as fantasies on his part, between him and the young Sylvia, and while the initial reason for his interest is stated as purely scientific, the so-called study he is undertaking sounds like a crock. In a close-up, we see one of the articles he is reading: “The Negro is a human being. His nature is not different from other human nature. Thus, we must recognize his rights as a human being. Such is the teaching of Christianity.”

What is fascinating about the film is its very rudimentary camerawork: The shots are all static. There is not a single pan in the whole film and very few close-ups, the latter usually saved for moments of intense emotion, such as Alma’s heaving bosom when she concocts an evil plan. But what Micheaux lacked during recording, he made up for during the editing process, not only by means of constructing parallel storylines, as Griffith had done, but by having these storylines metaphorically complement each other, as Abel Gance would do in Napoléon‘s “double storm scene” in 1927. He even includes two scenes, one apparently showing the real events and one the events as recounted by an unreliable witness, which anticipates the work of Akira Kurosawa’s famous Rashomon in 1950. Furthermore, besides the fantasies of Dr Vivian, there is a scene in which Efrem’s greatest fear is quickly realized when the image in his mind becomes the image on-screen.

The film is also broken into two time-frames, as the final 20 minutes are set in the South many years prior to the rest of the plot. It is a flashback that explains the context within which Sylvia has had to survive – a context we were completely unaware of, in which the lynchings of the South and the inequity of life as a black woman or man at this time in this place are made very clear. It is a brutal sequence, full of attempted sexual assault and physical violence that culminates in an amazing revelation comparable to the infamous final coup de théâtre of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

Within Our Gates is a told with limited means yet very well put together and truly remarkable considering it was the filmmaker’s second film and it was made during the infancy of the cinema. Micheaux has a real sense for storytelling and though his actors often behave in exaggerated fashion, the viewer is more accepting because of the lack of sound, and what we have is a film that serves as a concise but very powerful counterweight to the pro-white vision of the South as made popular by D.W. Griffith. At a moment of great tension in the film, the viewer cannot help but sympathize with an appeal made by Sylvia’s mother, when she asks:

Justice! Where are you? Answer me! How long? Great God almighty, HOW LONG?