4 stars

My Life to Live (1962)

André Crous

Sweet, tragic and playful, My Life to Live is almost entirely watchable despite its director’s gratuitous attempts at audiovisual contrivances.

Vivre sa vieFrance
4*

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

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux

A mildly interesting concept that Jean-Luc Godard developed with much less pretension in his first-ever short film, A Flirtatious Woman, the notion of a woman deciding to try her hand at the oldest profession in the world is the narrative hook of My Life to Live. But as happens so often with the director’s feature films, he frequently makes it all about himself and his need to experiment rather than letting us into his characters’ heads and hearts. This time around, the story is fragmented into 12 parts (or “tableaux”, according to the French title), all of which have detailed but generally unhelpful chapter headings and do their best to alienate us from the action – not without success.

Although he does have one or two enjoyable surprises up his sleeve, Godard starts his film off with yet another futile attempt to perform cinematic alchemy. In the opening scene, Nana and her husband, Paul, are seated at the bar inside a café, discussing their marital problems. But we don’t see their faces. Mostly, we only see the backs of their heads. In the mirror across from them, we can almost make out the reflection of Nana’s face – it is Anna Karina. Nana and Paul sit next to each other but don’t share a frame. Each of them speaks in a one-shot, and whenever there is a cut, the ambient sound on the soundtrack changes abruptly. The conversation is not particularly volatile, but these rough transitions and their lack of elegance underscore the emotional incongruence between the two characters. Godard later repeats his trick of showing the backs of people’s heads while they speak, but he is fairly inconsistent in his approach.

Nana is an actress and hoping to make it big soon. Sadly for her, the big time hasn’t called yet, and she’s quickly running out of money. Without a husband and seemingly disinterested in her own child, she cuts loose and goes on dates. Maybe she will find a husband soon. One date takes her to the cinema, where we observe her for two full minutes watching part of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and shedding a few tears over Falconetti’s angst-ridden performance. She is clearly moved, perhaps a little too much, but the direct comparison to Falconetti seems preposterous.

Soon enough, she starts walking the streets and almost immediately finds her calling before realising that one of her friends has a similar story, and she soon finds herself a pimp. Godard initiates us and Nana into the world of prostitution in his typically unconventional but surprisingly comical way. In voice-over, Nana asks specific questions about how a prostitute is expected to behave and what the law says about this activity. In response, Godard provides all the answers at length and often in dense legalese that unexpectedly turns this simple question-and-answer format into a hilarious kind of catechism.

As happens so often with Godard’s films starring Anna Karina, we are left scratching our heads about the origins of the main character. While Nana has a very suggestive surname (the Germanic “Kleinfrankenheim”) and was born in the Moselle department in the east of France, she speaks French with a heavy accent (Karina is Danish) and even misspells “l’adresse” in a letter as “la dresse”. Either the character is a foreigner or she is not very intelligent. But she sure is a lot of fun.

The indisputable highlight of My Life to Live – and easily among the most enjoyable scenes Godard ever filmed – happens around a pool table. Nana’s pimp is speaking to a business partner, and a young man is playing pool. Nana is bored and looking for a distraction. She finds the jukebox, puts a coin in and lets Michel Legrand’s “Swing! Swing! Swing!” take over the soundtrack before she starts dancing. Occasionally, the camera awkwardly takes her perspective, but most of the time, we just watch her dance enthusiastically on her own. She is enchanting, and the scene is even more entertaining than her equally famous dance (with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) in Band of Outsiders two years later. 

The penultimate tableau seems entirely out of place. Out of nowhere, Godard intervenes to dub the voice of actor Peter Kassovitz, the same young man who was playing pool in the paragraph above. The personal reason appears to be so that Godard can speak directly to Karina, although it is disappointing that Karina (or her character, Nana) doesn’t get the opportunity to respond while breaking the fourth wall. Godard doesn’t say outright that being an actress is like being a prostitute, but he certainly leaves enough hints for us to draw that conclusion. By extension, of course, Godard is a pimp who asks us for money to spend time in her company, but this logical extension of his ill-elaborated views gets no screen time. The film then turns turns silent, complete with subtitles, although no one would mistake this for Dreyer’s classic.

My Life to Live has quite a strong storyline for a Godard film, and despite the director’s attempts to go against the grain of traditional cinema, we easily share this little adventure with his lead character. By breaking the film up into pieces and disassembling the pieces in front of our eyes, My Life to Live follows in the footsteps of A Woman is a Woman, but this time around the overarching narrative is much more appealing, and that scene around the pool table gives the viewer a high she will take days to shake.

A Married Woman (1964)

André Crous

Thanks to a minimalist narrative, Godard’s look at an adulterer in A Married Woman is clear and uncluttered and yields one of his very best films.

A Married WomanFrance
4*

Directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Une femme mariée
Alternative title: Une femme mariée : Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964

Austere but hypnotic, fragmented yet smooth, Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman portrays a simple story of infidelity without adding too much intellectual baggage. For the director, who turns the camera on the problems in his private life while adding his usual dollop of literary nonsense, that is quite a feat. Although loosely inspired by and shot just a few weeks after the release of François Truffaut’s similarly themed, equally personal The Soft Skin (La peau douce), Godard’s excursion into the world of adultery is a wild horse of a very different colour.

Macha Méril stars as Charlotte Giraud, a gorgeous housewife who has seemingly made a habit of cheating on her husband, though this is never explicitly confirmed. Said husband is Pierre (Philippe Leroy), an aviator who spends a great deal of time away from his wife. Charlotte’s boyfriend of three months (played by Bernard Noël) is a theatre actor named Robert. In the film’s opening shot, we see her left hand, which sports a wedding ring, outstretched on a bedsheet pure as snow, before Robert gently grabs it and holds it tight. For nearly five minutes, we don’t see his face: We only get fragments – intimate close-ups and extreme close-ups – of Charlotte’s body and Robert’s hands caressing her face, her shoulders, her legs, her arm, her breast… It is all very reminiscent of the first scene in Contempt, in which Brigitte Bardot’s character asks her husband whether he likes all these parts of her. Fortunately, Méril’s acting is infinitely better than Bardot’s.

Godard shot this film after the Cannes film festival of 1964, where Truffaut’s film had competed as part of the official selection, and had it ready by the time the festival in Venice rolled around exactly four months later. Despite the incredible pace of production, this is easily one of his best films. Following his contemplation of marital mayhem the previous year, the director returned to the topic of marriage and whether it can last, in no small part because of drama in his own household: His wife, Anna Karina, who had earlier had a dalliance with Jacques Perrin, was having an affair with actor-director Maurice Ronnet. It should come as no surprise that in Godard’s film, the woman’s boyfriend is also an actor. And amazingly, all three actors were the same age as their real-life counterparts.

Over the course of 90 minutes of screentime spanning almost two days, Charlotte has sex with her boyfriend, uses multiple taxis to get to the airport (she suspects her husband is still having her followed by private detectives), meets her husband, who has flown back from abroad with a documentary filmmaker, has sex with her husband, learns some shocking news and then has sex with her boyfriend again.

A Married Woman was initially banned for its frank portrayals of adultery, although the sex scenes consist of nothing more than a long sequence of kisses on Charlotte’s various body parts. But when her husband tells her “Je t’aime”, she looks straight at the camera. Notably, she doesn’t betray any shame. She does the same when she is with Robert. These moments of apparent complicity or, at the very least, approval were likely the final straw for the censors, although the most explicit scene involves a housekeeper’s extended blow-by-blow recounting of her most recent romp.

However, by far the most egregious part of the film involves a demented attempt to compare Charlotte’s unfaithfulness to the Holocaust or, at least, France’s nonchalant amnesia of its complicity in the Jewish genocide. Roger Leenhardt, the (real-life) filmmaker whom Charlotte’s husband introduces to her, is recording the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which would last until 1965. He tells Charlotte that he had asked someone on the street in Germany, “What if tomorrow we killed all the Jews and all the hairdressers?” The man allegedly replied, “Why the hairdressers?” But even worse, Charlotte turns to Leenhardt and asks him, “Yeah, why the hairdressers?”, thereby firmly hinting at her implicit anti-Semitic prejudice or ignorance.

Godard later embroiders on this theme when Charlotte’s husband, Pierre, says he remembers everything that has ever happened to him. He contrasts his ability with the guards at Auschwitz, who pretend that they forgot what they did, but also, by implication, with his wife, whose hedonistic focus is the present, not the past. The subject feels entirely out of place in the plot and only serves to exaggerate Godard’s own anger about Karina’s infidelity. Adding some Holocaust to a film about love and lust is not provocative but preposterous. It should hardly need to be said, but the end of a relationship is not the same as genocide.

The film also marks a visible point of departure for Godard’s later critique of consumerism and its harmful effects on society, as all three characters repeat promotional slogans (like that of a company that produces electronic posture belts) without giving them a second thought. Here, his target is the profusion of sexual imagery in marketing, and he goes to great lengths to show us close-ups of advertisements in which women are wearing all manner of bras or men are sporting short swim trunks that barely conceal their bulges. In a strikingly simple yet beautiful scene, Charlotte stands alone in front of her bathroom mirror and measures her breasts to compare them with the “golden ratio for the bust” that a magazine purports to reveal.

In Contempt, Godard had panned from one character to the other during a fight to emphasise their isolation. Here, he does something similar during a late-night heart to heart in which we never see Charlotte and Pierre in the same frame, and when we see the one, the other’s dialogue is muted. This is a simple yet marvellous approach on the part of the director, and one wishes his other visual gimmicks, like turning the images into their negatives by inverting the colours, had been erased. The wordplay also becomes a bit much, although this will soon become par for the course in the world of Godard, where “ange” (angel) in “danger” or “MER” (sea) and “AMER” (bitter) in “AMERICAIN” (American) each apparently deserves their own close-up, for some reason.

However, what really sticks in our craw is that absurd and completely underdeveloped bit about the Holocaust and its inconceivable connection to Charlotte. It is also pretty revolting when Pierre tells her, in a moment of mild frustration, “I’ll rape you!” But who knows, maybe this is how Godard spoke to Karina.

And yet, even though it is clear that Godard himself was far from sure what he wanted to say with A Married Woman and ended up padding his strong central narrative with superfluous concerns and literary references (including multiple title cards that only start appearing in the second act), the film’s core is strong enough to keep its posture and our interest. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957)

André Crous

The Rohmer-scripted All the Boys Are Called Patrick is among the most straightforward, playful films of Godard’s oeuvre, although the number of references to the world of film already start to pile up. 

All the Boys Are Called PatrickFrance
4*

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

Running time: 20 minutes

Original title: Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
Alternate title: Véronique et Charlotte, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick

With two rather conventional début films – a documentary (about the construction of a dam in southern Switzerland) and a genuinely delightful short (about a woman deciding to spice up her life by engaging in some prostitution) – under his belt, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on his next project in the autumn of 1957. Shot on 35 mm, the result was All the Boys Are Called Patrick, 20 minutes in length and based on a screenplay by that great fanatic of dialogue, Eric Rohmer. Although unexpectedly cute for a Godard production, it clearly anticipated the budding director’s future (pre)occupation with films and form.

The titular Patrick is actually just one playboy who chats up and arranges to hook up with every girl he meets. What makes this story so interesting is that the two girls he happens to cross minutes apart one afternoon are roommates, and it is a shrewd idea to give them different perspectives on being flirted with. However, while the central narrative idea is wonderful, everything that Godard was responsible for (most notably, the multiple references to art and other films) makes this immediately recognisable as the work of a young film enthusiast rather than a director.

Véronique (Nicole Berger) and Charlotte (Anne Collette) are two young women sharing a flat in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Véronique has a lunchtime appointment but tells Charlotte they can meet up at the Luxembourg Gardens between 2 and 3 o’clock. Charlotte, who reads Hegel in the morning and flips through some pulp fiction (The Fate of the Immodest Blonde, which Godard probably chose because it was written by Patrick Quentin) over lunch, is immediately hit upon when she arrives in the public park.

The chatty flirt is called Patrick (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), who is clearly as shallow as a puddle but spouts off multiple references to the world of film in an attempt to impress her. Pretending to speak Japanese, for example, he merely drops the names of two of the era’s foremost directors from the Land of the Rising Sun: “Mizoguchi-Kurosawa?” It would not be a leap to equate the character with Godard himself, although Brialy is infinitely better-looking.

Charlotte eventually acquiesces to having a quick coffee with him. At the café, the two share a table next to a man whose face is buried in a copy of Arts, whose cover provocatively proclaims that “French cinema is dying under false legends”. This article by François Truffaut appeared in May of that year. Patrick persists with the falsehoods as he claims to be studying law, although the film slyly reveals that he has a geometry textbook. Despite herself, Charlotte ultimately arranges a date with him the following evening.

Moments after parting, Patrick runs into Véronique, who is just returning from the Luxembourg Gardens where Charlotte was nowhere to be found. All but beating her into submission to have a drink, they go to another nearby café, where Patrick runs through more or less the same lines as before (he told Charlotte it has been a month since he has picked up a girl and tells Véronique it has been a year) but somehow scores another date out of this forced meeting. The atmosphere of widespread cinephilia evolves as Véronique is also carrying around a copy of Cahiers du cinéma (it’s the July 1957 edition, with Orson Welles on the cover; later in the film, the magazine’s co-founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, also gets a shout-out).

Fortunately, unlike many of the director’s later films, this is the work of someone gingerly experimenting with the medium and not yet trying to steamroll over its conventional form. While the editing is rather thrown together, there is still very much a story to latch onto here, and Rohmer, in particular, deserves our gratitude for keeping the dialogue snappy and spontaneous. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick lags a bit in the second half, when Godard’s camera starts fixating on unnecessary details like the promotional poster for a Pablo Picasso exhibition (perhaps because Patrick, Pablo and the focal point of “Portrait of Paulo” all share the same first two letters, “Pa-“? I wouldn’t put such inanity past Godard) or a giant movie poster for Rebel Without a Cause that the girls have in their bathroom.

However, the verbal sparring keeps our interest, as the action we witness turns ever more complicated thanks to the way the girls tell each other about their respective Patrick. We know the truth, but it is fascinating to see them hiding and altering details about him to impress or slightly put down the other. One says he looks like Cary Grant, the other like the new American actor, Anthony something (presumably Anthony Perkins). Charlotte says she found Patrick incredibly interesting, and Véronique pretends she hates Coca-Cola, while the real events tell a very different story. There is something Rashomon-like about their interaction, albeit with fewer details and more uncertainty about the direction. 

The lack of firm direction from behind the camera is most evident in the endings of many scenes, which often consist of the characters laughing nonsensically at a non-existent joke. However, the story’s three-part structure is sublime in both its simplicity and efficacy. And despite the constant repetition of Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio in G Major” on the soundtrack and the camera’s unplanned (or badly executed) movements, the story loses almost none of its appeal, and the climax immediately gives way to the END intertitle. A perfect conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes.

Django Unchained (2012)

André Crous

In Quentin Tarantino’s best Western, Django Unchained, a slave set free by a German bounty hunter takes the South by storm.

Django UnchainedUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 165 minutes

Django Unchained is an unconventional love letter to the Western. It’s not a popular genre today, although the Coen brothers with some modest success tried to revive it with their 2010 film, True Grit. But Quentin Tarantino, the golden boy of cinema for the past 20 years whose name has unduly become synonymous with the gratuitous depiction of violence, has the magic touch and proves his mastery of the art form once again.

The film is excessively violent, but, among the slow-motion explosions of blood as if from flesh volcanoes, there is an incredible story of one man’s quest to find the woman he loves and reclaim her from her owner. With the exception of the film’s climactic shootout, which puts the bloodletting of The Wild Bunch to shame and ends with a manor house whose walls are covered in blood from the floor to the ceiling, the pace is mostly steady and not a single moment is wasted.

What will stir viewers’ attention more than anything else, however, is the language of the film. It is unlikely that the word “nigger” has ever been used this often by white characters in a film. Occurring more than 100 times, it pervades their speech to such an extent that it is tough to remember whether skin colour is ever explicitly mentioned. Tarantino gets away with it because even though the word is used almost as frequently as an article, it never ceases to remind us of the time and place the central character, a freed black slave, is up against.

The former slave is the titular Django (Jamie Foxx), who is set free by the German dentist Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who travels on horseback, followed by a wooden coffin with a plastic tooth on top bobbing up and down as he crosses the South in search of those wanted by the law.

Schultz is a peculiar creature who doesn’t seem to mind violence – besides, he is a perfect shot – as long as he gets the guy. He forms an instant bond with Django, mostly because he needs Django’s help in tracking down three brothers worth a lot of money dead or alive, and Schultz prefers them dead. But when Django tells Schultz about his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (yes, of course, the surname is a reference to the big-name ’70s blaxploitation movie), sold to a big slaveowner, the German bounty hunter has a personal interest in ensuring his friend and colleague gets his wife back.

We thus find ourselves watching a quest, and it is every bit as exciting as Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films, in which the central character pierced and sliced her way with a samurai sword until she reached the object of her affection. However, Django Unchained has about 30 minutes of post-climactic appendage that go off on a tangent.

This final act is separated from the film’s first two hours by an extended shootout, bloody to the point of excess, that sees Tarantino struggle to keep things together. He satisfies us with small details in that final part, including his explosive presence as an Australian slaver and some beautiful shots right before the end credits start to roll, but, in retrospect, this last section seems a big digression that doesn’t have the same driving force as the rest of the film.

The duo of Foxx and Waltz sounds like an odd couple, but Dr. Schultz – a character that calls to mind Waltz’s role in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds – has a playful, almost childlike streak that is captivating, if one can overlook his penchant for shooting people through the head.

Foxx, playing a variety of roles that see him as both a slave and a slaver, a lover and an assassin, is by far the coolest cucumber in the story, though Tarantino uses those (Sergio Leone kind of) extreme close-ups on his eyes for poignant moments, and this tactic works like a charm. It is no coincidence that the music of Ennio Morricone, a composer associated with Leone’s films, also features in Django Unchained.

Aside from the many gunshots and the cussing, the film also has some slave-on-slave ultimate fighting to the death, called “Mandingo”, and as the film takes place shortly before the Civil War, there is an epic scene with Klansmen.

It is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the show, perhaps to the detriment of the film. As a slave who has lived with his master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), for so long that he now shares Candie’s disdain for blacks, he is truly odious, a traitor to all the oppressed people around him, to freedom and justice, too, as he revels in the authority his connection with the white Candie grants him. An Uncle Tom for the ages.

The film is certainly not intended to be a very serious discussion about slavery, but it is a very entertaining one, and it doesn’t ignore the importance of past iniquities. This might come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t, as Inglourious Basterds already proved Tarantino a skilled craftsman even when dealing with the suppression and extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

It is no easy feat for a film to keep our attention for nearly three hours, but the director succeeds effortlessly. His style of entertainment necessarily includes people being shot to a bloody pulp, but when they’re all really bad guys, one tends to have fewer ethical objections, especially when everything is so clearly “just a film”.

Mr Tarantino, to quote Calvin Candie, “You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.”

The Club (2015)

André Crous

The Club is an unapologetic indictment of the sick structures that allow paedophile priests to continue their lives without facing justice

El ClubChile
4*

Director:
Pablo Larraín
Screenwriters:
Guillermo Calderón
Pablo Larraín
Daniel Villalobos
Director of Photography:
Sergio Armstrong

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: El club

If there was ever a film to put the final coffin in the Catholic Church’s case for credibility after decades of allegations about sexual abuse, paedophilia and cover-ups that involved the rotation of sex offenders from one parish to the next, it is Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s The Club (El club). With a plot set in a coastal town in the very recent past, it examines the activities of a group of four former priests who have been banished to an isolated house, along with a former nun, where they are expected to repent for their sins, which all relate to child abuse.

One of the opening scenes is a stunner and sets the stage for an hour and a half of tension that ultimately ends with an act so monstrous the fury quickly boils over from within the viewer because these supposed messengers of God reveal themselves to be nothing more than self-centred criminals who destroy innocent people and animals in order to keep their skeletons intact. In this particular scene, a victim of one of the former priests arrives at the home and proceeds to publicly castigate the priest at the top of his voice by going into detail about the sex acts the priest committed with him when he was an altar boy.

Paedophiles are mentally ill, and they should be treated, but if they commit sexual acts with a minor, such behaviour ought to be looked upon the same way one regards the acts of a murderer – with disgust and abhorrence – because the two acts are very closely aligned. It might seem like charitable (what some might label “Christian”) behaviour to love and support these people, but when they refuse to change and demand forgiveness, either because they don’t know what they are doing or because they are sinners and Jesus died for their sins, too, we need to stand up and refuse to grant them forgiveness, because they insist on destroying others in the quest for (temporary) self-gratification.

The majority of the five people comprising the titular “club” in Larraín’s film, his first since the beautiful true-to-life No, which depicted Chile’s landmark referendum in 1988, cannot even bring themselves to admit they are gay, much less that they sexually abused the minors in their parishes, and the same goes for the nun, who was sent to the house after her mother had accused her of beating her adopted daughter, an act of which she still proclaims her innocence.

When a prisoner is seeking parole, the board has to examine whether the individual in question shows any remorse. If there is no contrition, the person remains a menace to society and should be kept isolated. On a side note, this was the major problem with another film shown at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the same year: the Czech documentary Daniel’s World (Danielův svět), whose main character never elicits any empathy from us because he revels in being sick and seeks acceptance and understanding from society instead of help.

Early in the film, Father García (Marcelo Alonso), a young adviser with a background in psychology, arrives on the scene with the goal of steering the priests onto the right path, but he is of little help, and the four men and one woman have a great deal of experience in manipulation, to which he eventually succumbs. This film is a tragic indictment of the human evils harboured, sometimes with pride, by the very priests who are meant to protect their flocks from the wolves, and when cold calculation is carried out with a smile, as is the case with Mother Monica (Antonia Zegers), we feel a collective chill running down our spine because we know how prevalent these people are across the world and how much damage they have caused to people everywhere.

The Club is unapologetic in its treatment of its characters, and that is as it should be, because any hesitation on the part of the filmmaker would have weakened the impact of the film. This is a serious topic that requires a blunt approach, and Larraín does not back down, even when it comes to showing the more graphic consequences of the former fathers’ decision to stay in the house rather than integrate back into society.

There are moments of hope for the characters, especially Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro), who calls himself the King of Repression and comes to closest to admitting his urges have persisted despite (or perhaps because of) the prohibition on receiving pleasure – masturbation is forbidden, of course, but so is taking long showers. Eventually, little matters because the evil these men (and woman) are capable of when push comes to shove will be shocking to even those who have followed the scandals of the Church through documentaries and fiction films over the past decade.

On the whole, this film suggests that the structures that kept in place these places of refuge for sex offenders should be burnt to the ground and take their culture of moral authority, divine entitlement and protection of one’s own with them on their way to Hell, which is without a doubt where these people belong.

Viewers who have problems with animal cruelty – especially inflicted on domesticated animals – would be well advised to steer clear of this film. The ghastly acts committed in the final act will hit you hard.

Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The Beast (2016)

André Crous

Shaka does Shakespeare in The Beast, an excellently staged but very ambiguous, immersive yet enigmatic short film.

The BeastSouth Africa
4*

Directors:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Screenwriters:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Director of Photography:
Nicholas Turvey

Running time: 18 minutes

All the world is a stage, and we are merely watching the other players. Maybe that’s what happens in a comedy. But in a tragedy, we are also (unwitting, perhaps reluctant) players. And anyone who’s familiar with Funny Games will know that it can be frightful for the viewer to realise her implicit involvement in the spectacle.

The Beast is a short film set inside the pheZulu Safari Park, which is a real park in present-day South Africa. Here, tourists can see wildlife, walk around a “cultural village” with indigenous huts and witness traditional Zulu dances. What the (almost uniformly white) visitors find most thrilling, however, is the opportunity to see Shaka, the famous Zulu warrior who never lost a battle. Of course, it’s not the real Shaka, who died nearly 200 years ago. The imposing young man playing him (Khulani Maseko) is an actor who dreams of leaving this life behind and performing in a Shakespeare play at the National Theatre. Or does he?

Writing-directing duo Samantha Nell and Michael Wahrmann make the very clever decision to shoot most of their film in long, unbroken takes, which tends to imply a unity of space and time similar to what we experience in real life. The camera rarely makes itself known. Instead, it lets the action play out in wide shots that allow us to take in the actors and their surroundings. Among others, we get to know the aspirations of “Shaka”, who says he wants more than just to play the Bard’s famous dark-skinned Moor, Othello. Even though everyone we see is dressed up in costumes and moving around inside this Disney-like village, we are led to believe that these are intimate, “real” conversations between the actors.

But then, without warning, the film shatters all our illusions. And no review can do justice to the film without unpacking this multi-layered twist. The performers line up to dance and perform, presumably a traditional Zulu song. Shaka slowly separates from the group and takes up position between them and the audience. When he starts to speak, he speaks in Zulu. But the words that come out of his mouth are those of Shakespeare. More to the point, they belong to Shylock, the Jew, in The Merchant of Venice. 

We don’t see the audience for this performance, but it is because we are the audience. As a drum starts to beat offscreen, the drama increases, and Shaka switches to English to deliver the best-known and most aggressive portion of the monologue.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you offend us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that.
If a Jew offends a Christian, what is his answer? Revenge.
If a Christian offends a Jew, what should his punishment be by Christian example? Revenge.

By this stage, the rest of the group of Zulu performers have joined in, and as they reach the camera, their heads fill the frame. Just like Shaka’s famous bull’s head formation, the viewer is surrounded. Dead centre is Shaka, who now turns to look straight at us before delivering the final blow: “The evil you teach me will be difficult to execute, but in the end, I will better my instructor.”

At long last, we get a reverse shot of the tourists. Their jaws are on the floor. As a destabilisation of the expected boundaries between the spectator and the performers, this staging is very clever. It now seems clear that everything we have been watching – all the “private” conversations we were privy to, all the “behind-the-scenes” activity that we witnessed – was staged for us. We are the tourists visiting the film. Every moment and every action was merely part of a show, and we have not learnt anything about the individuals themselves. Perhaps we should have known better since “Shaka” is always in costume and is never called by any other name.

Unfortunately, those final words, which seem to create fear and provoke total confusion among the tourists clutching their phones like a security blanket, are too disconnected from the story to get a clear sense of what the actor is talking about. We can kind of grasp the metaphor of a struggle for equality. Jew–Christian can be replaced by black–white or indigenous–coloniser, but is this “evil” in the final line? Is the film really implying the possibility of another apartheid – one in reverse, in which blacks will dominate and enslave the whites? Is this merely a historical reminder that Shaka’s tribe, the Zulus, would ultimately take back power over this land? Or does it dovetail with Shaka’s desire to play “deep, ambiguous” characters?

With its series of impressively staged single takes and a powerful but puzzling ending, The Beast certainly stands out from the pack. The four scenes don’t fit neatly together, but with a powerhouse performance by lead actor Khulani Maseko, it almost doesn’t matter. This is Shaka’s show, and he hits the bull’s eye.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

André Crous

A change in the director’s chair ensures that the second instalment of popular Hunger Games franchise is just as entertaining as the first.

The Hunger Games: Catching FireUSA
4*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Simon Beaufoy
Michael deBruyn
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 145 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

When The Hunger Games was released in 2012, everyone knew it was going to shatter a few records. Based on the novel series by Suzanne Collins, the film eventually went on to make more than $680 million at the box office. The only other films with greater earnings that year were The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers, both of which had budgets nearly three times as big as that of The Hunger Games.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the second in a four-film series based on Collins’s trilogy – as was the case with the film adaptation of the Harry Potter series, the final Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay, would ultimately be split into two films, released over two years.

Drawing heavily on the influence of reality television on our lives, which pretends to epitomise the evolutionary race to the top with programmes named Survivor or The Apprentice, the first film centred on the titular life-and-death competition. The Hunger Games is a contest in which 24 individuals, “tributes”, from the world’s less-fortunate districts take part for the benefit of those living in the decadent Capitol. For them, this game in which people kill each other off until only one remains is the television event of the year.

In the first film, the teenage Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the impoverished District 12 volunteered to take the place of her younger sister whose name had been selected. She participated in the gory activities alongside Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who may just be the nicest guy you’ve ever met. Sooner or later, they realised they have to form an alliance and perhaps even a fake relationship to garner the support from the audience, which would give them a better shot at staying on the show because they provide entertainment.

At the end of the first film, the creators changed the rules of the game and decided that only one (instead of two) would be crowned victor. In rebellion, Katniss and Peeta, the two remaining contestants, made up their minds to swallow poisonous berries and thereby forfeit the game. The pressure on Gamemaker Seneca Crane resulted in them both crowned winners.

Catching Fire has a few very strong themes that may not fit together as well as in the first film, but it is a marvellous, informative piece of entertainment that does its best to do the duty of telling only the second act of the overarching tale.

First off, the tension between reality and illusion is foregrounded again, as we see Katniss agreeing under duress to play up her relationship with Peeta for the sake of entertainment and to convince the viewers (and more importantly, those in the districts) that this is pure love rather than a streak of rebellion that could destabilise the entire country of Panem. Because Katniss is not exactly an open book, it is not always easy to see where her acting ends and her true feelings for Peeta, whom we like very much, may begin, and this uncertainty is naturally a magnet for attention.

The other very evident theme is that of standing up against oppression. Small but powerful moments include the scenes in which the granddaughter of President Snow suggests an admiration for Katniss, as well as the many showings of a three-finger salute by the people of the districts, indicating their resistance to the rule of the Capitol.

The first half of Catching Fire shows the brewing unrest and Katniss’s and Peeta’s desire to quell the resistance even as they want things to change. The second half is the 75th Hunger Games, known as the third Quarter Quell, in which past winners of the games take part – like an All-Stars edition – to remind the districts of their past transgressions and the transience of life.

Although this happens every 25 years, and 75 is neatly divisible by 25, this comes as a great shock to everyone, and in this respect, the film makes little sense. But we have confidence in Katniss and Peeta because they are the most recent victors and are at a slight advantage over their opponents. It is too bad that the opponents, for the most part, are rather simplistically drawn as either good or bad (or what is supposed to be a grey middle ground of “provocative”, as in the case of Johanna) and don’t surprise us until, perhaps, the very end.

Another bit of plot that seems odd is the relationship between Katniss and Gale, her best friend and obviously a bit more than that. Despite the rest of the world thinking Katniss and Peeta are in love and would rather die together than have only one of them survive, that is obviously not the case in their home district, and everyone can see that. And yet, there is no uprising as a result.

The Hunger Games series changed hands with this instalment from Gary Ross to Francis Lawrence, whose approach to the material is much more obviously Hollywood than that of Ross, who memorably used a Steve Reich composition at a key moment in the first film. However, “more Hollywood” does have its pluses, as the special effects this time around are noticeably better, particularly during the scenes involving fire.

There are many problems with Catching Fire, but it remains an excellent piece of entertainment (Stanley Tucci’s turn as talk-show host Caesar Flickerman, tanned here to give him a John Boehner–like orange complexion, is as wildly amusing as in the past) that stacks up well enough against its predecessor and makes us impatient to see what happens next.

The Hunger Games (2012)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games, Gary Ross takes reality television shows to the extreme (within the family-friendly limitations of Hollywood entertainment).

The Hunger GamesUSA
4*

Director:
Gary Ross
Screenwriters:
Suzanne Collins
Gary Ross
Billy Ray
Director of Photography:
Tom Stern

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

The Hunger Games, a film based on the eponymous novel by Suzanne Collins, shares a premise with the notorious Japanese film Battle Royale: A group of teenagers, called “tributes”, are sent to an isolated area where they not only have to survive the elements but survive each other over the course of a severe couple of days. Whoever comes out of the ordeal alive wins the grand prize.

The story is set at some point in the future, and anyone who has not read the book might struggle to figure out exactly why these games take place at all. There are mentions of an uprising in the past that caused the world or the country to be divided into 12 districts, from each of which two children get chosen in an annual gathering called “the reaping”.

The 24 tributes, some with special skills, but most of them with nothing but their innate sense of survival, are shown on television for the duration of the games, and an easy parallel can be drawn to the ubiquitous reality shows we have become so used to. Indeed, the question of whether celebrity is worth the loss of privacy is addressed head-on.

Although only the barest details are given about the historical context of the ferocious spectacle, the viewer quickly enters this world with the help of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), two teenagers who are unwillingly thrust into the limelight and thrown into the lion’s den.

Even before their names are chosen, there is unease in the air. The people from Katniss’s and Peeta’s district live off the land and profit little from the glitz, glamour and riches of the Capitol – a city filled with wealthy people who have brightly coloured hair and wear gaudy outfits. The tension between the two groups of citizens is evident.

Insofar as its depiction of violence is concerned, The Hunger Games is far more Hollywood than Battle Royale. Going for a wide audience, instances of violence are kept to a minimum, and even the few action-packed moments that remain are composed mostly of blurred shots in which it seems the camera – rather than the characters – is under attack. The film’s use of rear projection, during some spectacular scenes in which the tributes are paraded on arrival in the city, is also very poorly executed.

But director Gary Ross, whose Pleasantville transported audiences to a time of nostalgia that was both playful and insightfully critical, here tackles some very timely questions about the nature of celebrity and reality TV. He also stealthily draws contemporary resistance movements (Occupy Wall Street, in particular) into the equation as a way of saying the majority does not have to be victimised by the ruling minority.

The director’s use of the handheld camera, to put us closer to the events, has mixed results, although our uncomfortable closeness to Katniss’ face when she is onstage during an interview with blue-haired talk-show host Caesar Flickerman renders some impressive results. As played by Stanley Tucci, Flickerman has exquisite timing, and his act, close to slapstick, is pushed to its limits. But Tucci never makes the character a joke by going overboard. And this observation is applicable to nearly all the actors in the cast, who are made to be much more human than one would expect.

Even Haymitch Abernathy, who is assigned to mentor Katniss and Peeta, and is a former winner of the Hunger Games, is portrayed as more than a drunk loser who used to be great. In his portrayal, Woody Harrelson credibly conveys the conflicting emotions of hope and hopelessness that can easily crush the spirit of all the contestants.

Another example of the film’s surprising departure from the average fare is the first scene inside this enclosed area in which the tributes will compete: When they all rush toward their gear before heading off into the woods, the music that accompanies this moment is not a glorious orchestral number but a minimalist composition by Steve Reich. Of everything that happens in the film, this combination of audio and visuals is perhaps the most telling of Ross’s desire to make a film that is different from the clusters of forgettable fantasy films we get every year.

The Hunger Games is a cautionary tale about reality television, and it effortlessly mixes in contemporary politics to produce a very intelligent film that never seems like it is trying too hard to be relevant. The focus on the characters inside the world of the game is tight, and the pacing is superb, and few other similar films of this length (142 minutes) go by so quickly.

Daisies (1966)

André Crous

Věra Chytilová’s inventive Daisies is never straightforward, and more than 50 years on, it still has some kooky flashes of brilliance.

Daisies SedmikráskyCzechoslovakia
4*

Director:
Věra Chytilová
Screenwriters:
Věra Chytilová
Ester Krumbachová
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Sedmikrásky

Her name might be “Jarmila”, or it could be “Julie”. That is how she variously introduces herself to others. She calls her best friend “Marcelka” in public, but when they’re alone, they address each other as “Marie”. This is all beside the point, however, because the name that shines the brightest across this quirky narrative landscape is “Věra”.

The two young women in question have come to be referred to as the dark-haired “Marie I” (Jitka Cerhová) and the fair-haired “Marie II” (Ivana Karbanová), the stars of Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film, Daisies (Sedmikrásky). The duo is not only the story’s main characters but also the only characters of any consequence. This is their tale, and they couldn’t care less about the people around them, especially the men. (Every single scene would pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.) In fact, the same may be said of Chytilová’s attitude towards traditional narrative filmmaking.

Considered one of the highlights of the Czech New Wave, Daisies made a splash for a whole host of reasons. In the director’s native Czechoslovakia, it sparked controversy upon its release, and its local distribution was heavily suppressed after it drew the ire of the country’s president. A few months later, a deputy in the National Assembly called it “trash” and heatedly enquired what the film might offer “working people in factories, in fields and on construction sites”. One specific point of criticism he had was the film’s apparent delight in showing food wastage.

Admittedly, it does feature a stunning amount of food being wasted, and no reference is made to factories, fields or construction sites. The goal was to offer a different vision: a story that, on the surface, is far removed from the humdrum of everyday life but pokes the stifling social order by using a wild and atypical approach to depict the escapades of two happy-go-lucky girls. Chytilová issued a particular challenge to the country’s totalitarian government because her criticism was wrapped up in an exuberantly artistic sensibility – one whose subversive message was evident but difficult to define and, thus, perturbed those seeking to control creative endeavours.

In the first seven decades of the cinematic art form, a small number of films had been made by female directors, and there had been a few more starring women in the lead roles, but these two circles hardly ever overlapped. Prior to Chytilová, women were not prohibited from making films or portraying anything other than damsels in distress or femmes fatales, but her Daisies broke the mould: It was directed by a woman, written by two women (Chytilová and influential screenwriter/costume designer Ester Krumbachová) and featured its two wholly independent-minded Maries in every single scene. It had been – and remains – a rarity for women to be so fully represented in this creative triad.

But the film’s unusual nature didn’t stop there. In contrast to the more dramatic, serious films of her peers at the time, like Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Chytilová chose to undertake a delightfully playful project. She deployed several unconventional editing techniques to inject visual surprises into her work and even undercut the male characters by having the women perform a memorable act of symbolic castration.

In the monochromatic opening scene, the Maries, wearing similarly patterned bikinis, make up their minds to shake things up. After deciding to “be bad” (in other words, to reject the status quo), they promptly jump off-screen into a brightly lit meadow, where they are shown, for the first time, in full colour. Evidently, the rather subversive implication is that being “bad” adds colour to life.

Throughout the episodic but free-flowing film, they play the children’s game Vadí nevadí (“It matters, it doesn’t matter”, similar to “Truth or Dare”) without getting flustered or hesitating to carry out each other’s wishes and, in so doing, push past social conventions. But their relationship remains undefined, and because they don’t seem to have lives beyond their friendship, they are mere ciphers, marionettes in the hands of Chytilová. At one point, sharing a bathtub filled to the brim with milk, they rightfully question whether they even exist.

Speaking of liquid being wasted, the film’s climax is a scene of such gastronomic debauchery it still hasn’t lost any of its shock value: Upon discovering a banquet-style buffet laid out in an empty hall, the two women move from one seat to the next, gorging themselves on a variety of meats, vegetables and desserts. After lobbing cakes at each other, they start throwing everything else that is edible, too, and turn the event into a proper food fight before strutting on the table, using it as a catwalk to crush the food under their high heels. All that’s missing is a literal applecart for them to upset.

The biggest twist of the knife in the heart of the regime comes a few moments later, when they suddenly decide to no longer be bad and return to being “good”: Back in monochrome, whispering to each other that hard work will make them happy, they carefully place all the broken pieces of crockery on the table, as if preparing for a meal, before lying down and meeting a grisly end. Chytilová appears to suggest that, under the strictures of communism, life is about going through the motions: You mechanically engage in (pointless) work, you pretend to be happy, and then you die – not quite the message the government wanted people to contemplate.

As she would continue to do in subsequent productions, Chytilová also shatters the illusion that men play any substantial role in women’s lives. In a very cheeky scene, Marie II uses scissors to cut a bread roll, a gherkin, some sausages, an egg and finally a banana into pieces while a man – who, significantly, is never shown – unsuccessfully tries to woo her over the phone.

But the destruction is much more widespread than a few sliced-up snacks. It also seeps into the physical manifestation of the film itself. In the restaurant, the two Maries upend convention by starting with dessert and finishing with the main course. And when Marie II devours the whole chicken she has on her plate, the camera essentially takes it personally as it begins to sputter and squirt in colour, alternately converting greys to purples, oranges, greens and blues and leaping across time. Later, to further underscore the notion that films themselves have traditionally been male, the images shatter into fragments when the Maries play with scissors.

Here and there, one can draw parallels with other films (perhaps most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark 1960 film Breathless, because of the jump-cut transitions), but Daisies is indisputably sui generis. Chytilová’s creation is a joyous celebration of turning the grim and dreary communist reality on its head and replacing it with something vivid and refreshing, albeit at times maddeningly incomprehensible.

Despite the short 80-minute running time, however, many viewers today might be put off by the characters’ lack of growth. Marie I and Marie II agree on everything, quite unlike the slow identity melding of the two women in Ingmar Bergman’s cerebral Persona, released the same year. While Daisies is dynamic and reaches for ever more imaginative ways to subvert the art form and its conventions, the Maries never face any real crisis in need of a resolution.

In addition, the visual gimmicks are inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary, the film doesn’t fall neatly into a genre, and at times the actresses’ deliberately mechanical, unnatural performances render their Maries silly and hard to relate to. They are neither glorified nor put on trial for their vapid conduct and their excess. And yet, perhaps because the “bad” behaviour they so nonchalantly engage in is much more interesting than the “good”, it doesn’t matter, because their brash hedonism is positively contagious.

Daisies may be more than 50 years old, but as a collage of female expression and a light-hearted romp in the face of suffocating state control, it holds up well and continues to entertain.

Toyland (2007)

André Crous

During the Second World War, a young non-Jewish boy who doesn’t want his Jewish friend to leave unknowingly alters their lives forever in Toyland.

SpielzeuglandGermany
4*

Director:
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Screenwriters:
Johann A. Bunners
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Director of Photography:
Christoph “Cico” Nicolaisen

Running time: 14 minutes

Original title: Spielzeugland

From Life is Beautiful and Fateless to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Painted Bird, stories of children caught up in the chaos and brutality of the Holocaust are nothing new. The horrors are often a turning point that inevitably marks the end of their innocent, protected childhood. But what happens less often is that the children’s loss of safety is that there is an explicit (and inextricable) link to the adults’ loss of control. Life is Beautiful hinted at this, and Sophie’s Choice centred on it. But Jochen Alexander Freydank’s innocently titled short film, Toyland, presents it with devastating clarity.

In a German city during the Second World War, the Meißners (Meissners) and the Silbersteins are next-door neighbours in their apartment block. Both families have boys who are the same age, play piano together and are the best of friends. Despite the war, it appears the two boys are unaware that one of them is Jewish. One evening, when Mrs Marianne Meißner and her son, Heinrich, are at the Silbersteins’, the boys’ duet on the piano is interrupted by someone else in the building screaming at the “the Jews” to keep it down. It is only a matter of time before the Gestapo hauls them off to the concentration camps.

Marianne has been trying to prepare Heinrich for the inevitable departure of his friend, David, and his family. She tells him that David is going on a trip to the “toyland” but that he can’t go with them. This place sounds like so much fun that Heinrich barks back at her that his father would have allowed him to go with the Silbersteins. But Marianne sticks to her story, even as she knows that her son will have his heart broken either way.

What follows, amid the period’s historic barbarity, is an extraordinarily touching demonstration of humanity that involves every single one of the five characters. The twist ending will grab at many a viewer’s heart, although the more sceptical amongst us will question the likelihood of such a drama being resolved so seamlessly.

Set in the deep of winter, the ominous greys everywhere shy away from the pageantry of the Nazis’ trademark crimson. It is a desperate, unforgiving landscape, and because Jews are not inherently distinct from other Germans, everyone can be a suspect. At one point, Marianne is mistaken for a Jew, and at another, David Silberstein is presumed to be Aryan. These mistakes remind us of the nonsense of the Nazis’ ideology of Aryan identity, but Toyland does not belabour the point. 

The acting from the main boy, Heinrich, is not the best, and Toyland’s final scene has an unfortunate Titanic quality to it, but the rest of the production is excellent.