4 stars

Death and the Maiden (1994)

André Crous

UK/France/USA
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Rafael Yglesias
Ariel Dorfman
Director of Photography:
Tonino Delli Colli

Running time: 102 minutes

Roman Polanski’s career as a filmmaker will always be best remembered for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, but his underrated Death and the Maiden is a stunning film, in large part thanks to the work of Ariel Dorfman, on whose play it is based.

The film is set in an unnamed country in South America “after the fall of the dictatorship”. This could be any number of countries, and since Dorfman has Chilean origins one would expect the country to be Chile and the dictator to be Pinochet, but even if this were true, it has no real bearing on our interpretation of the film. Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) and her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) are living in near isolation, and she becomes tense every time a strange car pulls up to their house. On the radio, Paulina hears that Gerardo has been appointed the new head of the government’s tribunal that will look into human rights abuses during under the former military junta. However, she remains unconvinced that the guilty individuals will be made to pay sufficiently for what they did.

It is a stormy night, and the power goes out. So, too, do the phone lines. Gerardo is brought back home by a friendly stranger after his car had got a flat tyre. Later in the evening, the friendly stranger appears again: Gerardo had forgotten to take his spare tyre. The friendly stranger makes some very flattering comments about Gerardo and his role in the upcoming investigations, and Gerardo asks the man in to have a drink with him. Hearing the two of them, Paulina flees from the house. In the man’s car, she finds a cassette of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet and decides to push the car down a cliff into the rough seas.

All of this might sound rather odd, but the thrust of Paulina’s mental processes is soon revealed when she goes back to her and Gerardo’s house, ties up the stranger, who is called Dr Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley), and accuses him of having raped her several times, while the Schubert Quartet was playing in the background, during her time as a political prisoner. She was always blindfolded, but she claims to recognise Miranda’s voice, his smell, the expressions he uses, his quotations from Nietzsche and, most importantly, his love of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”.

These three characters – Paulina, Gerardo and Dr Miranda – are the only people we ever see in the film, except for a prologue and an epilogue in a concert hall, where the title piece is performed. The actors’ performances are all very strong and make the film a wholly dramatic experience.

Viewers will vacillate between trust and distrust in Paulina’s assessment of Miranda’s guilt. Is Paulina, who has clearly been emotionally and mentally affected by her ordeal more than a decade ago, someone whom we can trust? Or is she just out for revenge? Even in the film’s climactic scene (an amazing piece of acting: nearly three minutes in close-up), things are not as clear-cut as they seem to be, making this journey towards the truth so much darker, because we have to decide for ourselves whether we have not been deceived one last time.

The strength of Death and the Maiden lies in the screenwriters’ ability to keep us guessing throughout, while still maintaining absolute control over the credibility of the admittedly theatrical world we see before us. Almost the entire film is set in the Escobars’ house (clearly in a studio), but the camera work by Tonino Delli Colli and the editing by Hervé de Luze create the necessary tension in concert with the actors’ performances. One minor weakness is the house’s lighting: Although the power is supposed to be out, every inch of the house’s interior is lit, and when characters throw five shadows, you know things are a bit fake.

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Rob Epstein
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Carter Wilson
Judith Coburn
Director of Photography: 
Frances Reid

Running time: 91 minutes

This film, which won the Best Documentary Oscar, has always been considered the No. 1 document that condenses the life of Harvey Milk and reminds viewers around the world of his importance in the gay rights struggle. In 2008, Milk, Gus van Sant’s fictional account of Milk’s life, with Sean Penn as the gay rights icon, heavily relied on information gleaned from this documentary by Rob Epstein, who would go on to direct an outstanding documentary on gay representation in the cinema, The Celluloid Closet.

Watching The Times of Harvey Milk, it is very clear that Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the screenplay for Van Sant’s film, was inspired not only by the content of the documentary but also by its structure; the two films have exactly the same book-ends – a tape recording of Milk’s will in case of assassination, the announcement by Dianne Feinstein that Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone had been assassinated, and Milk’s famous “Hope” speech. I was a little disappointed by Black’s stencilled duplication of these parts in his screenplay for Milk instead of integrating them into the fictional quilt in some other way.

In touching interviews with many of the people in Harvey Milk’s life – though, unfortunately, many of the important ones, such as Cleve Jones, Dianne Feinstein and Scott Smith, are not included – we get a sense of Milk’s achievements and his perseverance against great resistance, especially during the debacle of Proposition 6, in his first year in office, which would have allowed the Department of Education to fire teachers who self-identified as homosexual. Here, I learned about Sally Gearhart, a gay rights activist with an intimidating intelligence, who debated Jon Briggs in a very factual manner during their televised debates, and I believe her collaboration with Milk helped to defeat the proposed anti-gay initiative. Her words on the role of fear in the campaign explain the central issue very succinctly and are still relevant to anti-gay movements today.

The film provides a lot of detail about the political co-operation between Milk and Moscone, and we can easily understand how it came to be that Harvey Milk was given the opportunity to be elected city supervisor (redistricting provided the city with a much more representative combination of politicians than had ever previously been the case).

However, the film focuses too much on the role of Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and, after certain disagreements between him, Milk and Moscone, killed the two men. The film spends its final 20 minutes going over perceived discrimination in the trial, the jury selection and the verdict. Of course, one has to keep in mind that the film was made five years after the death of Milk and shortly before White’s release from prison (he would commit suicide a year later, in 1985). But all the talk of White, his conservative values and the lenient sentence that he was given after killing two men in a very obviously premeditated act of violence should not have taken up so much time in this documentary.

Pixote (1981)

André Crous

Brazil
4*

Director:
Hector Babenco
Screenwriters:
Hector Babenco
Jorge Durán
Director of Photography:
Rodolfo Sanches

Running time: 128 minutes

Original title: Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco

Pixote is gritty and tough and wholly credible as a faithful representation of the lives of street children in São Paulo. Whereas the title, unfortunately, focuses on one specific character, the film itself is interested in the larger group of individuals of which the young João Henrique, nicknamed “Pixote” (pronounced “pee-shaw-che”), forms an important part. It is a well-known fact that the boy who played the title character and whose living standards were comparable to those of his character in the film was shot and killed by police in August 1987.

The film’s extradiegetic opening is remarkably simple but entirely appropriate and manages to highlight the urgency of the plight of São Paulo’s street children: Director Hector Babenco, with one of the city’s favelas very visible in the background, speaks directly to the viewers and informs us that stories such as that of the film we are about to watch still happen every day. He even points to a small house where Fernando Ramos Da Silva, the actor who plays Pixote, lives with his family.

Pixote follows the lives of a group of young boys who, having committed crimes, can’t be sent to prison but are locked up in a reform school instead. At 10 years of age, Pixote is the youngest, and during his first night in the dormitory, a few bunks from him, a boy is raped by an oversexed teenager.

The image of Pixote sniffing glue is powerful, and we recognise this character’s desperation in a single shot. When circumstances around him become even worse (at times, the school may be confused for a prison, and a very corrupt prison at that), he decides to free himself from this restrictive environment.

But, as a relative of Pixote had warned him, life outside the school can be even worse than life on the inside. Even though there are a few wonderfully dynamic scenes in which we see the young boys snatch purses and mug unsuspecting seniors of their wallets, their eventual involvement in the world of drug dealing, which they know nothing about, is tense and leads to very bad things.

Pixote is not really the main character, and a title that made it clear that the focus is on the group rather than the individual would have been truer to the spirit of the film. The cinematography is excellent, and the acting is flawless. However, the story does not have the tight focus it could have had if the centres of interest had been more clearly defined. At one point, the film digresses into a musical number that only relates to a single character, who never really features again. However, the themes that the film does raise, including issues of poverty, sexuality and power, are all handled admirably, and it is clear to see why this socially conscious film caused such a sensation when it was first released.

The Inheritance (2003)

André Crous

Denmark
4*

Director:
Per Fly
Screenwriters: 
Per Fly
Kim Leona
Mogens Rukov
Dorte Warnøe Høgh
Director of Photography: 
Harald Gunnar Paalgard

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Arven

It is regrettable that I have come to associate Danish cinema too readily with the work of Lars von Trier and his Dogme brothers-in-arms. There are many other films from this small country that are (at least) equally capable of tugging at our heartstrings, and Per Fly’s The Inheritance is one of them. Along similar lines, one may look to Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet), released in 2006, a film whose images, like those of The Inheritance, were exquisitely lit and filmed with handheld cameras.

The Inheritance is set up as a tragedy from the start, and the film’s bookended structure is perhaps the only element that is worthy of harsh criticism. Director Per Fly makes it very clear from the start that Christoffer and Maria are no longer together, but as a result, he eliminates the tension that might have resulted from a linear telling of the story. After the opening scene, the film cuts to three years earlier (although, over the course of the film, the math doesn’t work out: It is in fact longer than three years), and we see the couple happy together in Stockholm.

The rest of the film would show us the deterioration of their relationship and, since we know how it will end, the film removes any hope of a successful resolution to the drama. This indication of a tragic outcome is mirrored in the plays performed by Maria, who is a theatre actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre: At first, she stars in comedies, As You Like It and The Twelfth Night, and as the story develops, she becomes involved in a production of Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo & Juliet.

Ulrich Thomsen, who is cast as Christoffer, is an actor I’ve seen twice before, as the ice-cold white-collar terrorist in Tom Tykwer’s The International, and a decade earlier as the emotionally damaged central character of the first Dogme film, The Celebration (Festen). The Inheritance provides him with a golden opportunity to show his range, for his is not a simple character: As the only son of the family patriarch and big businessman, his mother sees him as the natural successor to his father’s steel company, even though he had distanced himself from the operation years earlier because of the pressure.

When his father commits suicide at the beginning of the film – a bad omen for anybody who contemplates the idea of taking over his job – he is shoved into the limelight by his mother and Nils, the chief financial officer, even though his brother-in-law Ulrik had, for all intents and purposes, been the second-in-command. But when Nils tells Christoffer that Ulrik has been spreading rumours about him and his mother tells him that Ulrik doesn’t have the talent to take over from her late husband, Christoffer feels it is his duty to captain the ship. In the process, his marriage gets torn apart.

The film’s depiction of the business world is relentlessly bleak, and while this world does have its benefits, even the most faithful employees sometimes need to be sidelined. Christoffer’s first act as managing director of the steel company is effectively a betrayal of his own wife: He goes against the decision he took with her moments earlier. And these betrayals, justifiable as they might be in the business context, have terrible consequences for human relations. Slowly but surely Christoffer is pulled into the world that he had sworn he would never (and later, only temporarily) be a part of.

The film does jump around from one point on the timeline to another, but in general, the flow is consistent enough for the story to feel like it is developing at the appropriate pace. Per Fly handles his actors with great insight and manages to convey the correct image of the most important figures without resorting to clichés.

Machete (2010)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors: 
Robert Rodriguez
Ethan Maniquis
Screenwriters:
Robert Rodriguez
Álvaro Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Jimmy Lindsey

Running time: 100 minutes

Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil was released in 1958. Essentially the most stylish B-movie ever made, with an opening tracking shot that would be studied in film schools decades later, it famously stars Charlton Heston as a Mexican called Vargas, in spite of him having no accent whatsoever. The choice of Heston, who had played Moses two years earlier in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments and would portray the title character in the award-winning Ben-Hur the following year, was contrary to all common sense, but it worked because the film permitted such casting lunacy.

Machete offers a similar performance that initially takes the viewer aback but succeeds in grabbing the viewer’s attention for exactly the same reason as in Welles’s film: Steven Seagal, starring in one of the best films of his career, is cast as a Mexican crime boss named Torrez. I’m not suggesting that Seagal is equal to Heston by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps he realises as much because at least he tries to go for the accent.

Of course, a review of Machete must pay homage to the work done by Tarantino, starting with the two Kill Bill films and, in particular, the Grindhouse double feature that consisted of his Deathproof and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. In fact, Machete is a feature-length adaptation of one of Grindhouse‘s fake trailers, which accompanied the full version (as opposed to the separate films) and are available on the DVDs. In terms of the physical action, Rodriguez continues to relish in his exaggerated representations of bloodletting.

The story is set up as a clash of cultures between the Mexicans, who cross the border, and the Americans who lie in wait, ready to shoot ’em up the moment they set foot on Uncle Sam’s soil. A representative of the xenophobia gripping America, but also, we learn, merely a politician, is Senator John McLaughlin, played by Robert de Niro – his best role in more than 10 years (at least, since Great Expectations). McLaughlin is involved in target practice on Mexicans who cross the border during the night, but he himself is betrayed by an over-ambitious deputy, whose involvement in an assassination attempt causes him to become entangled in Torrez’s affairs.

It all might seem like a big mess, but Machete, played by the very ugly Danny Trejo (an amazingly prolific actor, I learn: His profile on the IMDb claims that he starred in 18 films in 2010 alone, including Machete), separates the wheat from the chaff, or the head from the body, with his big machete.

The film’s B-movie feel naturally helps to create the illusion that everything is permissible, and mistakes in continuity or visual effects may be ascribed to the film’s aspiration to be something unconventional. That is a very clever strategy, and it does cover a lot of ground, but the film is not an entirely homogeneous production, and therefore there is still room for improvement. Don Johnson’s role as Von Jackson, the leader of the group of vigilantes patrolling the border, did not shimmer with the kind of rough energy of any of the other characters, and the directors allowed themselves to be carried away by their own desire to produce something better than a B-movie: During a shoot-out at a church, the bloody action is accompanied by a rendering of “Ave Maria”, which is more reminiscent of the baptism in The Godfather, or scenes from The Boondock Saints, and does not fit with the rest of the filmmaking approach in this film.

Machete is bloody bucket loads of fun. The novelty does wear off after a while, but at least Rodriguez tells his story simply and effectively, without the many metafilmic flourishes that Tarantino would have added, and consequently, it feels like the product of someone who is more interested in the story than the format in which it is presented. The machete is a brutal weapon of choice, and even if we have never seen it used in real life, Machete shows us how it is done – as well as other uses for intestines.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
George Nolfi
Screenwriter:
George Nolfi
Director of Photography: 
John Toll

Running time: 105 minutes

This film, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, is first-rate entertainment and right up there with Inception and Dark City, although it is less complicated than the former and less intelligent than the latter.

The important point about the film is that it is set in a very recognisable world and that this is the film’s primary world. Whatever takes place “upstairs”, where the agents of control and change reside, is shown in very short scenes, whose interiors are either completely empty, not unlike the prison in THX 1138, or they resemble the actual world, as in the library scenes. The fact that the setting is so close to our world obviously suggests that we interpret events as possibilities, and the story, despite our better judgment, as realistic, at least for the duration of the film.

Writer-director George Nolfi does a very good job of focusing and keeping our attention. In the very first sequence, he places David Norris, a young representative campaigning for the position of senator for New York, next to a vast array of famous and influential political figures: Madeleine Albright, Michael Bloomberg and Jesse Jackson are some of the faces we see. He seems to be a shoo-in, but then, as in the real world, mud is thrown in the death throes of the campaign, and this mud sticks: pictures of the senator in his college days with his pants down. The image communicated is one of immaturity, and Norris loses by a landslide.

Norris quickly rebounds, however, after meeting – and making out with – a total stranger, called Elise, in the men’s restrooms. They lose touch, but this fateful meeting inspires Norris to reconceptualise his concession speech by doing something very unpolitical: telling the truth. His brand is immediately revitalised, but he can’t get Elise out of his head.

We discover (and eventually, so will Norris) that this meeting between him and Elise was never supposed to take place, and her place in his life would infinitely decrease his ambitions and his stature in the American society. And this is the question he needs to answer by the end of the film: Does he choose Elise, even if this choice means that his political life would take a turn for the mediocre as a result?

A group of agents in grey suits and hats follow Norris around, trying to make sure that his relationship with Elise does not prevent him from reaching his potential, and they want to do this by “adjusting” his life in small ways that cause the fewest ripples to the lives of those around him. But, this being a film, we know that there will be significant ripples, not least because Norris is so determined to take on the people who tell him he can’t have Elise.

Elise, played by Emily Blunt, is perfectly fine, but the two characters seemed like they were pushed together by circumstance, i.e. the film’s screenplay, rather than by desire. They clearly make a connection, as is evidenced by that first kiss, but what the reason for this connection is, we can only guess. Their subsequent conversations do little to convince us of the authenticity of their love.

But then, stories of rebellion against powers greater than ourselves, or the people we fully empathise with, are exciting. I thought of Neo’s meeting with the Architect in Matrix: Reloaded and of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and the power of saying ‘no’.

The Adjustment Bureau is highly enjoyable. Nolfi is an excellent director and in spite of a relatively small cast, his film never feels like it is too small. Some questions are left unanswered, most important among them the possibility of changing “the plan” if the “Chairman” is supposed to be omniscient. But the film is light and engaging enough to sidestep such issues and will be remembered for its high concept and its great style.

Duck Season (2004)

André Crous

Mexico
4*

Director:
Fernando Eimbcke
Screenwriters: 
Fernando Eimbcke
Paula Markovitch
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabe
Running time: 85 minutes

Original Title: Temporada de patos

When we, the viewers, spend an hour and a half in the company of a very small group of characters (four, to be precise) in one location, then they better be likeable. Fortunately, Duck Season does not disappoint.

One Sunday, two young teenage boys, Juan Pablo (“Moko”) and Mario (“Flama”), both 13 or 14 years old, spend the day at Flama’s mother’s flat, while she is out doing her chores. They drink Coke, eat chips and play video games. Then, 16-year-old Rita from next-door arrives to use their oven. They don’t pay much attention to her. Even when the power goes out, they prefer to sit in silence in front of the TV, rather than strike up a conversation. They order pizza, which leads to an oddly thrilling sequence in which the pizza delivery guy tries to outrun the clock. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t (although the soundtrack is clear on this point), and this uncertainty leads to a showdown between him and the boys.

By this stage, we’re only 30 minutes into the film, but you’ll have noticed that quite a lot actually happens, in spite of the many, many moments of silence, at least initially, in which the characters are visibly bored and just waiting for time to pass, for things to become less awkward.

Director Fernando Eimbcke demonstrates real skill in finding many different positions to place his camera: inside cupboards, inside the refrigerator, inside the oven – at one point, the camera even takes the place of an important painting in the living room. The film, shot entirely in black and white, on what must have been a shoestring budget, shows what can be accomplished when the characters are interesting and the story is well-developed.

The only deviation from the apartment setting (apart from the quirky sequence, mentioned above, in which Ulises, the pizza delivery man, races to deliver the pizza on time) is a flashback to a dog pound, which feels completely out of place. Also, the film tends to cheat from time to time by using the cuts, occurring between the scenes that mostly take place in the living room and the kitchen, as bridges across time, and these ellipses actually obscure important events that occur offscreen.

The self-confident Rita provides plenty of material to work with, but it is the young Moko, played by actor Diego Cataño, who impresses the most with his splendid performance, hinting at awkwardness and secrecy in his outer appearance of mere shyness, and yet these traces are never overstated or overplayed.

The Witness (1969)

André Crous

Hungary
4*

Director:
Péter Bacsó
Screenwriters: 
Péter Bacsó
János Újhegyić
Director of Photography:
János Zsombolyai

Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: A tanú

József Pelikán, by his own admission, is “ideologically ill-defined”, in spite of his affiliation with the Communist Party; he is a continuous victim of circumstance. All he really cares about is the dyke next to his house, where he does his best to keep the gophers from burrowing and destroying this wall that protects him and his family against the slowly rising level of water. And rise it does, in the end providing the inevitable tragedy in this tragicomedy.

In one of the film’s opening scenes (incidentally, one of the only instances when Pelikán deliberately defies the law of the land), he slaughters a pig in the basement while his children, standing on the trapdoor above, sing at the top of their lungs. Such an activity – the killing, not the singing – is illegal under law, and soon enough, by way of more misunderstandings, Pelikán is arrested and thrown in jail.

Very quickly, the film’s structure becomes a chain of predictable causality: He is thrown in jail, let out almost immediately, given a job by a Party senior, he fails to respect someone high up and is thrown in jail again. But the situations themselves are comedic gems. Pelikán is appointed as director of a swimming pool, director of an amusement park and director of an orange research institute but fails to impress.

However, the Orange Research Institute provides one of the funniest banners in the film, visible during a ceremony supposed to celebrate the success of the Hungarian Orange: “Forward with the Hungarian Orange!”

This film is one of those Communist-era comedies that clearly poke fun at the regime and still astound by virtue of having been made in such a political climate in the first place. In particular, I’m thinking of a Polish film called Miś, by Stanisław Bareja. The Witness is less overtly laughable, but there is a lot to laugh at, and this laughter is often derived from the hilarious absurdity of the main character’s ignorance of and disregard for the power structures.

A Witness is a grand farce, and the one character’s recurring reminder that “life is not a whipped-cream cake” might not be as poetic or optimistic as Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, but it makes clear what the characters should not be expecting.

The use of communist slogans in the film is striking and comical and can still be easily comprehended by a contemporary audience. Also, there is no difficulty in understanding the subtext of the episode about the Hungarian oranges. The last part of the story is handled well and contains one or two interesting surprises, which the episodic nature of the film up to that point had sought to conceal.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Lisa Cholodenko
Screenwriters:
Lisa Cholodenko
Stuart Blumberg
Director of Photography:
Igor Jadue-Lillo

Running time: 104 minutes

The other night, I watched an episode from the fourth season of the television series Queer as Folk. The lesbian couple, Lindsey and Melanie, had been together for many years and ont he verge of having their second biological child. Unexpectedly, an arrogant but brilliant chauvinist artist arrives and philanders his way into Lindsey’s panties – Lindsey clearly enjoys the sex but doesn’t see herself as any less of a lesbian. Nonetheless, this kind of sex puts a tense question mark above her sexuality.

There is a similar dilemma at the heart of the drama in The Kids Are All Right, a film by Lisa Cholodenko, who openly self-identifies as a lesbian. I mention her sexuality, because I think I would have struggled to reconcile the events of the film with my idea of realistic character development had anyone but a lesbian director made the film. Whether the viewer is gay or straight, the problem of strict definitions regarding human sexuality is still a biggy and very often, we will be confronted with situations we have absolutely no experience with, either in real life or in the lives we see on screen.

Paul, the “other man” in this film, is no random sleazy artist – he is the two children’s biological father and has never had contact with anyone in this family until the start of the film. He is single and likes to sleep around, with his employees and with other people he meets at his restaurant. He has a rebellious streak and when his children decide to contact him, he jumps at the opportunity to see what life might have been like in some other realm of possibility.

Obviously, he never would have been a part of this family. He is the father of two children, technically a step-brother and a step-sister, whose mothers are their parents. But he tries to be a part and successfully manages to get Jules, who is losing faith that her wife Nic still loves her, into bed.

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are delightful as the mothers of two children who simply wanted to meet their dad because they had the means to track him down. But it is Annette Bening in particular who shines as Nic, Jules’s tough-skinned but not insensitive partner, and I think this representation of an unconventional family with many problems, not unlike any other family, is necessary and convincing for the most part.

However, I take issue with the representation of lesbian fornication. Granted, I know nothing about it, but just as I do not choose to watch girl-on-girl pornography, I can’t really comprehend the thinking behind Nic and Jules’s decision to watch gay porn while having sex. Now, perhaps it problematises sexuality right from the get-go and that is probably the justification, but it becomes a plot point that their children address but neither they nor we get any satisfactory explanation for this beyond the “fluidity of sexuality” or something equally vague.