4 stars

Hugo (2011)

André Crous

Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s ode to silent cinema and serves as a fantastic treat for children and cinephiles alike.

HugoUSA
4*

Director:
Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter:
John Logan
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 125 minutes

It was always just going to be a matter of time before Martin Scorsese made a film about a filmmaker. In 2004, the fast-talking film encyclopedia of a director had already dipped his toe in the water with the Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. But in his latest film, Hugo, an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he goes all out. In the process, he rehabilitates one of the pioneers of the seventh art, Georges Méliès, and exhilarates the audience.

The first filmmakers, the Lumière brothers, emphasised cinema’s potential to capture daily life exactly as it takes place. By contrast, Méliès, who had evolved from magician to director, wanted to inspire the audience with flights of fancy made real. Even those viewers today who have never seen a silent film will recognise the shot from his Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket ship crashes straight into the eye of the Man in the Moon.

Scorsese, better known for using the Lumière brothers’ brand of objective realism, fully embraces Méliès and his kind of magic in Hugo. The film is a love letter to the era of silent films and features many clips from films dating to the early years of the cinema.

With action set in a snow-swept interwar Paris, whose blues and yellows have been amplified to suit the fanciful mood of the picture, the film shimmers with fantasy. Scorsese here takes full advantage of the digital format’s ability to liberate the camera, since the content isn’t always real. In the very first scene, the camera descends from the heavens above Paris, swoops down through falling snowflakes, makes its way onto the platform, swerves between trains and passengers at Montparnasse train station, arrives at the concourse and finally rises up toward the clock, behind which we can make out the figure of young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

The 13-year-old Hugo has been living between the walls of the station since the untimely death of his father, a watchmaker, a few months earlier. He stays alive by stealing scraps of food from the dining carts inside the station and swipes clock parts from a toy stand to use in an “automaton”, a kind of robot he inherited from his father.

The man behind the counter at the toy stand is Méliès (Ben Kingsley), whose fame all but evaporated after the Great War and who is now producing mechanical toys that keep children’s dreams alive. An encounter between him and Hugo leads to an eventual friendship between Hugo and Méliès’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a precocious girl whose love of books has her using big words and falling in love with characters ranging from Heathcliff to David Copperfield.

The sets and the background characters don’t always look particularly realistic. But regardless of whether this was done deliberately or is a consequence of the as-yet-imperfect 3-D technology, the almost dreamlike images are exactly in line with the films of Méliès himself. Unfortunately, the film’s dialogue occasionally comes across as rather forced, while a nutty performance by Sacha Baron Cohen as the station commissioner verges on the farcical. His actions, including a stubborn commitment to send stray children to the orphanage, don’t allow us any room for pathos, which the film desperately needs toward the end.

A more general problem is the characterisation of adults as somehow conspiring against children, before having a sudden change of heart to reveal that they have been acting out because they were scared to believe their dreams could be realised.

Hugo is a kind of time machine that takes the viewer back to the days of black and white, when it was so clear there was something magical about going to the movies. It is a work of which Georges Méliès would have been very proud. The clips from films by Harold Lloyd, D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton contain moments that far surpass Scorsese’s film in terms of wonder and excitement, but the importance of making Méliès accessible to a new generation of viewers can’t be understated and is one of the central reasons for recommending this enchanting film.

Zinneke (2013)

André Crous

A very young boy insists on committing a crime, and his two middle-aged accomplices see the upside to him tagging along in Rémi Allier’s short film, Zinneke.

ZinnekeBelgium
4*

Director:
Rémi Allier
Screenwriter:
Rémi Allier
Directors of Photography:
Kinan Massarani
Erika Meda

Running time: 20 minutes

“In the Brussels dialect, ‘Zinneke’ refers to the small Senne River that flows past the city. People used to throw stray puppies into the river to get rid of them.”

Zinneke’s stray puppy is the nine-year-old Thomas (neither his age nor his name appears in the film itself). The first time we see him, he is sitting alone in the middle of a flea market in Brussels. His gaze is melancholy but curious. His focus is on two men in their late 40s, Pascal and Bruno, hawking their wares. Although it seems they have met before, Thomas’s assertiveness in offering to help them and then, getting into their minivan and even threatening them if they don’t let him join them, catches us off-guard. What is he up to?

Whether he is after money or adventure or a substitute family is unclear, Thomas is undeterred and eventually convinces the guys to let him ride along. Day turns to night, and they arrive at a nondescript row house, where Thomas has to enter through the cellar and open a window for Pascal to climb through. Everything goes as planned, and they get their hands on a few pieces of household art. But then the alarm goes off, and the new friendship is put to the test. Do the experienced thieves stay and get their young accomplice out of trouble despite the risk of arrest?

Pre-teen Nissim Renard excels in the lead role as a boy whose confidence is tinged with melancholy but never veers too far from the centre. He is a model for child actors everywhere seeking to convey characters who are strong but still act their age. Thomas is insistent but doesn’t throw tantrums, and he is curious while never sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.

Initially, this 20-minute short seems to contain a wild mixture of visuals that don’t always fit together. The often rough camerawork and editing during the burglary and the kaleidoscope-like raindrops on the car windows are two prominent examples in this respect. But viewed as an oblique manifestation of Thomas’s own frame of mind – both scared and mesmerised by the experience – this representation is unobtrusive and entirely appropriate.

For all the naturalism of the acting, the effortless switching between French and Flemish and the careful approach to obtain a coherent representation, however, the film doesn’t really allow us to invest emotionally in the drama until the very last moment. Here, Thomas’s domestic situation becomes a little clearer. We also see traces of the beginning of a real friendship between him and Pascal. And yet, this is one of those films whose pieces all seem to be cut from the same cloth: Nothing feels out of place. Everything is tightly bound to each other, largely thanks to the realism of the performances. And when the final credits roll, we ignore the nagging part of our brain that wants to know what comes next, and we soak up the energy from a short film whose director and cast were fully in control of every second.

Carnage (2011)

André Crous

Based on the Yasmina Reza’s play, Roman Polanski’s Carnage tightens the screws when two couples sit around the coffee table.

CarnageFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Yasmina Reza
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 75 minutes

The main premise of Roman Polanski’s Carnage is to have two couples stuck in an apartment, unable to leave because of the hosts’ social obligation to offer their guests more coffee and cobbler, the guests’ obligation to indulge their hosts by accepting said offers, and above all, the collective obligation to keep smiling despite a shared desire to skip forward in time. Social commentary forms an important layer of this 75-minute film, though the most interesting aspect is the way in which the confined spaces of a New York apartment – of which we see the lounge area almost exclusively – can serve as a pressure cooker for the frustrated emotions of four seemingly level-headed individuals.

In the very first scene, which takes place in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, there is an altercation between two teenage boys symmetrically framed by big trees on either side. Visually wedged in the middle of the shot, one boy swings a stick and hits the other in the face, leaving him visibly injured.

In the subsequent scene, the parents of the two boys are in front of the computer, typing out a carefully worded statement that seeks to establish the facts (one boy’s teeth were knocked out) without offending either party. The parents of the alleged victim invite the parents of the alleged aggressor to their apartment to figure out how to proceed.

They all walk on eggshells, scared of being perceived as aggressive, for that would reflect on their children’s roles in the fight, but equally scared of being perceived as weak, for the same conclusion could be drawn just as easily. These people, acutely aware of the meaning of reputation, suddenly find themselves embroiled in a story of teenage aggression and need to find a solution.

But in twists that oscillate between purposefully frustrating and hilarious, and despite simmering tension and mutual contempt, the two couples, as a result of common civility, find themselves unable to leave the apartment. The setup is more realistic than, say, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a dinner party can’t leave and ultimately eat themselves to death, but such thoughts couldn’t have been far from the dark mind of Polanski.

Carnage depends heavily not just on the sharpness of the dialogue but also on the delivery by the four actors. In this respect, it is a very successful ensemble piece, pairing the slightly reserved Jodie Foster with the garrulous John C. Reilly, and the very uptight Kate Winslet with the snotty Christoph Waltz.

Based on a play by Yasmina Reza called God of Carnage, Polanski’s film is about the way dialogue can be wielded to gently do away with belaboured niceties. All that is required is some time and an airtight lid. It becomes obvious how laughter is used to alleviate moments of social uncertainty, though laughter itself can easily turn awkward, leading to a vicious circle of self-inflicted torture.

Ultimately, this Gordian knot of awkwardness is cut in a way that is greatly satisfying, though it comes at some personal and professional cost to Waltz’s loudmouthed character, whose devil-may-care attitude generates the most laughs by far and allows the actor to channel some of his Inglourious Basterds persona.

It is fascinating to watch the cracks appear in the formal pairings of the couples and alliances shift to give the characters the illusion they are not weak, although much dirty laundry is aired in the process of re-establishing a zone of social comfort.

As opposed to David Fincher’s Panic Room, in which Foster also starred, or Polanski’s own Death and the Maiden, both of which took place in one location, Carnage lacks a central animating force, some big goal, and the viewer has no real narrative expectation. There is much verbal mudslinging and even a few moments of physical conflict, but the conversations go off on multiple tangents, and after an hour, the whole muddle becomes a bit draining.

Luckily, Polanski doesn’t outstay his welcome, and when the conversation runs dry, the film simply ends. Carnage has a great deal of the explosive potential that its title suggests, featuring generous performances by its four main players. Unfortunately, the plot is too thin to make this a truly great piece of work.

Venus in Fur (2013)

André Crous

Venus in Fur is a two-character, single-location film by Roman Polanski that is delicious, sexy and gripping.

Venus in FurFrance
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
David Ives
Roman Polanski
Director of Photography:
Pawel Edelman

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: La Vénus à la fourrure

The term “masochism”, which refers to the feeling of excitement some people get from being hurt, abused or degraded, comes from the surname of the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz), published in 1869, revolved around a man who willingly lets himself be dominated by the woman of his desires.

The novel has been adapted for the big screen at least five times before and is the source material for Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, which ignores the side plots and focuses like a laser on the central couple. Besides having only two characters, the master filmmaker has gone for even more minimalism by setting the action in a single location, a theatre.

It is the kind of setup Polanski knows well from another film he made, Carnage, which saw four characters stuck in an apartment, determined to solve the problem of the one couple’s son having beaten up the son of the other. Both Carnage and Venus are tightly wound pieces that rely on powerful acting and subtle shifts in the power balance to hold our attention instead of the camera.

Venus in Fur is set inside a small, rather rundown theatre in Paris, where a middle-aged theatre director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is holding auditions for his upcoming play – of course, based on Sacher-Masoch’s book. He is desperate, having seen too many actresses who have absolutely no grasp of the main character and is about to leave when in stumbles Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is wet to the bone; however, the rainstorm outside hasn’t doused her garrulousness in the least, and Thomas wants to get this chatty, slightly overbearing (or intimidating?) woman out of his sight as quickly as possible.

She has her ways to break down his defences, however, and it is only a matter of time before they end up on stage, with Wanda (also – coincidentally? – the name of the main character in the play) gently wresting control from the director after she impresses him with her interpretation of the role.

Films that take place in a single setting are few and far between. The best-known examples are probably Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, both of which starred at least a dozen different characters whose interactions we could follow, which made the director’s job very easy when it came to keeping the viewer interested.

But those two films were from 1957 and 1947, respectively. An equivalent may be found in one of Ingmar Bergman’s last films, After the Rehearsal, from 1984, which is also set in a single space, and moreover takes place on the stage of a theatre and only has a total cast of five. There are a few other examples of note (such as Richard Linklater’s Tape, the overlooked but tense Buried and the modern-day triumph starring Robert Redford, All is Lost). However, this kind of self-imposed minimalism is something directors tend to avoid because the setup doesn’t showcase their dazzling use of the camera or innovative editing or control of a crowd of extras.

It takes an individual with a certain kind of talent to film what is essentially a theatre piece and make it come alive despite the obvious limitations. Polanski, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Ives, infuses his story with sexual tension, comedy and the word that keeps popping up in Thomas’ vocabulary, “ambiguity.” (Wanda keeps confusing it with ambivalence, and with good reason.)

The sexual tension is expected, but the film really earns our admiration through its comedy. Look how the ring tone of Thomas’ mobile phone references Wagner (definitely not a good omen), or the jacket Wanda pulls out of her bag is not only historically accurate but fits Thomas like a glove. This may not sound like comedy, but the actors let the moments sink in just long enough to thoroughly enchant us.

Despite our better judgement, we are constantly aligned with Thomas in the position of victim. We know this Wanda is up to no good, but Polanski’s camera always returns to a spot at the same level as Thomas, who seems to be getting ever more enjoyment out of her game of domination. In terms of content, there is not much going on here – Wanda seems to be omniscient and always in control, and she displays no real signs of character development – but the mystery of who she is very effectively animates the film throughout its 90-minute running time.

Polanski cleverly elides the space between the worlds of the film and that of the text, either by having Wanda respond in character to a question posed by Thomas (rather than the play’s Severin), inserting the name “Thomas” in the play, or even adding sound effects to give invisible objects a measure of existence, exactly as Lars von Trier did in Dogville.

Although we are captivated by the two characters, whoever they are, there are one or two big jumps that spoil the film and seem to come from nowhere. The first takes place right at the beginning when a misunderstanding leads to Wanda taking to the stage and Thomas simply yielding to her brazen informality. The other happens at the end when we are asked to believe Thomas has surrendered his sanity to the point where he would give up everything for a moment longer with his crazy actress.

More bizarre moments follow, and the film ends with some strong, dramatic catharsis that is both powerful and hilarious, answering some of our questions without removing all the ambiguity about Wanda’s identity.

Venus in Fur is a highly entertaining film that, although not as strong or as entertaining as Carnage, proves Polanski’s skills as one who can manipulate his audience’s emotions. Even while he deals with a story as intimate as that of two individuals vying for power, he deftly draws us in with a laugh here and a lingering question there.

Frankenweenie (2012)

André Crous

With Frankenweenie, a remake of his own material, Tim Burton outdoes himself by mostly restraining his creative tendencies.

FrankenweenieUSA
4*

Director:
Tim Burton
Screenwriter:
John August
Director of Photography:
Peter Sorg

Running time: 85 minutes

Frankenweenie is a stop-motion film made by the master of the morbid, Tim Burton. However, while many would readily think of his visually exuberant ventures (Big Fish, Dark Shadows and Alice in Wonderland, among many others, spring to mind), he is also the author of works that are at once comical and reflexive, even moving, like Edward Scissorhands or Corpse Bride.

One of Tim Burton’s first films was a 1984 short titled Frankenweenie, in which a young boy called Victor brings his pet bull terrier, Sparky, back to life by flying a kite during a thunderstorm with Sparky attached at one end. The film was a clever adaptation of the 1931 James Whale–directed horror classic Frankenstein, which centres on the misunderstood loner embodied by Frankenstein’s monster, who comes to a nasty end when he is chased by hordes of rabid townspeople wielding torches and pitchforks and ultimately perishes inside a windmill that’s been set alight.

Burton’s 1984 film was a scream, with violins throughout the score and people in constant hysterics, but it is absolutely worth checking out, even though most viewers tend to shy away from short films while having no problem watching an episode of a television series that is exactly the same length.

This live-action film has now been remade by Burton with numerous changes, some of which are inspired, while others are the almost expected consequences of stretching the same story from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.

In both stories, Victor is a bit of a recluse whose only real connection to the world is his dog, and he suffers terrible guilt and loss when Sparky dies as he crosses the road to fetch a ball Victor either threw or hit, depending on the film you’re talking about. In the new film, equipped with his own editing suite to perfect his short film projects, Victor is more of a nerd, and it’s not difficult to recognise Burton as the young boy.

The first half of the story stays more or less the same, but many formerly peripheral characters have here been given extra weight, with their particular actions expanded to fill the time. Whereas the original film was mostly about Victor’s discovery that electricity can reanimate the dead (incidentally, Victor’s surname is Frankenstein) and Sparky’s subsequent adventures that upset the small-minded townspeople, Burton’s feature-length film has many extra storylines.

The most intriguing of these involves the square old man living next door to the Frankensteins with his soft-spoken niece and her French poodle. He is the mayor of the small town and basically a carbon copy of Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace, except we never have any sympathy for him. Sparky has his eye on the French poodle, Persephone, and the attraction is mutual. In what is bound to be one of the film’s signature moments, a spark of electricity flies from the recently resurrected Sparky to Persephone, producing a white streak in her honeycomb, à la Bride of Frankenstein.

One unexpected improvement on Burton’s original is the personality Sparky now has, which Burton wasn’t able to glean from a real animal in his previous live-action short.

The plot is modestly modelled on Frankenstein, though only the transformation from death to life and the final chase of townsfolk with torches (but without pitchforks) are worth paying attention to.

What is more interesting is Burton’s use of his short film to tease the viewer in a way that is enriched by her having seen the earlier film but for whom such knowledge is not essential: Certain pivotal scenes are deliberately drawn out a little longer, and in the process, we move closer and closer to the edge of our seats, even though we know things will work out they did in the first film. Sparky’s death is one such moment, and so is the film’s final scene.

The director’s creativity is on full display in scenes at the pet cemetery, where gravestones are shaped into peculiar objects that reflect the animals buried below, but the last part of the film, in which a Godzilla-like tortoise, a halfbreed bat-cat and a delirious tribe of sea monkeys terrorize the small town of New Holland, is overkill and feels out of step with the rest of the production. Especially in light of the very touching, intimate shots that are interspersed with the footage, mostly with Sparky the outcast, this detour into mega-monster territory is wholly uncalled for.

With the addition of characters such as the wide-eyed cat, Mr. Wiskers, whose clairvoyance is proved by the form of its faeces, and the long-faced and eerie but misunderstood science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski (voiced by Martin Landau), this Frankenweenie has its eye firmly on the goal of entertaining the viewer. Add to this the central character of Sparky, the coat on his freshly exhumed body barely held together by screws and stitches, the evocative music of Danny Elfman and Burton’s always funny take on small-town America, and you have a film that is mostly as good as it can be given its apparent limitations as an adaptation of a 30-minute film.

Even if you are not a fan of most of Tim Burton’s films, this one is a must.

Exile (2020)

André Crous

In Exile, a long-term German resident originally from Kosovo appears to be experiencing daily discrimination at work, but is he overreacting and paranoid or is something sinister afoot?

ExileKosovo/Germany
4*

Director:
Visar Morina
Screenwriter:
Visar Morina
Director of Photography:
Matteo Cocco

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Exil

If Franz Kafka had written in anything other than German, perhaps his Josef K. would have been a well-balanced individual and the nameless, overbearing powers that be would have left him in peace.

A bit like Dancer in the Dark, Visar Morina’s Exile is about desperation (for both the central character and the viewer) in the face of injustice, except here, there aren’t any musical numbers to dilute the misery. No, from the very first scene, we have a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs. And it doesn’t get better or go away, not even once, over the course of a full two hours. 

Xhafer Kryeziu (Mišel Matičević) is a man in a country that is not his own and works with people who never accept him. Originally from Kosovo, he works as a pharmaceutical engineer at a big laboratory. His native language may be Albanian, but his life is effectively German: his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his job and everyone working with him. With a name like his, however, it doesn’t matter how well you speak the language. When you introduce yourself and people notice the slight accent, everyone will remind you, often by flashing a quizzical smile, that you are different.

In that opening scene, he finds a rat tied to the fence in front of his middle-class suburban home. The fact that his workplace often uses rats in experiments and that his colleagues know he has a phobia about these rodents is no trivial coincidence. But without any proof, what can he do? What can he accomplish against an invisible enemy?

Xhafer soon realises that he does not receive any group e-mails, which causes him to miss important meetings. He hears others sign up for a weekend trip, but he doesn’t get an invitation. And whenever he wants to speak to the boss, the secretary says there is no way because running the company keeps him so busy.

Does he keep his head down to pretend everything is fine and nothing is getting to him? Or does he confront those he perceives to be the most antagonistic towards him? He opens up to his wife, Nora (Sandra Hüller, playing the same emotionless character here as she did to such great effect in Toni Erdmann, whose director, Maren Ade, co-produces here) about this silent bullying at work, but she comes up with benign excuses for her fellow Germans. Maybe these incidents were all unintentional. Or maybe, she says, he is just an asshole and should try harder to be friends. After all, she says, things could be much harder: “You don’t look like a foreigner. If you were an Arab, it would be different.” Indeed, it might be, but why should it matter?

Understandably, Xhafer’s exclusion leads to loneliness. Without any emotional support, his attention turns to those who are somewhat more similar to him. He strikes up a casual sexual relationship with the film’s only other Albanian speaker, a cleaning lady at his company. But we quickly see that this doesn’t alleviate his problems; it merely pushes them out of his mind for a five-minute quickie in a bathroom stall.

Just like people, the film is much more complicated than it appears at first blush. We gradually come to understand that Morina is not going to offer us any real explanation for the central mystery of what is happening to Xhafer or why. He doesn’t confirm Xhafer’s paranoia but slowly makes us a part of his world. This means we expect other people to behave indifferently towards him because to everyone else, a foreigner is a foreigner is a foreigner. His colleagues all think he’s Croatian. But is this indifference or something darker? Are they behaving from a place of malice or are they just condescending, passive racists?

The film’s inference is that Germans are either racist to your face or racist behind your back. Xhafer says as much during a very well-written and even better-executed altercation with Nora. This may be too harsh a judgment on German society as a whole, but there is an evident, ubiquitous hostility to his mere presence. Because we lack a global understanding of the facts, we empathise with Xhafer, whose point of view we share to the point of witnessing his nightmares. He is far from perfect, but that doesn’t make him any less worthy of respect than anyone else.

But in the film’s final act, a few things happen that seem to contradict Xhafer’s (and our) reading of events. Our precarious explanation slips through our fingers, leaving us with an even more uncertain understanding of what is going on. We cannot read other people’s minds; we can only go by their actions, but these interpretations are almost always tainted by our own perspectives. Do his colleagues really hate him? Does he intimidate them, somehow? Or is their behaviour informed by factors that have nothing to do with him personally? And when they seem to reveal their intentions, can we trust what they say?

The fragmented editing, the hypnotic tracking shots inside his laboratory’s gloomy corridors, the darkness that envelops his marriage bed, the cold blues and nauseating ambers and the eerie music on the soundtrack all make for a disorientating experience as we try but fail, along with Xhafer, to make sense of it all. It all leads to a final shot that – similarly to that of another recent immigrant film, Synonyms – brutally but figuratively conveys the uncertainty of having to wait for acceptance, perhaps indefinitely.

Exile is a film that deserves to be watched a second time, but few in the audience will have the nerve or the stomach to go through this harrowing ordeal again straightaway.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Persian Lessons (2020)

André Crous

Persian Lessons may not be the most believable film about a Jew’s survival under occupation, but Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s seemingly infinite skills as an actor make this a worthy addition to the genre.

Persian LessonsRussia/Germany
4*

Director:
Vadim Perelman
Screenwriter:
Ilja Zofin
Director of Photography:
Vladislav Opelyants

Running time: 125 minutes

When people talk about the Holocaust as something we should never forget, they are usually referring to the events: the othering, the captivity, the humiliation, the torture and the extermination of human beings. But what is often forgotten is the individuals themselves. Jews were the primary targets, but what were their names? Who were they?

In a surprisingly effective high-wire act that pays off in large part thanks to the discreet but ultimately emotionally overwhelming performance of its lead actor, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons uses its entire cast to construct a truly unique language. The film centres on a dark-featured Belgian Jew named Gilles, who poses as a Persian named Reza in order to avoid being killed in a firing squad by German officers in France during the Second World War. The officers spare him because they know their captain, who wants to open a restaurant in Iran (commonly known as “Persia” at the time) once the war is over, is looking for someone to teach him Farsi. Thus begin the many months, which turn into years, of Reza teaching “Farsi”, when in fact he only knows a single word: “bawbaw” (dad, بابا).

If you can look past this rather improbable plot point and suspend your disbelief for the two-hour running time, you will be well rewarded. There is one reason we are able to do this, and his name is Nahuel Pérez Biscayart. After making waves with a dizzying performance in 120 BPM, this Argentine actor who has quickly learnt to speak the language like a native Frenchman appears to have no problem forming sentences in German either. Although Biscayart and his character, Reza, are obviously two different people, the former’s facility with languages goes a long way toward making us believe the latter might possibly remember the hundreds of fake words he teaches his captor.

It all starts with a German Army truck driving through a forest in Occupied France. It is transporting a new batch of Jews, including Gilles, a rabbi’s son, who has managed to sneak a sandwich with him in his coat. A fellow passenger trades a first-edition book with a handwritten dedication in Farsi for the food. He explains that it was a gift from “bawbaw” to his son, Reza. Moments later, the first dozen of them are gunned down. Gilles, in the second wave, sees what is coming and insists he is not Jewish but Persian.

At the transit camp, which serves as a limbo between Occupation and certain death at a concentration camp, Hauptsturmführer Klaus Koch (played with chilling friendliness by Lars Eidinger) is delighted to meet “Reza”. Over time, we learn that Koch’s brother lives in Teheran and escaped Germany just before the rise of the Nazi Party. However, Captain Koch is a loyal soldier and has no qualms about being a Nazi, but he is clearly a complicated individual; Perelman drops a few incredibly subtle hints that Koch might be gay, but thankfully there is never a reason to empathise with him, and his final scene in the film will be particularly satisfying to the viewer.

Gilles’s continued survival depends on him teaching a fake language and learning to speak it as if it were a second tongue. He does this with astonishing (at times, impossible) adroitness, but our suspense of disbelief is assisted in this regard by other films about the Second World War we may have seen already, like Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella), in which Roberto Benigni shelters his son from the horrors of war by pretending it is all a game, or In Darkness, whose Jewish characters hide out in sewers in the war-torn Polish city of Lviv. Over the decades, we have learnt in the history books, through survivors’ eyewitness accounts and on film how some people managed to find inhuman strength to hang on to life amid the abominable reality of the Shoah. As a result, this story, dissimilar though it might be to our own experience, does not seem entirely unrealistic.

The film generally steers clear of so many of the obvious moments in similar films. There is a single aerial shot that indicates the ongoing massacre of people and their cremation in nondescript buildings across the European countryside. But in this transit camp, people do not inhale gas in the showers, and the number of swastikas is kept to a minimum. There is no need for Nazi pageantry. One small picture of Hitler in the background of a shot suffices to remind us of the ongoing horrors at the next camp, and the next, and the next.

Perelman, who is best known for his 2003 feature, The House of Sand and Fog, has finally delivered another film on the level of that stunning début. Not just because both films refer to their final moments in their opening scenes but also because when their background tension is unexpectedly released, there will be few dry eyes left in the house. This was mostly thanks to Perelman’s staging in his first film, but here our gratitude goes to Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who is simply extraordinary as “Reza”.

Persian Lessons is what a mainstream film about Jewish oppression during the Second World War (as opposed to, say, a more artistically minded film like Son of Saul, which was unconventionally staged for maximum visceral effect) should look like. One can nitpick about the necessity of opening the film by revealing the ending or question the decision to have the main character interact so little with his fellow prisoners, but none of this takes away from what is simply a remarkable production.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Les misérables (2017)

André Crous

Although the resolution is surprisingly anticlimactic, Les misérables pulses with a pervasive sense of injustice. It is a masterful time bomb that keeps ticking until close to the end.

Les Misérables (2017)France
4*

Director:
Ladj Ly
Screenwriter:
Ladj Ly
Director of Photography:
Julien Veron

Running time: 16 minutes

For most people (especially for a middle-class white man like me), the low-income suburbs of Paris have a quality of mystery around them similar to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Known as the banlieues, they are filled with expansive but dilapidated high-rise apartment blocks around half a century old. They are widely known as places of poverty and unrest, and in recent years they have been the venue for countless riots directed at the police. Films like City of God (Cidade de deus) and Hate (La haine) draw attention because they offer a glimpse of this eventful but often dangerous other world that is visible from the city centre (of Rio and Paris, respectively). They also make waves because of their politics and their skill at making this world accessible to a viewer who may be too scared to set foot there.

With a few caveats, let’s add Ladj Ly’s 16-minute Les misérables to the two aforementioned masterpieces. In this short film, a trial run for his acclaimed 2019 feature with the same name, the director sets two polar opposites against each other: a group of three policemen patrolling the streets of a notorious banlieue, Clichy-sous-Bois Montfermeil, and a trio of teenage boys, likely the sons or grandsons of immigrants, who are flying a drone over this (their) neighbourhood.

The policemen patrol the streets and harass the locals under the guise of laying down the law. But their approach is both verbally and physically violent, more than likely as a way of pre-emptively defending themselves against any potential enemy in this part of the city where they don’t belong. In an early scene, they drive past a bus stop where they see a young girl smoking. The loudest cop in the group, Chris, (arguably, sexually) assaults her in an effort to uncover any amount of drugs on her person. This confrontation is followed by another arbitrary shakedown and a violent altercation in which the police appear to shoot a defenceless boy.

But it is all captured thanks to the drone, whose owner the policemen do their best to track down and… assault. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Hate also deployed a drone (when the film was shot in the summer of 1994, such a thing didn’t exist, so the 27-year-old fashioned one out of a camera tied to a remote helicopter), and Ly clearly pays homage to his cinematic predecessor. This time, however, the point of view does not belong to God but to the very real technology of today. By 2017, surveillance drones had become commonplace in modern warfare, and while they can kill from far away, they can also record things that would otherwise remain unseen, as Dziga Vertov already made clear nearly a century ago.

Les misérables opens and closes on Laurent, the newest member of the police team. Having recently been transferred from the relatively quiet city of Poitiers, he has to balance the pressure of his peers to quash any alleged wrongdoing with his own moral code, which is more accommodating and less pugilistic. Between those bookends, a firestorm erupts and his life changes.

The best shorts show how quickly things can change. In his rush to string all the parts together, however, Ly botches not only his staging of the critical police assault but also the series of events leading up to the film’s (anti-)climax. It feels like essential contextual tissue was cut in order to bring the film in at a certain length, and we are left with a central scene that appears out of nowhere. The expected clash between the two trios of characters also fizzles out as the teenagers and their lives are all but ignored in the second half, which makes it less easy to empathise with them as people.

With an ominous bass line supporting the minimalist electronic score that builds ever higher, couching the latter’s optimism in a vague sense of dread, the film rises to its climax only to stumble momentarily at the finish line. And yet, this restless short film’s portrayal of the Parisian banlieue and the injustice of living under corrupt police rule in a supposedly democratic society is nothing if not visceral and in-your-face.

Marriage Story (2019)

André Crous

Marriage Story tells the tale of a divorce, but instead of focusing on the protracted heartache, Noah Baumbach shows how entangled two souls can be, especially when they are struggling to uncouple. Marriage Story

USA
4*

Director:
Noah Baumbach
Screenwriter:
Noah Baumbach
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 135 minutes

The devil is in the details, but so is the divine. Two people who have lived together for years, had a child together and worked together suddenly separate to file for divorce, but these details remain embedded in their beings. With every encounter, the two souls are inadvertently drawn back to each other, even as the brains in the two bodies tell them not to. This is the tragic soil of a separation in which the two people who know each other best and can still stand each other try not to be together.

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is not so much an autopsy of a failed marriage as it is a forensic examination of a burgeoning divorce. What is most striking, however, is that things look grim even when the characters have the best intentions. The film opens with an extended montage that is filled with so much love and emotion the viewer may very well burst into tears right at the outset. In voice-over, we hear Charlie (Adam Driver) list all the things he loves about his wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Next, Nicole relates to us everything that makes Charlie so special to her. These are all details, many of them mundane, but they are the accumulated moments and qualities that epitomise their loving perception of their partner in sickness and in health, in love, marriage and life. That is, until it all falls apart.

We are quickly disabused of our fanciful notion that the love we see onscreen is enough, as the sequence ends with the couple at a marriage counsellor. But Nicole has made up her mind: She wants to leave Charlie and his theatre company and her job as actress in his plays and their life in New York – all of it – and move back to Los Angeles to star in a television pilot. And she is taking their young son, Henry, with her. A few days later, when Charlie comes to California to visit, he finds out she is intent on staying and has hired a high-powered kale-eating lawyer (Laura Dern at her absolute best) to defend her interests, just in case.

It should come as no surprise that Marriage Story is most affecting when the two main characters try to work through the rubble of their relationship. Filled with words carved from the flesh of its two leads, these moments are particularly poignant when they play out in an intimate setting. In a pivotal scene halfway through, Baumbach puts Charlie and Nicole in an empty room with nothing on the walls and no other characters to distract us, and he forces the couple to empty their souls. It works brilliantly as drama, and the scene is written in such a way that neither of the two characters consistently has the upper hand. We can easily sympathise with either of them. In fact, our sympathies swing back and forth between the two as the scene unfolds and they glimpse more and more of each other’s (and their own) deepest darkest sides.

It all comes down to the details – sometimes hidden, sometimes out in the open – and how they accumulate over time. Nicole’s reason for leaving Charlie does not have the drama we often associate with break-ups. We never even see the moment it happens. It was one final straw that landed on a decade of detail and broke the marriage carriage. It was as simple as her receiving a script for a pilot and him letting out a chuckle at the idea she would swap off-Broadway for Hollywood.

But that is exactly how these long-term relationships fall apart. Not with a bang, but with a fizz that is long in coming. And after holding their emotions in for long enough, the dam break is a sight to behold, especially in the hands of players as accomplished as Scarlett Johansson and, particularly, the large-of-frame but vulnerable-0f-voice Adam Driver.

In an early post-breakup scene at their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie finds his wife speaking to him like a stranger, but when Nicole says good night and turns the corner and the camera lets us see her unguarded, the true emotions are overwhelming. It is a breathtaking revelation that demonstrates how Baumbach puts his characters through their paces while never letting go of them as fully fledged human beings.

Those details of a relationship remain deep down, even when the people involved tell themselves they have moved on. We are reminded of how embedded they are again and again throughout the film, right to the very end. In so doing, Baumbach stitches his characters together even as their relationship irreparably disintegrates, offering a tragic reminder of the past while the present lurches forward, inexorably, towards a future that appears all but inevitable.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

André Crous

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature film as director, Quentin Tarantino reminds us that even when movies are based on very real events, their stories are in the hands of the filmmaker.

Once Upon a Time in HollywoodUSA
4*

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

Running time: 160 minutes

At the end of his Second World War drama and perhaps his greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino did something shocking: He recast history to give us the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in a movie theatre in 1944. While the viewer often suspends disbelief to follow the story of fictional characters in a recognisable historical setting, there tends to be an assumption that the main events will remain, in large part, intact and unaltered. But Tarantino says (correctly) that the filmmaker is in control of his or her depiction of history: Since a representation is already separate from the original, why not go even further and rewrite history for the purpose of entertainment, especially when there is no risk that anyone would mistake the film for actual history?

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature in the director’s chair, Tarantino is his revisionist self again: He tells a wholly fictional story within a recognisable context (Hollywood in 1969) with all the meticulous attention we would expect from David Fincher before reminding us that he can change the facts of history because the real world is only applicable to the extent he wants it to be. Many of the characters are very close to their real-life counterparts, but only up to a point. And in the tension between real life and representation lies the possibility to create great art.

Released exactly 50 years after the tumultuous year it depicts, Tarantino’s film is set in Tinseltown of the late 1960s, where we find the curious combination of a yearning for the innocence of yore, the hippy rebellion against the status quo and an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over it all because Hollywood in 1969 means only one name: Sharon Tate. Tate, an up-and-coming 20-something actress, had married Polish director Roman Polanski the previous year, a few months before the release of one of the highlights of his career, the classic Rosemary’s Baby. A little more than a year later, eight months into her pregnancy, she and three of her friends were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson.

Sharon Tate is played by Margot Robbie in Tarantino’s film, but the real Sharon Tate does show up onscreen when Robbie’s Tate goes to watch The Wrecking Crew at the cinema, and we see Robbie as Tate watching the real Tate play an awkward Danish blonde named Freya Carlson. And yet, while many viewers might notice these are technically different people, the entire setup is clearly one of make-believe, so the suspension of disbelief holds. What has been more controversial, however, is the clear divergence from historical fact at the film’s climax, even though the entire film is, by definition, covered by a “This is fiction” disclaimer.

So, what is this fiction all about? Despite all this talk about Tate, the film is actually primarily interested in her next-door neighbour on Cielo Drive: a former cowboy television star named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose friendship with his long-time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is by far the most intimate he ever allows himself to get with another human being. Missouri-born Rick’s career has gone downhill since his starring turn in Bounty Law in the 1950s, and he is scared of having to pack up his bags and say goodbye to Hollywood. But Cliff, who lives with his pit bull, Brandy, in a caravan next to a drive-in, is always available as his driver, a shoulder to cry on and a constant companion through thick and thin.

The plot, most of which unfolds over two days (one in February, the other in August), follows Rick and Cliff, together and separately, as well as Sharon, who spends most of her day at the cinema watching herself. Rick, who has all but given up on himself, meets a child actress (although she refers to herself as an “actor“) who will change his life. Meanwhile, Cliff gives a young hippie a lift to Spahn Ranch, where mistrust hangs thick in the air. At the ranch, peopled almost exclusively by young white girls, Cliff seeks out an old friend, the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who has gone blind since Cliff last filmed on the ranch and has shacked up with the most domineering girl in the group.

DiCaprio and Pitt both give some of their best performances ever here. DiCaprio, whose appearance is still strikingly boyish more than two decades after Titanic, conveys the sentiment of being an outsider very well simply by showing up. His character goes through multiple ups and downs, and we can always see the gears grinding behind his eyes during his silences. Pitt, by contrast, is the epitome of cool and easily outshines the character of Steve McQueen, who makes a brief appearance in a very unnecessary late-night party scene at the Playboy Mansion. Channelling the energy (and still sporting the looks) of a man half his age, he is kind to everyone but is not beyond striking a very hard blow, as we find out in a memorable interaction with Bruce Lee and a hilarious flashback with his former wife, whose demise he is very likely responsible for.

A major improvement on Tarantino’s previous film, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood gives itself space to breathe but never meanders. Two of the longest scenes – the one at Spahn Ranch and the wholly immersive production of the television show Lancer, in which the dialogue and the actions run almost indefinitely, without cuts or camera changes – have very good reasons for being there, albeit in retrospect. Spahn Ranch upends our expectations and introduces us to some very important characters, while Lancer marks a major turning point in Rick’s perception of his own potential.

But ultimately, after more than two and a half hours of leisurely comedic drama, most people will only talk about the ending. Those who know the story of the Tate/Manson murders will have a sickening feeling towards the end of the film when we see the eight-month-pregnant Sharon Tate and it appears Tarantino is about to shift from the leisurely fifth gear out on the highway right into first gear. But then, the director intervenes like God to give us a rousing version of history instead. In fact, knowing what really happened to Tate makes the events of the film, by comparison, all the more exhilarating, just as Tarantino had done with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t skimp on the violence but directs it elsewhere and even borrows a flamethrower from his Second World War masterpiece for added showmanship.

The final moments include one of the most acute examples of dramatic irony imaginable, as Jay Sebring, unaware that in a parallel universe (i.e. the real world) he has just been brutally shot and stabbed in a bloodbath, invites Rick over to Sharon’s house after the Manson trio has been taken away by the police. He has no idea what happened to his counterpart in the real world. But we know. And this discrepancy between the real and the fictional is particularly poignant because, in a sense, these characters are real to us, and the fictional murderers have gotten what was coming to them. When they are killed, we feel like they are punished not only for attacking Rick and Cliff but also for murdering the real Tate and her friends.

It is unfortunate, however, that the film does not make the connection with real life more concrete. While he appears on one occasion, Charles Manson’s name is all but left out altogether (his followers refer to him as “Charlie”, but he is never seen in their company). But perhaps Tarantino wanted his film to exist more in the world of make-believe than as a representation of history, which is why an infrequent and incongruous narration (by Kurt Russell, who plays a minor character here) pops up on the soundtrack.

To take the term used by André Bazin, a representation is always at best an “asymptote of reality” and never reality itself. So much focus has been on the closeness of those two lines as the film draws to a close, but few have extolled the artistic tension that results from that intimacy. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would have been entertaining enough without the last 30 minutes, but what happens there reaffirms its director’s capacity to amaze us.