4 stars

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (2018)

André Crous

In his epic documentary entitled CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur provides a comprehensive and sometimes mind-blowing overview of the Czechoslovak New Wave. 

CzechMateIndia
4*

Director:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Screenwriter:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Director of Photography:
David Čálek

Running time: 430 minutes

Without exception, an entire generation of Czech and Slovak filmmakers made their best films – and arguably some of the best their country ever produced – shortly after leaving film school. A perfectly balanced dose of freedom and oppression, along with powder kegs of talent, made these works possible. Unfortunately, half a century later, only a handful of them have received the recognition they deserve outside Central Europe. But now a new documentary clocking in at more than seven hours goes a long way towards remedying this oversight.

Almost every viewer interested in the history of cinema is aware of the French New Wave. Dating to the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the nouvelle vague basically comprised a handful of male film critics from the monthly Cahiers du cinéma journal who shared similar aesthetic sensibilities and looked up to many of the same filmmakers (“auteurs” like Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks and Robert Bresson). However, despite being even more ambitious in scope and more numerous and diverse in its composition, the Czechoslovak New Wave (Československá nová vlna) is much less known.

The movement’s best-known film is Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), which was released at the end of 1966 and was then-28-year-old Jiří Menzel’s début feature. It was based on the eponymous novel by famed Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, which had been published the year before. The film was screened at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1968 – the first Czech film and only the second Czechoslovak film (after Ján Kadár’s Slovak-language The Shop on Main Street) to do so. This elegant depiction of a young station agent who loses his virginity during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia remains one of the defining films of the era.

And yet, it is but one in a panoply of cinematic masterpieces produced by Czech and Slovak filmmakers under extraordinary political circumstances in the 1960s. To better understand the time and the people involved and to inform the world of the magic that was conjured up between Prague and Bratislava in a very small window of time, Indian filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur travelled to the Czech Republic to interview Menzel. Along with Miloš Forman, he is perhaps the best-known Czech filmmaker outside his own country. What developed from their initial conversations over the course of seven years was the 430-minute CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel.

“Film is my job”, Menzel announces in the opening moments of this massive film. It is a seemingly unremarkable comment but perfectly encapsulates this man’s view of his place in history, and its implications vibrate throughout the rest of the film. He sees himself not only as being at the service of a customer but also as part of a greater network of individuals. Most importantly, in order to get his movies made, he saw (and still sees) compromise as part of the process. Others, most notably Miloš Forman, who had enjoyed wild success with Black Peter (Černý Petr), Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) and The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko), chose to leave the country rather than work out a deal with totalitarians.

The morality of compromise is addressed most directly with the ambiguous case of legendary director and FAMU founder Otakar Vávra. Vávra was a chameleon able to adapt to the regime of the day and has been sharply criticised for his pro-communist films. And yet, many of his film school students subsequently went on to make anti-establishment films. Agnieszka Holland, who studied under him, says the dossier the secret police kept on her revealed how Vávra had falsely vouched for her belief in socialism, presumably in order to keep her from being kicked out of the school. Unfortunately, while writer-director Drahomíra Vihanová, who was banned from making features under communism, touches on Menzel’s apparent willingness to downplay the tragedy of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the film doesn’t push its professed subject on this point.

CzechMate focuses mostly on the 1960s but also spends a good chunk of time on the films the directors (especially Menzel) managed to make after 1968. It is at its best when it drills down into the historical context and the different ways in which political pressure affected or illuminated the character of the young filmmakers. Easily the most attention-grabbing part of the documentary is its account of the events between August 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and January 1969 (the funeral of Jan Palach, a student who had set himself alight in protest against the Soviet occupation). Director Ivan Passer’s description of how he and Miloš Forman escaped the country is also an unforgettable episode packed with adrenaline, incredible luck and white knuckles.

Emir Kusturica notes that Vávra once impressed on him the importance of having strong conflict in a film, as no one could keep still for two or three hours without it. In a surprising self-own on the part of Dungarpur, whose film contains no conflict whatsoever, Kusturica makes this statement around the three-hour mark. Menzel’s incredulousness at what the documentary will ultimately look like also provides some occasional levity, and more than five hours into the running time, he quips: “It will be long, long, long, long film!” Fortunately, the length is mitigated in no small measure by the absolutely stunning imagery from the directors’ films, with almost all of the clips appearing to have been restored to mint condition. 

Jiří Menzel, in his late-70s, cuts a congenial figure who can seemingly talk for hours on end without much prodding. With a lifetime of experience in the director’s chair and counting many of the best-known directors of the time among his friends, he is a font of knowledge about the New Wave. His infatuation with the female body, although infinitely less nuanced than the work of François Truffaut, is also emphasised on multiple occasions and gives a childlike quality to this director, not unlike that of his main character in Closely Watched Trains. However, quirky as he is, there are simply too many scenes with him speaking while lying in an empty bathtub, his dirty feet sticking out at the bottom, and this becomes a distraction in the latter part of the film.

He may well be the most talkative, but it is wholly unclear why Menzel should be the focus of attention and what the “search” in the title refers to. While Dungarpur provides a multifaceted view of Czech and Slovak filmmaking in the 1960s and beyond, thanks in large part to Menzel’s willingness to discuss it at great length, the latter is never challenged in any serious way. The last hour or two of the film does make clear that he is not universally beloved, but the director is not directly confronted with the criticisms his peers have of him and his work.

This brings up another missed opportunity. Perhaps it was just a matter of logistics, but it feels regrettable that almost all the interviews were conducted one on one. One of the film’s only truly emotional scenes is when Menzel talks about a rare group photo showing the luminaries of the New Wave together and goes down the line to point out the rare ones who are still alive. What the film doesn’t make all that clear is that many of the interviewees actually passed away during the seven-year production of CzechMate, including Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Drahomíra Vihanová and renowned cinematographer Miroslav Ondřícek.

Although some thematic montages are stronger than others, the film’s editing consistently ensures smooth transitions between a free-flowing, somewhat heterogeneous mixture of topics. The loose structure also means that a  lot more time is often spent on one film in Menzel’s filmography while another is almost completely ignored (Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut had the same problem, among many others). Thankfully, despite the vast number of interviews with close to 100 people, we never feel like this is all just a sequence of talking heads.

Watching a seven-hour film is physically exhausting, and one has to wonder whether a theatrical release was the best format. Given the lack of a strong thematic thread (sometimes, Menzel and his work all but disappear from the film), it might have been a better idea to rearrange the material as a miniseries according to topic or time period. The screening I attended at Prague’s Ponrepo cinema had no intermissions, so for those wishing to have a snack, relieve themselves or keep their legs from turning to jelly, it was necessary to leave the theatre and, therefore, miss out on part of the film. This situation is far from ideal, and it is up to either the cinema or the filmmaker to solve the problem.

CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel judiciously positions the Czechoslovak New Wave, brief though it was, as one of the most important movements in the 125-year history of the seventh art. While the highlights include the beautiful first scene of Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání), the amazing three-minute opening shot of Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) and a memorable dream sequence from Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic (Ať žije republika), the list goes on and on, and one can easily feel overwhelmed by just how talented this group of individuals clearly was.

Menzel is on the right track when he says that two of the most unfortunate events of the 20th century were the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the talkie. Seeing what these filmmakers created in the 1960s and knowing that it had all been snuffed out by 1969, when the most interesting works were banned (put in “the safe”) in the name of “normalising” the country is absolutely tragic. Just as cinema would undoubtedly have been better off had silent cinema evolved well past 1927, the global motion picture industry almost certainly would have benefitted from the raw energy and unbridled creativity of the nová vlna continuing long after the Prague Spring. While their counterparts in France were receiving rave reviews for each making one or two convention-busting films, these Central Europeans were churning out one jaw-dropping film after another, often in very different ways. Of course, just like the French films, not all of them were masterpieces, but CzechMate certainly piques our interest, and during the screening, one can’t help but make notes of which of these films to watch (again).

Successful at conveying the mesmerising skill on display in the many, many, many films that can be classified as part of the Czechoslovak New Wave but less exhaustive a portrait of its main protagonist, this documentary hides its minor flaws very well behind an assortment of likeable and very informative individuals and editing that rarely draws attention to itself. Because of its unusual running time, this is not your average film. But then, it was far from your average film movement.

I had two minor quibbles with the onscreen text: Only the English (not the original Czech or Slovak) titles are shown, which is a shame. In addition, we are not reminded very often of the names of the nearly 100 people who are interviewed, and over the course of more than seven hours, it is impossible to remember who is who. More reminders of people’s names would have been very helpful.

Parasite (2019)

André Crous

At times slapstick horror, at other times pitch-black comedy, Parasite pits a poor but very ambitious family against their polar opposites.

ParasiteSouth Korea
4*

Director:
Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriters:
Bong Joon-ho
Han Jin-won
Director of Photography:
Hong Kyung-pyo

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: 기생충
Transliterated title: Gisaengchung

If looks could kill, a wrinkled nose would eviscerate. A stare can be ambiguous as to precisely what the objectionable feature is, but a wince of disgust signalled by a movement of the nose is as clear as day: The smell is simply unbearable. When the stench emanates from an individual who, in turn, notices the nauseated expression on the receiver’s face, shock and embarrassment inevitably follow. And in the case of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, all of this leads to a surprisingly poignant bloodbath.

Loosely referencing his entry in the three-part anthology feature, Tokyo!, Bong starts his film with pizza boxes. The boxes are piled from floor to ceiling in a grimy basement apartment in a South Korean metropolis where the lower-class – and, from the looks of it, blissfully unemployed – Kim family resides. The father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), used to be a chauffeur but is now the one folding most of the boxes, albeit not very well. His post-teenage children, who epitomise the term “parasite singles”, are still living at home. And both the children and the parents, who live together in bug-infested squalor and leave their tiny piss-stained windows open to profit off the free municipal fumigation at street level, rely on proximity to their presumably slightly better-off neighbours to mooch off their Wi-Fi. But such multifaceted parasitism is not enough for them.

Through the fortunes of circumstance, Ki-Taek’s son, baby-faced 20-something Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-shik), is handed a job as an English tutor to a teenage girl at her wealthy family’s mansion. In terms of the relative standards of living, the contrast with his own family home is stark, and he soon spots an opportunity to spread the wealth, as it were, by getting servants fired and replaced with his sister (posing as an arts teacher for gifted children), his father (the driver) and his mother (the housekeeper). Thus, before long, the entire Kim family has all but moved into the perfectly manicured, ultra-modernist and very spacious compound of Mr and Mrs Park, and when the upper-class owners decide to spend the weekend glamping at a retreat, the Kims make themselves at home.

While they work hard to manipulate the elites, the Kims are, above all, interested in having the ability to partake of their employers’ material wealth; to this end, however, they remain dependent on the Parks. They are indeed parasites, gorging themselves on their host, but they can only continue provided that they don’t die, the host doesn’t die, and they are not removed by force.

Around the halfway mark, things turn slightly more serious (and, unfortunately, the plot gets bogged down in meandering conversations) with a revelation about some unexpected previous occupants of the house who may have more cunning and perseverance than the current crop of employees. We are also made ever more acutely aware of how body odour is tied to class. The Kims, who cannot afford the same extravagant treatments as the Parks and do not have the luxury of moving in slow motion to avoid breaking a sweat, may as well have a neon sign above their heads that is constantly flashing “paupers”. There is something appealing about this struggle to rise above one’s circumstances, but the Kims’ increasingly violent ambition to climb the social ladder – and, more importantly, get their competitors booted from the rungs – makes it difficult to root for them.

Not that it was ever easy to be on their side. While the first act is full of energy, and we are constantly surprised by how easy it is for them to wrap the well-to-do but seemingly vapid Parks around their little finger, we do not exactly sympathise with either of the two families. The Kims are devious and scheming but also want a better life for themselves, while the Parks genuinely want to protect what is theirs but are living their life in a bubble isolated from the rest of society. The only true caricature is Mrs Park, whose shopping sprees, white Pomeranian and ennui-driven naps around the house provide ample fodder to view her as privileged and clueless, and each of her scenes is likely to elicit a good chuckle. A juxtaposition late in the film contrasts Mrs Park choosing dresses from her walk-in wardrobe with people at a shelter receiving clothes.

As the narrative unspools, director Bong turns up the dial on his social commentary, which peaks with an astonishing visual tour de force. Just as things seem to reach boiling point, a devastating rainstorm begins to rage. While Mr and Mrs Park lie on their living room couch and have sex as their young son plays in his colourful teepee in the garden, which is so lush it almost resembles a real forest, the lower-lying city, including the Kims’ basement apartment, falls victim to a flood of biblical proportions. As the downtown dwelling (and the screen) fills up with rising water, the perspective dissolves to an innovative divine point-of-view shot slowly floating high above a river of destruction in the heart of the city.

Bong Joon-ho is in full control of proceedings in Parasite, and although it may take a while to warm up to his particular brand of genre-bending hybridisation, the pay-off is deeply satisfying. Some may quibble with the two-hour-plus running time (or, more justifiably, the amount of time spent on the post-climax coda) or the lack of any real texture in the relationships among the members of the Kim family, but this opportunity to indulge in a socially conscious comedy with elements verging on horror should not be missed.

Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

André Crous

Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a photographer whose work was only recognised after her death, takes audience on a voyage of discovery.

Finding Vivian MaierUSA
4*

Directors:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Screenwriters:
John Maloof
Charlie Siskel
Director of Photography:
John Maloof

Running time: 80 minutes

When he bought his first box of Vivian Maier negatives, John Maloof had no idea who the photographer was. At the time, in 2007, Maloof was just a 20-something guy who knew little about photography but sometimes frequented flea markets and auctions, a gift that had been passed down from his father, and to him by his father before him. He says he always had a talent for noticing something worth having, and when he started sorting through the negatives he had bought, he was struck by their consistent quality.

He knew these pictures were the work of a certain Vivian Maier, but searching online did not help him very much, as Maier had never achieved any kind of professional success. Two years later, after posting some of the pictures on the Internet and getting an unrestrained euphoric reaction from commenters, he tried again. This time, he found an obituary, posted only a few weeks earlier, that helped him embark on a journey of discovery into the life of this unknown but obviously talented individual.

There is no question that Maier is a subject worthy of an investigation that runs the length of a feature film, even though the opening sequence, clearly meant to be comical, shows us her acquaintances unable to come up with a word to describe her. They eventually more or less settle on “eccentric”. Although it becomes clear that people did not particularly dislike her, she was generally perceived to be somewhat odd.

There are multiple reasons for this, and whenever Finding Vivian Maier pursues another strand of her story, it always grabs our attention. The first act, however, is by far the most interesting, as Maloof takes us through his early realisation that he was onto someone remarkable. He also waits until just the right time to reveal to us what Maier looked like, and we get a real rush from the small discoveries along the way, from her name and her accent to her photographs and her occupation, and finally, her appearance.

For a long time, there is uncertainty as to whether Maier was French or American, and the interviewees have vastly contradictory statements. Along with Maloof, who has managed to get hold of some very curious individuals to interview for this film and thereby made them and the film especially memorable, we find out when she was born and what she did for most of her life. She started in a factory and eventually worked as a nanny, even though her approach to child-rearing is far from admirable, and late in the story we get to the darker side of her character, which unfortunately is examined rather superficially.

We watch the film, the photos and the person herself develop in front of our eyes from our perch inside the theatre – itself a darkroom of sorts – and ultimately the image we get is one from which we simply cannot turn away. Maier remains elusive to the end, and even though Maloof makes do with little information about her past, except for snippets revealed by a genealogist or those she worked for over the years.

Yet the magnetism of the story lies primarily with the photos, as would Van Gogh’s paintings, Mozart’s music or Kafka’s stories. In contrast with these artists, however, Maier created her pictures as a full-time hobby rather than her occupation, and she never tried to actively sell her work or get it seen by the public. She had taken more than 100,000 negatives over her lifetime, but almost none of them had been developed. Countless pictures are shown onscreen, accompanied by breathtakingly emotive music scored by Academy Award–winning composer Joshua Ralph, who has worked on some of the most widely acclaimed documentaries of the past few years, including Man on Wire and The Cove.

Maier shot hundreds of rolls of photographic film and film stock, but while we get to see an impressive variety of her films, we almost exclusively see her photos in black and white taken in the 1950s and 1970s, and the lack of colour photos, which goes unexplained in the film, is rather peculiar. What we see in these black-and-white pictures, however, takes our breath away, and there are many visual references to pictures by other renowned photographers of the era whom Maier was either consciously emulating or by whom she was influenced. Or perhaps she was doing all this without even knowing about someone like Diane Arbus or Helen Levitt.

It helps that Maloof himself is such a visual filmmaker, and his curious eyes draw us into the story he is telling, but we never get a satisfactory explanation for why he signs the backs of Maier’s prints that go on sale and are shown to great success at art galleries around the world. Another detail that was a bit hard to swallow involved him trying to track down a church steeple in a French town on some of Maier’s pictures: He says he used Google images by typing something like “French church steeples” and somehow found the picture. Perhaps because of a lack of information from the filmmaker, this bit seems mind-blowing at first and then suspicious in retrospect, especially because the village somewhere deep in the Alps only has only a few dozen inhabitants.

Whatever qualms there may be about the investigation itself, the quality of Maier’s images is unassailable, and while the character herself may fade into the background after we have seen the film, the striking compositions of her work will not.

Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel expertly connect details from interviews with the life captured in Maier’s tens of thousands of photographs, and while we cannot retrace the subject’s life exactly or feel like we are following in her footsteps, we do get multiple glimpses of the moments she caught with her camera. She may have been eccentric or even mentally unstable, and she may very well have lacked social tact, but what remains today is her extensive body of work, and everybody who sees Finding Vivian Maier would agree that her pictures have earned her a place alongside some of the greatest photographers of people of the 20th century.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

André Crous

David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo breathes fire over the chilly Swedish countryside.

Girl with the Dragon TattooUSA
4*

Director:
David Fincher
Screenwriter:
Steven Zaillian
Director of Photography:
Jeff Cronenweth

Running time: 160 minutes

At their first meeting, the septuagenarian Henrik Vanger, head of the powerful Vanger Industries, warns an investigative journalist about “thieves, misers, bullies … the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet.” These people, we learn, are his relatives, and in the cold winter air of rural Sweden, the fog that permanently hangs over the quiet desolation is the uncertainty about the intentions of a handful of people on a tiny island: the Vanger family.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, has come to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl, Harriet, which dates back to the summer of 1966. On that day, sumptuously recreated by director David Fincher and his cinematographer in shades of gold, Harriet seemed to be on edge, and by nightfall she had vanished like a dream.

Blomkvist seems to be the perfect man for the job: He is a keen detective and isn’t scared of naming and shaming the guilty parties, no matter how influential they are. He also happens to need some time alone, and the excursion to the remote town of Hedestad seems to be the perfect opportunity for him to regroup after a devastating legal defeat.

He soon realises that he is in over his head, however, with many corpses – all of them girls, which explains the (original) Swedish title of the book on which the film is based: Men Who Hate Women – rearing their heads from beyond the grave, and decides to bring in the goth cyber expert Lisbeth Salander to help him hack his way through the swampland of cold cases. Lisbeth is the girl with the titular tattoo, and has clearly had a very rough life, though presumably the details of her childhood will be dealt with in the sequel(s).

That is a shame, because the 2009 Swedish film, with which Fincher’s version will inevitably be compared, handles Lisbeth’s backstory very cunningly by using a momentary flashback to hint at an extremely violent streak. Furthermore, this American interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling three-part novel differs in one significant respect from the source and the other film version: While the setting, the characters’ names and all newspaper headlines are Swedish, the dialogue is in English, though Swedish interjections for “Hi” or “Thanks” do feature in speech.

Daniel Craig, who plays Blomkvist, overcomes this linguistic mishmash by playing his usual British self, and it works. Christopher Plummer, as Henrik Vanger, is an American who pronounces Swedish names with a Swedish accent. But Rooney Mara, who plays Lisbeth and has the right body gestures for the character, has a face that is too delicate for the role and her attempt at imitating a Swede speaking English fails miserably.

Fincher, who has had ample experience putting information-heavy storylines onscreen, skilfully guides us through the wealth of details from that fateful day in 1966 when Harriet disappeared. In one very effective sequence, while Blomkvist reads a timeline of the events with a yellow highlighter, we get brief glimpses of the day in the same yellow tones.

In contrast with the bright sunbathed images that constitute the past, the present is murky, perfectly anticipated by Fincher’s opening credits sequence – his best since Fight Club – in which a grey, metallic fluid seems to gush over a body that is half-animated, half-decomposing, while Trent Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” pulsates on the soundtrack.

Fincher allows himself one moment of the darkest brand of humour, pulling the kind of stunt Kubrick did when his main character in A Clockwork Orange committed a rape while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain”. Here, under slightly different but similar circumstances, some of Enya’s music is used to the same bloodcurdling effect.

Such effects are the director’s forte, and he uses image and sound both subtly and grippingly to affect the viewer on a subconscious level, often hinting at more ominous details that others have overlooked to their detriment. The film’s focus on Blomkvist and Salander is sharp, but the 2009 adaptation offered an impression of danger despite the family members’ proximity to each other. Then again, Fincher does provide greater detail about the investigation’s many twists and turns, and he does so in a firm and comprehensible way that has less violence than its Swedish counterpart yet is equally effectual.

Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

André Crous

In Searching for Sugar Man, documentary filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul pieces together the unlikely story of how an almost anonymous singer in Detroit became a star in apartheid-era South Africa without his knowledge. 

Searching for Sugar ManSweden
4*

Director:
Malik Bendjelloul
Screenwriter:
Malik Bendjelloul
Director of Photography:
Camilla Skagerström

Running time: 85 minutes

In Searching for Sugar Man, Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul travels the world to track down the major players in a drama that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic starting in the early 1970s. It is a tale almost too tall to be credible.

We hear the story of an unknown singer-songwriter performing in small smoky bars in the rundown centre of the Motor City, where on cold winter nights the lyrics would drift through the noise and the drinking and stick with anyone who bothered to pay attention. The singer wasn’t looking to make an impact on the audience, but one couldn’t help admiring the wisdom and sometimes the pain of the poetry in the lyrics.

This man was Sixto Rodriguez, and when he was discovered by some record producers, they thought they had found the next Bob Dylan. His first album, Cold Fact, was recorded and released in 1970 but sold so poorly that by the time his second record was put out the following year, the label thought it best to relieve him of his contract.

He didn’t give up on performing, but it was never the centre of his life, and he spent most of his time doing what he could get paid for: construction and renovation in the housing industry. He has lived in the same Detroit house for more than 40 years.

Meanwhile, completely unbeknown to him, he was becoming a star in a place he had never been to, and it’s still unclear what the genesis of his foreign fame was: In the 1970s and 1980s, despite no one knowing who Rodriguez was or what had become of him after his two albums, his records had phenomenal sales figures in South Africa, at that time mostly cut off from the international scene because of its racial segregation policy of apartheid.

The South African producers who sold his records in the country said they had either heard the legendary stories of his death – some said he set himself on fire during a performance; others claimed he was so disappointed by the lack of support at another show he blew his brains out onstage – or they thought he would never consider coming to South Africa because of politics and what they considered his “obvious” stardom.

Actually, he never had any idea, because those who made money from his records never told him. A very powerful interview takes place in Hollywood with the erstwhile chairman of Motown Records, Clarence Avant, who states that though Rodriguez was one of the best singers he ever worked with, it is pointless to look for where the money went. Avant is an odious fellow, getting riled up and defensive very quickly, and it is clear where the blame for Rodriguez’s situation lies.

In the meantime, the artist’s popularity surpassed that of Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones in South Africa, and a few music buffs tried to track down the man, or at least piece together his life story as they were more or less convinced that he had died early in his career. What would come of their investigation is something quite remarkable: After decades out of the limelight, Rodriguez went to South Africa in March 1998 to perform six sold-out concerts for people who had grown up listening to his music – most notably, his single, “Sugar Man”.

From the opening scene, in which Stephen Segerman drives along the stunning Chapman’s Peak Drive mountain pass on the western side of the Cape Peninsula, it is made clear what a friendly influence South Africa and its people would be on the story of Rodriguez. Although it is easy to say the weather was merely dependent on the time of year when the documentary was shot, one comes away from watching the film with very strong images of a warm, welcoming South Africa and, by contrast, the icy, desolate cityscape of Detroit, where Rodriguez has toiled all his life without any kind of acclaim.

The beginning of the film does use the snow-swept Detroit in an interesting way: In a few rare instances, black-and-white scenes turn to colour and static shots become mobile when Rodriguez’s songs start playing on the soundtrack.

One shot in the film, however, is particularly irritating: the staged arrival of Rodriguez at Cape Town International Airport in 1998, which consists of silhouettes, starkly contrasted with a painted orange backdrop of Table Mountain, moving toward a horde of waiting paparazzi. It is out of place in a film that draws so much on almost-unreal reality, and it undercuts the power of the facts. Luckily, this scene is complemented by photos of his real arrival at the airport.

The film briefly touches on apartheid and shows footage of anti-government demonstrations and police beatings. This is important in conveying the feeling of oppression that Rodriguez’s music helped people to cope with in some way, but the focus is still mostly on the singer’s lack of knowledge about his fame on the other side of the world.

Searching for Sugar Man is truly inspirational and shows how small gestures can lead to big things. With scenes all around the Cape Town city bowl, the film is also another reminder of the beauty of the city at the bottom of Africa, and it encourages further investigation of the country’s rich (musical) history and its influences.

The Little Man (2015)

André Crous

Czech puppeteer Radek Beran’s The Little Man is an unconventional fairy tale and a lovely adventure for children and adults alike.

The Little ManCzech Republic
4*

Director:
Radek Beran
Screenwriter:
Lumír Tuček
Director of Photography:
Filip Sanders

Running time: 70 minutes

Original title: Malý Pán

With his second feature film, puppeteer Radek Beran sets the bar deceptively low so that we are continually surprised and exhilarated by events, visuals, twists and turns that we do not see coming. The Little Man (Malý Pán) is a film shot on location in a Czech forest but starring puppets (technically, marionettes) that are visibly manipulated, as their movements are somewhat jerky and the strings from which they hang noticeably rise up to the top of the screen.

Based on a children’s book by Lenka Uhlířová and Jiří Stach entitled The Little Man’s Great Journey (Velká cesta Malého pána), the film is an adventure that is primarily aimed at children but offers very funny moments for adults, too.

The titular man, voiced by Saša Rašilov, is youthful and slightly naïve and recently left his parents’ home to build himself a refuge in the middle of the forest, but he is haunted by a recurring nightmare of a door that won’t open while a mysterious voice orders him to open the door. This dream pushes him towards a discovery of his surroundings and eventually to open his eyes to unexpected friendships with those around him.

His first point person on solving the mysteries of existence is Empty Head, a giant disembodied head lying on the ground not far from his house. Empty Head looks rather worse for wear and says it cannot provide any answers before drinking the crystal clear water found in a fortress guarded by the evil Great Strait.

Thus begins Little Man’s journey, during which he has to persuade Fishrew (a kind of gentle half-dodo, half-Nessie that guards the moat around the fortress) to let him through, fight the Cheeky Punk (voiced by the not-dissimilar-looking Pavel Liška), research ways to fight off Great Strait, visit an expert robotic handyman that can repair anything, make friends with a larva named Fida, ask gherkins questions, find talking trees brimming with wisdom that is succinctly expressed, and much more.

The plot is a magical ride that may be light on substance but has enough quirky moments, an easy-to-follow storyline and an eclectic soundtrack by Tata Bojs frontman Milan Cais to keep the viewer fully engaged.

On the technical side, the decision to put puppetry front and centre in the visuals (by showing the strings instead of removing them in post-production) never impedes our suspension of disbelief. The work on location certainly helps the process and perhaps in light of the generally light-hearted tone of the narrative, a character’s sometimes erratic movements frequently succeed in sustaining the levity.

That is not to say that the production appears to have been simple or the product simplistic. On the contrary, the interior shots are beautiful, and director of photography Filip Sanders deserves praise for his lighting in these scenes. The flyover shots, especially the ones from the point of view of a hot air balloon late in the film, are also impressive to behold and truly gives the viewer a feeling of briefly inhabiting the world of the film along with the characters.

Although the target audience is children, Beran adds one or two curiously gruesome moments to his film that will be particularly funny to adults because they are so incongruous with the rest of the approach. One such example is the depiction of a plan conceived by the Cheeky Punk to kill Little Man, and we are shown his fantasy not by means of puppetry but through animation that includes various forms of gory execution. Another striking moment of adult comedy manages to reference Immanuel Kant and Harry Potter in the same sentence.

For the most part, however, the storytelling does little to distinguish itself from that deployed in a fairy tale. The visuals are certainly more interesting here, and since there are no actors, as such, we are spared any overacting. In fact, whenever the voices become hysterical, the effect is comical and clearly intended to elicit that reaction from the viewer.

It would be easy to belittle the film for the uncomplicated progression of its story and that it is merely a life lesson (life is worth little if you don’t have friends) presented as a flimsy adventure story. However, as suggested above, Beran’s creativity comes through on many occasions, and although he does use a handful of special effects, their use can often be explained by pointing out the scene is a dream or a fantasy or (in the case of the “Universal Fixer”) simply unrealistic, even in the world of the film.

This unconventional film may not be the most polished or the most insightful film of the year, but it keeps our attention despite its flaws. Its characters are quirky and unpredictable, and it is always a joy to keep suspending our disbelief, even when what we see is so obviously make-believe.

The Night Before (1988)

André Crous

Bad acting be damned. The Night Before is more than a guilty pleasure. It is a classic.

The Night BeforeUSA
4*

Director:
Thom Eberhardt
Screenwriters:
Gregory Scherick
Thom Eberhardt
Director of Photography:
Ron Garcia

Running time: 85 minutes

There once was a time when Keanu Reeves was a bit of a dork. Not the actor, but his characters. Although in the minds of most viewers, the line has always been a bit blurred. He is as much Neo as he is John Wick as he is the second half of the unforgettable duo that is Bill & Ted. Keanu (because nobody refers to him as “Reeves”) has played some iconic roles over the years, but the main reason for this muddled boundary is that he is not much of an actor – at least, not one who produces speech in a natural way. As a result, his various performances have been remarkably similar in expression.

The Night Before was among his very first films and the one in which he made his début as a leading man. This mostly farcical production fits his adorkable line delivery and excessive hand movements to a T. But despite the laid-back nature of this pretty derisory undertaking, it should be regarded as a high point of Keanu’s career because it is so consistent in its wackiness.

His character, Winston, is a nerdy senior in high school whose biggest achievement is being vice-president of the Astronomy Club. Two of the coolest girls in school made a bet, and the one who loses is punished by having to go to the prom – and, worst of all, be seen in public – with Winston. That lucky girl is Tara Mitchell (Lori Loughlin), the daughter of a very protective single dad who is also an ominously cool-as-a-cucumber police captain. Naturally, the traditional “chat” between the date and the father involves a shotgun.

But The Night Before opens after the prom has already ended, and we never even get to the prom. One reason is the action itself: Winston gets off the highway too early and loses his way in an unseemly part of downtown Los Angeles. The other reason is structural: The film is a cleverly assembled mixture of quirky flashbacks triggered by a verbal or a visual cue in the present. But there is no way the prom was even a fraction as exciting as what Winston and Tara get to experience.

It all starts long after sunset, when Winston wakes up in a dark alley dressed in a white jacket and a pink carnation, just as a truck is about to (and then does) drive over him. He has no idea how he got there. This amnesia takes a while to shake off as he slowly pieces together the events that led up to him alone in the middle of the night without his wallet or his car keys, but $1,400 stuffed deep into his jacket.

While asking around, he quickly learns that he has to meet the local crime boss, “Tito”, at dawn, where they will have it out over… something. This impending doom imbues the entire film, comical as the events sometimes are, with a foreboding feeling of danger and dread, even as Winston (always awkwardly but, somehow, usually successfully) evades countless obstacles in his way. He also realises Tara has disappeared, and he doesn’t remember dropping her off at home, which means her father will have a bullet with his name on it.

A string of bad decisions – from Winston unwittingly helping a thief steal his car to him mistakenly selling Tara to a pimp – lead to the night unfolding as a horror show that the two teenagers take in their stride. They are either fearless or insane, and by the looks of things, these two options are not mutually exclusive. When a bartender overtly pockets Tara’s credit card before shuffling off, she blithely responds to no one in particular, “Well, there goes my credit rating…(!)” And when she is stuffed into the trunk, she is more worried about her silk dress getting ruined than the fact that she is about to be trafficked. Lori Loughlin plays this role of an airhead high school princess, who is indifferent to danger because she has always lived in a protective cocoon, exquisitely.

The night-time setting is remarkably seedy, and almost every character in both the present and the recent past (the flashbacks from earlier that night) either is a criminal, has criminal tendencies or gives off a vibe that has us grabbing our wallet to make sure it is still there. The Night Before particularly maligns its black characters: With a lone exception, every single one is some shade of a crook.

But it is the unexpected Proustian “madeleines” – those sensory triggers that evoke a particular memory – that stitch the plot’s two timelines together in a perfectly suited comical fashion and create a synthesis that is also an impetus constantly pushing the story forward. These bits of connecting tissue are very potent tools in a filmmaker’s toolbox, as Stephen Daldry proved in the opening credits of The Hours, which created visual links between three stories. Here, the moments are admittedly much less sophisticated but equally successful at establishing strong and memorable ties between the past and the present, thereby illuminating our (and Winston’s) understanding of his predicament.

The flashbacks are filled with such entertaining characters and events that we care little about the major plot hole: Locating the exact moment about halfway through the film where the flashbacks finally catch up with the film’s opening scene is not as easy as one would hope. But the reason this closure is lacking is that the film is always rushing full-speed ahead towards dawn, with the events around Winston quickly spiralling out of control as we reach the final act.

No one would have guessed Proust would make an appearance in a review of a Keanu Reeves film. Then again, many a Keanu film exists on a plane of existence that transcends that of its peers. The Night Before is serious yet ridiculous, clever yet superficial. And unlike many a comedy from the same period, the humour hasn’t aged a bit. (If you haven’t watched Wayne’s World in a while, try again and see whether you can call it anything other than cringeworthy.) Held together by performances that, if tweaked just a little bit, might have been unbearable, the film has a rhythm all its own and surpasses its respectable but staid counterparts, like those of John Hughes.

The Tribe (2014)

André Crous

‘Showing instead of telling’ takes on a whole new meaning in the subtitle-free The Tribe, set in a boarding school for deaf students in Ukraine, which rewards the viewer who is paying attention to detail.

The TribeUkraine
4*

Director:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Screenwriter:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Director of Photography:
Valentyn Vasyanovych

Running time: 125 minutes

Original title: Плем’я
Transliterated title: Plemya

Silence can speak volumes, as long as we keep our eyes peeled and our ears pricked. This is the central conceit of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s unusual feature film, The Tribe (Plemya), which features no spoken dialogue but has a lot of signing going on between its characters, who are mostly high school students at a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf. The only explanatory title card appears before the first shot to inform us that there won’t be any subtitles or voice-over.

This unorthodox approach of limiting the viewer’s ability to understand the dialogue has been used in the past to confuse us, as Michael Haneke did rather pointlessly in the opening scene of his Code Unknown (Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages). Fortunately, in Slaboshpytskiy’s film, the action and the body language play a big part and help us in our quest to make sense of the story behind the gestures. Above all, the film reminds us that life is always happening whether we see or hear it or not. It doesn’t matter whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound or not; it fell nonetheless.   

Although we don’t learn his name until the closing credits, the main character is the teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), whose arrival at the school during the opening moments sets the bar so high that the second and third act, despite some stunning set pieces, never quite seem to live up to it. Dressed in everyday casual clothes, he enters his classroom to find all the boys sporting the same kind of white shirt and business jackets. Nothing has to be said; his peers’ condescension (or revulsion) is immediately apparent. Even – or particularly – in silence, the facial expressions tell a lot. And yet, Sergey seems unfazed. Does he not realise how he is perceived? Or does he not care? And why?

These questions are answered gradually as Sergey reveals himself to be a quaint mix of violence and sensitivity. His ability to protect himself quickly gains him the respect of the most delinquent and industrious guys, as he gets roped into petty crime and is soon promoted to pimping two fellow girls in his class to drivers at the local truck stop at night. At the film’s weakest points, it veers off into territory where Sergey views himself as a saviour to protect a girl he has spent an intimate moment with, and all of this feels like something we’ve seen before in countless other spoken-word stories.

The Tribe finds greatest success in those scenes where we realise the degree to which the characters’ hearing impairment affects their lives in ways hearing viewers may be ignorant of. These are scenes (sometimes dramatic, sometimes tense, sometimes gruesome) that are unique to stories about these kinds of characters. Whether it is their soundless assaults on strangers, their inability to hear approaching danger or to call for help, or the realisation that their pain sounds so much worse when they can’t hear themselves scream, these moments are stripped down to the basics and pack an eerie, visceral punch. 

Sergey’s journey from zero to hero to zero (and possibly – depending on one’s reading of the potent but ontologically dubious final scene – back to hero) is compelling but ultimately undermined by the terribly contrived romanticism that fuels some significant developments in the story’s second half. The film also struggles with coherence, as scenes in the second and third acts feel much more fragmented than those that introduced us to Sergey and presented his integration at school.

In addition, the quality of the acting is also all over the place. While Sergey is seemingly contemplative and not overly emotional (at least, for the most part), Shnyr (Olexandr Sidelnikov), who is his first point of contact with school life and also partakes in the students’ late-night criminal ventures, has persistently wild hand gestures that would seem over-the-top even when viewed with a long shot. The same is true of one of the girls being procured by the truck drivers for a bout of silent intercourse, and these histrionics are incredibly distracting.

For the most part, however, the film commands our full attention as we rely on extra-auditory cues to make sense of the diegesis. There is usually enough happening for us to follow along, even if at times we can only make out the bare outlines and have to take our best shot at figuring out the details. But it was a peculiar decision for the filmmaker to eschew any form of backstory for Sergey and to avoid introducing us by name to any of the characters. And it is equally strange that the soundtrack is already audible (in the form of a car horn being honked) on a black screen before the film proper has even started.

If The Tribe had been as thoughtful in developing its narrative past the first act as it had been up to that point, this might have been a truly breathtaking production. In his role as Sergey, however, Fesenko has a magnetic presence even when the screenplay lets him down and we struggle to empathise with him, and he is a big part of the film’s general impressiveness. 

Us (2019)

André Crous

Jordan Peele’s second feature film, Us, is a serious horror production that surpasses his début, Get Out, in style if not in substance. 

Us (2019)USA
4*

Director:
Jordan Peele
Screenwriter:
Jordan Peele
Director of Photography:
Mike Gioulakis

Running time: 120 minutes

For the film critic, the problem with twist endings is that it is frowned upon to dwell on that final revelation, despite their importance to the experience. Even just mentioning that there is a last-minute information dump that causes us to rethink the entire film is often too much for the reader to handle. It’s a fine line to walk, but neither the critic nor the reader/potential viewer should be overly sensitive, particularly if it is made clear why such information is included.

Jordan Peele’s Us ends with a labyrinthine flashback that seems to tell us everything before turning our whole notion of the story’s past upside down and then, for good measure, twisting our collective nuts one last time before the credits roll. But while the film does contain traces of this shocking development throughout, most notably in the form of a tune that is whistled, the character concerned simply does not embody the skeleton she has in her closet. The traces seem planted, while the central performance is almost unaffected. The actions do not bespeak a closely held secret, and therefore, the film will not be much more interesting the second time around. And that’s worth a mention in a review such as this.

It all starts out very peculiarly and then gets weirder and weirder until the climax in a subterranean, rabbit-filled lair. In 1986, a young girl named Adelaide visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. At some point when they aren’t paying attention, she wanders off and into a mirror maze (in a dark twist of humour, it entices the customer to “find yourself”). She looks around for a way out but doesn’t find one. Someone appears behind her – a stranger who is as tall as she is, wears the same clothes and has the same hairstyle. But before we can see their face, the film cuts to the opening credits sequence, which involves a multitude of white lab rabbits.

Peele’s second film is a far cry from his first, Get Out, the global smash hit that somehow managed to induce in the viewer the anxiety of a psychological thriller while very clearly poking fun at supposedly liberal white Americans’ racial prejudices. In Us, whose title hints at a link with the United States (a link that is ultimately very weak if not altogether obscure), he is much more interested in making a genre film than in making a statement about contemporary society.

In the present day, an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is just settling in for holiday with her family at a cabin. Husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is happy-go-lucky, seemingly without a care in the world, and is particularly excited about taking his children to the nearby beach in Santa Cruz. This news, a close-up reveals, hits Adelaide like a ton of bricks. But she puts on a brave face for her children, Zora and Jason.

The same night, after the visit to the beach, a mute family of four appear in their driveway. But it’s not just any family – it’s their doppelgängers: four individuals who have features very similar to theirs but are wearing crimson-coloured clothing. In addition, each of them is armed with a golden pair of scissors. Only one of them speaks, albeit with great difficulty and a voice that sounds like someone who is always being strangled: Adelaide’s alter ego, Red, who is quickly revealed to be the mastermind behind an uprising from the underworld.

This underworld consists of underground walkways alluded to in the film’s epigraph, which informs us of “thousands of miles” of tunnels beneath the continental United States. The characters down below mostly behave in a way that mirrors their above-ground counterparts (although, curiously, that is not always the case). This intimate relationship means they are “tethered” to each other. Plato’s cave, but with sentient shadows, would be an eerie but apt comparison.

Except for the epigraph, the first real foreshadowing we get of this tethering is a stunning image at the beach, where the camera hovers straight above the action to capture the family walking in a straight line, barely visible, while seemingly attached to their giant shadows that are lifelike but take on a life of their own as animate shadows. National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz is famous for a similarly striking composition he made with camels in 2005.

Following the initial home invasion, we quickly realise that the uprising is not just limited to the family of four but extends to the entire United States. Somehow, as is all too often the case with disaster movies, the rest of the world is unaffected. The family sticks together, trying to learn from each other how best to kill the impostors, until the final act, when Adelaide races (all alone, for reasons unexplained) into the underworld to find one of her children, who has been abducted.

This is where things take on a real mind-bending dimension as we have to put all the pieces together when the film climaxes in brightly lit hallways that could very well be tethered to the hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peele hits us with the climax, then knocks us off our feet with a bombshell surprise before delivering a second body blow. It’s the Sixth Sense of horror films, but the unexpected double twist vaults the film into a league all its own.

And yet, whereas M. Night Shyamalan’s famous blockbuster both made immediate sense and elicited admiration for blinding us to something that was in plain sight the entire time, Us conceals more and thereby reveals less, even on a repeat viewing. In his effort to shield the truth from us, Peele varnished over all the details that would have contributed to a richer fictional world, even at the risk of unveiling too much.

Even if it seems much more complex than it actually is, this is an original and stunningly crafted horror film.

Buoyancy (2019)

André Crous

Taking as its central character a soft-spoken teenager from Cambodia, Buoyancy is a restrained but effective depiction of the very real machinations of slavery in the 21st century.  

BuoyancyAustralia
4*

Director:
Rodd Rathjen
Screenwriter:
Rodd Rathjen
Director of Photography:
Michael Latham

Running time: 90 minutes

There have never been more slaves in the world than there are at present, in 2019. The final title card of Rodd Rathjen’s strong debut feature, Buoyancy, informs us that some 200,000 of them are trapped in Southeast Asia.

The ones we meet here represent but a drop in the ocean, but their story is simple enough to comprehend. It also clearly represents the broader range of experiences among the region’s workers often held captive in inhumane conditions. Based on the experiences of many real-life (presumably former) slaves in the region, the story follows the journey of a Cambodian teenager named Chakra (newcomer Sarm Heng) facing the grim reality of life as a slave in the 21st century.

The film has beautiful bookmarks: In the opening shot, we see the back of Chakra’s head. He is carrying a heavy bag across his shoulders, and his shirt is drenched with sweat in the tropical heat. He is heading down a road. In the final shot, we see his face as walks down the same road, his life now completely changed. The events that mark this transition, however, are anything but innocuous.

Buoyancy’s opening minutes broadly sketch Chakra’s domestic situation as one that seems like the beginning of a decades-long dead-end. Living with his parents and multiple siblings under one roof is difficult enough, but Chakra knows things will never get better for him out here in the rice fields of Cambodia. He learns from his football buddies that it’s possible to escape the village for a better life in neighbouring Thailand.

Since he doesn’t have the money to pay a smuggler, he agrees to work for free for the first month. But instead of going to a pineapple factory like the others, he ends up on a boat where time stands still. Underscoring their grim social position are the fish they have to sort through, which are destined to be turned into dogfood. The notion of getting paid anything more than a bowl of rice at the end of a gruelling day of work is one his violent Thai captors, led by Captain Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro), clearly do not share.

Chakra shows remarkable maturity, or maybe it is his inscrutability that makes him seem less childlike. Despite the hopelessness of this situation, which drives some of his fellow slaves to despair, he perseveres by working as hard as he can. When he realises there will never be a salary at the end of the month, he seeks any way possible to make life bearable and, especially, to rise through the hierarchy among the workers, many of whom are Burmese and stick together against him – an outsider among outsiders.

His expressionlessness saves him because he is not as easy to read as his countryman, Kea (Mony Ros). Kea has a family and wants to send money back home to his children. He senses the danger early on and does his best to protect Chakra as well as his fatherly instincts can, but he also demonstrates how dreams unfulfilled can lead to tragedy. By contrast, Chakra appears not to daydream. He keeps despair at bay by always remaining focused on the present. And when opportunity comes knocking, he is quick to seize the moment and change the future.

Rathjen mixes a documentary approach, including a very mobile camera, with a more artistic sensibility that can sometimes seem dreamlike. Brief moments of respite from the horror include the camera seemingly suspended from the clouds as it looks down at the ship passing below us, framed by the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Thailand, or when Chakra spends a rare moment floating in the water at sunset.

Although deeply satisfying to viewers wound tight as a drum after more than an hour of Chakra’s harrowing and seemingly hopeless fate, the film’s final act seems like wishful thinking. Despite his lack of experience outside the bubble of his small town, he doesn’t make a single mistake out on the boat. Somehow, the sea gods smile on his predicament and allow him to take control of his destiny without much pushback. He reveals himself to be buoyant, able to rise up from intense turmoil, and he doesn’t even get stained by the dirty froth on top.

The sharp focus on Chakra, who appears in every single scene, draws us into his story regardless of whether we feel we understand him. Although a couple of the scenes are haunting because of their implicit inhumanity (the dismemberment of one of the slaves is particularly tough to watch), Buoyancy does not engage in gratuitous violence. Its mostly taciturn central character stoically confronts the tribulations onboard without contriving a drama that might justify a strong reaction. And as a result, the realisation of injustice dawns all the more forcefully on us as we leave the cinema.

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.