4 stars

Ida (2013)

André Crous

Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida, which deals with a young woman’s journey towards becoming a nun, is of the most beautiful films ever made.

idaPoland
4*

Director:
Paweł Pawlikowski 
Screenwriters:
Paweł Pawlikowski
Rebecca Lenkiewiczi
Directors of Photography:
Łukasz Żal
Ryszard Lenczewski

Running time: 80 minutes

With Ida, Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski may have created one of the most visually stunning motion pictures of all time. Harking back to the era of Carl Theodor Dreyer, one of the film’s main themes – religion – finds expression in the beautiful whites and blacks of the images, most of which are presented by means of static camera positions.

In the early 1960s in Poland, a young redhead nun named Anna, who grew up in a convent, is preparing to take her vows. But before she does that, her prioress asks her to visit her aunt, Wanda, whom she hasn’t seen for most of her life. Anna is reluctant to head out into the sinful world outside the nunnery, but she does as she is asked to do. In a moment of incredible candour, Wanda announces to Anna that she was born of Jewish parents (her real name is Ida Lebenstein) and sent to the convent because at the time of her birth Jews were being hunted down in Nazi-controlled Poland.

Wanda is a former state prosecutor who once got the nickname “Bloody Wanda” for her role in sending enemies of the socialist state to their deaths. It has been a long time since the Second World War, but although she doesn’t talk about it much, and we only glean tiny bits of information from her about her family’s life in hiding, it is an event that clearly took a toll on her, and along with Ida she tries to locate the remains of her sister and brother-in-law, among others.

The investigation is simple but leads to the introverted Ida coming face to face with the evils of the world. Her exposure to the life led by her more free-spirited aunt, who spends many a night with a different man in her bedroom, also attunes her to alternative ways of behaving (in other words, black and white turn slightly grey) that will significantly influence her way of thinking by the end of the film. This change is made visible in her arrival and departure from the city of Łódź, where Wanda lives, which is shown with a static shot of her arriving on the tram, and a lateral tracking shot that shows her leaving the city toward the end.

The world depicted is one of intense religious affiliation, and God’s blessings are mentioned in nearly every greeting between friends and strangers. However, always in the background, are the events of the Second World War, and the staggering injustices suffered by such a large part of the Polish population. The film moves at a leisurely pace, with scenes stripped down to their essential parts, even if those parts often mostly consist of silence.

We never feel that things are moving too slowly, but surprisingly the fragments of the final act seem disjointed, and the film moves too quickly from one scene to the next, often without explaining how characters got certain kinds of important information and how they respond to them.

The investigation in the present has as much to do with unveiling the past and getting at historical truths, painful as they might be, as it is about the veiled Ida’s quest (albeit one she is indifferent to at first) to find the truth within and about herself. She grew up a Catholic, always surrounded by the nuns of the convent, and it may not appear that her birth into a Jewish family is worth exploring, but she soon finds herself no longer able to ignore the circumstances under which she was torn from her family – an act that led to the point where she finds herself in the present.

The process is presented without any sentimentality or melodrama; on the contrary, things happen with very little fanfare, but there cannot be any doubt that Ida is affected by the discoveries she makes and the world she encounters, where she continues to believe in God despite all the misery of her earliest days on the planet. Whatever your view of religion, Ida is a character with integrity. She faces her struggles in silence but not with a mere shrug of the shoulders. And Pawlikowski’s gorgeous film is a very worthy modern-day addition to the canon of films dealing with religious subjects.

Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Anomalisa (2015)

André Crous

Charlie Kaufman continues his quirky quest to understand the human soul by deploying stop-motion animation.

anomalisaUSA
4*

Directors:
Charlie Kaufman
Duke Johnson
Screenwriter:
Charlie Kaufman
Director of Photography:
Joe Passarelli

Running time: 85 minutes

Michael Stone is big in Cincinnati, for what it’s worth. He is recognised the moment he checks into the city’s “la-di-da” Al Fregoli hotel, as a former flame describes it. Said flame is comically named Bella Amarossi (a very deliberate maiming of the word “amor”). But before we get to her, let’s back up a second to Michael Stone. Stone is a star in the world of customer service and has arrived in Cincinnati to deliver a major speech on the topic; after all, he has written a bestselling book titled How May I Help You Help Them?

Stone is the star of Anomalisa, a stop-motion animation film set in 2005 that marks writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s return to the director’s chair after one of the best début (and arguably one of the most imaginative) films ever made: Synecdoche, New York. Voiced by David Thewlis, the middle-aged, more-salt-than-pepper character is stuck in a world where everyone has the same lily-white voice (one that belongs to Tom Noonan) and different shades of the same face. Everywhere he goes, people have different names, even different genders, but the same voice every time. That is, until he meets Lisa.

Lisa is an anomaly, and Stone cannot believe his luck that he has found such a diamond in a place as uninteresting as Cincinnati, where people cannot stop talking about the city’s zoo and chilli but have absolutely nothing else to recommend. Jennifer Jason Leigh brings her voice to Lisa’s body (it is perhaps a tad disappointing the voice again belongs to a white woman, and the film would have been ever more buzzworthy had it been a little more inclusive), who vividly brings the shy introvert to life.

Before Stone meets Lisa, however, we are treated to a hilarious establishing opening act in which he is haunted by and ultimately faces the woman he dumped for no good reason 10 years earlier, in 1995: the aforementioned Bella. Bella has put her life on hold and never forgiven Stone for leaving her just when they were at their happiest together. Their meeting in a public area is as pitiful as we expect it to be, and Kaufman’s dialogue gleefully thrashes around with cringe-inducing moments of awkwardness that will have many in the audience in stitches.

It is after he gets back to his room on the 10th floor, takes a shower and looks into the mirror that his jaw literally drops: He hears a voice different from all the others, which seemingly causes his cheek to detach from his face – albeit just momentarily. He rushes out of his room, and after knocking on many other doors in the corridor, he finds Lisa, a customer service rep who has come all the way from Akron to hear him speak. When she opens her mouth, her voice is like magic to his ears.

And yet, the film does not pretend that these two are meant for each other in an otherwise dreary, hopeless world. Instead, it digs deeper, very subtly, to direct our attention towards the likelihood that even the most marvellous of experiences – falling in love – can be reduced to crass ephemerality within moments. It is in this process that Kaufman, as he did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, again shows us his cynical curiosity about people’s actions and the way they are tied to our psychological states of mind.

Take the name of the hotel, for example. Most of the film is set inside the fictional Al Fregoli Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. Names in Kaufman-scripted films are often subtle nods at a wider range of references, and in this case, Fregoli undoubtedly refers to the Fregoli delusion or syndrome, a condition that leads people to believe that someone they know changes disguises on a regular basis, instead of realising they are all different people. The connection to the material in this film is obvious although (fittingly) not a true incarnation of the disorder.

The quality of the film is superb, and while the dolls’ faces are deliberately crude, they move about elegantly. Such grace is even more pronounced in the cinematography, as the camera often slowly zooms in on action taking place, and sometimes there are multiples layers of action in a single shot, for which the choreography and the direction are almost too complicated to get one’s head around.

Anomalisa is unlike almost anything else you will have ever seen before. It cleverly draws laughter from the most uncomfortable of situations without ridiculing those involved. It gently reveals the complexity (as well as the humour and the tragedy) that accompanies the act of falling in love. And it has a sex scene that is filled with the clumsiness and uncertainty but also the innocence and desire to satisfy and be satisfied that the first sex act with a new partner often entails.

Although the story is sometimes painfully thin (much of the film takes place during a single night) and some scenes last much longer than they ought to, Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson successfully mine the material for laughs while keeping their collective eye on the ball that is human emotion. This may not be at the same level as his previous works, but Kaufman’s voice remains one that stands out from the others, and for that, we should all expect to fall in love with his work again and again.

The Major (2013)

André Crous

In a tiny village in the Russian heartland, a desperate cop tries to fight the consequences of a terrible accident.

major-mayorRussia
4*

Director:
Yuri Bykov
Screenwriter:
Yuri Bykov
Director of Photography:
Kiri Klepalov

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Майор
Transliterated title: Mayor

On a desolate road in the Russian countryside, a man is driving like a bat out of hell. There are very few cars about, but he seems to pose a threat to himself every time he passes another vehicle on the highway.

He is called Sergey Soubolev (Denis Shvedov), and despite his reckless driving, he is his small town’s deputy chief of police. He has just received a phone call from the maternity ward in the next town, where his wife has gone into labour, and he is desperate to be there as quickly as possible.

But in his frenzy, he fails to notice the pedestrian crossing in time, and fearing the icy road would pose a greater threat to his safety if he slammed on the brakes, he heads for the ditch on the side of the road, but at exactly that moment, a small boy runs away from the oncoming car…  in the same direction. The 7-year-old Kolya doesn’t die immediately, but in his shock, Sergey throws the mother, Irina, into his car, locks her inside and phones his colleagues at the police station. In the meantime, the boy perishes in the snow.

What follows is a harrowing scene that we know will turn out badly for the grieving mother, whose fate is in the hands of the policemen who want to protect their friend Sergey, a colleague whose record is otherwise spotless and who gets along very well with the rest of the force.

Although not exactly an indictment of the corruption among the Russian police in the countryside, The Major is a fascinating study of power in the tiny setup that is the local police station, affected by the regional forces of the Internal Affairs Ministry, their reputation among the townsfolk and the ever-present criminal underworld that we notice on the margins. Sergey, the second-in-command at the station, wants to hold on to his job, but he has come this far without turning his back on his own moral values, and now that he is about to become a father, he is between a rock and a hard place: He wants to be in a position to provide for his family, but he also wants to atone for what he has done, and he doesn’t shy away from his guilt in Kolya’s death.

However, an admission that he was at fault, especially after the speedy cover-up his friends provided at the scene of the crime, would have disastrous consequences for the reputation of the police force, and everyone around him tries to convince him to coerce the mother into taking the blame for her son’s death. His friend Pasha (played by director Yuri Bykov), who at first seems to be helpful, becomes a force of violence in the film, who seeks to solve the ongoing crisis in the department with aggression, openly insulting and intimidating Irina and her husband, whose son’s body isn’t even cold yet.

In the second half of the film, Pasha, who obviously considers himself to be the keeper of the police force’s standing, takes centre stage as he uses his firearm as often as possible to obliterate the rolling avalanche of problems that originated with Sergey’s accident and the cover-up that he feels Sergey is not sufficiently grateful for. We see almost as many scenes with Pasha as with Sergey, and we get small clues about his character’s motivations that greatly enrich our impression of him.

There is a lot of bloodshed in the second half of the film, as events continue to spiral out of control, but the camera stays on top of everything, and a few characters deliver important snippets of dialogue that make us second-guess our thoughts on some key individuals.

Director of photography Kiri Klepalov supplies superb unbroken tracking shots, and two in particular stand out: The first occurs in a crowded hallway in the police station while there is a hostage situation one floor down and Sergey takes control of his men again, showing his skill at tactical solutions when he feels passionate about protecting his men; the second is seen a few short scenes later, when Sergey exits the police station, gets into a car, drives through the town to blocks of high-rise apartment buildings and exits one of them. The unbroken continuity of this second take and the continuous excitement and interest its content provokes are signs of a detailed directorial approach that should be commended.

One flaw is that the opening scene, in which Sergey gets the phone call about his wife at the hospital, seems to take a back seat for the entire duration of the film until it conveniently rears its head again to create a convenient bookend in the final scene.

Although action-packed, The Major, thanks to the director’s role as Pasha, the very likeable title character, Sergey, and a dynamic camera with some wonderful moves, rises above the level of a pure adrenaline ride. The individuals at the heart of the drama have some very understandable conflicts that provoke tension because a bona fide solution escapes us, too.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

The Verdict (2013)

André Crous

Belgian director Jan Verheyen takes on the fundamental absurdity of country’s acquittals by ‘procedural error’.

het-vonnis-verdictBelgium
4*

Director:
Jan Verheyen
Screenwriter:
Jan Verheyen
Director of Photography:
Frank van den Eeden

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Het vonnis

It is always much more fun when a film asks us to sympathise with a murderer – to see the murderer as the victim rather than an aggressor – rather than the actual victim. Not only does this strategy keep us on our toes, because we continually ask ourselves whether we may allow ourselves to form such a counterintuitive opinion, but also whether, as a character in the Belgian The Verdict suggests, such an argument would “open the floodgates to barbarism” by undermining the rule of law and creating a slippery slope for anyone to commit heinous crimes for any reason and get away with it.

It is not an easy terrain to navigate, but armed with a script that simultaneously gives the impression of being both comprehensive and activist, director Jan Verheyen asks a very fundamental question about one of his country’s most debated legal issues – one that continues to wreck lives, if we are to believe a final title card, for the sake of maintaining the house of cards that would allegedly collapse if any of its parts were removed or ignored.

Verheyen makes no secret of the fact where his sensibilities lie. The film opens with the loving couple Luc Segers and his wife, Ella, at a fancy corporate gala event where it is rather obvious the CEO has handpicked him as his successor and is about to ask him to accept the offer. Luc and Ella leave with their 6-year-old daughter, Anna, and stop for gas on the way home. Ella goes across the road to buy bread, but at the vending machine, she is assaulted and left unconscious. When Luc finds her, he confronts the assailant, but when he is also attacked, his daughter runs across the road and is hit by a car. Luc wakes up three weeks later from a coma to find he has missed the funerals of both his wife and his daughter.

However, the worst is yet to come. Luc recognises the murderer, but he is set free after a “procedural error,” a missing signature on an important document, is discovered. It is easy to imagine where the story goes from here, and it is a lot of fun, especially because the director has chosen a few comical faces, like the dry prosecutor-general (brilliantly played by Jappe Claes) with the enormous bat ears who inadvertently helps the defence and the bumbling justice minister who repeats the same stock lines of written statements every time something terrifying happens on his watch.

Once Luc’s trial gets underway, things really start to heat up, as legal experts on television explain the gravity of getting to the bottom of this question about “procedural errors” and whether anyone may ever be pronounced “not guilty” if they have admitted to the crime, just because they had their reasons for acting the way they did. And what if the man who murdered Luc’s wife in cold blood by beating and kicking her countless times also had his reasons for doing what he did?

The Verdict skirts this grey area in the advocates’ closing arguments, although our questions about just where the line may be drawn are left unanswered. This may very well have been the intention of the filmmaker, who wanted to start a conversation rather than provide us with all the answers. These procedural errors, that final title card tells us, are a well-known problem in Belgium today, and yet they have remained unaddressed.

A bit like The Life of David Gale, this film proudly wears its intentions regarding questionable practices in the legal system of the real world on its sleeve (in the case of the 2003 film by Alan Parker, the issue was the problem of the death penalty). However, while it may be regarded as activist, it is also difficult to deny the power such a topic has to convince us that things are not as black and white (or as “factual”, as the film’s prosecutor-general puts it) as we would like them to be for the sake of simplicity.

There are many shots at the beginning, looking straight down from a great distance, that seem to imitate God’s point of view, but they also create enormous tension because they give the impression of a bad omen rather than any kind of comfort. For the rest of the film, these shots are absent, perhaps as a nudge toward the importance that people deal with their problems themselves rather than expect a higher authority, whether on earth or in heaven, to intervene.

Such creativity is also at work in a few unexpected flashbacks that occur during the trial, but a recurring image, which also opens the film, is a closeup on Luc’s trembling hand after he committed the act. We see the same shot at least three times throughout the film, which is frankly unnecessary as there is no real doubt that he committed it as a last resort, almost despite his own moral values.

But the film’s greatest flaw is one it just barely makes. The viewer wonders how everything will turn out in the end, because it seems there are only two possible outcomes, and we would see either of them right before the end credits. The film doesn’t do this but instead gives us a firm closing that is not at all unlike a television episode, whereas it would have been much more effective to leave the ending open and ambiguous and confront the viewer with the aggressive but factual title card immediately afterwards.

As the work of a filmmaker with an evident passion for his subject, The Verdict is a powerful mixture of message and execution.

Viewed at the Festroia International Film Festival 2014.

Marguerite (2015)

André Crous

The story of a woman who sang opera even though she did not have a shred of talent is more enchanting than it sounds.

marguerite-xavier-giannoliFrance/Czech Republic
4*

Director:
Xavier Giannoli
Screenwriters:
Xavier Giannoli
Marcia Romano
Director of Photography:
Glynn Speeckaert

Running time: 130 minutes

In Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane’s second wife’s ambition of being an opera singer, despite having a terrible voice, was bankrolled by her rich husband, a newspaper tycoon and heir to a sizable fortune. The reviews were terrible, but their isolation from the rest of society served to protect her from the overwhelmingly negative response from both the public and the critics.

Marguerite, a French-Czech-Belgian co-production, provides French comedy legend Catherine Frot with a similar role – one informed by the real-life story of the wealthy but notoriously out-of-tune opera soprano Florence Foster Jenkins. Frot stars as the titular Marguerite, a French baroness whom we first encounter at a private recital in aid of First World War orphans. She is the only one who fails to recognise her attempt at channelling Mozart’s “Queen of the Night’s Aria” (Der Hölle Rache) from The Magic Flute is so crass it sounds like a cat is being strangled. The high society audience can barely restrain themselves from snickering into their perfumed sleeves.

But while many a newspaper excoriates her performance, one even running the headline “Pauvre Mozart” (Poor Mozart), a single critic, the dashing young Lucien Beaumont, lavishes her with ambiguous praise when he remarks that her voice seemed to want to expel some demon from the room. Of course, Beaumont has an ulterior motive, as we can easily guess when we see his friend, Kyrill, regale a well-to-do woman at the recital with tales of an art gallery he wants to open and inquires about the possibility of an investment.

Set between 1920 and 1921, Marguerite makes seamless transitions across time that become veritable leaps toward the end, as the baroness, with no shortage of instigation by Beaumont, moves toward an unskilled performance on a large public stage. Small moments along the way highlight her most intimate relationships, complicated by the lies people tell to spare her the pain of the truth.

It would be easy to dismiss the central character as a thinly veiled embodiment of anyone surrounded by yes-men and yes-women who merely exacerbate a toxic situation by avoiding the potentially agonising conversation that breaks the truth: This woman cannot sing to save her life.

However, such a view of the film would be overly simplistic, as Marguerite, thanks to Frot, is endearing and close to naïve but does not have a single mean bone in her body. Persistent exposure to her singing may cause some people to pine for hearing loss, but she is not hurting anyone, and telling her she is delusional and sounds worse than a broken bagpipe may wreck her life, which revolves around her love of music.

She has accumulated in excess of 1,400 partitions, some from the great masters of opera, and she seems to know the libretti by heart. But as those in the music industry are astounded to learn, such a deep knowledge of the fifth art does not preclude one from reproducing it with utter ineptitude, albeit with heart and soul.

Frot, however, is in complete control of her portrayal of the musically challenged baroness. Marguerite is serene and focused like a laser on the task at hand: Sharing her love of the opera with those around her. In this task she is loyally assisted by her butler, Madelbos, who has her best interests at heart and, considering the impressive collection of pictures he has taken of her in various poses, likely also yearns for her affection.

Director Xavier Giannoli, who presents his material with a straight face, includes the symbol of the peacock, which we never see displaying the beautiful colours of its feathers but whose screams we do hear at irregular intervals around the house (the sound is not dissimilar from the brief meow of a cat).

All the main parts are admirably depicted, and it is to Giannoli’s credit that this inherent romp is lighthearted but never turns into a circus. Unexpectedly, Marguerite’s climax is both funny and deeply affecting, as a moment of magical realism turns the spectacle into a heartfelt recognition of the purity of Dumont’s desire to be close to her husband and to sing her heart out. The balance here, as elsewhere in the film, is highly commendable.

The 127-minute film never feels like a drag; on the contrary, some characters – like Hazel, a talented young graduate from the conservatory, or the slightly mysterious Madelbos, who likes to take pictures of objects being consumed by fire and leaves an indelible imprint on the viewer – are sorely underdeveloped. Nonetheless, the effortless distinction with which the director and his leading lady present the comedic melodrama of this peculiar individual whom we cannot but pity makes for a very gratifying film.

Family Film (2015)

André Crous

A family is torn apart, a dog fends for itself, and the director proves his filmmaking chops with an unexpectedly affecting work of dramatic fiction.

family-filmCzech Republic/Slovenia
4*

Director:
Olmo Omerzu 
Screenwriters:
Olmo Omerzu
Nebojša Pop-Tasić
Director of Photography:
Lukáš Milota

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Rodinný film

Following up on his widely hailed début, A Night Too Young (Příliš mladá noc), Slovenian-born FAMU graduate Olmo Omerzu’s sophomore feature – shot once again in his second language – is yet further proof of the young director’s (he turned 30 during production) talent for storytelling: He manages to tackle a theme as serious as the crumbling family unit with a mixture of short, powerful revelations in a snow-swept Prague and lyrical, wordless snippets on a tropical island in the eastern Indian Ocean.

In a deceptively simple but well-chosen opening scene, which takes place inside the family sedan of Igor Kubín, his son and daughter are watching a nature documentary on the television embedded on the back of his headrest. Igor’s wife, Irena, asks him whether he took their sheepdog, a Border Collie named Otto, to get vaccinated. Igor sheepishly admits he forgot. In the meantime on the documentary, a frog unceremoniously meets its end.

Igor and Irena leave for a yachting expedition around Christmas Island and expect everything back home to go well as they will keep in touch with their teenage son, Erik, and his elder sister, Anna, via Skype. But when the cat’s away, the mice will play, and they do so no sooner than on the way back from dropping their parents off at the airport, when they pick up Anna’s friend Kristýna.

Omerzu is cautious to show too much too quickly, and he uses small but striking hints that things are headed south, for example by ending many a scene on a slightly awkward facial expression that firmly indicates the situations are not as innocent as they seem at first. The day after his parents leave, Erik arrives back home to find the doors to the building’s elevator closing shut, and we briefly spot Kristýna, stark-naked, inside.

She later explains to him that she plays this game because she is bored, and before long she turns her sights and her wiles on the naïve Erik, whom his father had playfully advised to enjoy himself in moderation. The calculating Kristýna moves in with Anna and Erik, and even when the children’s uncle Martin eventually turns up, she stays put, sometimes snuggling up next to Erik in bed, at other times stroking his hand or licking his ear.

All the while, there are glimpses of sun-kissed beaches, palm trees and turquoise waters half a world away, where Igor and Irena are blissfully ignoring any possibility their children would get into trouble. It is only when Anna receives an unexpected phone call about her brother’s fortnight-long absence from school that she is compelled to convene a Skype intervention between her, her parents and a teacher from school. Irena wants to go home at once, but Igor insists there is nothing they can do but bide their time.

At first, it is challenging to understand what Omerzu is getting at, or why he wants to tell us this story. But everything changes in the final third, which in formal terms is also by far his most ambitious act, as all the pieces suddenly come together in a stunning contrast of wrenching heartache and serene tranquillity, as revelations about the family structure in Prague play off against scenes of perseverance in a tropical wilderness, with Otto stranded on a deserted island.

Although there is little development in his character, the story of Otto the dog unexpectedly turns out to be one of the most impressive additions to the screenplay. His arrival on the island is a gorgeous example of Omerzu’s talents, as the camera follows the dog slowly swimming ashore, time and time again briefly disappearing from view behind the crest of the wave before re-emerging, snout in the air. The scene will be sure to leave many a viewer breathless, thanks to the visual dynamics we are made witness to.

Other scenes with or around Otto are equally mesmerising, from a palm tree hit by lightning to crabs scurrying surreptitiously behind the dog while it takes shelter from the rain. The film’s final scene is another astonishing triumph, and Omerzu’s decision to let it play out with barely a word of dialogue demonstrates his eye for cinematic intensity.

Family Film is a rich, satisfying experience of a minimalist storyline that includes a handful of unforeseen developments, all presented with a firm hand and no desire to shock. The director is in complete control of his material, and while a few characters lack depth or motivation, the last act of the film is a wonderful display of a range of feelings, from passive aggression to love and forgiveness.

Viewed at the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival

Paris of the North (2015)

André Crous

Subtle comedy set in far reaches of Iceland’s cold Westfjords has a warm heart with likeable (but not entirely lovable) characters.

Paris of the NorthIceland
4*

Director:
Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson
Screenwriter:
Huldar Breiðfjörð
Director of Photography:
Magni Ágústsson

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: París Norðursins

“The one who travels the farthest knows the least”, the middle-aged Svanur tells the 37-year-old school teacher, Hugi (Björn Thors), who is a recovering alcoholic. The men live in a tiny, secluded village on the coast of north-western Iceland. Hugi copes with his addiction by attending weekly AA meetings with his sponsor, Svanur, and Svanur’s son, a deadbeat dad named Richard who plays in a band and spends most of the day smoking a bong. These meetings with three people who introduce themselves to each other again and again have an absurdist quality that sets the tone for much of the film. Also, that quotation is from Lao-Tzu and seems comically out of place in the vast, desolate landscape of the Westfjords peninsula.

All of this is about to be upended, however, when Hugi’s nomadic father, Veigar (Helgi Björnsson), phones him up out of the blue, and he is too reluctant to say no to him coming over from Reykjavik. But the very first glimpse we get of the father does not bode well. When he disembarks at the airport, he stands on the runway and lights up a cigarette. Also, he is carrying a large cage with a dog inside.

With Paris of the North, Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, the director of the minimalist but hugely entertaining Either Way (Á annan veg) — remade as the equally engaging English-language Prince Avalanche, by David Gordon Green — has created another very compelling film whose characters are likeable but not entirely lovable. And it is this delicate balance, along with beautiful sequences of tracking shots showing Hugi running to the surprisingly haunting sounds of Richard’s band, that makes the film such a consistent pleasure.

Guarding over all of their quirky ways is Thorfinnur (Þorfinnur), a mountain that seems to rise up out of nothingness. But while the mountain never moves, many of the characters are uneasy with the place they have reached in life. Hugi is yearning for an ex-girlfriend, Helena, who has moved to Portugal. He is even learning Portuguese, but his phone conversations with Helena provide no reason for optimism. His father, Veigar, has spent some time in Thailand, buying and selling a bar and fathering a child in the process. Richard’s ex-wife, who used to date Hugi, is now flirting with Veigar. Everybody is unmoored, seemingly lost and adrift.

While Hugi, at least for a while, finds some company by kicking around a football with one of his students, the 10-year-old Albert (Haki Lorenzen), who not coincidentally is also Richard’s son, this clearly cannot be what his life will be like, and he recognises this all too well.

What he needs is an intervention of sorts, and not the one that AA sponsor Svanur wants to stage when he fears Hugi may have fallen off the wagon. He needs to make a life-changing decision, based not on his obsession with his former girlfriend but on something else – perhaps himself. It is a difficult journey, especially because everybody sees (and tells each other) how good he would be as a father, but being responsible in one aspect of one’s life does not mean everything is sorted out.

Paris of the North conveys both the beauty of the majestic Thorfinnur and the grubby streets of the former fishing village that lies next to it, and it shows characters straddling the line between the safety of mediocrity and the desperation of repetition. Love or lust often pose a challenge for the characters to make the right decision, but in the end, they do find an answer that works, one that may initially be sad but is emotionally satisfying and feels just right. Director Sigurðsson has a fine career ahead of him.

Sparrows (2015)

André Crous

Rúnar Rúnarsson’s second feature film provides an emotionally resonant look at a teenage boy’s coming of age on Iceland’s majestic Westfjords peninsula.

sparrowsIceland
4*

Director:
Rúnar Rúnarsson
Screenwriter:
Rúnar Rúnarsson
Director of Photography:
Sophia Olsson

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Þrestir

The first time we see the teenage Ari’s face, he is singing in a 28-boy-strong choir in Reykjavik. The hall in which they are performing is stately and white as snow, and as the rays of sunlight hit his neck, we see what appear to be light tufts of down. This boy is still very much an innocent angel, and although he will mostly remain that way for the duration of the film, the situations he is confronted with become ever more complex as he gradually learns what it is to be a man.

Sparrows (Þrestir), Rúnar Rúnarsson’s second feature film, doesn’t cover the usual bases of a coming-of-age story. Yes, in this case, there is a divorce, an absent father, his first sexual encounter and so forth, but Rúnarsson’s perceptive eye for teenage politics in general and the loneliness of an outsider in particular, as well as frequent dips into melancholia that wash over the pale, almost inexpressive face of the main character, make this a wonderful glimpse of one boy’s life in the wilderness.

Said wilderness is Iceland’s Westfjords, the country’s large peninsula to the northwest, where cliffs rise up sharply out of the ocean and appear to be much more imposing than their actual height would lead one to believe. The town where almost all of the action is set is the hamlet of Flateyri, although shots of nearby Bolungarvík also make up the fictional town here. Everyone here knows each other, but this familiarity is worlds removed from Ari’s former life in the capital with his mother, who has now upped and moved to Africa with her Danish husband.

In spite of the talk of hunting, the fighting and the sex, it ultimately becomes clear to Ari that being a man does not mean being macho. Being a man does not even mean one has to be responsible. However, it does entail dealing honestly with one’s own shortcomings, and that is why the film’s final image – an intimate hug between two men – is ultimately so incredibly powerful. On three occasions, the ethereal sounds of a piece of music by Kjartan Sveinsson lift Sparrows into the realm of the transcendental, flawlessly complementing the religious songs that Ari sings on multiple occasions, including, most strikingly, all alone inside a giant water tower. His solos bring almost heartbreaking calm to the turmoil that we know he is experiencing on the inside.

The film has countless small moments that are not highlighted but stand firm as milestones that line Ari’s journey towards maturity. While there will be a great deal of focus on a particularly traumatic scene late in the plot that will have the viewer’s stomach churning with empathy, other smaller incidents are equally important. Ari’s father, Gunnar, who has drowned his sorrows in alcohol since divorcing Ari’s mother, is ill-equipped to take care of his teenage son on the cusp of adulthood but out of sorts in this new landscape. Every moment that Ari considers unique is somehow spoiled by his father who has a similar moment with other characters, from having sex with the same woman to sharing a jacuzzi and even the house with too many other people.

Throughout the film, the towering cliffs – their feet often shrouded in mist – are ever-present, seemingly about to overwhelm the insignificant figures in the foreground. In fact, our very first impression of the area is a shot of the tiny airplane flying almost too close along the fjord walls before landing at the airport in Ísafjörður. This image is followed almost immediately by a shot of Ari waiting for his father, as he has done for much of his life, at the arrivals gate.

While main actor Atli Óskar Fjalarsson is very good, the only letdown is the scenes when he is supposed to express violent rage, which unfortunately comes across as somewhat contrived. This issue is perhaps understandable given that these moments turn very sharply away from the general trajectory of the plot and the overall restrained behaviour of the character. The quieter scenes, of which there are many, are much more convincing and more effective at drawing the viewer in close to Ari.

Sparrows are never seen nor spoken of, but the title most probably refers to the small birds because of their biblical meaning of being among the smallest and least valuable of animals while nonetheless still cared for and watched over by God. While this explanation is informative, it is unclear why the title takes the plural form.

Rams (2015)

André Crous

Two elderly, taciturn sheep farmers who are also brothers have to work together in the face of a plague that hits their remote valley in northern Iceland.

hrutar-ramsIceland
4*

Director:
Grímur Hákonarson
Screenwriter:
Grímur Hákonarson
Director of Photography:
Sturla Brandth Grøvlen

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Hrútar

The first scene of Rams, a film from Iceland that falls squarely within the country’s canon of beautiful and always-eccentric films of late, tells it all: In a valley called Bárðardalur, in the north Icelandic countryside, Gudmundur (“Gummi”), an old, bearded farmer, finds a ram among his sheep that is not his. It has clearly strayed across the fence that separates his flock from that of his neighbour. He calls one of them by name, strokes its face and then proceeds to take a ram into his neighbour’s house in silent protest at the transgression that occurred.

The neighbour turns out to be his brother, the similarly bearded, equally aged Kristinn (“Kiddi”). The two have not spoken for 40 years, and although the reason for this is never explicitly stated, the resentment from both sides is clear as day. Their tense silence could very well have to do with the fact that Gummi’s father did not want Kiddi to inherit the farm, but he has stayed on because their mother insisted on it.

They are also big rivals, as their respective flocks share an esteemed bloodline, and at this year’s edition of the annual competition, Kiddi’s ram prevails by half a point over Gummi’s prized tup. Gummi is naturally crestfallen, but after closer inspection, he comes to believe that Kiddi’s ram, and therefore his flock and all other flocks in the area, might be suffering from scrapie, which would be fatal to both the sheep and the entire valley’s livelihood.

It is to be expected that the two brothers, facing the worst crisis in their extensive time on this Earth, will be pushed together to tackle this problem, but their distrust and general dislike of each other certainly makes this a protracted call to collaboration, whence the film’s running but subtle comedy. Despite their differences – Gummi is the serious one, while Kiddi is prone to hit the bottle on frequent occasions and more likely to behave like a fool – they are also dedicated to their sheep, which for these two lifelong bachelors are just like their own flesh and blood. When tragedy strikes their animals, it is like they see their own bloodline vanish in front of their eyes.

Their attachment to the animals also extends into a very warm relationship with Kiddi’s sheepdog, Sómi, which steals every scene in which he appears. Gummi uses him as a carrier pigeon to deliver handwritten messages to his brother whenever the rare occasion arises for them to communicate, and Sómi is almost giddy with anticipation to oblige.

This anthropomorphism is the logical extension of the affection afforded to the ovine creatures, and screenwriter-director Grímur Hákonarson’s decision to imbue his animals with just as much humanity as his two-legged characters add enormous warmth to the film. And warmth is certainly welcome in this desolate valley that has been hit by disease and remains exposed to the rigours of the island’s thick white winters. The final scenes, set during a blizzard unleashed on the surroundings of Gummi and Kiddi’s farm, is particularly harsh, and at a screening I attended, the wailing gusts of wind on the soundtrack literally caused the ground in the theatre to vibrate. 

As a final point, even though it does not shed much light on our interpretation of the film, it is worth pointing out that the title can equally refer to the two brothers. The men’s interaction and communication at the very end are intimate and more related to instinct than purely rational thought.

Rams is about silence and a secret shared with a combination of naughty subversion of the rules and a determined desire to uphold to the status quo, even when the course of life cannot be turned back, and life itself can barely be resurrected. The two main characters, offbeat as they are, have affection for their animals and even for each other, and their presence in the story brings out both the comedy and the drama of the unexpected situation they are confronted with.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015

Brooklyn (2015)

André Crous

Based on the novel by Colm Tóibín, story of Irish immigrant to the United States in the early 1950s is filled with compassion and tenderness.

Brooklyn_1Sheet_Mech_7R1.inddIreland/UK/Canada
4*

Director:
John Crowley
Screenwriter:
Nick Hornby
Director of Photography:
Yves Bélanger

Running time: 110 minutes

For anyone who has ever moved far away from their parents and their childhood home to pursue new opportunities that did not immediately manifest themselves, Brooklyn will be an evocative, deeply felt (though for some perhaps too optimistic) depiction of the struggles of adapting in a new country, even one as accepting as the United States of the early 1950s.

The New York City neighbourhood that shares its name with the title of John Crowley’s heartwarming film about one of the hundreds of thousands of post-war immigrants represents a world and ultimately a home for Eilis (pronounced “eye-lish”) Lacey, a 20-something girl from rural Ireland. Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is bright and dedicated, but she cannot achieve her full potential working at the general store in Enniscorthy, whose generally laid-back atmosphere may have escaped because of the terrible economic climate in the country following World War II.

Eilis’s father passed away a few years earlier, and she is living with her older sister, Rose, who has a job as a bookkeeper, and her mother, who has little financial independence. But Eilis is determined to make something of herself, and thus she undertakes the nauseating journey across the Atlantic – along with so many other Irish immigrants, some first-timers, others returning from a visit to their former home – to New York City.

She settles in the Irish immigrant–heavy Brooklyn, in a boarding house overseen by the strict but witty Mrs Kehoe, played with more than a smidgen of naughty relish by Julie Walters. Father Flood, a longtime immigrant who facilitated her move to the 48 states, secures a job for her at a department store, but when she starts receiving letters from back home, she quickly becomes a homesick duck out of water, turning reticent, introverted and generally down in the dumps.

The film, based on Colm Tóibín’s eponymous novel, is deliberately paced to take her higher when she meets the Italian Tony – a shy young man who looks like a young Gene Kelly (incidentally, the two watch Singin’ in the Rain together at the cinema) and worships the ground she walks on – and achieves enormous success in her accounting studies before taking her lower with an emotional trip to Ireland that makes her question her decision to move to the New World.

Throughout the entire film, the focus is almost exclusively on Eilis, and it would be difficult not to empathise with her plight as she makes her way in a world that, despite it being Anglophone, is almost completely foreign to her. Crowley also subtly hints at the communication difficulties that existed at the time, as a telephone call between Ireland and the United States was a privilege afforded to very few and had to be organised and booked via special channels.

The cinematography, like the story itself, is infused with a sense of romanticism. The images are luminous while retaining a slightly hazy quality, hinting at an almost dreamlike state of mind as Eilis tries to work through her fantasy of living in America to forging her own path. Luckily for her, New York City is almost filled to the brim with good-hearted people who welcome her into their midst – quite a contrast to the refugee-phobic rhetoric of many U.S. politicians and their supporters that is making headlines as of this writing in November 2015.

Unlike other films about Irish immigrants to the United States, such as Jim Sheridan’s brilliant but underseen In America or Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes, Brooklyn is not mired in misery or peppered with unsavoury characters and situations that show the rougher side of adapting to a new country and its people. Crowley’s view of the United States is uplifting and shimmers with compassion for the local population. In a way, the representation perfectly fits the time period perfectly and seeks to present us with a character pursuing the American Dream without losing the connection to her family and community an ocean away. The only truly odious moments take place within the confines of the grocery store in Enniscorthy, but while they have a very important function, they last mere moments before goodness overthrows their fleeting dominance.

With humour, tenderness and a beautiful love story, Brooklyn is a tale that is as optimistic as an incoming immigrant who has not yet experienced the clash of cultures or any hints of xenophobia. Its central character’s determination to start a new life, one that she chooses for herself, is very appealing, and the wisdom she picks up along the way marks her engagement with her surroundings in a way that promises a bright future, despite life moving on and bonds inevitably breaking.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015