comedy

Irrational Man (2015)

André Crous

An alcoholic philosopher decides to try his hand at committing what he believes to be an ethical murder, but the execution is neither comical nor tragic.

irrational manUSA
3*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Darius Khondji

Running time: 95 minutes

Woody Allen likes to play it safe in all of his recent films. This safety, while often peppered with hilarious dialogue or neurotic characters teetering on the brink of hysteria, also makes many of his works, at least those of the past 20 years, mediocre and forgettable. There have been demonstrable exceptions, particularly when his actresses are given free rein to express themselves, or when he takes greater pains to construct a story with both a beating heart and a strong head.

For the former, the examples that come to mind are the hot-blooded whirlwind performance of Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Cate Blanchett’s stunning portrayal of a narcissistic, delusional, alcoholic divorcée in Blue Jasmine; the latter include Mighty Aphrodite, which borrows from both George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and ancient Greek plays, as well as his magnificent Crime and Punishment-inspired Match Point.

Irrational Man is not a comedy and does not elicit a single laugh from the audience. In theme, it is closest to Match Point, replete with Dostoyevsky references (a copy of The Idiot lies next to his bed, he scribbles in a copy of Crime and Punishment, and the Russian novelist’s name is explicitly cited in a discussion with a student), but unlike his 2005 film, there is no thrill and no tension. Even the film’s most dramatic moment – a murder – is devoid of anxiety, and while the homicidal act takes place onscreen, the death occurs off-screen.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Abe Lucas, an alcoholic philosophy professor who has just joined the faculty at Braylin College in the sleepy town of Newport, Rhode Island. He is a nihilist who believes philosophy can do little more but talk about life’s problems. Nonetheless, Allen gives us a CliffsNotes introduction to existentialist philosophers in Lucas’s classes and then proceeds to the much more dramatically satisfying situation that serves as the plot’s turning point: Lucas decides that he can give meaning to his life by helping someone in need, even if this means he would have to commit murder.

One day in a coffee shop, he overhears a woman complaining of a judge who will very likely take custody of her children away from her and give it to her ex-husband, who is friendly with the judge. Lucas, without knowing much more than what he discovers from this one-sided account, makes up his mind to kill the judge.

The other track on which the story advances involves one of Lucas’s students, Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), who has fallen in love with him despite her having a long-term, caring boyfriend. Jill is a terribly disappointing character, as much for Allen as for Stone, who has played much stronger women in the past (her attention-grabbing turn in Easy A immediately comes to mind). In Irrational Man, she starts off as a smart philosophy major who takes on her professor’s worldview head-on but very quickly becomes doe-eyed and infatuated with him, and she tries her best to lull him out of his rudderless existence. When she fails, she flings her body at him.

This is a terrible debasement and does not endear her character to the audience at all, particularly because we feel she has given up control of her life to a man who is tossing and turning in a wasteland of despair.

The mentions of the philosophers are little more than padding and serve little purpose other than to remind us Lucas is philosophically minded. The look of the film, as is usual in an Allen production, is competent without drawing any attention to itself. The single exception, however, is absolutely stunning and underscores the skills of master cinematographer Darius Khondji, for whom this film marks his fifth collaboration with Allen.

Towards the end of the film, when Jill is starting to suspect Lucas has had a hand in the death of the judge, she watches him alone out on a jetty, a silhouette against the radiant sunlight reflecting off the still water. But there is something unusual: Lucas’s silhouette seems to vibrate, even melt, around the edges where it meets the bright luminosity behind it. The shot is breathtaking and catapults the film’s visual language into the stratosphere, albeit momentarily.

This Woody Allen film is about as unfunny a movie as he has ever made. But unlike some of his other films, which at least worked still played with our emotions, this one lacks the vocabulary to get us roaring with laughter or our adrenaline pumping. Despite the intriguing premise of ending a life to infuse your own with meaning and intensity, this work is mostly forgettable, and the weak character portrayed by Emma Stone is very unfortunate.

Dogtooth (2010)

André Crous

In a world that is entirely make-believe, a patriarch creates the rules that govern the existence, even the meaning of words, of his children, and no outside influence is tolerated.

dogtoothGreece
4*

Director:
Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenwriters:
Yorgos Lanthimos
Efthymis Filippou
Director of Photography:
Thimios Bakatatakis
Running time: 95 minutes

Original title:
Κυνόδοντας
Transliterated title:
Kynodontas

They play a tape recorder and listen to the week’s lesson. Words from outside the home, like “sea” and “highway” and “excursion”, are redefined as elements inside the home, and the obvious take-away is that these people will never get to experience real seas, or highways, or even excursions.

The five people in question constitute a family, although the connections between them are so tenuous that we cannot say with certainty that they are related because they do not interact with each other the way family members tend to do. In fact, they do not act the way anyone does and none of them is called by a name. Although they do not live far from the Greek capital of Athens (the one car they have, which only the domineering father is allowed to take to venture outside the house, has the number plate “YY”, for the East Attica regional unit), their house is located on a restricted access road, and no one ever drops by to say hello.

For all intents and purposes, the two parental figures and their three teenage children (one or two of whom might even be in their 20s already) live in a bubble that is highly manipulated by the father, and to some extent by the mother, who introduces new words in a way that distorts the reality outside the home. The lack of natural social interaction has also led the children to speak in a detached manner that makes them sound a little like lifeless robots.

The father, cognisant of his son’s burgeoning needs to express his sexuality, brings home a female security guard from the large firm where he works to have sex with his son. The act itself has no chemistry whatsoever, perhaps because the son’s lack of stimulation has turned him into a mechanical puppet. The son soon learns that his favourite position is doggy style, and many a viewer will speculate whether any allowance has been made for the son to be homosexual. If the term does not exist in the son’s vocabulary, what would he do with such feelings?

The family has a television set, but the outside world does not intrude. They only watch their own home videos, and between the videos, the cassettes and the 1983 Mercedes-Benz (according to online posts) that the father drives, one could easily assume this story takes place in the 1980s — that is, until we see the mother phoning her husband at work and him picking up his small mobile phone. It is also easy to think that the parents are conservative individuals who are scared that their children would be exposed to salacious influences, but they watch porn together in the living room when their offspring are asleep.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos presents his material with sharply lit images and very often shows his characters with their heads cut off by the frame to convey the idea of an idyllic atmosphere that leads to mindlessness. The robotic voices and the simple white clothes that the children wear also suggest a complete lack of creativity and a bond of unity and uniformity that is hard to miss. The father, who is the only one ever to leave to house, even goes as far as to remove the labels from the food and water he buys, lest they indicate life beyond the walls of his property.

And yet, there are subtle hints that things are not as peachy as the father would like to believe. The middle child (the elder daughter) bears a scar of unknown provenance on her shoulder, and all the children sometimes speak to the fence or throw a slice of cake to the other side. We later learn that they used to have a brother, who has escaped to the other side, but his existence only comes up in a single scene whose focus is very much elsewhere.

This film is clearly about control, and about the abuse that parents sometimes inflict on their children in order to “protect” them from undue influence. It is a fascist approach, to be sure, and the film ends on a very tragic note that should not come as a surprise to anyone who recognises that anyone who has tasted freedom will demand more of it. Throughout the story, the family dog is being trained to listen to his master’s orders, but the dog appears to be just one yelp shy of Labrador kindness, and the question hangs in the air whether control and training would ever be able to supersede innate behaviour.

Dogtooth is a powerful indictment of parents who impose their own vision of the world on their children and subsequently distort reality so that they may feel like they are in control. Lanthimos’s approach is both shocking and slightly comical, and we cannot look away.

(The title refers to the father’s statement that only when the children’s dogteeth, or eyeteeth, have come out, their bodies will be ready to “face the dangers that lurk outside”.)

Move (2012)

André Crous

drei zimmer kueche badGermany
3.5*

Director:
Dietrich Brüggemann
Screenwriters:
Anna Brüggemann
Dietrich Brüggemann
Director of Photography:
Alexander Sass

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Drei Zimmer/Küche/Bad

Almost as if he is baiting the critics and the nay-sayers to respond the way he expects them to, director Dietrich Brüggemann repeats one key phrase, or value assessment, or judgment, in the very last scene of his third feature film, Move: “It tries to overwhelm, but it doesn’t transcend.” It is almost too easy to apply this criticism to the 110 minutes that precede it, as a group of 20-something friends learn to deal with growing up, mostly without any abiding success. Their inability to look beyond their common bubble means that their interactions are solipsistic, a cesspool of relationships that develop out of convenience, and the only saving grace — the reason why this film is worth your time — is its comedy, which at times literally had me rolling around with laughter.

Despite the “three” in the original title, which refers to the layout of an apartment as one would find it in the classified section of the newspaper, the film is actually divided into four parts (and a loose fifth) that mirror the seasons and thus allow us a yearlong overview of the eight central characters’ actions and the reactions they produce.

Philipp and Dina have been best friends since forever. Philipp is dating the wildly moody Maria, who is moving to Berlin to be with him. Meanwhile, Philipp’s one sister, the timid Wiedke, is moving in with the popular Dina, while his other sister, Swantje, writes down every conversation at their parents’ home and is dating a Goth. Philipp is also good friends with the expressionless, emotionless Thomas, who has been dating Anna for a while, but the relationship is clearly going nowhere. And then, the handsome Michael arrives on the scene, and most of the girls fall for him, even though he is dealing with issues from childhood. Oh, and then Philipp’s parents non-chalantly break some shocking news over Christmas dinner.

This is just part of the round-robin of relationships and relationship issues that the film offers its viewers, but Brüggemann, who co-wrote the screenplay with his sister Anna (playing the role of Dina, arguably the main female character), is stunningly adept at steering our attention where he wants it to be, without ever seeming heavy-handed. He crams an enormous amount of plot into his film, perhaps too much, by cutting the material very tightly, and it is often at the end of his scenes that one recognises how other films would have lingered or over-explained. Brüggemann’s actors and his editor together create snappy moments whose meaning is immediately obvious, and yet they are as brief as they likely would have been in real life. His use of jump cuts is always well-timed and underscores the subtly comical nature of many of his more dramatic scenes.

Brüggemann’s sense of humour is equally refreshing, from hiding the identity of a peripheral character by only revealing one part of him (and then being open about the approach by having Philipp say he can never remember the guy’s face) to creating dramatically ironic comedy that only the viewers can appreciate because they see both sides of the moment to very judiciously having the same Christian missionaries knock on people’s doors at the worst possible times in their lives.

But despite the director’s masterful combination of sights and sounds (the indie band Guillemots and its frontman Fyfe Dangerfield provide the background music to the film’s most emotionally resonant sequences) and narrative sprints, as well as his playful approach to storytelling (he even goes “meta” by starring as a photographer named Alexander Sass, the name of the actual film’s director of photography), his film reaches a point where the norm is the unexpected, and there is no firm sense of where all of this is headed, or what would bring closure.

The final few seconds are a case in point, as Brüggemann suggests that, despite everything these characters have been through, they are likely to go through it all again, because you never stop growing up and you never stop learning. You keep on falling, like the pots and the pans in the very first scene, or Philipp, whose skills as a cyclist leave much to be desired, but you keep getting back up. Things may be precarious, but they are not entirely hopeless, and that is why we stay tuned.

It’s not easy growing up, but watching other people doing (or trying to do) it can be hilarious. The performances of the cast members all gel together very well, and the casting of Herbert Knaup (whose turn as Lola’s father in the cult film Run Lola Run is unforgettable) as Dina’s slightly hysterical father is a masterstroke. The only minor problem with casting was that Swantje (Philipp’s younger sister) and Maria (Philipp’s girlfriend) look so similar they are difficult to tell apart at first.

Move is a fast-paced look at the angst of becoming an adult and the mistakes that people make again and again as they try to find the balance between pleasure and stability. The Brüggemann brother-and-sister duo is very perceptive about the good and the bad of this period in people’s lives, and their depiction of the turmoil is genuinely engaging, even though they almost exclusively prefer to prioritise the funny sides of their episodes. The story does start to become slightly absurd towards the end, as coincidences seem to spawn more coincidences, but all in all, this is a creative, masterly controlled film about a key point in the characters’ lives and one that most audiences will be enthusiastic about.