short film

Toyland (2007)

André Crous

During the Second World War, a young non-Jewish boy who doesn’t want his Jewish friend to leave unknowingly alters their lives forever in Toyland.

SpielzeuglandGermany
4*

Director:
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Screenwriters:
Johann A. Bunners
Jochen Alexander Freydank
Director of Photography:
Christoph “Cico” Nicolaisen

Running time: 14 minutes

Original title: Spielzeugland

From Life is Beautiful and Fateless to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Painted Bird, stories of children caught up in the chaos and brutality of the Holocaust are nothing new. The horrors are often a turning point that inevitably marks the end of their innocent, protected childhood. But what happens less often is that the children’s loss of safety is that there is an explicit (and inextricable) link to the adults’ loss of control. Life is Beautiful hinted at this, and Sophie’s Choice centred on it. But Jochen Alexander Freydank’s innocently titled short film, Toyland, presents it with devastating clarity.

In a German city during the Second World War, the Meißners (Meissners) and the Silbersteins are next-door neighbours in their apartment block. Both families have boys who are the same age, play piano together and are the best of friends. Despite the war, it appears the two boys are unaware that one of them is Jewish. One evening, when Mrs Marianne Meißner and her son, Heinrich, are at the Silbersteins’, the boys’ duet on the piano is interrupted by someone else in the building screaming at the “the Jews” to keep it down. It is only a matter of time before the Gestapo hauls them off to the concentration camps.

Marianne has been trying to prepare Heinrich for the inevitable departure of his friend, David, and his family. She tells him that David is going on a trip to the “toyland” but that he can’t go with them. This place sounds like so much fun that Heinrich barks back at her that his father would have allowed him to go with the Silbersteins. But Marianne sticks to her story, even as she knows that her son will have his heart broken either way.

What follows, amid the period’s historic barbarity, is an extraordinarily touching demonstration of humanity that involves every single one of the five characters. The twist ending will grab at many a viewer’s heart, although the more sceptical amongst us will question the likelihood of such a drama being resolved so seamlessly.

Set in the deep of winter, the ominous greys everywhere shy away from the pageantry of the Nazis’ trademark crimson. It is a desperate, unforgiving landscape, and because Jews are not inherently distinct from other Germans, everyone can be a suspect. At one point, Marianne is mistaken for a Jew, and at another, David Silberstein is presumed to be Aryan. These mistakes remind us of the nonsense of the Nazis’ ideology of Aryan identity, but Toyland does not belabour the point. 

The acting from the main boy, Heinrich, is not the best, and Toyland’s final scene has an unfortunate Titanic quality to it, but the rest of the production is excellent.

Zinneke (2013)

André Crous

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

ZinnekeBelgium
4*

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

Running time: 20 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whale Valley (2013)

André Crous

Geographical isolation and emotional remoteness go hand in hand in Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s personal short, Whale Valley.

Whale ValleyIceland
3.5*

Director:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Screenwriter:
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Director of Photography:
Gunnar Auðunn Jóhannsson

Running time: 15 minutes

Original title: Hvalfjörður

The titular whale is already dead and being sliced up in silence to feed the small community. Meanwhile, taciturn teenage Arnar is still thinking about taking his own life. Or is he?

The 15-minute Whale Valley takes place almost entirely on a farm in rural Iceland. The blustery, barren landscape mirrors Arnar’s unexplained but clearly unbalanced emotional state. This atmospheric resonance with inner turmoil (“nature in sympathy”) is an element that director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson would go on to develop three years later in his feature film début, Heartstone (Hjartasteinn). But the brutality of his later work is much more discreet here. The film’s focus is sharply trained on the climax, which is hard to watch, although not unexpected.

The first time we see Arnar (one can assume the director’s choice of this name, his own middle name, was deliberate), he has a noose around his neck. He is standing on a flimsy wooden crate inside the farm shed, his body rigid with fear but awkwardly twitching. So, will he or won’t he? We don’t have to wonder long, as his younger brother, Ívar, happens upon him. In shock, he runs off into the distance, and out of fear that Ívar would tell their parents, Arnar tears after and quickly catches up to him. This is their secret, but we don’t know much more. Was this Arnar’s first time trying? Was this the first time that Ívar found him? And wouldn’t a noose hanging in the shed draw attention and suspicion from their father?

We don’t get answers to any of these questions. In fact, for all the initial focus on Arnar, he isn’t even the main point of interest. Gradually, we realise that Arnar and the explanations for his eternal melancholy take a backseat to their impact on Ívar. It is a dynamic tension, if such a thing is possible, as Ívar is always aware of his brother’s morbid intentions, but despite their tussles, the uncertainty hangs in the air until the climax. Two short scenes in the brothers’ bedroom also poignantly underline the protective bond between the two here in the outback.

Halfway through the film, the beauty and confusion merge in the wordless scene with a sperm whale. Lying beached on its stomach, the giant mammal is imposing, even in death. It completely dwarfs young Ívar, just like near-death seems to loom over everything here. But the boy stretches out his hand to touch the oily skin and then proceeds to gently stroke the animal. We follow his hands, collecting oil as they slide further, before he puts his head on the animal’s body and listens. For a second, he seems to think it might be alive. It is a beautiful moment rudely interrupted by the arrival of his father and friends with their flensing tools. Although initially stunned, the boy doesn’t run away this time. He looks on, and as the men start cutting the blubber, his gaze turns impassive.

Life and death and love all meet up in the next sequence, which takes us back to the barn before a final coda in the brothers’ bedroom. This is a story of unfledged emotions that try to stand out here in the wilderness but are often blown off-course by life’s unpredictability. 

Like the brothers it depicts, Whale Valley is cold and distant on the outside while hinting at warmth and intimacy. The boys’ father could have been benefitted from a bit more interaction with his children. As it is, he seems to care as little about Arnar’s state of mind or Ívar’s daily routine as he does about the whale. But despite Guðmundur’s reluctance here to engage in robust storytelling, the emotions that he teases out are clear, and his two main characters clearly have inner lives. In a longer film like Heartstone, he would succeed in giving us a true peek into their souls.

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Les misérables (2017)

André Crous

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

Les Misérables (2017)France
4*

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

Running time: 16 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denali (2015)

André Crous

Denali is a love letter that conveys a lifetime with a wave of feeling but without ever reaching for emotion.

Denali

USA
5*

Director:
Ben Knight
Screenwriter:
Ben Knight
Director of Photography:
Skip Armstrong

Running time: 8 minutes

It is rare for voice-overs to be deployed successfully. But Ben Knight’s Denali is rare in many ways.

It may be the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been written on film. All of 8 minutes in length, including credits, it looks back over a lifetime filled with comedy and tragedy. But in large part, it’s an adventure, a shared experience of a bond that is as strong as anything we can imagine. When the identity of the narrator was unexpectedly revealed about a minute into the film, tears started streaming down my face and didn’t stop until the closing credits rolled, at which point I was literally gasping for breath. The voice-over narration belongs to the title character, Denali, who (not which) is a 14-year-old mutt.

Of course, it’s a human being reading the lines. But that is also the point. Most people have animals as pets, but few have them as part of an active life in which they serve as loving companions, fellow adventurers and compassionate co-survivors. Denali’s friend and owner is adventure photographer Ben Moon, who got the dog in his mid-20s and has spent his entire adult life with Denali by his side.

This life includes a great deal of time spent on the beach but also in hospital as Moon struggled with but ultimately survived a bout of cancer, a period during which his insurance company kicked him off his plan (after all, the story takes place in the USA). Denali’s emotional intelligence lies in its knowledge that we want to see what we believe to be true. We believe that our pets – especially our dogs – can sense how we feel, that they understand us without us needing to tell them and that they care for us no matter what happens.

“When someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy”, the narrator tells us. It serves as a reminder that many of us already have this kind of love in our lives and should recognise it more often. It may seem like the act of a simpleton – of someone who cannot remember the past and does not consider a future in which the affection is not returned. But it is as pure an expression as one can imagine of life-giving love that soars the heights of Denali’s namesake, the highest mountain in North America.

Unsurprisingly, given the title and the fact that one of the world’s best-known outdoor clothing brands provided half the budget, every single image looks like a crisp painting and offers a direct link to nature. The voice-over is delivered nearly monotonously and yet, it is deeply moving. Human but different, it stands in perfectly for the quasi-human thoughts of a dog.

Denali is not just a film for those who have lost pets they loved. Nor is it even for those who have ever had pets. It is a film for anyone who has ever had an intimate relationship with anyone or anything. If you have lost that person or that animal, this is for you; if you have ever been scared of losing him or her or it or them, this is for you; if you are human, this film is for you.

Tambylles (2012)

André Crous

By deliberately avoiding all forms of confrontation, this very uneven hourlong graduation film turns its main character’s already undramatic existence into rigid stasis.

TambyllesCzech Republic
2*

Director:
Michal Hogenauer
Screenwriters:
Michal Hogenauer
Markéta Jindřichová
Director of Photography:
Adam Stretti

Running time: 58 minutes

Tambylles (a title that translates as Therewasaforest), a one-hour film that Michal Hogenauer made as his FAMU graduate film, is as uncomfortable to watch as its main character, an anonymous young guy from a small Czech town who has recently been released from a juvenile detention centre. Stripped down to very minimalist scenes and a lead actor who always has to contain his emotions, this film is not particularly viewer-friendly.

At first, we seem to be watching a documentary: An increasingly annoying filmmaker is interviewing people and asking persistent, provocative questions. But slowly, as the credibility of the staging becomes more and more suspicious, we realise this is a film within a film, with the fictional filmmaker presented inside more static, well-composed images. Luckily for us, director Hogenauer’s preoccupation with form is done away with more or less as soon as this fictional filmmaker’s attempts to provoke confrontation fail to deliver and he leaves the central plot.

These well-composed images are certainly one of the highlights of the experience of watching Tambylles, although I found myself tuning out very often because there is so little to tune into. Though the fictional filmmaker tried to construct the first 15 minutes of the film in a way so every interview is interrupted in order to create a cliffhanger, our anticipation constantly heightened, we find out very little about the central character and the events that sent him to the Big House. “Everyone one should know what he did”, says one character. Yes, they should, but what is it?

Given the fact this central character says so very little, becomes more and more isolated from society and from us and isn’t even given a name, he does not represent something universal – rather, he fades out in every scene to which he is supposed to bring some substance, or interest.

Nonetheless, actor Ivan Říha has captivating eyes that pull the viewer toward the screen. Despite his character’s visible solitude, a completely unbelievable domestic situation – not just the lack of chemistry between him and his parents but a lack of any feeling whatsoever – and a lack of much to hold on to in terms of character traits, we certainly want to find out more, and he offers the promise of something more. Unfortunately, he never fulfils that promise.

It is difficult to become involved in the development of a film that is going nowhere. We keep waiting for confrontations that Hogenauer instead chooses to avoid. The confrontation (provoked by the fictional filmmaker) between him and the mother of his victim is wordless and actionless; the confrontation between him and the fictional filmmaker consists of him grabbing the camera and storming off, though this action is elided by means of a cut; the confrontation between him and his boss, who discovers his secret, is avoided when he storms off, again; and a final suicidal confrontation is shown without any sound.

Minimalism is one thing, but deliberate obstinance is another. Říha’s face (the only thing the character has going for him) can only interest us for a limited time, and that time is much shorter than the film’s 58-minute length.

Hogenauer shows great promise with his camera, but the images he creates cannot inspire us to sympathise with a character who encounters resistance everywhere he goes. Moreover, we have no real clue about his past and don’t get an insight into his feelings in the present. Along the way, a character played by Hogenauer himself steals away the girl who might have brought this guy out of his shell. A fitting metaphor.

Noah (2013)

André Crous

Noah, a remarkably perceptive short film about the consequences of relying on social media alone to gauge what is happening in real life, has first-rate visuals and a climax immersed in a quiet pathos. 

NoahCanada
4.5*

Directors:
Patrick Cederberg
Walter Woodman
Screenwriters:
Patrick Cederberg
Walter Woodman
Director of Photography:
Patrick Cederberg

Running time: 17 minutes

A kind of Lady in the Lake for the age of Facebook, the 17-minute-long Noah is only shot from the point of view of its central character. The twist is that this POV shows only one thing: the screen of a Macintosh computer, conveying thought processes to us as we skip from Wikipedia, Facebook and Skype to YouPorn and Chatroulette, often to the soundtrack of whatever is playing on iTunes. But we need nothing more, because in so many respects life today is “lived” online, and much of the power of this film lies in the two young directors’ firm execution of rhythmic pans and zooms to build suspense at exactly the right moments.

Co-created by Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, who were students at Ryerson University during production, the film stars Sam Kantor as the titular Noah Lennox, who is in his final year of high school, but it takes a few screens before we even know what he looks or sounds like. After all, how often are our own faces projected back to us when we are online? But our fingerprints are all over our Internet history, and thus, we immediately recognise Noah (and parts of ourselves) when we see him open Safari to start browsing.

With porn running in the background, he opens Facebook to chat with his girlfriend, Amy, who says they have to talk. He opens Skype to chat with her, but the interaction is awkward because he is not really paying attention, and she is obviously about to broach a serious topic: life and their relationship after high school graduation. The connection is lost, and there is silence, although Noah can see that she received and read his “hello?” on Facebook during this time.

Thus begins an obsessive quest for answers, as Noah browses Amy’s Facebook photos, notices one guy’s name coming up again and again, then wonders what this is all about and eventually pries his way into and violates the most sacred of Amy’s online spaces: her Facebook profile. To ratchet up the tension, Cederberg and Woodman punctuate hyperactive pans and zooms with well-placed pauses to convey hesitation and to make us feel like we are not only inside Noah’s skin but also feeling the same anxiety he is. A cursor hovering momentarily over a button is the calm before the storm as we realise he is about to cross their relationship’s Rubicon.

Noah is insightful, hip and one-of-a-kind. The compelling artistry of its visuals, made elegant thanks to seamless editing and other post-production work that successfully imitates the darting movements of the eyes, and the continued topicality of the themes of technology and isolation mean this film has not aged a day since its release. There is not a single moment that could be trimmed from the film without tarnishing the perfect integration of plot and form that the filmmakers sought and achieved. By the time we reach the climax, which appears like a brilliant sunrise over the soggy marshlands of all that came before, the feeling is one of pure empathy with Noah.

Many a viewer will be drawn to and fascinated by the form but stay to live through this particular moment in the life of a total stranger because the devices and the emotions they evoke are so familiar. And that is something that doesn’t happen every day.

Noah is an ark captained by two gifted filmmakers whose execution matches their vision and who steer the narrative seemingly effortlessly towards its majestic conclusion. It is daring and dazzling, and its depiction of a moment of life online feels damn authentic.

La jetée (1962)

André Crous

La jetée, Chris Marker’s classic short film about time travel, is as intelligent, as unconventional and as emotionally engaging today as it was upon its release in 1962.

La JetéeFrance
4*

Director:
Chris Marker
Screenwriter:
Chris Marker
Director of Photography:
Chris Marker

Running time: 28 minutes

Perhaps best known today as the short film that inspired Terry Gilliam to make 12 Monkeys, Chris Marker’s La jetée is very unconventional as a moving picture precisely because the pictures do not move. Unlike the overwhelming majority of films out there, of which movement is a defining feature, this 28-minute work of science-fiction employs photographs to tell its story, and the reason is quite simple: These are supposed to be fragments of memory, and memories are experiences that we almost never remember in their entirety but rather in snippets.

The first few moments already hint at the distorted nature of the world we are about to encounter when the opening credits themselves are altered, albeit very subtly: Upon expressing thanks to the research department at the national public broadcaster, the Radiodiffusion-télévision française (RTF), the credits change momentarily from “Service de la Recherche de la R.T.F.” to “Service de la Trouvaille de la R.T.F.”. In French, the word “trouvaille” means a “(lucky) find”, and the fact that most viewers might only notice this change during a second or a third viewing underscores the notion that there is more beneath the surface than we may realise at first.

Indeed, the entire story depends on our impression of reality, constructed on the basis of fragmented memories, that in the end is revealed to be defective in a crucial way that the main character (and we) realises all too late.

The film has almost no diegetic sounds but does have a narrator. This narrator’s voice belongs to Jean Négroni, whose surname is curiously, though perhaps intentionally, written without the requisite diacritical marks in the opening credits.

Set mostly in a dystopian environment (what used to be Paris) after the end of the Third World War, a nameless man (played by Davos Hanich), is haunted by an image burnt into his memory as a child. Shortly before the outbreak of the war that would destroy most of mankind, he was standing on the viewing pier (the “jetty” in the title) at Orly International Airport in Paris. There, he saw a woman, but the rest of his memory is blurred by a feeling of violence and the perception that someone had died.

Today, huddled up in subterranean passageways under the Palais de Chaillot because the world above is too radioactive for human life, there are victors and victims, and the former are conducting experiments on the latter: The prisoners have to imagine a moment from their past so intensely that they are transported back and can eventually bring help from the future into the present. But there are many failed attempts, with the experiment’s subjects either dying or losing their minds.

With the image of the woman seared into his brain, the main character is successful at making the past vibrate with such life that it becomes a living memory, although not without pain. And all the while, in a nod to the events of the Second World War, which had ended barely 17 years before La jetée‘s release, the people conducting the experiment are ominously whispering to each other in German.

When the man starts forming images in his head that appear to correspond to the peacefulness of the past, the narrator insists on calling them “real”: “a real bedroom”, “real children”, “real birds”, “real cats” and, deliberately anticlimactically, “real graves”. And yet, there is a firm suspicion on our part that these are merely imaginary projections, most importantly because there is no movement. Another acknowledgement of the likely fictitious status of the events comes when the narrator explains that the man “never knows whether he moves towards her, or is pushed, whether he’s made it all up, or is only dreaming”.

But this is where the intelligence of Marker’s chosen form starts to reveal itself because before long, the man and the woman from his past find themselves in a museum with stuffed animals. By this stage, the viewer has already started to ascribe movement to the film’s frozen images, and therefore the exercise now engenders a cognitive animation of the immobile animals, too, which produces a frisson and a feeling of confusion, not unlike what the main character is experiencing. This bewilderment is particularly palpable when we see a close-up of a shark baring its teeth right next to the couple. At another point, in a timeless space filled with statues, the narrator also describes his memory as a kind of museum.

The final development in La jetée, during which the man is sent to the future, is a little ridiculous and compares badly with the rest of the film, as expressionless, alienoid humans with medallion-like objects on their pale foreheads learn of the desperation in the present.

The ending will leave the viewer breathless, because at the end of a brief but brilliant action montage, insofar as that label may be applied in this case, the smallest revelations suddenly hit us like a brick wall and leave us pulverised with despair. The final image is held just long enough for us to take in but not fully digest the gravity of the narrator’s explicit closing of the circle of life – and with it, of hope.

Vale (2015)

André Crous

These 10 minutes on Ibiza spent with five Spaniards and an American girl, despite the commercial origins (and intent) of the production, are simply irresistible.

vale-amenabarSpain
4*

Director:
Alejandro Amenábar
Screenwriters:
Alejandro Amenábar
Oriol Villar
Directors of Photography:
Eduard Grau
Cyrill Labbe

Running time: 10 minutes

A romantic story with a touch of magic, even when blatantly presenting itself as little more than a commercial for the Catalan beer brand “Estrella”, can still be affecting, and it is a pleasant surprise to discover how quickly the 10-minute-long Vale swoops us off our feet and carries us on a wave of laughter and curiosity off towards the stars.

See, estrella means “star”, and in this short film by Alejandro Amenábar, perhaps the most consistently awe-inspiring filmmaker the Spanish film industry has ever seen, the brand is not just a name but also a symbol, both literal and figurative, for the story itself.

Victor (Quim Gutiérrez) is a handsome young Spaniard we first meet next to the swimming pool one morning, hanging out with his handful of close friends. The one outsider, an American girl named Rachel (Dakota Johnson), catches his eye, and he tries to strike up a conversation with her. The problem is that he barely speaks a word of English. She only met up with Victor’s friends at a party the previous evening, as one does on the party island of Ibiza.

Their initial interaction is pure awkwardness from beginning to end, as Victor tries to string a sentence together but fails miserably, even as a smile never leaves his face. But then, something magical happens: He connects with Rachel through the intermediary of his friends’ interpreting, by revealing his comprehensive knowledge of the tiniest of details about movies, music and even art exhibitions.

The reason is an Estrella-inspired Slumdog Millionaire, which reveals itself to us through a string of very succinct flashbacks that demonstrate how the promise of an Estrella with his friends and his decision to accept the invitation (the title, Vale, is a Spanish interjection that roughly translates as “OK”) ultimately exposed him to countless cultural experiences that he now draws on to impress Rachel on the other side of the linguistic abyss.

The visuals are sharp and clean, and we are always aware that Estrella Damm, whose name is the first to appear as part of the opening credits, is behind this project. And yet, somehow, we don’t care. The narrative has a very deliberate whiff of contrivance that we nevertheless succumb to because of the promise of magic if we suspend our disbelief.

This being a short film, the pay-off comes very quickly, although it has to be said that the ending is surprisingly open-ended. Vale positions itself as a romantic film of sorts by making it clear very early on that Victor, who not coincidentally is always wearing red (or showing off his strapping torso), has the hots for Rachel and by overtly referencing films about relationships, like Before Sunrise, Love Story and (admittedly, for a laugh) There’s Something About Mary.

Vale is too short and leaves us wanting more, but it is a gem of a movie that you can watch again and again and never grow tired of. Just like the Mediterranean climate in which their friendship blossoms over the course of a single day, these characters all have an irresistible warmth about them that makes us feel completely at ease, like we’re one of the gang.