torture

The Little Soldier (1963)

André Crous

Tackling the immorality of war but doing so from a stable, sterile perch, The Little Soldier points the finger of blame at all sides in France’s War on Algeria.

The Little SoldierFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Le petit soldat

Made in 1960 but banned until 1963 because of its content, The Little Soldier was Jean-Luc Godard’s first political film. It followed hot on the heels of his wild and massively entertaining début, Breathless, which had made him famous. This, his second film, turned out to be so controversial in his native France that he would release two other films – A Woman is a Woman (1961) and My Life to Live (1962) – before the censors finally permitted it to see the light of day. The reason for the controversy was the film’s tackling of the War in Algeria and, specifically, its depiction of torture scenes involving Algerian fighters who use the French army’s methods of torture on a white French citizen.

And yet, the film is more about the protagonist’s lack of conviction than anything else. Ironically, much of the action is the result of inaction. The main character is Bruno Forestier, a young reporter for the French News Agency who is based in Geneva. At least, that is how we are first introduced to him. It is May 1958, the height of the conflict in Algeria, and he tells us in voice-over that “the time for action is over… the time for reflection has begun.” That does not sound like the start of a very dramatic story, and it won’t be, as the film will have its fair share of self-important “reflection” replete with literary quotations grabbed out of thin air.

Literature is everywhere, and, with one major exception, these references are pure Godardian onanism.  The most ludicrous reference comes early in the story onboard a train ride, when Bruno’s thoughts turn to a story by La Fontaine entitled “The Acorn and the Pumpkin”. The French title, “Le gland et la citrouille”, is repeated over and over on the soundtrack, and slowly the focus shifts only to the first part, “Le gland”. A few moments later, we see the train pass the station of “Gland”, even as a voice on the soundtrack drones on by repeating this word.

The action proper, which will culminate with such drama in the last third of the film, starts out very slowly and rather aimlessly. Bruno is involved in French intelligence-gathering operations and has been tasked with assassinating a pro-Algerian radio host in Geneva. But Bruno is not really interested in following orders – not because he feels particularly strongly one way or the other but because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. In his opinion, you’ll get scolded for not doing something, so it’s preferable to do it even if you don’t want to. But this speaks of stunningly weak character. Bruno has no real opinions and even less passion. His passivity alone, while certainly representative of many young French men at the time, almost sinks the entire film.

Luckily for him, he meets a Danish-born Russian girl named Veronika and can’t stop thinking about her. Here, the film industry makes the first of many obtrusive appearances. Godard pays tribute to the famous Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer by giving Veronika his surname. Later, while taking photos of her, Bruno expresses one of Godard’s most famous phrases of all time: “Photography is truth, and the cinema is the truth 24 times per second.” This saying may have some validity in certain contexts, but so many of Godard’s films would seem to remind us how artificial, constructed most films are, although the truth (of the diegesis? of the world outside the film?) can certainly be a malleable concept.

Unlike Breathless, where the focus was firmly on the romance between the two main characters, A Little Soldier has little to say about the relationship between Bruno and Veronika. However, it is clear that Bruno is besotted with her, and so is the camera. Although he doesn’t look it (the film is very stingy with its emotions), Bruno is in high spirits. “I wondered if I was happy to feel free or free to feel happy”, an improvement over Patricia in Breathless, who had a more melancholy demeanour (“I don’t know if I’m not happy because I’m not free. Or not free because I’m not happy.”)

As an aside, Godard and Karina got married the next year. Following her début here, she would go on to star in another six of his films.

The Little Soldier takes an inordinate amount of time to reel us in, but around the one-hour mark, we finally reach the most dramatic portion of the narrative. And it’s a doozy. After refusing to reveal the telephone number of a close associate, Bruno is kidnapped by members of Algeria’s pro-independence FLN, who handcuff him in a bathtub and gradually escalate the torture. First, it is psychological (they show him a photo of an acquaintance who had his throat slashed), and then it is very physical: They burn him with matches and hold him underwater before wrapping his head in a sheet and waterboarding him with a handheld showerhead.

But this is Godard, so nothing seems straightforward. When he is burnt, there is a cut to a woman in the next room who is reading Mao Zedong and Lenin so that the chairman’s big thoughts (“One spark can set an entire plain ablaze”) are put in relation to the events we witness. But before we can blame the communists for such inhumane punishment, we see the Arabs are reading Henri Alleg’s La Question, which had caused a scandal when it laid out in detail how the French tortured the Algerians. This was clearly the reason the French censors banned the film until after Algeria had gained independence. With both the far right and the far left implicated in war crimes here, seemingly no one leaves unscathed.

Despite this torture, which also involves live current, Bruno doesn’t crack. “I’m not opposed to telling you, but I don’t feel like it, so I won’t”, he tells them. But while some may find his commitment to apathy admirable, Veronika makes an astute (and prescient) observation. She tells him that France will ultimately lose its battle with the Algerians because it lacks the latter’s strong ideal (namely, having an independent nation).

The film’s slow pace, its protagonist’s inscrutability and the alienation induced by the steadfast lack of emotions all make for a frustrating viewing experience. A protracted dialogue towards the end is an absolute mess of topics and sounds like a checklist by the screenwriter-director instead of an organic dialogue to bring the film to a satisfying close. Although eminently watchable, it is a far cry from Godard’s début film and hints at problems to come in his later political works.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009)

André Crous

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s prelude to his award-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives offers very little but looks exquisite and does hint at a deeper meaning.

letter-uncle-boonmeeThailand/UK
3*

Director:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Screenwriter:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Director of Photography:
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Running time: 17 minutes

Original title: จดหมาย ถึงลุงบุญมี
Transliterated title: Cdh̄māy t̄hụng loong buỵ mī

For the sake of clarity, this review refers to Apichatpong Weerasethakul as the film’s “director” while using the term “filmmaker” to point to the anonymous diegetic individual/s who is/are allegedly making the film in front of our eyes.

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film A Letter to Uncle Boonmee – a trial run for what would eventually become his Palme d’Or–winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – eludes explanation to the uninitiated viewer and eschews plot in favour of feeling, which is always a gamble. However, while Weerasethakul does give us a bit more to chew on, it is only in the short film’s closing credits that we get a firm indication of the theme that we were witness to.

The images in A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, all linked to the small town of Nabua, are without a main character. Except for what appears to be an ape-like apparition lurking in the forest, there is only a single individual whose face we clearly see, and he never speaks nor does anything of note – in fact, he barely moves at all, and we certainly don’t know his name nor function in the story. But the director does give a subtle hint, as the man, like all of the handful of other characters we see in the film, wears a military uniform, a feature that receives some weight from a voice-over recalling how “soldiers once occupied this place” and that they “killed and tortured the villagers and forced them to flee to the jungle”. The many portraits we see on the walls inside the cottage presumably pictures of these villagers.

Furthermore, the closing credits are immediately preceded by a black screen carrying the following dedication, which briefly contextualises the action, albeit with extreme hesitation: “For Uncle Boonmee Srigulwong, who remained in northeastern Thailand for his past reincarnations, and for the residents of the village of Nabua who were forced to leave their homes.”

The film starts by repeating the words in the titular letter to the filmmaker’s uncle Boonmee. However, “filmmaker” is a very slippery term here, because neither of the two (different!) voices that speak the letter via voice-over belongs to Weerasethakul. The fact that the two voices audibly do not belong to the same individual is emblematic of the director’s approach to his story, which relishes the mixture of reality and fiction that is apparent at every turn.

In the short letter, reproduced below, the filmmaker talks about the film we are watching and how it likely fails to accurately depict the reality of his uncle’s living conditions. The making of the film is supported by off-screen dialogue later on about the wording of the letter itself, and we get a very modernist breaking of the fourth wall when we see someone swing the matte box away in order to change a lens and thus allow us to “see things more clearly”.

Uncle,
I have been here for a while. I want to see a movie about your life. So I proposed a project about your reincarnations. In my script, your house is in a longan farm surrounded by mountains. But here there are endless plains and rice fields.
Last week, I met a man I thought was your son. He works at the auto garage. But after talking to him, I thought he was your nephew because his father was a policeman who owned hundreds of cows. Judging from your book, I don’t think you owned a lot of cows. And you were a teacher, weren’t you? The man was old. He couldn’t remember his father’s name very well. Might have been Boonmee or Boonma. He said it was a long time ago.
Here in Nabua, there are several houses well-suited for this short film for which I got funding from England. I don’t know what your house looked like. I can’t use the one in my script since it is so different from the ones here. Maybe some parts of these houses would resemble yours.

These words play out on the soundtrack while we watch the camera gracefully track through the empty cottages, devoid of any life but vibrating with absence as we see room after room with bedding on the floor and portraits on the walls. There is a beautiful transition when the last tracking shot eventually opens onto a full-frame view of a golden sunset in the distance, beyond the lush greenery in the foreground. This moment is accompanied by a question as to whether Uncle Boonmee had a different view from his own home compared with the one we see in front of us.

The uncertainty, which extends to the identity of the subject himself, is clear as day in this letter. But it is interesting to note that even though the filmmaker, whoever he is, addresses this letter to someone who is likely already dead, and he is not sure that the final product will reflect his uncle’s reality, he is confident that his uncle has indeed had multiple lives thanks to reincarnation. Perhaps that explains the bizarre egg-shaped object in the garden, which puffs out thick plumes of smoke from inside itself throughout the film without any explanation.

The end of the film includes the abrupt and unexplained appearance of the hairy creature, which might also be the thing or person barely perceptible behind a thin pink curtain in the cottage on two occasions in the film. However, things move very quickly, and then, suddenly, the story is over, if it ever really started.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee feels disjointed, reaching for mostly uninformative bits of voice-over to compensate for – or perhaps to attempt to mask – the lack of substance. The visuals pique our interest, but the ending will leave most filmgoers (certainly those who haven’t seen the subsequent feature film) scratching their heads and ultimately sinks what comes before.

Unbroken (2014)

André Crous

Story of Louis Zamperini gets sumptuous treatment in a dramatically uneven retelling of his World War II ordeal.

unbrokenUSA
3*

Director:
Angelina Jolie
Screenwriters:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
Richard LaGravenese
William Nicholson
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 135 minutes

Life is what happens while some are just trying to survive. In Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s epic, ambitious but also commendably restrained retelling of the life of Louis Zamparini, the canvas is vast and so, too, is the range of pain inflicted on a young man during wartime. Jolie proves to be enormously talented as a storyteller, but unfortunately, the film is preoccupied with showing us that everybody has their reasons. In so doing, and by watering down the violence and bloodshed, it also commits the indefensible sin of downplaying the horrors of war.

Zamparini’s life was filled with good fortune but also a great deal of physical suffering at the hands of his captors, and the desire to survive obviously makes him a heroic character that deserves the big-screen treatment. The film plays it safe throughout, making sure to achieve nothing higher than a PG-13 rating by having children-friendly dialogue and restraining its depiction of violence; however, in its final moments it goes for broke by clearly drawing a visual parallel to Jesus Christ on the cross, and the absurdity of this comparison leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

British actor Jack O’Connell does a fine job in the lead, his clean-cut face serving him well as both the romantic representation of the wholesome American and ultimately as the object of sadistic affection of one of his detention camp guards in Japan, the feared Matsushiro Watanabe, better known as “The Bird” (Takamasa Ishihara).

The first half of Unbroken opens above the Pacific Ocean, aboard a B-52 bomber during the Second World War, where Zamperini is in charge of dropping the bombs at exactly the right moments. There are some hairy situations with the boys in the aircrew nearly losing their lives, and at the most dramatic point in the scene, the film cuts back to Zamperini’s early childhood in Torrance, California, with his Italian immigrant family. He was headed towards teenage delinquency when his older brother noticed how fast he can run, and suddenly, in a jump cut that comes as no surprise, we see him running as a teenager who has turned into an athlete of some renown.

After a few more scenes during the Second World War, we get yet another flashback to Zamperini’s early years, during which he sets off to compete in the Olympics in Berlin, Nazi Germany. This section of the film is magnificent, not only because of the overwhelming success of director of photography Roger Deakins in recreating the feeling of being inside the enormous arena but also because of the subtle but powerful moment that is so brief the viewer might miss it on the first viewing: When all the athletes gather inside the stadium and the cauldron is lit, Zamperini looks behind him and sees a Japanese athlete looking back at him. They smile at each other in sportsmanlike camaraderie, both elated to participate at the highest level of their game. But as we watch them, the dramatic irony is evident as the bloody United States–Japan war scenes from earlier in the film still ring in our heads.

Once we return to the battlefield, we stay there, and it is a never-ending parade of misery for the poor Zamperini, who spends weeks on the open sea before being taken captive and held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese until after the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The quick pace of the first half slows down significantly in the second, as the screenplay focuses intently on Zamperini’s ordeal in the detention camps and the unjust treatment he receives at the hands of the androgynous Watanabe, whose ambiguous behaviour towards the Olympic athlete makes him a menace from whom we can only expect the worst. Viewers familiar with Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence will notice familiar traits in the Japanese sergeant, but unfortunately, Ishihara doesn’t bring much to his performance except sexualised menace.

In the film’s final moments, however, Jolie reveals the story behind Watanabe, and while this explanation in no way excuses his actions, the glimpse into his own story does offer us a way of recognising the humanity in some of the most malicious people we have ever come across. But perhaps it is a good thing Jolie decided not to show Adolf Hitler at the Berlin Olympics.

“A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain”, Louis’s older brother tells him in one of the film’s many trailer-ready snippets of dialogue. “If you can take it, you can make it” is another oft-repeated saying. The inspirational power of these two expressions is lost because the moment we hear them, very early in the film, we know they will be important later on.

Given Deakins is the film’s director of photography (the visual stalwart of the films of the Coen Brothers, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay), it should come as no surprise that the images are gorgeous, as all the yellows and browns are tinged with gold, and the blues of the sky and the ocean hew between azure and a clear green-blue, respectively.

As Russell “Phil” Phillips, one of Zamperini’s crewmen aboard the bombardier, who endures much of the same hardship throughout the film, Domhnall Gleeson delivers a poignant, highly memorable performance. By contrast, Zamperini’s parents are caricatures of Italian-Americans, and his mother in particular, who never learns a word of English, is maddeningly simplistic.

With Unbroken, her second feature film as director, Jolie plays it too safe. Despite the publicity around the film that stresses the personal importance of the project to her, we feel little passion, and only a handful of scenes have the visceral quality we expect from a war film. The notable exceptions come during the characters’ near-death experiences, when the tension is handled admirably without sentimentality or exaggeration.

On the whole, however, the film is rather disappointing, with dialogue that is often stilted and situations that, while perhaps historically accurate, have little credibility when they are stacked together like here. It remains to be seen what becomes of Jolie as a director; as a storyteller, she is very capable, but as a filmmaker, she still has some way to go.