I Killed My Mother (2009)

Canada

4*
Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Director of Photography:
Stéphanie Weber-Biron
Running time: 96 minutes

Original title: J’ai tué ma mère

If Antoine Doinel was bipolar and gay, perhaps his story would have looked a little like that of Hubert Minel.

His French counterpart — and particularly his actions in Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) —  is indirectly referenced at many turns in the film, the interview with a psychologist in Truffaut’s film here becoming a self-shot black-and-white confessional that is repeated throughout.

Hubert is in his late teens and lives with his mother, whom he obviously despises. Over time, we get the impression this is not just everyday conflict between a teenager and his parent(s), but Hubert has other issues, some related to him not having told his mother he is gay, others perhaps having more to do with his mental health.

This début film of Dolan, who plays Hubert and was only 19 years old when he directed this self-written screenplay in the autumn of 2008, is as artistic as it is intense. The mother-son couple spend much of their time either engaged in passive-aggressive interaction or screaming at each other (sometimes Dolan starts speaking and doesn’t stop, while the camera stays on him for an extended period of time), but while the mother, played by television actress Anne Dorval, often tries to shrug her shoulders at her child’s behaviour, the petulant Hubert goes from one extreme to the other in hopes of manipulating his mother into letting him do his own thing.

That approach is not bearing much fruit, and one day at school when he receives an assignment to question his mother about the family’s financial situation, he tells the teacher his mother has died. This is a line taken directly from Truffaut’s directorial début, The 400 Blows, which was also about a single child, although Truffaut’s Antoine had a much friendlier school environment.

Dolan’s use of his camera is striking, although there are moments when it crosses the threshold of pretension, as in his character’s supposedly self-shot confessional tapes — which nonetheless are not entirely static, proving someone else was behind the lens — which have his face cut off at the nose, showing us only his bottom half of his face, sometimes for an extended period of time.

What is truly amazing to watch is the one scene of intimacy, which takes place one day when Hubert and his boyfriend Antonin go to paint Antonin’s mother’s office by dripping paint on the walls à la Jackson Pollock. Noir désir’s “Vive la Fête” pulses on the soundtrack while the scene itself is constructed in many parts that include close-ups of paint added in many colours onto the wall, dripping, running from top to bottom in various patterns, shots of Hubert and Antonin eagerly throwing paint on the wall, a beautiful close-up of the colourful cans of paint, shot vertically from above, and ultimately the action of the two boys making out and having sex, their arms stained in different colours, sometimes accelerated, sometimes slowed down.

 The jump cuts of the paint dripping down the walls are reminiscent of Clouzot’s Le mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso), in which the master’s artwork grows in front of our eyes from one separate artwork to the next. But Dolan, not interested in the final product, has his eye on the beautiful, artistic mobility of the paint in motion.

The transition between scenes is where the pretension sometimes sneaks in to fragment the film into more pieces than necessary, given the division established early on between scenes taking place in black-and-white and colour, respectively. Shots without any motion, a kind of photographic still life,  are inserted instead of a cut or a dissolve in order to add rhythm where none is actually needed, even though the exercise of create motion with static images is admittedly fundamental to the cinematic art form.

Dolan’s sense for visual creativity, thinking outside the box, is breathtaking, from adding text onscreen instead of cutting to a close-up or a voice-over, to using a deliberate continuity error (faux raccord) when he puts a cigarette in his mouth in his bedroom before we cut to his face and he is in black-and-white — confessing in the bathroom that the doesn’t love his mother the way a son should love his mother.

He also makes the world his own, not unlike Tarantino, by actually changing the opening quotation from the original. Even before the opening credits, we see a quotation from Guy de Maupassant, from his novel Fort comme la mort (Strong as Death), from which he excises Maupassant’s contention that love for one’s mother is as natural as it is to live, and he changes “on ne s’aperçoit de toute la profondeur des racines de cet amour qu’au moment de la séparation dernière” to “on ne prend conscience de toute la profondeur des racines de cet amour qu’au moment de la séparation dernière.” The change is subtle and doesn’t change the meaning to any degree, but it is interesting nonetheless and suggests that Dolan, while respecting the conventions (many other authors, from de Musset to Choderlos de Laclos, are cited throughout the film by means of their works), also allows himself to make them his own.

But while the relationship at first seems toxic, unsalvageable, we slowly recognise that Dolan focuses on some particularly hurtful moments for the mother, and treats them with the respect they deserve. What is equally interesting is the framing of the two individuals: Whether in the car or at the dinner table, they are very often framed in a two-shot, sitting next to each other instead of opposite each other. While this pretends they are on the same level, equally vulnerable to our gaze, it also shows they are not making eye contact and therefore communication is obstructed.

Hubert’s confessions about his feelings and his mother’s true feelings about her situation, whether silently whispered to herself or in a moment of unleashing pent-up anger of years over the phone, we get a good sense for both of these characters and learn to accept the difficulty they face getting to know and accept each other. In this way, Dolan shows an acute sense for showing us the many sides of his characters and giving human drama a human face, and makes his entry onto the world stage with elegance and insight.

No (2012)

Chile

4*
Director:
Pablo Larraín
Screenwriter:
Pedro Peirano
Director of Photography:
Sergio Armstrong

Running time: 118 minutes

“Pinochet could win this vote without cheating, if he wants — that’s what is so terrible”, says José Tomás Urrutia, a socialist who is spearheading the “No” campaign against Chile’s military dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988.

His line is the first of many details that push the young advertising executive René Saavedra (played by the enormously gifted Gael García Bernal, here taking on the Chilean accent with as much success as he had with Che’s Argentinean in The Motorcycle Diaries), who had no real desire for political involvement, especially in a system rigged against its own people.

No opens with an example of an ad Saavedra has conceived. It is lively and recalls many Coca-Cola commercials in its use of different genres all tied together with one song, but the postmodernism of the exercise frighten the clients, who can’t understand why there is miming in the commercial.

The scene has two important reasons for being included in the film. Firstly, it bookends the production by anticipating an almost identical scene at the end, in which it is made clear what change has occurred in the minds of Chileans in such a short period of time, thanks to Saavedra’s eventual participation in the “No” campaign. Secondly, the more immediate reason is the name of the product: a soft drink called “Free”.

This kind of advertising has obviously affected Saavedra’s way of thinking, and he proclaims it is “in line with the current social context”. Whether or not that is true, it certainly influenced the “No” campaign, and the result is a spot full of feeling, although the people in the advertisement are nameless and without identity, save for being Chileans, or rather virtual Chileans inhabiting a better future. The resulting video, naïvely optimistic but brimming with energy, accompanied by the campaign song “¡ Chile, la alegría ya viene !” (Chile, happiness is coming!), can be viewed on YouTube. 

Each campaign has 15 minutes on television to make its pitch to Chileans, but the “No” organizers have to contend with an interesting dilemma: They want their commercial to be about a better, brighter future full of people smiling and not fearing the regime in power (which, by the way, uses fear in its own ad campaign), but they want to convey this by using the negative “no”. The way they choose to attack this problem is to view the no as the opposite of complicity, in other words a deliberate decision to break with the past (and the present).

This break with the past is very well depicted by the film’s fragmented visuals. Often, scenes would start in one location (usually inside) before suddenly continuing in another (usually outside). At first, this seems like an odd directorial decision, as a question may be asked in one place and answered in another, but the many lens flares caused by the sunshine outside do suggest brightness ready to envelop our protagonists.

The film itself was also shot on U-matic film stock, which reminds us of the small budget the characters’ real-life counterparts were working with but also allows the seamless integration of archive footage, especially of the mass protests and the government’s ruthless response. The richest colours are onscreen when the commercial is aired, and although it makes a stunning contrast with the relatively “realistic”, drab colours of the rest of the film, it is not of a different world, just one that is hyperreal, its palette boosted and the action either sped up or slowed down according to the need for emphasis. The success of the film’s own combination of reality vs. idealism in its visuals mirror the tension the “No” campaign has to mitigate.

They do this by their choice of an idealistic symbol for their effort to fight a very real threat: They choose a rainbow. Saavedra urges his fellow organisers to use happiness instead of fear or hate, although the facts are often presented in smaller spots, and with great effectiveness on the viewers, especially those who are angry at the government and don’t want the happiness to silence or ignore the pain.

The “No” campaign doesn’t really have a leader, although the leader of the Christian Democrats, Patricio Aylwin, who would eventually replace Pinochet as president, does appear from time and time. And it is important to notice that these important political figures, central to Chilean life, are not played by actors but instead presented by means of footage recorded at the time, like George Clooney did with Joe McCarthy in Good Night, and Good Luck.

The future is constantly in our heads, because Saavedra has a young son, Simón, on whose life the imminent referendum will have a very visible impact. In one very powerful shot, Saavedra and Simón walk hand-in-hand down the road, our view of them only slightly obstructed by blurred figures in the foreground. We realise these are riot police, but we don’t see them until a wider shot, quite unnecessary, showing them lined up on one side of the street. 

The single take in the first 15 minutes of Billy Elliot, in which a conversation between a young boy and girl takes place while the girl walks past riot police in Newcastle, seemingly oblivious to their presence as she drags a stick across their shields, was done much better, as it made a much bigger impact because it was so much simpler.

No is about small moments almost hidden in everyday life. We realise the importance of events in shaping the characters’ view of their situation without the film dwelling on any of it. When Saavedra’s middle-aged housekeeper, Carmen, who had considered her life to be quite good and was going to vote “Yes” in the referendum, is confronted by police late at night who call her a “bitch”, the film doesn’t go in for a close-up, it doesn’t stretch the moment, and it doesn’t refer to it again, but we know this has probably changed her relationship to the government.

In another very brief moment, the “No” logo can be seen scraped out on the outside of a house, and we realise the movement is quietly gaining momentum, and yet our focus could or should be on the characters in the shot. Director Pablo Larraín creates a world that doesn’t need us to stop and think; his film creates a world rich with detail and behavior, and asks us to put some of the pieces together ourselves and provide a more engaging experience of the material.

Bernal’s emotional range is noteworthy; in particular, by the end of the film, he has gone through threats, betrayal, physical violence and elation, and his face can change from anxious to childlike glee in a second. And the film uses him in this historical setting very well to highlight the human dimension of the struggle for freedom combined with a display of the power of people, not to change things, but to make more people change, until the regime crumbles from the inside.

The Watch (2008)

Argentina

3.5*
Director:
Marco Berger
Screenwriter:
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomás Pérez Silva

Running time: 14 minutes

Original title: El reloj

Argentinian director Marco Berger’s very first short film has so much ambiguous sexual tension it is surprising the film wasn’t remade and included in the anthology film in which he participated with fellow countryman Marcelo Mónaco, Sexual Tension: Volatile.

Two teenagers meet on a curb at sunset, waiting for a bus that never comes. It’s a wonderful image that sums up the rest of the film very well. The one, Juan Pablo, is talkative and very sure of himself, looking straight at the other, so much so he makes the already-shy boy even more nervous. Juan Pablo says he’s sure they know each other from school, but they don’t. Then he says the other boy is called Maxi, but he’s not. He’s Javier.

In a flashback it is revealed they went on a double date once, but only for the sake of their former girlfriends, and they didn’t really talk to each other.

Juan Pablo invites Javier home, where Javier meets Juan Pablo’s cousin (this moment is repeated in Berger’s own El Primo episode in Sexual Tension: Volatile, in a way that shows how much the director’s sense for visual tension has developed in four years). The boys watch television before going to bed, where they lie next to each other in their underwear without doing anything.

In the end, there is no big spark or moment of realisation, but there are short glances, and it seems obvious the boys are curious, even if not necessarily in each other.

Although the cast is small, the action minimal and the locations few, the film is a treat, as we get suggestions of depth in these characters whose intentions are elusive without they themselves being distant or unreadable. The chatty Juan Pablo, in particular, played by Nahuel Viale,  is a very interesting figure as he tries his best to attract the handsome but timid Javier without really knowing what all of this is leading to. Every time he suggests they do something (go home with him, have something to drink, go to bed), Javier simply goes along. That says as much about Javier’s intentions or curiosities as it does about Juan Pablo’s interest.

The short interaction has no real meat to it, and the appearance of Juan Pablo’s mother feels out of place because of it is so brief, but the film doesn’t leave us unsatisfied. It may not be transparent, and even the meaning of its title is not particularly self-evident (nor is that of the hot-air balloon in the opening shot), but the hesitation of making a fantasy a reality and the implicit but silent acquiescence that is visible to the viewer but not so obvious to the characters themselves speak to a very human quality that is highly commendable; it also informs nearly all of Berger’s subsequent films.

Sexual Tension: Volatile

Argentina

2.5*
Directors:
Marcelo Mónaco
Marco Berger
Screenwriters:
Marcelo Mónaco
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomás Pérez Silva

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title:
Tensión sexual, Volumen 1: Volátil 

Didier Costet, who co-produced Beauty, a 2011 film in which a middle-aged man from rural South Africa stalks one of his daughter’s male friends, which was well-received in the country, is also the production muscle behind this anthology of short films about gay attraction. Only two directors took part in this project, which accounts for the generally homogeneous tone, one that is usually missing from anthology films with a larger variety of voices and visions.

The two directors are Marcelo Mónaco, who has helmed raunchy films from the sexually explicit Porno de autor to the gay porn film Cum-eating Rancheros; and the more commercially oriented Marco Berger, whose films, like Ausente, have dealt much more with tension and lust than sexual release.

While Berger has stated in the past that he is often conscious of making gay films for a straight audience, Sexual Tension: Volatile is very clearly targeted at a gay audience, as the tension is not really between the characters but rather from the side of the viewer, who wonders whether there will be a spark between two characters, even when such a turn of events would be narratively implausible.

The film consists of six short films:

Ari, by Mónaco
El Primo (The Cousin), by Berger
El Otro (The Other), by Mónaco
Los Brazos Rotos (Broken Arms), by Berger
Amor (Love), by Mónaco
Entrenamiento (Workout), by Berger

Each is around 15 minutes in length, and the film ends on a very playful note, just as the tension is about to be broken.

The opening short is very silly, with a young twink who goes to get his first tattoo falling in lust with tattoo artist Ari and fantasising about him. The tattoo parlour looks like little more than an empty studio, and the fantasies are nothing to get excited about.

It is only by the time of Berger’s short film, El Primo, that we can sense it might be worth our time to watch the entire compilation; in fact, this may be the best film of the entire bunch, although Mónaco’s Amor comes a close second . The object of affection is a boy who never speaks (something that can work wonders in a film of this length), but whose crotch outline seems to be everywhere the lustful visitor (Javier De Pietro, who has matured physically and professionally since his stint in Berger’s Ausente) casts his eyes. Berger’s films are often interested in crotch outlines — in swim trunks (“Platero” in another anthology film, Cinco; and Ausente) or in underwear (El reloj; Plan B) — and have become a trope in his canon. De Pietro, who sometimes pushes his glasses back up his nose to see better, conveys some nervous energy, and in this case his expressionless face helps the film a great deal by allowing him to act as a screen for our projection of anxiety.

El Otro demonstrates that Mónaco can produce some gorgeous moments, as two best friends Kevin and Tony talk about their sexual escapades. Kevin is complaining that he isn’t getting sex from his current girlfriend, but Tony, having just seen what a big member his friend is sporting, wants to help him out by showing him positions and suggesting phrases to help things along. The catch is, Kevin has to try it on Tony. The actions are not always credible, neither is the blocking, but there are two long takes, both two-shots, that look beautiful and show directorial promise, even though the camera more often objectifies the two boys completely by focusing on their crotches throughout.

Los Brazos Rotos is a bizarre inclusion and seems too artistic even for a gay audience. There is no dialogue, although only the arms of the main character are (more or less) supposed to be broken, and not the soundtrack. Berger shows his cinematographic range, as he did in El Primo, by playing more with shadows and darkness than co-director Mónaco; however, shots like one in the bathroom, which shows a man being washed by his male nurse while we look at it in a mirror, with a bottle of shampoo strategically placed to obscure our view of his private parts, seems almost amateurishly titillating. We only realise the intimacy of the situation afterwards, when the nurse does, but while it is going on, you may just want to hit the fast-forward button.

Amor certainly has the best-looking pair in the entire film. On a bed and breakfast in the countryside, a youthful man and girlfriend are escaping dreary city life by sleeping in late. When she is on the phone to her mother, she asks the manager of the place to wake up her sleepy boyfriend, but in the bedroom the two accidentally touch each other, without being repulsed by it. It is a beautiful, innocent moment that creates tension and questions, none of which is properly resolved, but these issues don’t seem at all misplaced.

Berger’s final film, Entrenamiento, sees two men very interested in building muscle spend all their time together. At first, we may think they are boyfriends, but they soon start sexting with girls who demand to see more and more skin. When they take pictures of each other, from up close, we question their sexuality even more. However, as in all the other films, no one is ever shown to be hard, so perhaps the situations are as sexless as they seem and it is only the viewer whose tension the title refers to.

This is the first volume in what is supposed to be a series, and a second collection of shorts, titled “Violetas”, about attraction between women, was released early in 2013. What the title’s “volatile” means in this case is wholly unclear. All the crotch shots are probably meant to entice us, but that would make this a kind of porn, without the sex, and that’s not really any fun, is it?

Games of Love and Chance (2003)

France

4.5*
Director:
Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenwriter:
Ghalia Lacroix
Director of Photography:
Lubomir Bakchev

Running time: 119 minutes

Original title: L‘esquive

Taking a place among the most moving and insightful films about the lower-income suburbs, known as la banlieue, that surround the French capital, together with Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film la Haine and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs from 2008, this is a remarkable film shot on a very small budget with few if any professional actors.

Thematically close to Games of Love and Chance, the three-act play by Marivaux that is explicitly cited at many turns in the film, the story is set among a group of teenagers who come face to face with very real emotions as friendships are tested and they deal with the problems that separate them from the innocence of childhood. 

Abdelkrim (“Krimo”) is a quiet boy around 15 years old. His father is in prison, and he lives alone in a small apartment with his mother. In one of the first scenes of the film, his girlfriend Magali breaks up with him because she says he isn’t paying enough attention to her. Not one with words, Krimo stays mute in the face of this rejection, and focuses on one of his longtime friends instead: Lydia, who has the starring role in a school production of Marivaux’s play.

Lydia, played by Sara Forestier, is a girl who has the gift for the gab, and the talented cast, without whom this project would have been impossible, engage in a number of lengthy verbal exchanges that will test the skills of even the most fluent of French speakers. With a rapid-fire delivery of combinations of swear words and verlan (the “inverted” speech of the suburbs) that is as colourful and creative as it is offensive to whomever it is directed at, the aggressive interactions keep our exchange by virtue of the passion of the actors and actresses alone.

Lydia is one who often engages in this kind of behaviour, and an early scene between her and her good friend Frida, who feels threatened by Krimo’s presence at an outdoor but private rehearsal of the play, is the first of many similar scenes that nonetheless never lose their tension. We keep wondering whether acting out with words will lead to more violent reactions.

Although not single takes, the takes in these scenes are sometimes shot in a way that the camera has to constantly pan between two faces, each taking up the whole screen in close-up, which emphasises the speakers’ importance and fully directs our attention towards the particular speaker instead of the (temporarily) silent party.

The audience cannot escape these shouting matches, and although we get a false sense of security sometimes that things won’t get worse than words, the threat of violence and the assumption of authority that goes along with it sometimes pops up to ensure some stomach-churning moments — including one that involves the police patrolling the low-income suburbs constantly on the lookout for trouble they assume to be ubiquitous. While la Haine treated the threat of the police much more aggressively, Games of Love and Chance uses it with great success to underline the potential for one’s life to suddenly be turned upside down, simply because of living in one of these neighbourhoods.

Although there is little development in Krimo’s character (as opposed to the crises faced by Lydia and Frida — of whom the latter arguably has the hardest job confronting not only a threat on her life, but also theft, as well as some personal issues she has to resolve), we are glued to him perhaps because he says so little yet is not inscrutable. As Krimo, Osman Elkharraz delivers a wonderful performance that, like his interpretation of the character of Arlequin, which he plays when he decides to get closer to Lydia, says too little to be fully engaging, and never really seems to enjoy his life or the emotions that go along with being alive.

The film is edited together so there is no padding: Everything that happens is necessary and we get no dead space in between the important points.

A work of immense interest for anyone who wishes to see the Parisian suburbs as a vibrant hub of emotions rather than simply la banlieue, Games of Love and Chance benefits from the talented cast, including theatre actress Carole Franck as the teacher who tries her best to get Krimo to crawl out of his shell, express his emotions and enjoy the feeling of being in love. The language of the characters is one of the most interesting and impressive aspects of the production, as it becomes a part of the very fabric of the film. But while it admirably refuses to develop in the same way a film with a bigger budget would, it doesn’t thoroughly take advantage of some themes it raises through its intertextual use of Marivaux’s play either.

*The original title, l’Esquive, refers to a line in the play and translates as the action of shying away from something, or dodging it, instead of submitting to it. The connection with the material should be obvious.

The Miracle Worker (2012)

South Africa

3.5*
Director:
Katinka Heyns
Screenwriter:
Chris Barnard
Director of Photography:
Koos Roets

Running time: 121 minutes

Original title: Die Wonderwerker

Feelings that remain unspoken can turn into a festering mess. The Miracle Worker, about a peculiar man who turns up on a farm in the north-eastern part of South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, at that time still a British colony, shows how tension can become a fissure when even the gentlest bit of pressure is applied.

The farm is “Rietfontein”, the year 1908, and acclaimed Afrikaans poet Eugène Marais pulls up at the front door of the farmhouse, out of breath and very thirsty, his piercing grey-blue eyes hauntingly asking the woman of the house, Tamaria (or often just Maria) van Rooyen for some water. As usual, she is a little nosy, but when he insists, she turns into a lovely hostess, running to get the water herself and offering him a bed to sweat out what he says is malaria. In fact, it is not malaria, and he ultimately stays much longer than just the night.

Maria’s husband, Gys, is the head of the household by virtue of his gender, but it is clear from the start that Maria runs everything in the house and even admits that Gys doesn’t do anything without her say-so. However, she is far from being in control, and while she has issues of her own, she also turns a blind eye to her son Adriaan’s continual sexual harassment of their adopted 19-year-old Jane. When Gys tells her Adriaan is too horny, she retorts with, “At least he has some balls.”

In that single brief exchange a great deal of character is revealed, as Maria not only indicates that Gys should pay more attention to her, but also that her own desire for affection has blinded her to the suffering inflicted on a girl in her care, under her roof, by her own son.

Maria is by far the most interesting character in the film, despite its focus purportedly being elsewhere: The title refers to the wily Marais, whose presence on the farm leads to all kinds of bizarre encounters with wildlife. Maria is played with grace and determination by actress Elize Cawood, who seems to simply slide into the role, her dialogue never coming across as contrived or affected. The same can be said of Marius Weyers, who plays Gys, although the character is unfortunately much less complex. As a matter of interest, I’ll note that Cawood and Weyers — well-known figures in the South African film and television industry for more than three decades — also appeared as husband and wife in The Fourth Reich.

The Miracle Worker is different from the Ross Devenish’s 1977 film The Guest, a film whose scarce availability stands in direct contrast to its acclaim as perhaps one of the best South African films ever made, in that the struggle with addiction — frighteningly, graphically obvious in the latter — is all but absent from Heyns’s film. While Marais’ addiction with morphine is an important thread in the plot, Heyns doesn’t show us how the poet managed to cope with a dwindling number of morphine pills, rationed out by Maria, and therefore the title character remains an enigma throughout, perhaps making him more iconic but certainly making him less accessible.

And yet, there are tiny, almost transient, hints that he has had pain in the past he would like to forget. Dawid Minnaar, who plays Marais, communicates this deep pain, or loss, by not answering certain questions posed by the curious Van Rooyens while remaining almost entirely transparent about everything else except the drugs. The psychology of the characters is mostly opaque, and we don’t learn until very late in the film what is going on inside the heads of Maria and Marais. While they eventually say what we have been thinking all along, Maria’s revelation in particular in poignant and is made by an actress who has to bare her soul and admit she has aged. It provides for a stunning moment that is perhaps one of the strongest in Cawood’s entire career.

This is the first film by director Katinka Heyns since Paljas, released in 1998. She has directed a number of television episodes since then, and unfortunately it would seem that the television style has taken over completely, as demonstrated by the almost exclusive use of medium shots and close-ups to tell the story. Never a particularly visual director, her stories have usually benefited from rich landscapes, from the forests of the southern Cape in Fiela se Kind to an enormous sand dune in Die Storie van Klara Viljee to the arrival of a circus in a small railway town in the heart of the arid Karoo region of South Africa in Paljas. 

The Miracle Worker does little to draw attention to the vast landscape of the Bosveld that surrounds the farm, and it is equally unwilling to use the camera in a way that either focuses or captures our attention. The cinematography is boring and forgettable, with the one exception of a scene of hypnosis, in which a character dances with a broom, that is shot as a reverse Steadicam shot in a single take and stands out from the rest of the film, though it is far from being especially creative.

The film’s bookend structure with scenes in Pretoria in 1932 doesn’t work, not only because we know in the opening scenes that, whatever happens, Marais will survive his ordeal on the farm and eventually meet up with the young Jane again in the future, but because it forces a very unnecessarily descriptive voice-over onto the viewer throughout the film, because the story is not told in the present but as something that happened in the past.

However, the relationship between the 19-year-old Jane and the nearly 40-year-old Marais is beautifully portrayed as something Marais himself acknowledges as a confused struggle to deal with the past, and it is a struggle with which he knows he never copes particularly successfully. The emotional pieces of the puzzle start to fit together by the end of the film, though it is unfortunate that Adriaan is never really examined and comes across as a simpleton, a simplification rejected by his curious eyes.

Marais is charming and knowledgeable, and his interactions with baboons provide the viewer with a greater appreciation of these primates. However, despite the acting talent on display, the film never truly overcomes Heyns’ inability to tell a story with any kind of cinematic flair; going by the visuals, it sometimes seems like she is bored with the material. That is a terrible shame.  As with the silence of the characters, her voice is cold and distant, but luckily the landscapes in the background, the ones she tries to keep out of the frame, make their way into the spirit of the film and end up enriching our experience.

Sexmission (1984)

Poland

4*
Director:
Juliusz Machulski
Screenwriters:
Juliusz Machulski
Jolanta Hartwig
Pavel Hajný
Director of Photography:
Jerzy Łukaszewicz

Original title: Seksmisja

Running time: 116 minutes

This Polish film from the early 1980s is at times hilarious and very often terribly kitsch but can also be rather uncomfortable given the basic plot of a chauvinist protagonist facing off against feminism run wild in 2044.

Opening in 1991 with the arrival of a doctor whose one hand is limp and covered by a glove (the Dr. Strangelove reference cannot be by accident), named Dr. Kuppelweiser, it is said that cryogenesis has developed to a point where an experiment is feasible. Two men, the overweight and bombastic Maksymilian and the slim, more bookish Albert, leave their loved ones behind in the name of science and are scheduled to return three years later.

But plans don’t always work out the way we expect them to, and they wake up in 2044 in a world without any men — a “lesbian utopia” where reproduction is accomplished through asexual parthenogenesis, and any deviations (i.e. men) from the ideal are scheduled for naturalization, through which they will become female.

Maksymilian and Albert are certainly not in the mood to have their sex changed, and Maksymilian start hatching a plan to seduce the female population en masse. His thinking, rarely questioned by the filmmaker, is that women need men and men need women. And yet, there is a revolutionary underground force of women who like to experiment with each other (a scene that exhilarates the two men) and many of the powerful women give off lesbian vibes.

But leaving director Machulski’s confused contemplation of gender equality aside for a moment, it is important to note the film as a slightly subversive record of its time. While never as overtly satirical as Stanisław Bareja’s Miś, another Polish classic from 1981, there are moments when we can see Machulski making light of the political situation in Poland in the 1980s while at the same time underlining its seriousness.

An obvious example is Maksymilian’s realisation that, by sleeping for 53 years, he missed out completely on getting his long-awaited flat from the government in 1998. While it may not seem like such a big deal, since he was frozen in 1991, the film itself was released in 1984, and many Polish viewers would have viewed the year 1998 in that context, in other words a wait of 14 years.

But another example is more opaque, as it is tied to the film’s very foundation. It provides a moment reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village when, towards the end, we discover that things on Earth are not really quite as bad as the all-female population have led themselves to believe, and in fact the major players are only pretending to safeguard lower-ranking members in order to maintain control. This power they exert in order not to lose control is actually very easily comparable to the regime of the Communist Party of the time, and the lies that are told about life outside the confines of their bubble can be equated to lies (or exaggerations) told about the West.

In these final scenes, a revelation is also made about the existence of a cross-dresser that narrowly escapes labelling as transgenderphobic. Jerzy Stuhr, who plays the slightly heavy-set Maksymilian, at one point goes on a kissing rampage in the all-female world, which causes many women to pass out. This reaction is for comical effect, but also creates the impression that women and men necessarily need each other for sexual satisfaction. And when the one woman is revealed to be a man, the psychological effect of pretending to be something you are not is not addressed at all; instead, there is a substantial assumption that things will immediately go back to normal and he will simply “be a man”.

Sexmission is more about comedy that about filmmaking. The images are often a mess, following no particular point of view or sequence, and in on particular shot the focus is racked completely out of sync with the actions it seeks to highlight. The story is lighthearted and easy to enjoy, and the young blond girl who is the principal guardian of Maksymilian and Albert in the future, Lamia Reno, is particularly effective as a strong woman whose sexuality makes her more amenable to sexual persuasion. Students of feminism will have a field day tearing the film apart, and for most 21st-century viewers the film will also provide its share of uncomfortable moments, though Machulski is not entirely indifferent to man’s negative influence on the world, as is made clear when we learn wars and venereal diseases are a thing of the past thanks to the extinction of man.

Polytechnique (2009)

Canada

4.5*
Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter:
Jacques Davidts
Director of Photography:
Pierre Gill

Running time: 77 minutes

It would be inappropriate to call a film about a mass shooting “lyrical”, but Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique comes as close as possible to such a description without undercutting the horror and the human impact of the events it depicts.

A recreation of the 1989 shooting at the Montréal Polytechnique university that left 14 students dead, another 14 injured, and a dead gunman, the film is shot in black and white and is intimate in its portrayal of three individuals deeply affected by the events.

At first, it’s unclear what the filmmaker’s approach is to the telling of his story. The opening scene shows a very immediately recognisable university environment: the copy room, where students are making photocopies of notes. Suddenly, piercing shots ring out from a hunting rifle and the two girls in the foreground fall to the floor, before the rest of the students in the room realise what has happened and start to panic.

We then cut to that same morning, in the apartment of the killer, where he is packing up his gun and bullets. He is behaving lifelessly, stares off into space and speaks but one word to his housemate. On the voiceover, we hear him speak his suicide note, in which he rants about women and the rights they demand and how they should be at home rather than stealing jobs that belong to men.

We don’t get a clear sense of this man, who doesn’t have a name in the film but whose real-life counterpart was Marc Lépine. But as the film plays out, it becomes clear how cleverly it was put together, as the film’s “present” (the shooting) seeps into its past and its future, not firmly connecting the threads but leaving us with a sense of coherence that is at once satisfactory and poignant.

There are many brief instances of the killer shooting the girls on campus, but there are even more moments of silence, almost never for the sake of tension (with the exception of the moment when the killer waits, rifle in hand, outside the first classroom where the victims would be his first), but because it is in tune with our minds going blank at the shock of the events unfolding before our eyes. When there is chaos, during a shooting or when a student named Jean-François rushes to inform security of the massacre, we are in the moment, but every second of silence makes us acutely aware of the spectre of death that hangs over this institution of higher learning on that snowy day in early December.

The killer’s actions are treated mostly as senseless, and his suicide note is the only insight we get into his act and his personality. Rather than focus on the events that brought him to this point, as done by the best film ever about a school shooting, the Estonian Klass, this film looks at two characters — one boy, Jean-François, and one girl, Valérie, both engineering students — whose lives changed forever on that day. Polytechnique is much more similar to Elephant, although Gus van Sant’s film spends more time with the killers, hinting at their reasons for feeling excluded by their peers; on the other hand, Villeneuve directs with a firm hand that produces a stylish work of art that is intellectually and emotionally mature. Jean-François’s consideration of Picasso’s Guernica in the copy room is proof of Villeneuve’s mastery of the medium of film, as this moment has nothing exaggerated or self-conscious about it.

But then, Villeneuve is one of Canada’s best directors. In his short film Next Floor, a group of people eat an impossibly rich meal until they are so heavy that the floor gives way and they fall onto the floor below, only to continue eating until the floor crumbles and they fall onto the next one. It is a surreal, heavily metaphoric work that is incredibly stylish and is both ominous and funny, using only visuals and minute audio cues. 

And in the widely acclaimed Incendies, his characters travel back to the country their mother came from — Lebanon — to eventually uncover a terrible tragedy that haunts them and us right until the very end.

Polytechnique has numerous seemingly insignificant moments that are later revealed from a different angle to give emotional resonance to the journey of the characters, especially Jean-François, and they are all well spaced out and never feel rushed or contrived. At key moments, Villeneuve cuts away from the massacre to show us an empty apartment, or a snow-covered landscape that break the tension but in retrospect add a great deal of depth to the events in the present.

The killings are senseless to those who have to live with the consequences of such a tragedy, and this message is the most important reference point for the viewer of this remarkable film.

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

Mexico

3.5*
Director:
Luis Buñuel
Screenwriter:
Luis Buñuel
Director of Photography:
Gabriel Figueroa
Running time: 88 minutes

Original title: El ángel exterminador

The Exterminating Angel demonstrates how elusive explanations for human behaviour can be, and while we can often feel confident that rationalisation will eventually win out, or that time will tell why people behave the way they do, it’s not quite as simple as that. It is true that people have their reasons, but these reasons may be obscured by so many other factors that an explanation, though it may seem just beyond our reach, could in fact be forever out of reach.

The film is surreal, which means the pieces don’t quite fit together unless you allow for the loose traits of a dream. However, unlike more avant-garde works such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, this film by Luis Buñuel has a general plot outline that can very easily be summarised.

At the house of a rich couple, their servants all decide to leave one night just as a whole host of guests arrive for a dinner party. They do so with their own very obviously made-up reasons, but it’s not made clear what their real intentions are. Only the majordomo remains. At the end of the evening, after many backstabbing bits of gossip between them, some drinks and a piece played on the piano, the guests prepare to leave, but then they realise they cannot bring themselves to do so.

They end up spending many days in the house, mostly inside one room, where their once mannered behaviour lapses and they descend to a level of basic needs and uncivilised outbursts, though the actual occurrence of some incidents is brought into question by the presentation of the material in the film.

The first shot of the film shows the name of the street on which this mansion is situated: Calle de la providencia (Providence Street). And the last shot in the film is of the exterior of a cathedral. The role of religion in the film is very oblique , although the title obviously has that connotation. The most straightforward connecting tissue would be the issue of free will and predestination, but Buñuel doesn’t make these themes explicit in any real way.

The easiest solution to the film lies in its inception. Having just left Spain after the controversy sparked by his Viridiana, and suffering under the rule of General Franco, Buñuel returned to Mexico to make this film, and it presents no obstacle to being interpreted as a demonstration of what happens to a group of people cut off from the rest of civilisation, left to fend for themselves in a small space and unable to leave.

The metaphor is problematic, especially because so many of the possible escape routes we think of never get tested, or the film discards them as soon as they are raised, for the example the possibility of pushing someone across the invisible but apparently insurmountable threshold inside the house.

“Life is amusing… and strange,” says one guest shortly after she realises she will be stuck against her will. At first, it seems it is the good manners of the guests that imprison them, as they are all too embarrassed to admit they want to leave, and simultaneously the hosts feel they cannot ask their guests to leave. But this explanation also unravels somewhat once the guests make it clear they truly want to go home. Unfortunately, the situation is summed up very explicitly in a laughable bit of dialogue by the character of the doctor, when he states that “no matter how hard we try, we cannot leave this room.”

One man dies, and two people commit suicide, and while the bodies rot and the stench drifts into the room, people are literally passing out from hunger and thirst. However, whenever they do get a bite to eat or something to drink, the small respite seems to prolong their stay even more – another potentially political statement.

The film isn’t always entertaining, as it has too many different characters who are never properly introduced or distinguished from one another, and the acting isn’t great either, but Buñuel’s ellipses between reality and dream are exceedingly well executed and often keep us in suspense as to the true events.

The Exterminating Angel contains numerous bizarre moments involving animals – among them a bear and a flock of sheep roaming around the mansion, and a bird in someone’s purse – that are left unexplained but never fail to pique or renew our interest in the events on-screen.

As social commentary, the film is biting, and its political slant is also difficult to miss. However, by refusing to explain why certain solutions are not available to his characters, Buñuel often doesn’t answer our questions and it is tough to read the film as a serious work of art. Dialogue scenes are too short and fragmented, and characters who start an important conversation or make a valid point are often interrupted and we are left hanging.

With a very sharp outline, the film’s central premise is difficult to forget, and while the film has its ambiguous moments, most of the plot is presented as if the actions of the characters were taking place according to the physical rules of nature. Determined filmgoers will scratch their heads about many of the events, and Buñuel likes to tease the viewer, as in the scene with a young boy who makes it onto the house’s grounds before, inexplicably, backing away. But all too often, explanations remain out of reach, and parts of the film cannot satisfy the viewer who demands some kind of cause and effect.

8½ (1963)

Italy
5*
Director:
Federico Fellini
Screenwriters:
Federico Fellini
Tullio Pinelli
Ennio Flaiano
Brunello Rondi
Director of Photography:
Gianni Di Venanzo

Running time: 137 minutes

Original title: Otto e mezzo

The splendour of Fellini’s eighth and a halfth film lies in its ability to entertain us so effortlessly while being simultaneously incessantly creative, weaving together dream, fantasy, recollection and present reality, and commenting on the struggles of an artist while doing all of the above completely coherently.

After all these years, just like Citizen Kane, the film it is often compared to, despite the two being very different in many ways, it is still a gorgeous piece of work that, mostly thanks to the music of Nino Rota, glues your eyes to the screen as it is never quite obvious what might follow next. It is funny and sad and sexy and naughty and breathtaking, and there is nothing out there quite like it. This was made before postmodern cinema was à la mode and it is all the better for it, as the focus is not on connected texts in film or literature; instead, the film looks inward, at its main character, a director named Guido Anselmi, played by Marcello Mastroianni, and by extension at Fellini, who treats the ennui of his character with droll asides and yet evokes real empathy in the viewer.

We first meet Guido in a dream immediately after the opening credits. He is sitting in a car in a traffic jam in Rome and tries to escape from his vehicle, but can’t. Everyone around him is staring at him in stony silence while his deep breathing is become more and more pronounced, anxious. In one car, a man is stroking the exposed arm of a voluptuous woman as she purrs. Suddenly, Guido is seen flying out of the car, along the cars stuck in traffic. He flies up towards the clouds, past an unfinished construction that we would later learn is part of the set for his film, before he is pulled down by a piece of rope, or string, attached to his leg, and falls into the sea.

There is much to analyse here, from the setting of the beach and the excited woman in the car to the smoke that fills his car as he tries to escape and all the people passively looking at him in silence. But it is the images themselves that catch our attention. The stark black and white and the surreal visual of Guido flying along the road, into the sky, before crashing down into the sea when someone pulls the rope and another commands it by reading from a screenplay, “Down, for good!” suggest Icarus but also the fragility of his own position, a prisoner of strangers’ looks.

The first time we see Guido’s face in close-up, he is looking in a mirror. Perhaps sooner than us, he realises he has to face himself, and much of the film will be devoted to this enterprise, and although the things he finds are not discoveries and don’t necessarily lead to some kind of catharsis, it helps the viewer accept the final moments of the film, one that does not offer closure but that simply extends the merry-go-round of Guido’s life one has been presented all through the film.

Guido has checked into a spa to relax and work in peace on his latest screenplay, but he is at his wits’ end, and very playfully, but intentionally ominously, we share his point of view when he arrives outside, people greeting him with a nod of the head and a smiling, all the while looking straight into the camera, and Rota’s rendition of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries takes over the soundtrack.

The only bit of self-reference that comes into play is from the mouth of Carini Daumier, the script consultant who very likely represents the worst of the worst self-involved and terribly opinionated film critics out there, who discusses Guido’s screenplay with him and tells him bluntly:

You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. … That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director trying to do?

These words refer, of course, to the film itself, and while Guido plays the main part in the flashbacks of Fellini’s film, it might not be Guido but rather the main character in Guido’s own film, and in this way the two overlap significantly, though it is irrelevant to our entertainment what scenes belongs to which film. In the final scene, for example, a character from Guido’s childhood, Saraghina, appears, though this scene is suddenly set in the present, and she hasn’t aged. Was that scene not a memory but rather a scene Guido had in mind for his own film? At another point, early in the film, Guido’s walks down his hotel corridor singing Rota’s music we’ve been hearing on the soundtrack. How is this possible? Was the music actually playing in his world? Where, and who played it? These are the kinds of questions that demonstrate for the film’s clever interplay between different fictions in the story, and the fact we don’t mind so much signals the skill and success of Fellini with this film.

The film is packed with scenes that can be either memories or potential events (most likely autobiographical in some way) in Guido’s own film. But far from being “gratuitous episodes” as Daumier fears, they are absolute marvels of storytelling, often with either a great deal of dialogue or a complete lack of dialogue. One is spoilt for choice for examples, but among the most talked-about scenes is the one that takes place in a bath house, or more accurately Guido’s harem. 

Fellini’s 8½ is daring and adventurous and eschews an intellectualisation of its subject while making us wholly aware of the trials and tribulations of the central character and not undermining the severity of his situation. The theme is not overwhelming and the actions themselves are often staged in restricted spaces, but the film is as monumental as anything the cinema has produced. After so many years, the film still delivers a powerful blow to the system, because it shows what can be done with the medium. Like the enigmatic formula Guido as a young boy is told to repeat to protect him at night, “Asa nisi masa”, there is a formula to this film, but the power of the director is such that it takes on a magical quality only he knows how to wield.

This is one of the finest films ever made.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

USA

3.5*
Director:
Sean Durkin
Screenwriter:
Sean Durkin
Director of Photography:
Jody Lee Lipes

Running time: 101 minutes

Martha Marcy May Marlene doesn’t do anything wrong, but there is just not enough to hold on to for the film to become beloved. Its main character, Marcy May, real name Martha and telephone name Marlene, has just escaped from a cult on a farm in upstate New York where she has spent quite a bit of time being “purified”, what many in the audience will call “brainwashed”.

The girl has become a young woman who feels comfortable in her own skin but is now faced with a number of problems that need to be resolved for her to integrate into normal society again. The first is the people she left behind, people who seem to be folk of the land, working on the farm to sustain themselves, but whose rare interactions with the rest of society are cold and haunting.

In one of the film’s very first scenes, we see a group of men eating dinner. In the meantime, the women of the house sit and wait patiently on the steps, only making their way to the dinner table once the men, led by Patrick, have finished and left the dining room. Everything is done without question, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.

We struggle to understand the dynamic here. The film offers very little to explain the relationship between Patrick and his men, though it is clear the women are all damaged in some way. However, the main focus is Marcy May, who takes this name when Patrick tells her she doesn’t look like her actual name, Martha. Especially at the beginning, she is the only person on whom the shots focus, even when other people are in the room with her. And yet, we know nothing about her life before she joined.

Most of the film is spent in the company of Marcy May’s sister, Lucy, and her husband of only a few months, Ted. Their beautiful, spacious home next to a lake in Connecticut would seem to be the perfect refuge for the girl they know as Martha to recuperate after her ordeal, but she is haunted by memories of the events on the farm, and her behaviour often veers from the merely awkward to close to the sociopathic. One can laugh when she takes off her clothes to go and swim in the lake, but it becomes a bit disturbing when she can’t sleep and therefore decides to curl up in bed next to Lucy and Ted while they are having sex.

We realise over time how her words are mere copies of what she has been told by the cult’s psychologically affecting Patrick, who also took her virginity while she was drugged — an act, she is told by the other women, in which she should rejoice, because Patrick is such a great guy who purifies her. 

If the film had dug a little deeper, we could easily have been disgusted at the underlying goings-on. At one point we realise Patrick has fathered only boys with the girls, and the question remains open what happened to the women who were pregnant with girls. But the film has its eye on other things, like the visual motif of the empty room in which Marcy May is consoled after losing her virginity, and the same empty room, later on, in which she tries to console, drugged drink in hand, a girl before she goes to meet Patrick one dark night. In this way, the full story is revealed from many different angles while being visibly, securely grounded and connected by the visuals.

This is the first film of director Sean Durkin, and he treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, with the exception of one particularly grating outburst of Marcy May during some celebration at Lucy and Ted’s, when the dramatic music takes over the scene completely.

But Marcy May’s past haunts her less than it haunts her sister, who is the real victim here. Having worried for years about her, she now wants to patch things up, but Marcy May won’t let her. Instead, although she is already imposing on her by staying comfortably at her house, she also makes some rude comments about her to Ted and laughs out loud when he tells her they are trying to have a baby.

“If you’re going to live here, you need to be a part of things,” are words of wisdom Patrick had told her that she could have kept in mind, but her lifeless eyes reveal her as being lost and confused. Yet it is frustrating to see Lucy also being too afraid to ask her why she is the way she is, and what had happened to her during all that time they didn’t see each other.

Viewers will talk about the ending, and it is one that isn’t entirely clear. Little of substance happens, but that is a general observation about the film itself, whose events can be read as an ineluctable journey towards tragedy, or merely small coincidences that Marcy May hysterically, but not without reason, interprets out of proportion.

It is possible she is merely hallucinating everything from before she arrived at Lucy’s place, though such an interpretation is itself perhaps a little far-fetched. The many L-cuts (sound that starts in one shot but is actually connected to the shot that starts, in a different time and place, a few seconds later) suggest this might be the case, but you can judge for yourself. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a very competently directed, but not entirely solid story that is nonetheless a powerful, memorable film.

Czech Dream (2004)

Czech Republic

3.5*
Directors:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda
Screenwriters:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda
Directors of Photography:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda

Original title: Český sen

Running time: 90 minutes

Vít and Filip are documentary filmmakers from the prestigious Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), who will use their documentary skills over the course of the film to examine the gullibility of the average Czech citizen in 2003 by using an approach with a wholly unreal central object.

In the run-up to the Czech Republic’s decision to join the European Union, the country was inundated by a very well-funded government campaign to nudge (or push) Czechs in the direction of voting “yes” in the referendum. The glossy campaign led Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, final-year film students, to consider the impact such marketing has on a population, especially when the goal (joining the European Union) is more or less intangible.

They decided to use money from the Ministry of Culture to fund a project that would see them advertise a new hypermarket in Prague. The hypermarket would be called “Český sen” (Czech Dream) and the prices would be a small fraction of those paid in other hypermarkets. This happened around the time the country was first introduced to big shopping malls and chain supermarkets with reduced prices where customers could buy everyday groceries in bulk and find everything they looked for in one store, under one roof.

Using one of the top advertising agencies in the capital, the filmmaking duo proceed as if the hypermarket is real, even constructing an enormous scaffold on an open field outside the city. For the duration of the campaign, the location of the shop is kept a secret, and the marketing approach is playful and unconventional, touting a big surprise for everyone who comes on the opening day and telling potential shoppers everywhere not to spend, not to come, not to bother. So, reverse psychology. 

But the approach is surprisingly effective, and the whole city goes into quite a frenzy about the ridiculously low prices on the advertising pamphlets, including an offer of a colour television set for $25. If things are too good to be true, they usually are, but it’s difficult to kill a dream before reality hits you in the face. The hypermarket also has television spots and even an official jingle, complete with violins and a children’s choir.

We know this can’t end well, with people necessarily being disappointed, but the film’s interviews with a wide range of people, all of whom pitched up one sunny May 31 to witness the opening of, well, not a shopping mall, shows the expected mixture of anger and disillusionment. Walking from the holding area across a large open field to the scaffolding behind which the new mall supposedly lies, one individual already questions whether this is what the country’s future looks like if it joins the European Union, with malls like these, in the middle of nowhere, sprouting up.

Introduced by the filmmakers on the empty space in the suburb of Letňany that would be the location of their prank, we are in on the joke from the beginning, but as we spend very little time with them when they are portraying themselves (rather than acting the parts of the managers of the new mega shop), it is difficult to judge their attitude towards the people they are duping. Do they consider themselves superior? Do they think they are smart and the average Czech is a stupid fool? Or do they ever realise that their marketing campaign was good enough to pique the interest of even the most sceptical potential shopper?

We don’t know, but the opening shot showing Czechoslovaks in 1972 queuing for groceries, which eerily resembles the hordes rushing towards the scaffolding on May 31, 2003, is an indication that the filmmakers themselves don’t think much has changed, although that would be a terrible simplification of the situation.

The film is funny and certainly succeeds in pushing the envelope while it peeks behind the scenes of the advertising business (with those working in the industry memorably claiming that they never lie, and have terrible moral qualms with the filmmakers’ empty promises). Their fellow cameramen are determined to get answers from their interviewees and deserve a lot of credit for their persistence, though ultimately we don’t learn much from this material.

Czech Dream is a film that made a big splash upon its release, because it changed reality in order to be filmed, which can be risky terrain for a filmmaker, and the film’s directors fail by not being more visible in their own work or explaining their motivations. During a final question-and-answer session with furious would-be shoppers, they try to justify their actions, but we are not convinced. The film is based on a clever idea with some nifty details that may be inspired by the production of a fake war in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, but suffers greatly from the underinvolvement of its central characters. At one point, a mother in a parking lot sings “Hey, ho, nobody home”, a very serendipitous moment caught on film by Klusák and Remunda, and one that is bound to stick in your head as you watch both the crowds walking across an empty field and the filmmakers speaking to the angry mob.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

Czechoslovakia

4.5*
Director:
Karel Zeman
Screenwriter:
Karel Zeman
Josef Antonín Novotný
Directors of Photography:
Václav Pazderník
Antonín Horák

Running time: 84 minutes

Original title: Cesta do pravěku

The fossils of prehistoric creatures housed at the National Museum are just a collection of bones, either spread out or assembled in a skeletal structure or set in stone as a result of petrification over millennia. They are not alive, and they only hint at the original. Sometimes, a museum may have an exhibit that is a representation of what one of these animals from long, long ago looked like. Usually, it’s a mammoth.

What the luminary Czechoslovak special effects director Karel Zeman realised, was exactly the same motivating force that must have compelled Steven Spielberg to shoot Jurassic Park in the early 1990s: The ability of the cinema, and of skilled filmmakers, to bring to life what until now we could only imagine, and make the past almost physically present.

Journey to the Beginning of Time was released in 1955, but as the country was isolated internationally at the time and would only open up a few months after Zeman’s death in 1989, his fame and magic were confined to the borders of the landlocked country in Eastern Europe.

What we realise more and more, however, is how far ahead of his time Zeman was. Inspired by Georges Méliès and explicitly referencing Jules Verne, whose work is the obvious forebear of both these artists, Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time is a beloved classic in the Czech Republic and deserves widespread recognition, even though its visual effects have by now, more than half a century later, been surpassed by computer-generated effects.

Three teenagers, Petr, Jenda and Toník, and a younger boy named Jirka set off on a journey through the ages. Having read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, they consider themselves explorers and set off on a canoe upstream from the present day all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, where the fossil of a trilobite that Jirka found in stone will be seen for real.

It is a journey that obviously boggles the mind, and we are left wanting for an explanation of how the children go about skipping from one time period to the other (the film does employ some mist to cover the transitions, though), but what is obvious is that these machinations of the fiction are not what we should be focused on. The real reason we watch the film is to see the prehistoric animals come to life, and do so in the presence (and in the same frame!) as the children.

Petr, the de facto leader of the group, obliquely speaks for the viewer, too, when he observes:

We haven’t made this journey just for fun; we came to study what prehistoric life really looked like. We are so lucky to have the opportunity to do just that, to see everything with our own eyes.

Indeed, this is a privilege, and as the children travel back from the time of the cavemen to the time of the dinosaurs and beyond, we find ourselves constantly aware of the fact that while the events are about as possible as time travel, the thrill of seeing creatures from these two very different times in one place is extraordinary, and Zeman assembles and stages the actions with a very firm and steady hand.

While the special effects are not on the more or less seamless technical level of Jurassic Park, they are breathtaking considering the film was made in the early 1950s, in a country that had a few months earlier been racked by its infamous currency reform that cut the worth of everyone’s money by 90% while prices remained the same (a tale told in great detail by the remarkable 2012 film, Ve stínu). Often, the stop-motion animal movements would seem to be too fast or too slow, or when the mammoth stands still but raises its trunk, the bushes around it move without reason with jerky movements.

But Zeman achieves some impressive results during the staging of a nighttime fight between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while many animals don’t have a reflection in the water because they were not shot next to the river, but separately, the Brontosaurus’s appearance in the river, reflection included, is gorgeous.

At another point, the camera follows the enormous dragonflies called Meganeura as they fly between the trees, the camera apparently tracking down below while looking up at them. The effect is powerful and this technically ambitious sequence is very rewarding.

In some ways, the film can be called superficial, but covering the various life forms of 5 billion years in 80 minutes is no small feat. From time to time, mention is made of life in the present, and the juxtaposition is worthwhile, for example when club mosses were the size of trees, their eventual stratification would give rise to coal mining in the 20th century.

The four boys, with the exception of the inquisitive Jirka, don’t get up to much trouble, and have a surprisingly easy time of all this travelling through the ages, so in the end we learn little about them, but their awe at being able to see all these creatures is something the viewer understands all too well, as Zeman’s film awakens a curiosity in us for the life of things we may never really have considered beyond the bare bones of a museum exhibit.

 

Dante’s Inferno (1911)

Italy

4*
Director:
Giuseppe de Liguoro
Screenwriter:
Dante Alighieri
Director of Photography:
Emilio Roncarolo

Running time: 68 minutes

Original title: L’Inferno

Though creaking a bit with a load of peripheral characters that appear for a mere handful of seconds, as they are usually physically constricted from moving around, this very first filmic depiction of the “Inferno” part of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a remarkable visualisation of the story in a way that the cinema had not really taken advantage of before.

The one striking exception is the director whose style certainly influenced director Giuseppe de Liguoro: Georges Méliès, whose formative tendency (films whose meaning was enriched, even informed, by their visual style, in contrast with the Lumière brothers’ documentary-like films that strove to capture the world as it is without demonstrating any real creativity from the filmmakers, except for their placement of the camera) is on full display in this film that takes place in the underworld.

The film’s opening montage already gives us a peek into the underworld, presenting us with fragments of despair whose characters or settings we do not know yet (they will all be revealed over the course of the film), but the writhing bodies present a world undeniably abhorrent that rapidly comes into view.

Dante’s Inferno is very text-heavy as a screen full of words precedes nearly every scene, and this screen tells us what we are about to see and especially who the diverse assortment of characters are that Dante and his guide, the poet Virgil, meet on their way through he underworld. The problem is that the film’s one-hour length means the entire journey has to be condensed and all of the duo’s interactions with the condemned last a very short amount of time.

Sometimes, the names of the characters are onscreen for a longer period of time than the physical individuals themselves. But Dante carries on, carried – as  are we, the viewers – by the trance-like music that accompanies the film’s most recent release, of the German electronic band Tangerine Dream.

There are many noteworthy special effects in the film, and the moments when Dante or Virgil or Dante’s muse, the young Beatrice who has an impressive spinning halo above her head, lift off to float away or fly off are very effective and do not seem as rudimentary as one might have expected. It’s pure Méliès for the contemporary viewer: at once fantastical and uncanny because of the slight awkwardness of the movements or the stammering nature of such an old film of which not all the frames were in perfect condition.

At other times, the use of superimposition and even of forced perspective (see, for example, Dante and Virgil meeting the giant Antaeus) is equally splendid. At one point, a headless man appears holding his own head – it is very easy to guess how this was done, but the effect is rather good.

Famously, Dante is reminded to “Abandon all hope [ye who enter here]” and the images we certainly fit very well with this notion. Those trapped down below have been sentenced to suffer for their sins for all eternity and the variety of ways in which they have to pay for their time spent on earth can make for rather uncomfortable viewing, from the Summonists (those who have cheated the Church) trapped with their heads buried in the sand, and the spendthrifts who have to roll bags of gold around their circle, to the hypocrites wearing cloaks of gold on the outside but filled with lead on the inside.

Dante is a bit of a wuss, as he faints or screams all the way through Hell, once even pulling a tuft of hair from a head sticking out of the ground, but on the other hand the majestic Virgil, wearing a white sheet and wearing an olive wreath on his head in the style of an Olympic Games winner, and gesticulating hither and thither in extremely melodramatic fashion, doesn’t make any better an impression.

It is a frightening moment when Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucanus appear and give the travelling duo the Roman salute, as within a few years of the film’s release, it would be co-opted by the fascists in Italy and Germany and become the Hitler salute.

This world where steam seems to be everywhere is a place where no one wants to end up. It is a place of endless misery, and the film presents a thorough catalogue of the pain and suffering that awaits those who choose to live according to their own vices and desires. It is sometimes rather obvious that the story was conceived on the first level to warn Dante’s fellow Florentines of their reckless behaviour, but the rundown of the levels of Hell makes for a powerful visual argument against immorality.

The film is unfortunately very episodic, and even the relationship of the two main characters, Dante and Virgil, is not allowed to develop. But as a purely visual experience, this film is a feast.

Olympic Garage (1999)

Argentina

3.5*
Director:
Marco Bechis
Screenwriters:
Marco Bechis
Lara Fremder
Director of Photography:
Ramiro Civita

Original title: Garage Olimpo
Running time: 100 minutes

Although this makes it all the more frightening, it is refreshing to see a conflict not based on race or religion, but on ideology. The reason this should inspire fear in viewer and character alike is that this kind of setup makes it much more difficult to distinguish a friend from an enemy.

Olympic Garage is set during Argentina’s Dirty War of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which many Argentines were rounded up, because they’d been denounced by someone as a traitor to the system or an anarchist or a subversive, and tortured before simply disappearing. The mass disappearances of the country’s citizen led to a commission established after this time of military rule called the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons to look into the vast scope of the government’s actions to silence the general population.

What the film manages to convey better than anything else — and there are many scenes of torture and calculated moments of sudden, cold-blooded violence to demonstrate how power-hungry and callous some of the policemen were who enjoyed this civil war against the people they are meant to protect — is that shocking, government-sanctioned acts can take place in the middle of a city without anyone knowing about it.

A great deal of the film takes place underground, in a parking garage in downtown Buenos Aires, and we regularly see people (often, the same people, going about their daily life) walking lazily past the entrance to this parking garage, ignorant of the abhorrent acts being committed inside. In the same vein, there are multiple shots taken from a helicopter that might signal the constant surveillance of the citizenry, but as the sound is cut completely, all we get is a feeling of cars flowing over highways and people walking on sidewalks, unaware of the things their fellow citizens are suffering.

These scenes in the parking garage focus on Maria Fabiani, a girl whose French mother living in Buenos Aires doesn’t know where her daughter is, only that the police came to take her from their home and that she will be at Police Station 23, but she is nowhere to be found, like so many others. Over the course of the film, Maria slowly loses her mind (who wouldn’t?), but actress Antonella Costa isn’t always convincing.

However, her boyfriend Felix, played by Carlos Echevarría, is a study in how to effectively communicate conflicting emotion and convey complexity with few words. While he is her boyfriend in an on-again off-again kind of way, he never told her that he tortures people for a living in a parking garage (luckily the torture sounds are mostly obscured by a portable radio outside the room whose volume is turned up whenever the pain is about to start), but when she shows up as a suspect he has to fulfil his duty while not alienating or hurting her. It is a delicate balance that Echevarría, in his début feature film, pulls off admirably.

The film has a nice bookend structure involving a man in whose home a bomb is planted right at the beginning of the film, though the woman with the bomb, called Ana — a friend of his daughter’s — is not given any back story nor integrated into the rest of the film, which is a real shame.

There are some nice little details, in particular the relationship (or the beginnings of a relationship) cultivated between Maria and a fellow inmate, a mechanic called Nene, as well as the hints of feelings that Maria inspired in another fellow anti-government activist Francisco, and the observation of how Felix tries to assert power over Maria, but the film is not very strong on story. 

Toward the end, the film becomes very political as the church is implicated in oppressive regime’s horrible deeds and a final title card informs us that many of these people responsible for the disappearance of thousands of innocent civilians today walk the streets freely.

Olympic Garage offers a glimpse of the hardship endured by those fighting for a better life but who were tortured and ultimately ended up dead as a result of their desire to fight, or just resist. The film is not entirely engrossing but it has many points of entry for anyone wanting to know what kinds of things went on underground during Argentina’s Dirty War.

How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate (1997)

Ireland

4*
Director:
Graham Jones
Screenwriters:
Graham Jones
Aislinn O’Loughlin
Tadhg O’Higgins
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 77 minutes

First things first: This was the début feature of a 22-year-old, and yet neither the usual first-time desire to show off nor the flaws of not knowing how to direct actors are on show here. The film has fast pacing but slows down at very significant points to focus on effecting smooth transitions through credible though very well-written dialogue; it is also great fun.

Shot during the summer of 1996 and showing the last school year (culminating in the middle of 1997) at James Joyce College in Dublin, the film quickly assembles a group of characters who want to beat the system by cheating on the big school-leaving exam called the leaving certificate or just “leaving cert”.

The film exploits the creativity and ingenuity (and, perhaps, blind optimism) of school children to make us believe they can put their heads together and best the security of the establishment, i.e. the Department of Education. But they, and the filmmaker, present the case in almost meticulous fashion to make us believe this can be done, even by complete amateurs.

Now, as the narrator reminds us, “cheating in the exam properly isn’t easy”, and it takes the group of students, almost all of them intelligent in ways that are different to the one tested by the school-leaving exam, a full year to put together a plan that would work.

They have few real obstacles, but while there are one or two tense moments, including a classically staged but very effective sequence of cross-cutting that brings to mind the famous tennis sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, the goal of How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate is to be more like a manual than a dramatic tale.

The idea of a manual is supported by delicious, informal but very informative narration provided by Nial O’Driscoll, who sets out all the information one would need to pull off the act of stealing the papers from the Department of Education’s high-security warehouse in the town of central rural Irish town of Athlone successfully.

The narrator also continuously reminds us of how important the exam is, and we often go back to the teachers who try to explain to their students how they should divide up their time to study for this once in a lifetime opportunity to make it big in the world and go to university. “Failure in the leaving certificate means failure for the rest of your lives!” a teacher bellows ominously in the opening scene.

The main actor in all this is Fionn (Garret Baker), a pupil whose friend Cian committed suicide when he was found cheating in his exams. Fionn is a lonely boy but he is committed to make a point by cheating and then coming out afterwards to show that his skill at staging such a heist apparently means nothing because it is not the kind of skill tested by the leaving certificate exam.

The logic is a bit flawed, but his quiet determination to prove to himself and to those around him the Department of Education is not as intelligent as they would like to think is certainly admirable and keeps the viewer glued to the screen.

The generally light-hearted approach of director Graham Jones to his material, especially in the form of the pleasure of listening to the narrator explain in great detail (at one point he even laughs at the naïveté of the characters, immediately endearing himself to us), goes a long way towards gaining our confidence that this is a film to be enjoyed fully.

And yet, with Cian’s suicide in the background and the sad face of Fionn claiming our attention in many scenes, it is also clear that this entertaining film is tinged with sadness that adds unexpected depth to the characters.

It is a great joy to watch this film, which shares the same kind of wit as The History Boys but is far more straightforward in its intentions and its emotions, perhaps unfortunately eschewing the complexity of the latter. The title tells us that everything will be fine, and the moments of dramatic tension because of uncertainty of what is going to happen are very rare. The writing is superior to the film itself, although there is the odd well-chosen visual flourish, and it would have been good to see Graham Jones contribute to more screenplays, which unfortunately has not really been the case since the release of this film.

From Beginning to End (2009)

 Brazil

4*
Director:
Aluizio Abranches
Screenwriter:
Aluizio Abranches
Director of Photography:
Ueli Steiger

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: Do Começo ao Fim

From Beginning to End is a brave film from Brazil that handles not only the issue of incest, but of same-sex incest, with unbelievable grace and beauty, and were it not for some awkward moments of acting and an overuse of its poetic approach, this could have been a truly breathtaking film.

At times, the events as presented are depicted with such love and tenderness it is difficult not to be moved to tears, despite any misgivings one might have about the makeup of the relationship at the core.

The film, narrated by an adult Thomás, tells of the first few weeks after his birth, during which he didn’t open his eyes until he felt ready. That moment when he decides it is time coincides with a visit by his slightly older half-brother, Francisco, to the hospital, and when Thomás opens his eyes, he looks straight at Francisco.

Six years later, the young boys show a remarkable bond. Although they are stepbrothers and live in Rio de Janeiro with their radiant mother and the younger Thomás’s youthful father, Alexandre, everyone gets along very well, and there is great friendliness between these two parents and Francisco’s father, Pedro, who lives in Buenos Aires.

Luckily for them, such an open and friendly environment does not reject or question their intimate relationship, despite the parents’ suspicions that their sons’ behavior is not something they are used to seeing. But it has to be said that this behavior is heartrendingly beautiful.

Francisco takes on the role not only of older brother, but of caretaker to his brother, whom he showers with love and attention. As Thomás admits on the voice-over, his brother always made sure he was happy, as we can see in a scene where Francisco receives a present and then asks his father whether he brought Thomás a present as well.

We never see the two of them fight and they seem to share not only a bond but a heart and a soul. There is a scene where the 11-year-old Francisco falls asleep on his bed holding the 6-year-old Thomás in his arms that has more emotional resonance than most films about love and intimacy.

The film’s opening shots are long, unedited tracking shots and Aluizio Abranches should be highly commended for his direction of the two boys’ movements in these scenes, as they run through the house playing, being followed by the Steadicam. It’s an approach that is also very effectively repeated during a trip to Buenos Aires during adulthood.

While it is no surprise that the relationship between the two brothers turns physical when they become young men, this physical attraction isn’t always presented on-screen with the same careful approach as during the earlier scenes, and we get some awkward images that resemble soft-core porn and a transition from childhood to adulthood that is anything but smooth. However, this awkwardness is redeemed by numerous moments of endearing delicacy that join Thomás and Francisco over time, and we realise that there lies beauty in a relationship not born out of sex but born out love built up over a lifetime of shared memories.

When two partners are the same age and engage in acts that are pure and consensual, anyone with the faintest of libertarian streaks would agree that there is nothing wrong with them continuing their committed relationship with each other. Incest too often calls up the abhorrent crudeness of young girls and boys raped by their own father, which is something light years removed from the feelings of mutual love, respect and responsibility made evident in From Beginning to End.

Abranches acknowledges that his characters live in a kind of bubble, removed from the rest of the world, by having them mostly interact with each other whenever they are not speaking to their parents, and we start to wonder whether they have any other friends. In a particularly striking scene, when the bubble is about to break, they sit on a rocky wall high up on a hilltop with the Carioca coastline behind them, but it seems like the world behind them is cold, completely blue, filtered off from the contours of their immediate setting.

It is unheard of for a film of this nature to deal with its problematic central issue in this way, and while it steers clear of confronting some of the larger problems this relationship is likely to generate if more people became aware of it, its decision to immerse the viewer in a world of acceptance and understanding is understandable as it succeeds in communicating the strength of the feelings at play and the depth of emotion these characters share.

Ausente (2011)

Argentina

3.5*
Director:
Marco Berger
Screenwriter:
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomas Perez Silva

Running time: 87 minutes

It’s appropriate that a film about a swimming teacher at a high school and one of his students should dive right into the action. Right at the start, 16-year-old Martin Blanco (Javier De Pietro) complains to his teacher of having something in his eye. They go to the emergency room together, but nothing is found. When they return, Martin realizes his bag and cell phone are still with his friend, at whose house he was going to spend the night. After going back and forth between many places, it seems there is no other way but for the boy to spend the night at the teacher’s flat. Nothing happens between the two of them, but there is a lot of tension.

The problem is that the tension is mostly from the side of the viewer, and the soundtrack also does its part to convey to us the fact that something ominous is hiding in the shadows. However, neither the teacher, Sebastián Armas (Carlos Echevarría), nor Martin shows any kind of anxiety, despite the admittedly awkward situation of a student spending the night at his teacher’s flat. They don’t really speak to each other, and before long, Martin passes out on the couch.

One of the first scenes shows Martin looking at fellow teammates. He is a bit of a starer — you know the type: says he is straight, but all too often he is caught blatantly staring at another guy — but the problem with the film is that he is too ill-defined: He is neither aggressively pursuing the teacher, nor is he awkward because of some sexual insecurity. Given the fact we dive right in, there is no initial setup, which means Martin is not given much context. Neither is Sebastián, really, but that matters less, because the presence of Echevarría makes up for it. In fact, Echevarría’s face, almost entirely expressionless, works extremely well in the way of a Bressonian model, as we project our fears onto him.

There is great potential for Martin’s character to involve us. This is a high-school boy obviously not openly homosexual who either has a crush on his teacher or is on a power trip to explore what might happen, but we don’t know how confident he is, or even what his own agenda is. He seems self-assured (though quite naïve when it comes to a certain girl’s interest in him) but when he apologizes for his behavior, can he be trusted? Perhaps director Marco Berger (who made another poignant drama about two straight men slowly discovering their interest in each other, Plan B) wanted to keep us in the dark, but then why isn’t more of the film shot from the teacher’s point of view? The constant shifting of perspective from one character to the other only gives the illusion of balance, while it clearly isn’t interested in illuminating us.

Sebastián is dating a very annoying woman, Mariana, who wants to spend time with him but doesn’t want them to discuss any of their problems. In one scene where we think there might be a way for Sebastián to open up and share some of his fears, she quickly tells him to shoosh and him not standing up to her not only makes the drama more tense (a good thing), but also makes him a character with fewer options for action and self-actualisation (a bad thing).

Some more details on Martin’s life at home (we don’t see his parents, except for his mother once in a hallway from the waist down) would have helped us get inside his head, as this side of his life — at least, if he is to be believed — played an important role in his spending the night at his teacher’s place. We see a James Dean poster on his wall and the already mentioned peek at his swimming mates in one of the film’s opening scenes immediately positions him as closeted or questioning, but there is little else to develop this impression.

Berger is more of a storyteller than a flamboyant director, but one scene at the heart of the film is staged particularly impressively. It has to do with Sebastián’s recognition of Martin’s perhaps not entirely truthful behavior, as he listens to one side while some of his colleagues discuss the revelation that Martin’s parents arrived at school looking for him the day after the night before. The scene is shot in a single take, now focusing on the teacher telling the story, then focusing on Sebastián who tries not to look too interested in the story, though it concerns him directly. It is a wonderful shot, timed just right without ever seeming contrived or stylised. On the other hand, the film suffers, especially at the beginning, of a soundtrack that is overly dramatic and overpowers the events it seeks to portray as suspenseful.

What we end up with is a film with good intentions, very cleverly devised (especially with Carlos Echevarría in the lead) and boasting a very unexpected but wonderfully touching conclusion. However, Berger could have delved deeper into the characters, in particular the character of Martin, to shape and inform our perspective of events. In a bit of commentary by the filmmaker, perhaps, we see Sebastián reading Kundera’s Laughable Loves, and that title might have served the film itself equally well. It wants to be a psychological thriller, but ends up being a film you have a crush on for a few days before you move on to something more substantial.

The Adopted Son (1998)

Kyrgyzstan

3.5*
Director:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Screenwriters:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Avtandil Adikulov
Marat Sarulu
Director of Photography:
Khassan Kydyraliev

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: Бешкемпир
Transliterated title: Beshkempir

The films of the countries that used to form a part of the Soviet Union are not very well-known, primarily because there are so few of them and the nascent film industries in those countries in general have neither the money nor the experience to make films that can be marketed to a larger audience outside the country. From time to time, filmmakers from elsewhere come to take advantage of these foreign lands and the vistas that viewers around the world might never have seen on film before, and thereby produce small but interesting films, for example the French production Moi Ivan, Toi Abraham, made in 1993 in Belarus; Tengri, made in Kazakhstan by a French production team that used Kyrgyz actors; or notable films out of Tajikistan thanks to director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov in the 1990s, before he started making films in Russia.

Kyrgyz director Aktan Abdykalykov, who also goes by the name of Aktan Arym Kubat, is a Kyrgyzstan native who worked as a production designer on some of the films made by the former Soviet Union’s local Kirgizfilm, the films almost always — with a few rare exceptions, mostly in the 1980s — in Russian. The country’s independence at the end of 1991 also heralded the coming of the Kyrgyz-language film industry. The films of Abdykalykov (and more recently, of Ernest Abdyjaparov and the young Nurbek Egen, as well) have been some of the lone cinematic voices in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Like all the other films made in the country since the fall of the Iron Curtain, The Adopted Son is set in rural Kyrgyzstan. The film stars the director’s son, Mirlan, in the role of the young teenage boy Beshkempir, whose life is about to “go berserk”, as his grandmother puts is. But this is not his grandmother: The opening scene, 12 years earlier, shown to us in warm colors, already established that he was adopted at birth, and this fact is about to turn his life upside down.

Cut to the present in black and white, when Beshkempir’s hair is cut and the sound of clippers is suddenly replaced by garden scissors cutting a small branch from a tree. Things obviously do not look good for the boy’s future, and the rest of the film is in black and white, with the exception of some slightly more optimistic shots (rather than scenes) briefly presented to us in colour, almost all of them unfortunately disconnected from the storyline, bringing atmosphere rather than substance.

The other children play with him and he is not socially isolated, but at this age children have started to show their true colours, and we can see them whispering in each other’s ears, clearly spreading a story about him: the story about his origins that, soon enough, he will discover for himself.

The other strong thread in the film has to do with the sexual coming-of-age of the boys, and as Beshkempir sees another boy, who already has a job as a projectionist at the open-air cinema where they screen Indian musicals from the 1960s, picking up a girl on his bicycle, and he wants to eventually do the same with the girl he has his eye on, Aynura.

But in the meantime, he is frustrated, as first a woman the boys make out of dirt, for them to have their way with, is trampled by a heard of bulls, and then when he lies in bed one morning and his hand slips down to his grown, a bird flies into the room (a hoopoe, whose sound permeates the soundtrack of the film).

Beshkempir tries very hard to be poetic, and while there are numerous important incidents that should energise the narrative, they are all presented as fragments with little or no transition between them, and furthermore the addition of colour, often completely unexpectedly, draws more attention to itself than is required for this particular film. So does the racking of focus from Beshkempir and his father, a bitter man whom we don’t get to know or understand, to water dropping from a makeshift tap in the foreground during an altercation.

The dialogue is post-synchronised, but even so, one of the central scenes, in which Beshkempir is most seriously stabbed in the back by one of his best friends, features a boy whose words are, even in Kyrgyz, delivered very poorly, which makes our empathy with Beshkempir and our interest in the events more difficult.

While the film shows some technical creativity, the narrative is more opaque than necessary, as it leaves many questions unanswered and sometime even unasked, though the viewer needs more information to know who these people are (most of the characters are never introduced by name) and why they are behaving the way they do. However, despite its shortcomings, Beshkempir is a more-than-adequate contribution to world cinema.

Noy (2010)

The Philippines

2*
Directors:
Dondon Santos
Coco Martin
Screenwriter:
Shugo Praico
Director of Photography:
Tim Jimenez
Running time: 105 minutes

Noy sounds like an interesting film, made under circumstances that are tough, and in some ways it might even bring back memories of Medium Cool, that Haskell Wexler film of which some parts were staged during the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This Filipino film was shot during the 2010 presidential campaign, with Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino at the centre of all the attention, and he even generously (and politically, this was a clever call, bringing to mind the work done by Robert Drew on Primary) participated in the production, always available for questions and answers with the average Filipino.

All of that sounds like a good idea in theory. But the film is filled to the hilt with a directionless narrative that only moves when the worst possible situations are thrust onto the characters, done in the worst possible way. Noy even contains a wholly gratuitous sex scene, shot in a way that may easily be shown to a toddler, so devoid it is of any kind of sexual energy, and after all, the use of slow motion and soft focus has never enhanced these kinds of scenes; on the contrary, it only makes them look more toned down.

The young Manolo “Noy” Agapito wants to improve his life. He lives with his mother, younger sister and cripple older brother in a Manileño house on the water that can only be reached by raft. I hadn’t known about these kinds of living conditions in Filipino society, and this window onto the daily lives of the country’s inhabitants was very informative.

Noy has faked going to university, but his friends have managed to put together a fake demo CD of his supposed work and a certificate to match. In this way, he joined a television network and is immediately put in charge of directing a documentary on presidential candidate Noynoy, whose name he nearly shares. If this quick climb up the ladder surprises you, wait until you hear what’s coming next.

Noy starts filming and the footage is obviously junk. He doesn’t ask questions, or asks questions irrelevant to the campaign, but somehow his editor and producer have faith that he will find his voice. The scenes with the editor Caloy, played by Baron Geisler, are some of the more interesting ones, but every time we see footage of the campaign events edited together at a pace of sometimes two or three shots per second, everything feels rushed, disconnected and chaotic. It doesn’t help the film that the opening credits sequence consists of this material, as it immediately reveals the film as an amateur project. Actor Coco Martin, who stars as the lead character Noy, was in charge of this documentary unit of the film, but should have remained in front of the camera, where he looks good and acts equally well.

There are many moments in the film that seem fake, in particular an ending that doesn’t just push the characters into the worst possible circumstances, a bit like an Alejandro González Iñárritu film, but pushes the knife in firmly (in slow motion, again, and with constant cuts back and forth between an action and a reaction shot) before suddenly wrapping up the film in almost utopian fashion. This paradise at the end cannot be interpreted as anything other than the work of that politician who is followed throughout and who ended up winning the presidency: “Noy” Aquino.

Though Aquino clearly has the common touch, easily conversing with people wherever he goes and easily generating excitement, he is shown in a positive light from beginning to end. One single remark about the Aquino family’s responsibility for the deaths of workers on their Hacienda Luisita sugar plantation in 2004 is not pursued and this moment stands alone amid the sunshine presentation of the candidate, whose opponents are never even mentioned. Were it not for a few posters here and there, we could be forgiven for thinking he is running for the presidency unopposed.

As is often the case in foreign-language films, the casting of the English-language actors falls short, and here too an American who is on the prowl for Filipino prostitutes and mistakes Noy’s mother for one (though Noy himself doesn’t mind the misunderstanding — a rather shocking detail that is all but ignored by the screenwriter), is absolutely terrible in his representation of this shady figure. The actor simply doesn’t deliver his lines in a way that is credible by any stretch of the imagination.

While serving as pro-Aquino propaganda, without a doubt, Noy doesn’t link the poverty and the struggles of the lower class with the campaign and fails to deliver a coherent film that would illuminate the future of the nation — something one would obviously expect from this kind of film.

Its use of documentary footage, the involvement of Aquino and the acting talent of Coco Martin notwithstanding, this film’s amateurish use of material, its ghastly editing and its lack of a clear direction all make this a great disappointment. Considering how far the Aquino family has come and what its significance in the country is, it is sad to see how little insight the film offers into the life or ambitions of the man, and his link with the title character is tenuous at best.