Posts filed under 'Cinema'
Good old herd mentality has taken over where good judgment was just too difficult. The European Film Academy had too many good choices in the nominations, so the voters just went for the obvious, and threw nearly all the awards at Gomorra, Italy’s sensational mafia saga. Certainly, this film had a winning combination: a courageous bestselling book by Roberto Saviano, an exciting screenplay, a smooth and professional director and a great actor, but really, now, 5 Efies?
The big prize was European Film of The Year, and Gomorra had to face some real heavyweights: Il Divo, the fascinating albeit esoteric film about Italy’s former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the Cannes Festival Golden Palm winner Entre les murs, Guillermo Del Toro’s production, the haunting thriller El Orfanato, the explosively innovative Waltz with Bashir and the crowd pleasing Happy Go Lucky. Gomorra came out on top, and that was fine.
But then the waters get a bit murkier. The European Director Award for Gomorra’s Matteo Garrone was a surprise, since he had to share the philo-Italian voters with the highly stylized and imaginative work of Paolo Sorrentino for Il Divo. Sorrentino’s direction was really impressive, but perhaps the film, which opened late in the year, was not seen by enough voters. European Actor was a lot easier to predict, as it went to Toni Servillo, for his work in both Gomorra and Il Divo, but even there, the competition of Michael Fassbender for his awe inspiring performance in Hunger gave him a run for his money, as well as Jürgen Vogel in Die Welle (the Wave) a great performance which unfortunately may have gotten lost in the confusion. Then there was also the double whammy of Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen in Flame & Citron, a Danish favorite which might have garnered votes to honor the Copenhagen venue for this year’s awards. But their performances were not extraordinary and they didn’t offer much competition, just ahead of Elmar Wepper who brought up the rear with his role in Kirschblüten (Cherry Blossoms).
Then the only way to explain the rest is momentum. The herd mentality that Europeans are famous for. The team of writers for Gomorra’s screenplay-by-committee won with their somewhat meandering script over the soul-searching musings of Waltz with Bashir and the seething poetry of Il Divo. Another surprise was Gomorra’s Marco Onorato winning Cinematographer of the Year over the sweepingly cinematic epic Mongol, the dark and eerie (though perhaps conventional) El Orfanato and the truly artistic (and ubiquitous also-ran) Il Divo.
Mercifully, there were a few categories left over for other movies to get a chance. Kristen Scott Thomas won European Actress as the enigmatic ex-con in Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, a role she played all in French. This too was an overcrowded field: Arta Dobroshi as a disoriented Albanian guestworker in Belgium in Le Silence de Lorna, Hiam Abbass as a Palestinian landowner who becomes a cause célèbre in Lemon Tree, Ursula Werner as a senior citizen with lots of womanly needs in Wolke 9 as well as Sally Hawkins’ great comedic shtick in Happy Go Lucky and Belén Rueda’s driven-made-by-ghosts shtick in El Orfanato. My only regret here is that there was no room left over for Barbara Sarafian for her great performance in Moscow, Belgium (Aanrijding in Moscou).
Other major awards went to Waltz with Bashir’s Max Richter for European Composer, and a well deserved award for European Discovery of 2008 for Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen. Magdalena Biedrzycka won the Prix d’Excellence for her 1940s costume designs in Katyn, and rounding out this group of feel-good winners was Dame Judi Dench, who won a Lifetime Achievement Award.
As a whole the list of nominees was very satisfying, even if the end result was a bit lopsided. All of these films were deserving of recognition, even the deadly clunker Delta, which was a convincing nominee for production design. But then there was a sound design nomination for O’Horten. Really? O’Horten? The film about the deadpan train conductor who sleepwalks through a comedy drier than the Sahara? Were there really any sounds in this film at all? I guess every party’s got a pooper… Despite that, it was a fine year for European film, and the voters reflected that in their choices. AWOL this year were all the cheesy little festival favorites that open with 5 minutes of someone walking toward the camera on a country road and end with that same person staring soulfully into the sunset. So if there are any little Efies left over, one should go to the EFA voters for bringing these awards one giant step closer to being the most important European awards event of the year.
December 7th, 2008
Revanche. Written and directed by Götz Spielmann. The look of the film is thoroughly authentic, and the Austrian milieu very convincing. Johannes Krisch is fabulous as Alex, the peasant brute with a broken heart and an uncontrollable sex drive. Andreas Lust is very good as well, as Robert, Alex’s police officer nemesis. Caught in the middle is Ursula Strauss, who plays Susanne, Robert’s wife.
The story starts out in the squalid world of Viennese prostitution, at a tacky brothel on the periphery. Alex works for the local prostitution boss and he has fallen in love with one of the Eastern European streetwalkers, Tamara, played by Irina Potapenko. When Tamara is recruited for a promotion to call-girl, she decides instead to run away with Alex. Here the story moves to the countryside where Alex’s father lives in a miserable cabin on the outskirts of modern Austrian society. But if the surrounding become simpler, the interaction does not, as Alex becomes entangled in the lives of the small town police office and his wife.
The film is satisfying on many levels. It is a veritable ethnographic study of the interface between post-modern Central European human trafficking and pre-industrial Austrian bauern culture. Alex and his father speak to each other in what has been described to me as a rich and authentic peasant dialect rarely represented in film. Not only does it look and sound authentic, but the story makes perfect sense, too. And that’s saying a lot for a European “written and directed by” film, where narrative logic doesn’t often get more than cursory consideration. The name “revanche” has a double meaning in German, both revenge and a return match or a second chance, and it seems that both of these ideas are being developed throughout the story, as characters juggle their need to get even with their desire to secure their own futures. The tragic consequences of their every action lead them further and further down a path not of their own choosing. We get a taste of this feeling of predestination when the camera stops still at a forested point in the road, a spot that will take on fatal significance later in the story. Yet, if fate controls the characters’ destinies, it is the strength of willpower that will decide who survives and who will fade into insignificance.
Revanche did not get nominated in any categories for the EFA awards in 2008, but it is Austria’s entry for the Oscar Foreign Language film nomination in 2009.
December 3rd, 2008
The 72 hours before a comet strikes is just enough time to launch a cult film about the struggle of good versus evil. This film may not go far with the Euro-Film-Fest Seventh-Art crowd, but it will definite have legs to stand on for a long time.
3 Días or Three Days (US title) or Before the Fall, (international title), examines the actions of a man stressed almost to the breaking point by outrageous fortune. It is directed by F Javier Guttiérez, and written by him and Juan Velarde. This is a period of three days, before the end of the world, in a small town in Spain. What would the general population do if they knew the Earth would be destroyed in three days? You’ll have to do most of the imagining yourself, because the film only gives a glance at what is happening in the outside world. This film focuses on one man’s efforts to save his family from evil of others in the microcosmic environment of an isolated area of the Spanish interior. It is an odd study of human nature, that this man has no time to ponder his own life, his own personal disappointments and philosophy, but must spend the last 72 hours of existence in this primitive struggle against evil. It is film with subtlety, making the land seem timeless, the sun searingly close and the wind explosive. The direction is also excellent, not only for the major characters but for everyone that comes before the camera, the people are dangerous and inscrutable and very cinematic. In keeping with the apocalyptic theme, there are some bloody scenes, though none are particularly gruesome. The scenes of violence against young children, however, are difficult to take.
Victor Clavijo plays the part of Alejandro with amazing energy and emotional involvement. This is acting that is worthy of award attention, but although the film was considered in the pre-selection for the European Film Awards in 2008, it did not make it to the final round, so Clavijo will have to wait another year for that kind of distinction. Though he might have never prevailed against such major competition as Toni Servillo in Gomorrah and Il Divo, and Michael Fassbender in Hunger, it is still one of the outstanding European performance of this year. However, it is the kind of acting that usually gets ignored at the European Film Awards: physicality and pathos, unfortunately, don’t play well across the European cultural divide. It was also produced by Antonio Banderas, an important figure in international cinema with the smell of Hollywood about him, not exactly considered an eau de cologne at EFA. Add to that its aura of genre film, kind of sci-fi, fantasy and El Mariachi cultish. It is easy to see why the film has been totally ignored for EFA awards in 2008.
The screenplay, written by the director Guttiérez and Juan Velarde, won the Best First Screenplay award at the Málaga Film Festival, and that, I would say, is about as far as the awards should go for this script, since the script is probably one of the weakest elements here. It effectively sets up the situation and develops the tension in an exciting way, but there are the usual lapses of logic that occur when a European auteur film has not gone through a thorough review. Who are the violent criminals in the early scenes? Why does the grandmother wander away? Why would the children accept this situation without question? These are irritating problems that could have easily been fixed with some more careful scripting.
In general, it is a very satisfying genre film, an action-slash-slasher film in an unusual setting, and it serves to introduce Clavijo, a well known Spanish TV actor, to the international cinema. I think this film will continue to attract viewers for years to come as it spreads beyond Europe just below the radar.
December 3rd, 2008
Rachel Getting Married, directed by Jonathan Demme, is a convincing melodrama about a family in a constant state of rebuilding and self destruction.
The film has a first-feature-film quality about it, at times like a high quality home movie, at times self indulgent like a European film d’auteur and these conceits can detract from the whole. However, the stellar performance by Anne Hathaway carries the story along, and is the unrelenting focus of this work.
This is a familiar premise: a far flung family comes together for the wedding of the good daughter, Rachel, all the time fearing the return of the black sheep. The latter is played by Anne Hathaway. She is Kym Buchman who has been released from rehab just in time to come home to a house bustling with happy prenuptial activity – just the kind of activity guaranteed to bring out the self-destructive and resentful instincts of the girl. Hathaway plays the character with demonic energy and spot on accuracy, sending shivers of recognition through the viewer with her first utterances. We have all known people like Kym Buchman, but if we are not related to them, we tend to push them out of our consciousness as quickly as possible. Here we are forced to look Kym in the face, hear her words and understand her anguish. It is one of the great powers of cinema to make us do this, and Demme uses his skills and long years of experience to bring it out so effortlessly, in the service of an intelligent and intense script by Jenny Lumet.
The film has its problems which inevitably detract from the effect. There are times that the cinema verité quality can be overbearing, the arrival at home by Kym in which the camera flows nervously from room to room becomes tiresome, as does an extended sequence later in the film centered around a dishwasher. What I found most distracting, however, were the cultural implications of what was going on. This was a film about a marriage, one of the most characteristic events in the sociological construct of a culture. Whole books of anthropology have been written about the marriage customs of various peoples around the world, because the rituals reveal so much about the relationship of individuals in the group. To be sure, there are scenes in this film where marriage customs are used to bring the story forward, for example, some toasts at the dinner table, and when Kym fights to be Maid of Honor, but in general, the marriage rituals depicted in this film are strangely alien and difficult to decipher. This is a family that is ruthlessly and maniacally multi-cultural: the bride, played masterfully by Rosemarie DeWitt, is white and blonde, the groom a dark skinned black man from Hawaii. The dresses for the bride and bridesmaids are saris, and the ceremonies are a mad pastiche of borrowed customs thrown together incoherently, including just about anything that could be dreamed up except the upper middle class Judeo-Christian rituals that one might expect. This obsessive foreignness in itself seemed to be of significance, implying some kind of self-denial, some fleeing from the self that this family is enacting, yet the strangeness of this wedding is never discussed, and is presented as though completely normal. It is as though one of the guests at the wedding had arrived dressed as Napoleon, and nobody even noticed. What’s more, the situation seemed forced at times. At one point it is revealed the bride, Kym’s absolutely-perfect older sister, is already pregnant. When this news comes out, her father breaks into immediate gleeful cheering, and rushes to embrace his daughter and prospective son-in-law, i.e., the black man whom he has just met that has knocked up his daughter. It just doesn’t ring true. These oddities seem to be a missed opportunity to give the family more depth and nuance. Yes, we just elected Obama as president, but we haven’t gotten to the Promised Land just yet, and Mr. Buchman could have at least stepped back a moment to reassess the situation. Other characterizations are also left to wither on the vine. Kym’s new love interest, the Best Man Kieran, played by Mather Zickel, is never developed satisfactorally.
However, the most important element in the story is Anne Hathaway’s character, and this person is presented with great skill and nuance. I left the cinema wondering about the implications of her actions on the family, and that is a testiment to the efficacy of this performance.
November 30th, 2008
In 2001 Stéphane Breton, a French ethnologist with a video camera seemingly implanted in his shoulder, recorded his everyday dealings with the Wodani villagers he had come to live with in the Irian Jaya highlands of Papua New Guinea. It had taken a long time for Breton to gain acceptance by this village, first setting up a tent on the outskirts of the settlement, and then winning over local reticence, by learning the local language (called Wolani), and finally building a small home for himself. In “Eux et Moi” he documents the full development of his relationship with these neighbors. When the film begins, Breton has just returned from an extended absence, and his hand is seen dispensing Indonesian banknotes to young men who have just cleared the overgrowth from his front yard. This monetary negotiation is the first of many throughout the film, and sets the main narrative line of the story. Villagers come and go, checking his array of medicines, buying his plastic bottles of oil and touching the small objects at reach on tables and shelves in his wooden cabin, artifacts from a barely conceivable foreign land. Conversation consists mainly of monetary transactions: negotiations for the purchase of a pig, for the dowry of a spouse for his “adoptive son” and estimating the value of local currency, shells wrapped meticulously in rolls of cloth and leaves.
The life in this village, which seems to inhabit a blurry territory between isolation from civilization and cultural integration, is very poor, dirty and laborious but not particularly unhappy. There seem to be few conflicts (in this period, at least) either between villagers or with outsiders, and people seem to have a reflexive smile and easy laugh available for every unoccupied moment. However, the obsession with money and negotiation can seem a bit sad and ominous. All the cautionary tales about the damaging effects of western influence on traditional societies come to mind. When a villager happily invites Breton to bring more people from his faraway “village” to settle in the area, one can only wonder how long it would take for that person to sour on the idea, should any of Breton’s fellow westerners actually take him up on the offer. Breton seems to encourage this speculation on the viewer’s part, saying that the interaction of the outsider and the villagers, the cautious dance of eventual recognition that they are constantly engaging in, is one of the important things that he wished to depict.
The film was shown at Le Latina Cinema, (which has recently acquired the adjective “Nouveau’) on November 25, 2008, with the filmmaker in attendance. In a discussion that followed the screening, Breton made the point that he did not see the money centered activities as signs of decadence or outside interference. The monetary negotiations were part of traditional life, merely integrating the use of banknotes with that of precious shells. He maintained that the western concept of money as somehow “impure” is something that entered Western culture sometime after the Classical period, and it should be seen as a part of our own ethnological baggage. He also discussed how he learned the language of these people. It was a daunting task, since the language has no written form, and the village no bilingual speakers. In addition, the adults of the community were loathe to speak to him for a long time, because of his stammerings and mistakes, and he was forced to communicate verbally with children in order to gain fluency. He said one of the biggest difficulties that he had was to understand a concept he called dispersion, or the peripheral effects of an action, which are expressed in a particular verbal form. Another difficulty was something called duality, when talking about two people. It is not merely a grammatical form somewhere between singular and plural, but a spiritual and philosophical concept about the interaction of two beings and the bond that they create. Could it have been this concept that gave him the inspiration to use the duality of foreigner versus insider, “them” versus “him” as a theme of his film?
Stéphane Breton seemed uncomfortable with the label of ethnologist and he tried to downplay the specifically ethnological approach of his documentary filmmaking, calling it a narrative, an interplay between the outsider and the villagers. Breton did not like the term “document” either, saying that a document is a cold artifact, one that exists in itself, regardless of whether it is witnessed, studied or understood. He preferred to talk about his film as an experience, something that exists because it is seen. I don’t really see what the problem is, since his film can be both experience and record, like the artifacts that the visitors pick up curiously in Breton’s wooden cabin. The villagers see a beauty and a usefulness in these strange imported things that is immediately evident to them. However, there is also so much more there than they can grasp. Perhaps they will understand some more the next time they pick up that object, or perhaps never. And it is an interactive form of learning as well: they learn about themselves, their own interest in grooming, their own need for medicine. The same is true for us, the viewers of this film. Much happens here in these multifaceted interactions that we will not immediately understand. And we, too, learn in a complex way. When we see a villager pick up a safety razor for the first time, we learn more about his society and more about our own; when we react to the Wodani handling money we learn about them and about ourselves at the same time. The value of ethnography is that it teaches about all of mankind by studying the behaviors of its distinctive groups, and the value of art is the feeling of appreciation that it provokes in the viewer. This film deserves a place among the artistic objects to be seen and enjoyed on our cinema screens, but also as a document to be archived and stored so that future viewers from the Western “village,” as well as from the Wodani village can come back and learn something more from it in the future.
November 26th, 2008
One of the hottest tickets at the 49th Thessaloniki Film Festival was the event at the Olympion Theater honoring Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano on the evening of November 18, 2008. The great director received his special award with a short speech expressing his esteem for Greek culture, the sincerity of which was proven by the title and opening images of his latest film, Achilles and the Tortoise, which was then shown. The film begins with a simple cartoon sequence depicting the well known paradox of Zeno, in which Achilles must always halve the distance between himself and the tortoise, but in so doing, can never quite overtake him. This lesson sets us up for the film depicting the life of frustration and underachievement of a Japanese painter. Machisu is an artist who begins as a child prodigy with an innate talent and heroic compulsion to be a great painter. Before he has reached adolescence, he has made half the journey. However, the constant succession of selfish guardians, tragic events and heaps of bad advice cause him to halve his progress continuously, so that, try as he might through a lifetime of perseverance and hard work, his goal always seems just out of reach.
The film is beautifully crafted, and along the way it not only tells this personal story, but also satirizes an entire period of Japanese art appreciation after World War Two. The bewildered and sometimes foolish Japanese fascination with western art movements is ruthlessly parodied. But Kitano is far too subtle and perspicacious to settle on this easy target as a focus for his film. He gets beyond this fawning mimicry, accepting it as a given, and explores the drive and ambition of the artist himself.
In the Q and A that followed the screening, Kitano made a point of declaring that he did not see the protagonist of this film as a failure. Machisu had lived his life the way that he chose, and had acted with sincerity throughout, even though the materials and the products of his work were bogus, and inevitably flawed beyond redemption. The filmmaker also acted in the film, portraying the artist as an elderly man in the final scenes. Mentioning this, he told the Thessaloniki audience that the film was autobiographical in some metaphorical ways. He too had found his way in art through trial and error, and survived harrowing physical tragedies (such as a motorcycle accident in 1994 that has left his face partially paralyzed). He even used some of his own painting in the film. While it is clear that much of Kitano’s recent film work is inspired by his own life story, he manages to see beyond the particulars of his own life. In fact, the universality of the experiences in this film could make it somewhat biographical for all artists. Underneath all the specific Japanese satire is a solid level of truth about the minefield of ambition, public tastes and luck that are the treacherous road that every artist everywhere must travel.
Kitano also said that he sometimes feels like this artist because his films are not well received in Japan, and are much better appreciated outside his native land. If this is the case, it may be because he is better known at home for his work as a comedian, television producer and actor. Among his many TV productions was the highly ironic spoof game show Takeshi’s Castle that has enjoyed international cult success. His work as a comedian has also been controversial and not always considered in the best of taste. Another factor is the highly erratic nature of his filmmaking, which has gone through a great metamorphosis over the years, and because of his constant experimentation, has been received with widely varying levels of acceptance. The fact is that every element of Kitano’s artistic career has been on the cutting edge of what is acceptable, and thus every work must be taken individually. No matter how his other endeavors are judged, I believe that this film will go a long way to cementing his reputation as a great figure in modern Japanese film culture.
November 25th, 2008
Roberto Saviano’s 2006 book, “Gomorra” has had enormous success in a very short time. In it he tells the stories of organized crime that circulate through the Italian consciousness like vaguely remembered recurring nightmares. The book describes the activities of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, considered the oldest criminal organization in Italy, as it has evolved in the Twenty First Century. This is where cocaine, sweatshops, loan sharks, illegal immigrants and toxic dumps all come together to create a modern day horror of biblical proportions.
The book has sold over one million copies in Italy and has been published in numerous translations, illustrating not only Italian readers’ morbid interest in the subject, but also the alarming parallels for so many other societies suffering the ills of modern life. It is available in bookstores in approximately 50 different countries, in spite of the fact that it cannot be easily classified. It is a work of reportage, but done in a narrative style, a sort of non-fiction novel. Saviano cites the murdered Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya and Truman Capote as his forerunners in this genre and his work seems to occupy a space somewhere between the two, investigating the corruption of big business on the one hand, and the sick allure of bloody crime on the other.
The Camorra, (which when spoken with a Neapolitan accent sounds like the infamous biblical city) along with its Calabrian counterpart ‘Ndrangheta are not nearly as well known as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, and for that reason, they have very successfully insinuated themselves into the industrial economy of the country. Saviano says in an interview with Fabio Fazio for Italian television, that the Camorristi don’t even call their organization by its name, merely speaking of the “system.” Members of ‘Ndrangheta similarly speak of “Cosa Nuova.” To them, calling their own organizations by their names is something laughably quaint, like calling murder, usury or blackmail by such pedestrian names. These people see themselves as mythic figures living out the cinematic visions of a hundred films. With this book, this courageous journalist (who has been the victim of numerous death threats) endeavors to tear the covers off of this clandestine culture, as one would tear the bandages off a festering wound. He calls evil by its name, and then dares Italian society to do something about it.
“Gomorra” is not just a fascinating book, one so true to life that it is the most widely read book in Italian prisons, it is also a powerful film directed by Matteo Garrone, and winner of the Grand Prize of the Festival at Cannes in 2008. The screenplay takes five of the stories from Saviano’s book and intertwines them dramatically. Garrone uses a mix of professional and non-professional actors who move through a filthy labyrinth of decaying housing projects and polluted lands as they sleep walk/run through this nightmare. There are quarrels and beatings and deep rooted fears, and there is cocaine to make it bearable, either through its money or its high. And there is murder, lots of it. But what is most tragically depicted, is the hope that so many of the individuals kindle inside of themselves, to succeed in some way, hopes that will inevitably be snuffed out. The film is a searing, burning tool with a sharp edge that cuts the images into the spectators brain, just as Saviano intended to cut his words into the reader’s mind. Here we see the underbelly of modern Europe, the apocalyptic Naples that cries out in self-inflicted pain. It is up to the viewer to decide if this is really someone else’s problem, or a social disease that infects every one of our cities, no matter how far we live from Vesuvius.
The book has been published as “Gomorrah” in the U.S. in 2007, translated by Virginia Jewiss. The film of the same name was shown at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival and will be distributed in North America by IFC. It is to be released in late 2008 or early 2009.
September 30th, 2008
“Hunger” directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, is a frightening look at life in Maze Prison during the IRA “dirty” protests of 1981. As the scenes unfold in this unrelentingly dark film, the camera moves into cells with walls covered in feces, through halls flooded with pools of urine, under the clubs of sadistic prison guards as they beat prisoners and into close-ups of the savage chopping of hair and beards, with bits of scalp and flesh cut away for good measure. This is violence that goes both ways, balancing the savagery neatly with the assassination of a prison guard while visiting his mother in a rest home. He ends up with his brains blown out in her lap, as she stares uncomprehending into the distance.The graphic violence is difficult to take, and this is certainly intentional. McQueen wanted to make the horrors of that period visual and visceral for today’s audiences. There have been so many other calamities and historical upheaval since those years, that we are in danger of forgetting the suffering that so many went through, and this film very successfully puts the brutality of that era “in your face.” The director achieves a growing tension in the film through several strategies, some of them quite effective. At the beginning there is a sense of barely contained violence in the images, and interaction that eventually explodes into scenes of horrible brutality. This is also reflected in the dialog. McQueen has stated that at first he wanted to begin the film with almost total silence, and then build the pressure to a sudden outpouring of words. He eventually modified this approach somewhat, with the first thirty minutes or so of the film characterized by extremely sparse dialog. The near silence is suddenly ruptured by the first incongruous sound of chattering voices in the prison chapel, where a Catholic priest is saying Mass, his formulaic words barely audible above the din of urgent conversation. The camera pulls back to reveal a crowded room of political prisoners standing around talking excitedly as though at a cocktail party, rushing the words out in this their only opportunity to communicate beyond their isolated cells. It is a highly effective scene, illustrating beautifully the paradox of profanity, humanity and religious mission at the basis of the IRA movement.
Many questions are raised by a film like this. The most obvious ones begin with, “What for?” Why did these men join the IRA, why did they fight so tenaciously in the prison, and why were they treated so inhumanely? And the most pertinent question, why bring this all up now?
Steve McQueen avoids any direct answer to these questions in the interviews he has given regarding the film. It seems that he considers the entire tragedy of those years to have been a force of human nature, an inevitable Via Dolorosa that the Irish and British people needed to stumble through for their own salvation. He says that he created the story in a non-judgmental way, and did not intend to take sides with this film. However, the portrayal of Bobby Sands, the most well-known IRA fighter from that period, is presented with undeniably heroic overtones. For this reason, the film will almost certainly be very controversial in its UK release in October, 2008.
Although the scenes are intense, the storyline of the film has certain weaknesses that detract from its potential impact. The story seems to meander from a distance before it finally takes some direction to chronicle the last days of Bobby Sands’ life. It begins in the home of one prison guard as he leaves for work in the morning. It follows him into Maze Prison where it then takes up with a new prisoner as he is being processed into this vast dungeon. We follow this prisoner into his cell where his cellmate has already covered the walls with his own feces. We are quite far into the 96 minute film before we even meet Bobby Sands, played by Michael Fassbender, and a while more after that before we realize that this silent character locked up further down the corridor is, in fact, the protagonist of this film. In compensation, Fassbender’s performance, when he is finally brought front and center, is outstanding, and his final agony as he struggles with his own responsibilities and slowly dies of hunger, wasting away before our eyes, is an astounding performance.
But besides chronicling the physical suffering, McQueen is interested in also presenting the intellectual dilemma that this situation laid bare: the anachronistic existence of this medieval religious warfare in Twentieth Century Western Europe. He achieves that through the use of a crucial central scene, a polemical conversation between Sands and a priest who has come to visit him in the prison just as the hunger strike is getting underway. This seventeen minute scene, a tour de force filmed without any cuts, seeks to encapsulate through dialectics the entire tangle of contradictions, paradoxes and doom inherent in the situation, with Sands defending the choices made by the striking prisoners, and the priest taking the opposing views.
At the Sarajevo Film Festival, there was much talk about the technical achievement of creating such a long scene without any cuts, as well as the dramatic talents of the two actors in pulling this off. However, the real measure of success for this scene is how effectively it communicates the message. In my opinion, the seventeen minutes without a cut was static and counterproductive. It served to highlight the stagey-ness of the dialog, with the back and forth repartee of Sands and his confessor quickly becoming wooden and artificial. After about five minutes I had the sense of watching a verbose Edwardian production, and the scene still had twelve more minutes to go. Perhaps in an attempt to give it an emotional drive, the actors progressively talked faster and faster, but for me, this only made it worse. It seemed like they were pushing the words out to try to get through the scene before collapsing in exhaustion. With these distractions, I had difficulty listening to the barrage of arguments in those thick Ulster accents and I found myself repeatedly wondering when this scene would ever be over.
Even with its defects, this film is forceful and impressive, reminding us that history can never truly be resolved. The implications go far beyond the borders of Northern Ireland. When the film was shown at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2008, the actor who played the priest, Liam Cunningham, alluded to this when he spoke to that Bosnian audience, referring to parallels between the Irish situation and Bosnia’s own “troubles.” Steve McQueen has also hinted at a certain parallel between the brutality of Maze Prison and the prison scandals that have come out of the Iraqi occupation. This may be a story about one time in British and Irish history, but in a sense it is about the tragedy of human nature, when one group takes control over another, far beyond the rules of civilized society.
“Hunger” is an important addition to the body of work dealing with this painful period. Hopefully it will inspire a new, more emotionally detached discussion of the meaning of those years. This film very articulately poses the questions. If it has no answers to give, that is because there are still none to give. This is history still being written, very painfully, one page at a time.
September 30th, 2008
I managed to catch the last few days of the Sarajevo Film Festival in August, 2008, and see some interesting and not-so-interesting films. I have written separate reviews for “Gomorrah”, and “Hunger” two excellent films that should not be missed. However, there were some other films of note that deserve a few lines as well.
I saw two documentaries. One was “24 City,” by Jia Zhang Ke, a film about the transformation of Chengdu, from military factory town to modern metropolis, as seen by a group of aged former factory workers. The stories that these people tell, of lives filled with hardship and unrecognized sacrifice is very touching. Hopefully a wider audience will get a chance to see this film on European television.
The other one was “A Road to Mecca - The Journey of Muhammad Asad,” directed by Georg Misch was a fascinating look at the life of a Muslim scholar with a unique background, and an even more unusual life. Muhammad Asad, born Leopold Weiss, an Austrian Jew, wrote many books about Muslim theology which became very popular in the Islamic world during the mid-Twentieth Century. He lived in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Pakistan, becoming the ambassador of this last country to the UN. He died forgotten in Spain in the 1970s.
There were some good feature films.
“The Fourth Man,” directed by Dejan Zecevic was a brilliant mystery in the style of “Klopka,” also from Serbia, which made the rounds of festivals last year. Serbia is by far the largest producer of films in the former Yugoslavia, and the superior technical production values of these films is evident right from the start. The script here (by the director and Boban Jevtic) was also far better than most of the work on display at Sarajevo.
“My Marlon and Brando,” directed by Huseyin Karabey, is an entertaining film about a star-crossed love affair between a melodramatic Iraqi Kurdish film actor and a somewhat unattractive struggling actress from Istanbul. Ayca Damgaci, as the Turkish actress, is exceptionally good in this role, playing it with a great amount of comedy and affection for the character. She went on to win Best Actress at the festival, an award she certainly deserved.
“Delta,” a Hungarian film directed by Kornel Mundruczo, tells the story of an incestuous relationship in a small Hungarian community. It is an interesting study of small town attitudes but it has the usual defects of this type of film. There is very little real communication, and very little exploration of people’s motivations for the things that they do. The atmosphere of the Danube Delta is fascinating, though and the local characters are interesting to watch, even if they don’t have very much to do.
One of my few favorite films at the festival was “My Winnipeg,” directed by Guy Maddin. The technique is similar to that used in “The Saddest Music in the World” from 2003. The wintry, black and white Winnipeg setting will be familiar too. This film is supposedly auto-biographical, though it is impossible to tell when he is being ironic, silly or just plain lying. The script also gets tangled up in supposed reality scenes from the shoot. It is truly an original script. There is a great preponderance of voice-over narration, usually a deadly device, but in this case it works perfectly. The narration is poetic and funny, and is perfectly complemented by the surrealistic scenes. The film is an original work of art, and served, unfortunately, to highlight how conventional the story telling and conservative the filmmaking of so many of the other films at the festival.
Now that I have gotten through the good stuff, on to some duds that sputtered and died on the screen right from their first scenes:
“Buick Riviera,” announced immediately that it was going nowhere. A woman stands at her window in a modest suburban American home. It is a snowy winter morning and she is watching the man who has just left the house clear snow off the clunky gas guzzler parked out front and get in and warm it up. I used to hate the endless minutes spent sitting in a 1980 Oldsmobile warming it up, and I really don’t want to watch someone else do it for several minutes. The film was well received in Sarajevo, though, because it touched on a subject of interest there. The protagonist is Hasan, a Bosnian refugee who meets another ex-Yugoslav, a Serb named Vuko. The two see each other in a new light, lost as they are in this frozen North in middle America.
“We’ve Never Been to Venice,” directed by Blaz Kutin, begins with a scene of a young couple sitting on a couch staring toward the camera. They sit and sit and do nothing. The doorbell rings, and they continue to sit and do nothing. I’m not fascinated. I’m bored. Is the director is willing to waste my time with this, how good can this film ever get? Not very. Actually, the film does contain an interesting plot twist that becomes clear only at the end of film. If you must see it, do so with a DVD player with your finger firmly on fast forward.
“Los Bastardos,” directed by Amat Escalante managed to be disappointing, even after it was clear that something was wrong right from the first scene. This was an extended sequence when two figures walk toward the camera along the Los Angeles River canal. They get from way in the distance, past the camera and up the sloping bank of the canal in real time. It was a mind numbing waste of film stock and time, the kind of self-conscious hackneyed beginning that is a staple of artsy “festival” cinema, and it should have served as a warning to get out of the theater immediately and find something more original. The film was ostensibly about the exploitation of Mexican migrant workers in Southern California, but it managed to exploit the Mexicans, the Southern Californians and the Sarajevo Festival for little purpose, all at the same time.
But it was not the worst beginning I saw at the festival. The first few minutes of “In the City of Sylvia,” directed by Jose Luis Guerin, was possibly the most pretentiously empty feature film opening sequence I have ever sat through. It begins with an endless shot of a young man writing in his diary on the bed in a cheap hotel. He writes furiously a couple of words, and then gets stuck and stares into space, and stares and stares. I found myself watching his eyelids, just to assure myself that the camera was really running and that this was not a movie still. The film has no plot, and barely any dialog in its script (which must be about five pages long). It is really a concept, a young man looks longingly at beautiful women in the streets and cafes of Strasbourg. He sees one that he thinks he recognizes to be Sylvia and follows her through just about every street in the city. There are some nice shots of women, a neck, a hand gesture, a whisper in someone’s ear, but is that the basis of an 84 minute film? Fifteen minutes, max! This was absolute torture.
On the whole I guess I saw two good films for each seriously lousy film. Not a good ratio. What was particularly disappointing, was the fact that most of the really bad films that I saw were from the Features Competition. I have the feeling that the selection committee wants to give the festival an identifiable quality, to distinguish a Sarajevo style. With the proliferation of film festivals all over the world, it is probably a very good idea to make Sarajevo distinctive in some way but be careful what you wish for. Branding is always good,… as long as your brand doesn’t mean boring, pointless and pretentious.
September 29th, 2008
Ferzan Ozpetek has created another grand film that promises so much, only to inevitably fall just short. Saturno Contro (Saturn in Opposition) is an ensemble story of a group of friends who create their own sense of family in the absence of traditional relationships. They face a series of personal crises together and find their way forward through adversity realizing, (though they seem to already know) that without each other, they would never survive.
If this storyline seems to be everything and nothing at once, then you have hit upon the major weakness of this film. The cast is superb, with convincing performances put in by all these accomplished actors, and they have engaging personalities and quirks. But the jumble of interlacing lives leaves little room for a story to develop. Most of these people have been friends for many years, and their backstories continually intrude and dominate the proceedings. This imposes some very real problems of storytelling that the script is incapable of resolving. The film must take so much time filling in the past that the there is no time left for the future.
There are simply too many people on the set at any one time, and too many subplots. There are even two couples whose stories compete to be the central focus of the proceedings: Lorenzo and Davide, the gay couple and their straight friends, Antonio and Angelica. All four actors (Luca Argentero, Pierfrancesco Favino, Stefano Accorsi, and Margherita Buy, respectively) are excellent and ultimately wasted in a story that does not go very far. But at least they get to center stage. Other fine performances by Ambra Angiolini and Ennio Fantastichini are thrown away in roles that are simply screaming for development.
Certainly the problem is not with the filmmaking. Ozpetek is an accomplished director who manages to make this rather artificial story thoroughly enchanting. The exteriors are sweepingly grand, the close-ups peculiarly revealing; especially with the extravagantly handsome Luca Argentero and the hauntingly needy “other woman,” played by Isabella Ferrari. And there is one scene that is so ingenious it could be considered a lesson in filmmaking. While the ensemble of friends sit about in a public space, gloomily contemplating the future, a stranger, a woman talking on her cell phone, comes into earshot. She is speaking in a foreign tongue and her voice is at first a minor disturbance that the characters and the spectators try to ignore. But gradually, we can tell from the tone of her voice that she is describing some disaster over the wires, and finally, her sobbing, nearly hysterical voice completely dominates the scene, sending the characters off to face their crisis. In this way, this unknown woman becomes the personification and the expression of all their grief and anguish. It is stunningly effective.
There seems to be a desire to say too much with this one film, like someone who is trying to hold far too many tennis balls in their arms: inevitably there will be several tennis balls bouncing away on the floor, and that is what will draw our attention. All of the missed opportunities are like films waiting to happen, and Saturno Contro ends up feeling like the pilot for a television mini-series.
July 5th, 2008
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