Month: August 2019

Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies)

Posted on by victorfraga

Prolific French director Olivier Assayas follows up the recent success of Personal Shopper with the work entitled in English Non-Fiction, and in French, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”, in free translation); both titles provide complementary clues to the content. This film is in complete contrast to the earlier film which was a mysterious, intriguing and often ghostly exploration of how grief at the death of a twin brother affects the surviving twin sister.

In Non-Fiction, the subject matter deals with the present and the story unfolds in order to to reveal the complexity of the long-standing friendships and relationships of a group of friends who live in the centre of Paris. The foursome at the centre of the film have known each other for years and are part of a wider circle of friends who meet to enjoy each other’s company, eat, drink and converse.

Those familiar with the French language will undoubtedly get more from the long, discursive debates about the future of the printed as against the digital world, while those with a familiarity of film will enjoy the references to Bergman and Haneke. The cultural background extends to a literary reference to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard. While some may find it too wordy, there is humour, wit and even mockery in the exchanges. Serena’s (Juliette Binoche) defence of the role she plays in a popular TV crime series, explaining more than once she is not “a cop” but a “crisis management operative”, is particularly interesting.

At the core of the narrative is the involved relationship, professional and personal, between publisher, Alain, (Guillaume Canet) and Leonard (Vincent Macaigne). This is tested when Alain rejects Leonard’s latest book. It is an acknowledged fact that the material for Leonard’s books are his most recent affairs, often with women in the public eye. The film follows the issues that this creates with the full understanding of another dimension only emerging towards the end.

The mise-en-scene which draws the viewer into the atmosphere of life in Paris is thoroughly enjoyable. At the same time, Assayas highlights to the limitations of this sophistication. Most of the group are so Paris-centred, that they have no idea of the geography of France. Leonard’s partner, Valerie ( Nora Hamzawi) an advisor to a left wing politician, is the only one with knowledge and engagement with the industrial world outside Paris.

While the characters involvement with each other is complex, there is great warmth in the way they relate to each other. The acting subtly gives depth to the characters. The cinematography by Yorick Le Saux supports Assayas’s clever dialogue which is thoroughly engaging and credible. A film which deals with the cultural issues of our time through the eyes of a director steeped in French culture. Highly recommended.

Non-Fiction is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 18th, with previews across the country on Saturday, September 7th. On VoD in April.On BFI Player in June (2023)

The dark humour of fatherhood

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The movie A Voluntary Year (Das Freiwillige Jahr), which played in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, is the second film in two years from Ulrich Köhler after In My Room (2018). Co-directed with Henner Winckler, it tells the story of generational conflict. A father drives his daughter to the airport to take part in a voluntary year in Costa Rica. But when her boyfriend Mario resurfaces, she finds herself unable to truly figure out what she wants, much to her father’s chagrin. The result is a bitterly funny exploration of home, father-daughter relationships and the inability to see past one’s own perspective. We sat down with the two directors to discuss the process of making the film, what the actors brought to the film’s point-of-view and how to maintain narrative conflict when your characters refuse to change.

Read our A Voluntary Year review here!

…

.

Redmond Bacon – What was the main idea behind the film?

Ulrich Köhler – The main idea was to make a film together. During Sleeping Sickness (Schlafkrankheit, 2011) I felt: “This is really too much for one person.” It’s a very uncreative process because you never have a view from a distance where you can say: “This is the problem” or “This is the possibility.” This was the first starting point. Then we have a lot of matching biographical experiences. We are both fathers of children and we hope for them to have a happy life. We have a certain vision of life but we have to learn that our vision of life is not automatically the thing that will make them happy.

RB – The film deals with the concept of a Voluntary Social Year: a strong concept in German culture. Can you tell me more about what it means?

Henner Winckler – We had military service as a duty for our generation. When they stopped it they invented this idea instead. Lots of kids go abroad. I’m not sure if it’s always a good idea. These young people are not trained for anything. They go into the world and they want to help, but they don’t know anything. For the young kids it’s very interesting. For the countries they go to, I’m not sure it’s really helpful.

UK – You’re not automatically an expert just because you went to school in Germany.

HW – It’s controversial.

RB – Is it a hangover from colonialist ideals?

UK – It was a very populist move from a Social Democratic Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, who wanted to say that he’s doing something for the Third World. In a way it’s neo-colonialism. It’s absurd to think that just because someone went to high school in Germany he’s automatically highly qualified to help people in less privileged parts of the world.

RB – The film flips stereotypes on their head. In conventional cinema it’s usually the daughter who wants to break free and the father who wants her to stay at home. Here it’s the other way around. Was this a conscious decision?

HW – On the one hand yes. On the other hand this is something we experienced as well. In our generation the parents think this is how it should be, to go out and see the world, but some just want to stay. They have their friends. There is no need to go abroad because they have everything on Netflix.

RB – The use of perspective in the film is very interesting. There are no crosscuts between characters. We only switch if they have interacted in the same scene. Is this an intentional move to immerse us in the lives of these characters?

UK – It comes from the formal idea that a lot of this film should take place in the car. And that the car was like a relay race. Every time someone has the car, then we’re with them.

HW – This was one of the main ideas when we started: to tell the story from the view of a car.

RB – It’s funny because it’s a Volkswagen Camper Van too.

A Voluntary Year

UK – That’s like the embodiment of socially liberal Utopia. There were those parents who went on traditional vacations in hotels in Lago die Garda or Rimini. Then there were those like our parents, who either had a boat or a VW van and went wild camping in France.

RB – This generational change forms the conflict between father and daughter. I found it to be bitterly funny; a dark comedy of awkwardness. Would you agree?

UK – For me it’s a situational comedy. Humour is always a question of perspective. If you go back far enough in history, then even the war between Gallics and Romans can become comedy. Something that feels very serious and very emotional for a person when they’re living through it, might seem very different when he looks at it from the outside or five years later. That’s how humour works for me.

RB – A lot of this humour rests upon the performance of Sebastian Rudolph. Did you have him in mind when you were writing the screenplay together.

HW – We had a different character for both the father and daughter in mind. We thought it had to be a “real man” with a beard.

UK – A patriarch.

HW – And for the daughter we had a more narrow-minded girl in mind. So the father is ashamed of his daughter. When we started casting it felt like a cliché. Instead, Sebastian Rudolph’s Urs is more like an older teenager, a softer type, and Jette is much stronger than we thought. She’s not someone who has no idea what to do. She’s just jumping from one thing to another and this makes it more complex.

UK – If you look at what Maj-Britt Klenke made out of this character, it’s very different. We really had the desire to make a film about a boring girl. I found it a dramaturgically risky but interesting thing to do.

RB – In most films people change their perspective from the beginning to the end, but here no one seems to change. How do you keep the narrative full of conflict while characters don’t fundamentally change their perspective?

UK – I think on a superficial level it’s quite simple dramatically. It’s like a film where a bomb is ticking. You always have this decision: Is she getting on the plane or not? When she changes her mind, it restarts, and you have the new decision. If you look at it from a purely analytical, formal and superficial point of view, this very primitive dramaturgy keeps the film going. It’s very character driven but also very plotty in a way.

RB – I thought fundamentally the way father and daughter react to situations is actually quite similar. They’re both impulsive characters. Were you trying to show how father is like daughter and vice versa?

UK – When I look at the film, I’m amazed how much the daughter behaves like the father. It’s not something we had felt strongly.

HW – The idea was the opposite: there’s one that makes decisions and one who can’t make decisions. Now we say the way she behaves with her boyfriend Mario is quite similar.

UK – It’s something I really love because it shows that filmmaking is a process. You start something then it has a dynamic of its own. You’re not just fulfilling an idea you had five years ago.

RB – Ulrich, there were seven years between Sleeping Sickness and In My Room. Now there’s only one year between In My Room and this film. How did you turn around a new film so quickly?

UK – That’s not our decision. That’s the decision of the film funding system. We just had the opportunity to make the film as a TV movie. For me it was an interesting experience. For the first time I felt like a professional director. Otherwise I always start from scratch. This time I was well aware of how the process works.

A Voluntary Year

RB – It seems films for TV can be made a lot quicker.

UK – That was interesting for me. It gave me the feeling that there’s less to lose. That gave me and the actors a certain amount of freedom. It was an interesting experience and it will change the way I work.

RB – I want to talk about the character of Murat, the refugee. Urs says that he will take him in but due to personal circumstances he changes his mind. Is this a pointed comment on how the response to migrant crisis in Germany changed from openness in concept to more complicated in reality?

UK – Yeah. It’s easy to say “welcome” but it’s not so easy to give Murat a room when you’re in a big crisis with your daughter. It’s understandable he doesn’t want Murat in that situation. At the same time it’s very consequential. I think we’d all like to be better people, but we also don’t really want to give away too many of our privileges.

RB – Ulrich, you wrote a political essay around ten years ago explained why your art isn’t political. Have you changed your mind on this?

UK – The point I was making is that filmmaking is not a political action. Well, everything is political. Taking a shower is political. But in a narrow definition, filmmaking is not political. If you want to change the world actively, change it actively: it’s not the reason why I make films. I think there’s a hypocrisy in making a film out of creative or commercial ambition and thinking that you’re changing the world.

RB – Are you two planning to work together on your next project? Have you got anything in mind?

HW – Vacation.

UK – I’m sure we’ll work together in one way or another. I’m not sure we’ll work together directing again.

HW – I think first we want to do our own stuff but I never know how it will.

UK – [laughing] When he’s deaf and I’m blind we will do the next film together.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Posted on by victorfraga

This brand new fantasy-horror movie – showcased with much fanfare at the Bankside Vaults – struck me as a combination of The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1993) and It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) by way of Goosebumps (Rob Letterman, 2016). An interesting set of influences, you may think, but the result is narratively and thematically trite – haunted houses, cursed books. Even triter is the character work. It’s all geeks and jocks. How many times have we seen bookish girls and bespectacled boys get tormented by douchebags in a varsity jackets? Too many.

However, the most disappointing thing is the utter dearth of scares. This is cattle prod cinema at its most formulaic; so easy to read that even its most earnest attempts to spoil your underwear barely register. All it succeeds in doing is a spot of heart flutter and a touch of ear damage – decidedly unimpressive.

There’s no denying its technical proficiency, though. It has a deft blend of the practical and the digital, which is no surprise given the Guillermo del Toro’s influence, although this counts for little when the subjects, their dialogue and their circumstances which are impossible to remember.

The problem is that director Andre Ovredal and producer/writer del Toro appear to be far more interested in Stephen Gammel’s macabre illustrations than Schwartz’s writing. There’s period detail and a slim satire of the Nixon era – represented by the bigoted, authoritarian police chief – but any substance is sidelined in favour of ghoulish set pieces, which may be exciting to its loyal fan base but are too random and episodic to anyone else.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 23rd. Special screenings will be held across gloomy locations such as the Bankside Vaults of London. Available on VoD in April!

24 Snow

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The highs and lows of extreme rural living are expertly depicted in 24 Snow, a documentary that dives into life in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Alternating scenes of natural beauty with a down-to-earth character portrait of an middle-aged Yakut horse breeder, it celebrates traditional forms of living while lamenting their slow erosion to the forces of modernisation.

Sergey Loukin’s story takes place in the area around Sakkyryr, Russia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, where temperatures regularly plummet below minus fifty degrees. It’s so cold in the winter that sheets of ice cling to the horse’s fur and must be removed with axes, and reindeer and husky-pulled sleds remain the only form of transportation. There is no electricity, no internet and no shops for miles around. Sergei must make do with his immediate surroundings alone. We follow him for around a year, from snow to summer to snow again.

There is something very satisfying and empowering even in watching someone dedicate themselves to a simpler, less encumbered way of life. It’s evident that director Mikhail Baryin feels the same way. Stunning cinematography of the Russian Taiga — replete with endless snowy plains, misty mountains and huge lakes — give Sergey’s work a mythical vibe, as if his life is untouched by time itself.

But times are changing, Sergey deliberately framed with his cowboy hat and leather jacket like he’s the last hurrah of the old school. His eldest children have left for the city, earning plenty more than the mere 5,000 roubles (£61.79) he says he earns a month. Sergei knows he could earn more money working elsewhere, but its evident that nothing beats the rush of horse breeding or being so close to nature. He is also often estranged from his family for long periods of time: he says he left his daughter while she was starting to laugh and came back to see her starting to walk.

This is the price he pays for his life, which he accepts with both grace and a touch of regret. He knows he is an outlier, even for the Indigenous Yakut people, yet it is this very extremity that seems to be its own reward. Baryin finds ways to express this in both deeply dramatic ways, such as an epic horse herd crossing a vast river, and the perfectly simple; after cutting grass all day, he lies down and takes a nap, his exhausted expression the very picture of contentment. A likeable, talkative narrator, he warmly invites us into his life, regaling us with anecdotes and minuscule details, expertly communicating the sheer joy he finds in his work.

And there are certain moments that seem to place us right there alongside him. Cinematographer Mikhail Kardashevski rigs his camera on top of racing horses, travelling reindeer and the back of trucks, immersing us in Sergey’s journey across this vast, gorgeous, desolate landscape. Although we probably wouldn’t last a day in Sergey’s winter, rare films like 24 Snow give us the opportunity to imagine, ever-so-briefly, that we could. A truly transportive experience.

24 Snow shows on October 15th as part of the 13th Native Spirit Festival. Just click here for more information.

Neither Wolf nor Dog

Posted on by victorfraga

The opening wide angle shot takes in an impoverished scene, a wooden shack with a privy up a rough grassy track. A very old man is making a laboured progress towards the privy. A young woman appears at the door of the shack about to make a phone call on her cell phone. It connects her to a man about to say goodbye to his wife and child. The phone call is made to a man living in a city 400 miles away. Her message to him is that her grandfather wants to speak to him and he does not speak on the phone. From this moment on, we are drawn into an unfamiliar world where a different reading of the history of the American West and the Native American experience gradually emerges.

His reluctance to become involved is the narrative thread which continues throughout the film. Our understanding grows as we begin to appreciate that the old man nearing the end of his life wants the younger man to write a book about his Lakota Indian Nation’s history in a way which realistically reflects the experience of those living in the west when the white man came. Despite false starts and misunderstandings, he is confronted with his own ignorance of the issues faced by the people who lived on the land he is travelling through.

The film is an adaptation by the director, Steven Lewis Simpson, and Kent Nerburn, author of a book published 25 years ago, based on a journey he made and recorded in a book. The narrative is brought to life by the participation of an outstanding cast of Native American actors. The old man, Dan, is magnificently played by 97-year-old Chief Dave Bald Eagle, a Lakota elder, a man whose commitment to being an American is demonstrated in having been in the D-Day landings in WW2. He lived to see the completed film.

Dan and his companion and younger friend Grover (Richard Ray Whitman) more or less take Nerburn (Christopher Sweeney) on a road trip and organise various encounters with the aim of opening his eyes to the experience of the Native American people. The austere landscape is elegantly filmed contrasting starkly with the rundown townscapes of the various settlements. The leisurely pace belies that the film was shot in 18 days with a small crew. The music composed by Evelyn Glennie conveys a dream-like and mysterious atmosphere which complements the growth of Nerburn’s new awareness of the experience of the Lakota people.

Neither Wolf nor Dog is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 23rd.

Discover Iceland in all its glory!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Icelandic movie Echo (Bergmál), which premiered in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, is a major step up in form and content for Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson. Set over the Christmas period, its a wide-spanning portrayal of the nation that’s equal parts profound, funny, and banal. Its standout quality is the way it marries formalist rigour — each scene focusing on a new character and shot with a single static camera — with emotion, humour and philosophical enquiry. We sat down with the director to discuss his unique approach to hybrid forms, Icelandic society, and working with real people.

Read our review now!

Redmond Bacon – Echo is very different from single character portraits Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015). Why the massive change in tone?

Rúnar Rúnarsson – I wouldn’t say that its a massive change in tone. People say to me: “you made some radical changes in your life making this film”. The fundamental difference is that we are portraying society instead of one person, but I think the fingertips of the creative team and I are quite similar.

RB – Echo takes such a panoramic view of Iceland. Do you think it will strike a chord across Icelandic society?

RR – Festival-wise my films have always done well, but I’ve never sold tickets anywhere, not even at home. I’ve been privileged in my life to do the things that I wanted. But you can’t have it all. You can’t have sold out theatres night after night. My main aim has always been to follow my vision. I have no expectations towards ticket sales, in Iceland or elsewhere. To be completely honest, I don’t think in this way. I have a big misconception of my films though. I think they are really audience friendly but I’m still regarded as an “artist director”!

RB – I think Echo is very accessible due to how true to life it is, and its humour. The form of the film is a hybrid between documentary footage and fiction. How much was documentary footage and how much was fiction?

RR – There was a really detailed manuscript. I think there were maybe nine or ten scenes that didn’t end up in the film. The rules we had were made for effect. I think we achieved a sense of authenticity. We decided not to say what is real and what is in full control. Anyway, even when you look at a fly-on-the-wall documentary, there are decisions such as when you come in and out of a shot and how its put together. There is always a sense of the author.

RB – Yes, there’s always an artificiality to a documentary, because you choose what to put in, you choose what to take out and you choose how to present it and edit it together. It doesn’t just happen by itself.

RR – All my fictional films are about things I’ve gone through in my life or people close to me. My goal is to be honest and capture a sense of reality and a sense of my emotions; to put it out for whoever would be interested. Most scenes in this film are in a greyscale. All people in front of the camera are under their own identity; sometimes you hear their names. And it is their real names. Often they are in their native surroundings.

Echo

RB – These are native actors playing versions of themselves?

RR – Sometimes being themselves, sometimes following a script. There are some with acting backgrounds, then they went into farming and play a farmer in the film.

RB – There’s so many different perspectives in the film…

RR – Iceland is a small community. The Prime Minister of Iceland [Katrín Jakobsdóttir] is in this film. We bumped into her while shooting another scene. There are homeless people as well. I know the assistant to the Prime Minister and I know one of the homeless people really well. In a society so small, you know somebody in every situation.

RB – So there isn’t a massive divide between rich in poor in terms of being aware of each other?

RR – No. It’s so small. But the gap is getting bigger. There is private education and healthcare, which didn’t exist when I was growing up. Society is changing, but it still has this Scandinavian Social Democratic foundation.

RB – You tackle the Panama Papers scandal when former Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had to resign. Was it important to have these contemporaneous elements too?

RR – We shot during Christmas 2018. There were things debated at the time that ended up in the film. But it’s not about the truth of the period; it’s an echo, hence the title, portraying fragments of life from Iceland during that time.

RB – I want to talk about another Scandinavian director. Roy Andersson. Echo has a similar mise en scène to The Living Trilogy (2000-14)? Was this an inspiration?

RR – A friend of mine didn’t understand the project I was working on. I was about to go to the financing place and gave him the script. He went through it and said: “It’s going to be really simple for you to present this film. Just tell people to imagine if Vittorio Di Sica would make a Roy Andersson film.”

RB – In terms of narration it reminded me of the British movie Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), in that there’s a lot of stories set around Christmas and the season itself becomes the narrator. Was this an inspiration at all?

RR – No. But when I was developing the movie it was at first about these fragments of life. First I thought about doing it over the period of a year. But I wouldn’t ever be able to afford it, and the more I developed it, the more I wanted to have more control. I felt like Christmas was the right framework because it’s hard to sympathise with people you don’t know. In normal films you have the time to build up a character and for the audience to care about them. Here you meet people and then they’re gone and never reappear…

RB – But Christmas gives it this sentimental overlay?

RR – Yes. It’s an amplifier of our emotions. It helps the audience to be put in the place of these people. Many of them have been in these situations. It’s a time of year where people are more observant. They try to be better people; more generous and open-minded. At the same time, for many people, it’s the worst time of the year. It was a good guide to constructing a narrative.

RB – Was it all shot within this two week period?

RR – There was one scene we just had to do earlier. The burning house scene is from another time of the year.

RB – That’s a very evocative scene. It reminded me of The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986).

RR – He had to burn that house two times.

Your

RB – Films are always set against nature, a natural byproduct, I guess, of shooting in Iceland. But this film seems mostly focused on the people itself, which goes against a conventional approach to depicting the country. Was this intentional?

RR – It was never my intention of decorating something in nature. Nature is a part of living in Iceland. Look out the window and there are mountains! Nature is beautiful. But it shouldn’t only be used for decoration or production value. You should use it as a narrative tool. In a perfect film, everything that you see or hear should have a function. For example, the final shot of the film is there not only because its beautiful. It’s a metaphor of life continuing. Water is a transition, a vessel in the water, going through the tides and waves. It’s the year ahead.

RB – There are some great transitions, such as between a Children’s Christmas Pageant and a Bikini Body Building Contest. How long did it take to think “OK, this will go here and this will go there” before putting these scenes together to develop the film’s rhythm?

RR – We slowly put the film together while we were shooting. Working with these tableaus. Whether you go 10 seconds earlier in or out of a scene can have such an impact on the rhythm. So we try to take enlightened decisions. But you shouldn’t be too clever. You have to follow your instincts.

RB – The film has a strong cycle of life theme, best expressed when it contrasts New Years Eve celebrations with a baby being born. How did you gain the trust of the couple to film a live birth?

RR – Like with many other people in the film, it was a search for the right people who were generous enough to share their lives. There were many other people who showed interest then backed out. We have no control over a birth. We are not cutting either. We thought we would have to shoot many different births to have something to choose between. But we were just extremely lucky and only shot one birth.

To get people to participate in this kind of thing is about being honest with what we want to achieve. I don’t want to to manipulate anybody; whether its real people or my fictional characters. They represent something in me and I want to respect myself. Sometimes I’ve been to film school conducting lectures. At the end the moderators ask: “Do you have a message to the students? What should they do?”

And I say “Be honest!”

Photo Credit: Ottavia Bosello. Also pictured: Producers Live Hide (left) and Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir (right). Others photos are from the film itself.

Hail Satan

Posted on by victorfraga

Political activism has never been this dirty and fun before! A small and yet very vocal and active group of political activists founded an entity called the Satanic Temple. They dress up in black and use a copious amount of iconography, as you would expect from a good evil-worshipper. Yet there is no religious connotation to their endeavour. They have simply found a very peculiar and effective way to make themselves visible and their progressive statements heard.

Their creepy-looking leader Lucien Greaves (who is seemingly blind in one eye, although it’s not entirely clear whether that’s just a clever ruse), explains that the “satanism” is an entirely random choice. They are not eagerly waiting for the arrival of some Antichrist. Instead, they stand against “arbitrary authoritarianism” and demand a separation between church and state, and they find very provocative ways of drawing attention to themselves. During the film climax, they request that a Ten Commandments monument is removed from a government building in Arkansas, and upon failing that, they proceed to install a statue of the demonic Baphomet facing the holy scripture. To the sound of Marylin Manson’s I Put a Spell on You!

Hail Satan is a register of a little-known subculture teeming with vivid and extravagant characters, who are seeking a cathartic outlet from their mediocre existence. They are male and female, of various ages, and come from many parts of the US. What they have in common is that they are seeking more personal freedoms. This is expressed in a variety of ways, ranging from a passionate pro-choice enunciation to a very naughty and demonic dance, where male nudity is prominently featured (thereby challenging old-fashioned sexist orthodoxies). They are also anti-aesthetic, refusing body fascism and mainstream beauty stereotypes (which might explain Lucien’s eye)

They have devised the Seven Fundamental Tenets, which include “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason and “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone”). Their principles are far more morally liberating than the Ten Commandments. They are also fiercely anti-violence (a member is promptly expelled after advocating) and very socially active (cleaning streets, educating children, etc).

All in all, Hail Satan is a devilishly fun documentary to watch. Ironically, it’s also a feel-good movie. It’s not anti-Christian. Instead, it challenges the autocracy of government of religion. Simply dirtylicious. Go see it!

Hail Satan is in cinemas on Friday, August 23rd, and then on VoD the following Monday,

Killer Kate!

Posted on by victorfraga

Sometimes, when I’m tempted to stick a blade into a film and really twist it, I’m reminded of Brendan Behan’s scoffing putdown: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves”.

This line came from a bitter place, no doubt, and it discredits the art of critical writing, but Behan’s sentiment speaks to the difficulty of collaborative artistry and the relative ease of spewing venomous barbs. After all, there’s something churlish and unappealing about overly harsh criticism.

Every once in a while, though, a film comes along that tests your good will – a film that isn’t merely bad, but one that actively puts you in a bad mood. This is what Killer Kate! did to me and I am unwilling to let it slide.

It’s not like I was being unrealistic – I entered the film with expectations checked firmly at the door; this was a micro-budget indie that I hoped would be light on dialogue and heavy on grindhouse splatter. And in its opening 5 minutes or so I was somewhat beguiled – it had a pulpy synth score and Daud Sani’s camerawork was crisp and fresh. Its attempts at humour were disturbingly laugh-free, granted, but there was time.

This hope was quickly dashed, however, by the introduction of the titular Kate (Alexandra Feld), whose presence is dollish and wooden in equal measure. After a bizarre scene of flirting with some guy in the office and a clichéd exchange with her stock character father, Kate meets up with her sister and two friends, which is when the filmmakers’ sheer dearth of talent is exposed. A nasty thing to say, yes, but this film’s existence – why it was made, how it was made, what on earth compelled them? – is genuinely dumbfounding to me.

The most egregious offence of Killer Kate! (apart from that annoying exclamation mark in its title) is the dialogue – almost every exchange is turgid with small talk, risible attempts at pathos and eye-rollingly bad humour. For instance, we are told that Kate has a fraught relationship with her sister, yet the dialogue is so preoccupied with utter banalities that we never understand why.

The script’s empty verbosity is compounded by the performances, which are led by Kate (Alexandra Feld), who has the range of a porcelain doll; Angie (Danielle Burgess), who can’t operate beyond grinning pleasantries; Sara (Amaris Davidson), who’s insufferably chipper (and also stupid); and finally Mel, an improbably surly mega-bitch. There isn’t a shred of subtlety between them.

The nadir of this ensemble occurs when Mel goes on a strange rant about Sara avoiding pain killers, which is supposed to display her mercurial nature but just comes across as teeth-grindingly cringeworthy. It was at this moment when Killer Kate!, despite being just 80 minutes long, became a genuinely arduous experience. It was also an illuminating one, however, for this little film has put cinema in perspective – mediocrity has never seemed so good.

Killer Kate! is in selected cinemas from Sunday, August 18th. On VoD in April!

Cinema that bites!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A remarkable hybrid of documentary and fiction tells the story of Laika, the first creature to be set into space by the Soviet Union. Growing up on the streets, the legend goes that she now roams Moscow as a ghost. Blending archival footage with remarkable on-the-ground tracking shots of wild street dogs, it is a bizarre, compelling and controversial tale, likely to provoke discussion for containing one of the most shocking documentary scenes seen all year. The brains behind the story are couple Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, who also produced the film under their own company RAUMZEITFILM. We sat down with them to discuss morality, Soviet cinema, and working with four-legged protagonists.

Space Dogs has just premiered in the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of the 72nd Locarno Film Festival. You can read our film review here.

…

.

Redmond Bacon – What attracted you to the story of Laika?

Elsa Kremser – We wanted to make a film about a pack of dogs. But we had no idea where. Then we found out that Laika lived on the streets before she was sent to space. We had to go to Moscow.

RB – The narration is by famous Russian actor Aleksey Serebyakov. Why did you pick him as a narrator?

Levin Peter – We knew early on we wanted to have a Russian voice. Only a small part of the film has this narration, but it needed to be Russian because we wanted to create an atmosphere where you can imagine it’s an old scientist reading from his diaries, or a voice from the cosmos! Serebyakov was the first voice that we had in mind when we thought about a Russian voice.

RB – It reminded me of Aleksey Batalov in The Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Nortstein, 1975)…

Both Elsa and Levin – Yes!

RB – Discussing other Russian analogues, the subject matter also brought to mind classic Soviet film White Bim, Black Ear (Stanislav Rostotsky, 1977).

LP – Yes we love it.

EK – We watched it to better understand Russia’s relation to dogs. For them it’s a really important film. Every child in Russia has seen this film.

LP – When we watched it we were amazed by how they created a narrative about this dog. In comparison to American products, it’s much less humanising.

EK – And less pushy than something like Beethoven.

LP – If you compare these two movies, the Russian one wins.

RB – White Bim Black Ear is renowned for its unsentimental approach and very distressing scenes. Space Dogs has one scene in particular, which I won’t spoil as the film has only just premiered at Locarno, that is very violent! Did it just happen out of nowhere?

EK – Yes! We followed these dogs for weeks. Sometimes they slept the whole day and sometimes they were biting into cars. One morning this just happened. The entire team was immensely shocked!

RB – It’s interesting from a moral point of view: On the one hand it’s not something you want to see happen, but on the other, it does make for a great scene. As you’d expect, it provoked a few walkouts. How would you justify such a violent scene? How is it necessary in terms of the narrative?

LP – We really believe that there is no need to justify this scene. If you decide to make a film about dogs in the city who live on their own, it would be really stupid to believe that they will act like normal dogs. Of course we never expected this to happen. This was really a turning point in our production. We realised that night that we were working on something that was never shown before and in a way that was never shown before.

RB – It’s extremely well-filmed. How did you keep the camera stabilised for these low shots of the dogs? What equipment did you use?

EK – It took a long time to find the right equipment. Luckily the film is supported by Arri. They gave us all this equipment and helped us to develop this system. We shot with the Alexa Mini Body with a stabilisation system called Wave 2. The stabiliser is built by a little company in Munich [Betz-Tools], and it’s used for shooting on boats. But the beauty of the shots comes from cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer himself, because he had to put all his force into the movie; walking for hours and following dogs, all while keeping the camera steady.

LP – I want to point out the sound too. It’s a really fucked up job for a sound operator.

EK – To get footsteps of dogs!

LP – From the beginning we thought this is going to be a sound movie. From the beginning on we really wanted to hear the tiniest movements and the kind of sounds dogs make.

EK – It was very hard because we could not ask [our team] about any previous experiences. We had to invent everything. How can you arrange a sound recording system for this kind of specific thing? How can you arrange a camera system?

RB – Did you pick all the sounds up on mic, or is there also added foley work?

EK – In Moscow we also made foley recordings with the dogs because every dog has very different footsteps. It was a big collection.

LP – The archive footage was silent. We had to start from scratch.

RB – How did you find the archive footage? Was it all based in Moscow?

LP – It’s all from Moscow. We had brilliant support from Sergei Kackhin. He helped us stay brave enough to wait years for access. One source is the Russian State Archive for Scientific-Technical Documentation. It’s a huge archive where everything that was once invented in the country is stored. Much more interesting is the institute where the dogs are trained. In the basement there were mysterious reels of 35mm footage. Yet from the moment we were told about it to the time we digitised it, three years passed.

RB – How difficult was it to navigate Russian bureaucracy? Was it difficult administratively or was there also political pushback?

LP – It’s a very personal pushback. Of course it’s a huge system. There’s a lot of bureaucracy. But first you have to gain the trust of the person who is directly responsible. It’s interesting because when you enter nothing is possible, which we have also experienced in German archives, where the bureaucratic level stays the same. But in Russia, as soon as they understood our mission and what we wanted to do, they were more open.

EK – But we did struggle with the ongoing tensions between Russia and Europe, especially in the media. There have been scandals that have thrown us back for months. Every time something came up on a big German TV channel, they would say: “OK, no. Now it’s done you cannot come anymore and we don’t give you the material.” Then several months later, we talked again and again, and we made more progress.

RB – Most Western depictions of Russia don’t do much to help these tensions. What I found refreshing about Space Dogs is you don’t otherise Russia at all. There’s a conscious effort to see their treatment of dogs as a universal problem rather than through a stereotypical Anti-Soviet context.

EK – Yes. With the monkey scene [the American government sent the first monkeys into space] you can see that it happened all over. We also thought that these dogs are not Soviet or Russian. They might be inhabitants of these countries at these moments in time but these animals don’t have nations. We never wanted to be too pointed with the Russian angle. We wanted to show it’s a global thing.

RB – The Soviet Space Program has brought untold benefits for mankind, and is a huge achievement, yet for me, watching the way these dogs have been treated, I wondered: was it really worth it? What do you think?

LP – It’s such a difficult question. We still don’t know what will happen in the next 50 years. It would be naive to believe that everything they developed with dogs — such as the rescue systems and bringing living beings back to earth — wouldn’t be possible without these tests. It’s the same moral question when animal testing comes up; in cosmetics or medicine…

EK – But of course there’s the point that with medicine people survive thanks to them. The dog experiments raise the question: why do we want to conquer space so much?

RB – The film also challenges people’s perceptions about dogs. If the film was about rats in space, no one would care.

EK – And there are plenty of rats in space!

RB – Dogs are considered to be man’s best friend. But this film challenges this idea and asks: are dogs naturally domestic or are they actually quite wild and feral? Are you trying to change the way people understand dogs in society?

EK – Of course. We think it’s weird that we always want to be their boss. With the film we turn it around a bit and say it’s not just us controlling them. They have their own world.

LP – The Space Program was also about entertainment. It’s the same in our film, in a way. They are the main heroes. We followed these dogs and of course we gave them names and projected some kind of human behaviour onto them. It will happen with everyone who has seen this film. There is no escape.

RB – Thanks to the low point of view and lengthy shots of the dogs, its a very immersive experience. Are you trying to get people to imagine what it might be like to be one of these animals?

LP – Of course. To raise the question of how I, as a human, might look like from this perspective. From very early on we know that dogs are part of our world, but we know nothing about ourselves as part of their world. We know nothing about the role we play.

EK – What we enjoyed personally from watching our own film is that sometimes you can forget these are dogs. You can feel just like you’re in a movie and the main character is falling in love…

Space Dogs Interview

RB – Moving onto the Moscow setting. The dogs are filmed a lot at dusk, dawn and nighttime. The sky is electric orange and there’s not many people about. Was it your intention to make the city this kind of otherworldly place?

LP – It mostly came out of the situation, because these dogs mostly sleep during the day. At night, when the humans go home, this is their space. During early research there was a moment where we knew we could make this movie. We went to a factory where a pack of dogs were living. We came during the day and they were just sleeping. I thought: “It’s interesting but how can we do a movie with just sleeping dogs?” Then Elsa said: “Let’s try again at six am.” When we went the whole street was full of dogs. One pack was fighting against another…

EK – [interrupting] They were mating! Then we knew we had a movie.

LP – The good thing about the movie is that the more interesting people come out at night too. They really have a connection to the dogs, like the homeless man searching for goods in containers. It’s very obvious that he has his own language with these dogs.

RB – Circling back to the very beginning of the movie. It starts in space, then there’s a very trippy scene depicting Laika re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) homage?

EK: Of course. Especially in the sound design, we had a lot of inspiration.

RB – The music too; it sounds very cool.

LP– When we were finishing the music with composer John Gürther, we watched this 20 minutes of tripping in Space Odyssey again; just to check once again how it works on the audio layer.

EK – For music and sound development we watched hundreds of space films. Especially 70s.

LP – We liked The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise, 1971). This was really the direction we wanted to go in.

RB – You’re currently working on a fiction feature set in Minsk, Belarus [The Green Parrot, telling the story of a 34 year-old autopsy assistant who falls in love with a 17-year-old woman, is currently in development]. What draws you to the Russian speaking world?

EK – The reason our next film is set in Minsk is a bit of a coincidence. It was not an intellectual choice, like: “We want to go to Minsk to tell a story about a guy in a morgue falling in love.” Coincidentally we fell in love with this area of the world.

LP – We grandfather taught Russian his whole life. There were Russian friends visiting my family once a year. We started to explore this world together from the first moment on. But it was never a choice to say: “We dedicate our lives to this.”

EK – It somehow happened.

Picture at the top: Locarno Film Festival, Marco Abram. The other images are from the film

South Terminal (Terminal Sud)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A doctor (Ramzy Bedia) in an unnamed French-speaking Mediterranean country finds himself caught in the grip of endless violence in Terminal South, a meandering drama about trying to maintain dignity in a world gone wrong. Despite boasting solid performances, handsome cinematography and moments of sheer viciousness, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s sixth film has little to say and even less to say it with.

The opening sequence quickly shows what kind of country we’re in; a bus trip through the mountains raided by men in army uniforms who take everyone’s most precious belongings. Moments of bloodshed spark out of nowhere, any encounter containing the ability to erupt into a skirmish. When the bus driver reports the theft to a local newspaper, he cannot identify the men, unsure if they’re actually the army or simply bandits dressed up in their uniform. The chief editor agrees that it’s important, and promises to publish the story the next day. But when he goes to the office the next morning, a car pulls up and he is shot dead.

The shocking death of the doctor’s is treated as a watershed moment here, the traditional Islamic funeral given ten plus minutes to really soak in his tragic fate. Yet this is a guy we have only met a couple of times; making it difficult to really care that he’s gone. Making scenes like this longer than they need to be often achieves the opposite effect of what a filmmaker intended; causing me to lose interest just when my emotional investment should be growing.

Terminal South

Meanwhile, the doctor’s fate is a miserable one, caught up in a Kafkesque world where the line between police, terrorists and militia men has collapsed. There are no real good guys here, no epic signs of resistance, just ordinary men and women trying to do their best. Even he is sent death threats and told to stop his work, treating patients whose ailments have been exacerbated by living in such a society. But the doctor’s story randomly piles on the misery, giving Bedia little to work with dramatically. The predominately comic actor pulls in a decent shift here, yet he cannot overcome a fundamentally weak screenplay without any true central conflict to speak of.

There is a difference between being ambiguous and being vague. While ambiguity invites the viewer to search for different meanings, vagueness can often leave us scratching our heads. We never even find out where the film is set. Are we in the south of France or are we in North Africa? I assume this is the point, to display how any country has the capacity to steadily disintegrate. Yet without any real context, I found it hard to find a foothold in the story, its tale completely washing over me like the Mediterranean Sea.

A French Release date has been set for 13 November. Whether the film is released anywhere else remains to be seen.

A Serious Man

Posted on by victorfraga

During the past three decades, the Coen Brothers have established themselves as a diverse and fascinating auteurs. They explored greed and criminality (Blood Simple, 1984, and Fargo, 1996), the creative dilemma (Barton Fink, 1991), the shock of attitudes (The Big Lebowski, 1998), and so on. Then they questioned the meaning of life itself in A Serious Man, in 2009. The film is amongst their most mysterious, intriguing, funny and – unfortunately – overlooked.

A Serious Man is mysterious from the opening sequence. A 19th century Eastern European couple re visited by someone who may or may not be a dybbuk – a malicious spirit of Jewish folklore who impersonates the dead. This sequence has no explicit relation to film narrative, only a thematic one. The song in the following sequence – Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane – fulfils a similar function to the unusual prologue.

The 14th film by the Coen Brothers follows Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor in 1960s Minnesota whose life is seemingly imploding. His wife is dumping him for his friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), he is being bribed and later blackmailed by a student and his chances of obtaining a tenure (permanent employment after probation) are threatened by a mysterious conspirator.

A lot is happening to Larry and all he can do is ask why. Given his knowledge of physics and mathematics, he feels he should have all the answers, but can see no explanation why his life has suddenly fallen apart. The fact that his freeloading brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has created a formula that seems to be able to predict the future (it helps him win at poker) only aggravates his anxiety.

As a Jewish man he questions if it is some sort of divine punishment, and what is it has he done in order to deserve it?

He seeks enlightenment, only for a junior rabbi to give him an irrelevant parable using the synagogue’s parking area as a device. A more senior second rabbi is even less helpful, telling him a story that doesn’t go anywhere about a dentist who thinks he sees a message in a patient’s teeth. Everyone advises Larry to see the wise old rabbi Marshak. Unfortunately, Marshak is now devoted to the boys who have become bar mitzvah. Larry’s son, Danny (Aaron Wolff) will likely hear Marshak’s wise words before before his father.

Even though the film is about a man in a deep crisis, A Serious Man is hilarious. The Coens’ script perfectly and expertly strides the line between drama and comedy, with a great deal of the humour derived from the disconnect between Larry and everyone else. Everyone seems oblivious to Larry’s visible desperation. The only sympathy he gets is from a cold-caller from a record club he never joined. That doesn’t last long either. The stranger soon turns the friendly conversation into money matters.

The script also delves into Jewish neurosis, male inferiority, as well as having many Coen-esque dark and peculiar humours: Arthur constantly draining a cyst on his neck, his daughter is constantly washing her hair, and Larry contemplates the purpose of life in a motel called The Jolly Roger.

Perhaps the reason A Serious Man failed at the box office (despite being a hit amongst critics) is the absence of well-known actors. Or possibly because it never provides answers to the complex questions raised, as mainstream audiences often expect. The movie is open to many interpretations. The ending is a sobering reminder that life can change in a split second.

A Serious Man is a film that deserves to be rediscovered and reevaluated for its compelling, thought-provoking and hilarious qualities.

This review was written for the occasion of the film’s 10th anniversary in 2019. No re-edition has been scheduled, but you can watch the movie on all major VoD platforms.