Category: Review

A Silence (Un Silence)

Posted on by Eoghan Lyng

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN

The timing for A Silence (Joachim Lafosse, 2023) couldn’t be more fitting, because the film is being screened concurrent to accusations of rape being levelled at British sweetheart, Russell Brand. At this moment, millions all over Britain are asking themselves if it’s acceptable to believe a man based on how he appears to the public. Because that’s precisely the dissertation behind A Silence: men can wear their smiles in public, while their women carry the scars of a fraught relationship.

Emmanuelle Devos stars as Astrid, a spouse to a lawyer of some acclaim (played by Daniel Auteuil, from Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette, 1986). For 25 years, she has been subject to a shame she has done everything in her power to protect her children from. We see her interact with her husband who glares at her when she looks at his private possessions, and chides her when he thinks she’s straying from the role of dutiful wife. The shame she feels isn’t felt by her children, who decide to bring her private story to justice – and in doing so, expose her to the media she has largely left to her husband to fend off.

The plot is bone-thin, but between the shots lies Astrid, a fragile, middle-aged woman who spends much of her time either in tears or in shock. She regularly gives a look of deflection: Closing out conversations when they get too uncomfortable, or gazing out into the road where she longs to escape. In some ways it recalls the loneliness of another Belgian feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), as both movies exhibit women in the most comfortable of settings (their homes), drifting into a despair they have unwittingly facilitated. But that’s where the two similarities end, as A Silence presents us with a woman who has spent much of her life in the arms of a celebrity figure, only to find that it’s more difficult to endure because it’s so public.

Devos is excellent: Barely off camera for a minute, the French actress has to carry the emotional undercurrents that cement the work. The same cannot be said for Matthieu Galoux, who plays the sullen son determined to present another side of his mother to the public. Galoux is stoic, but could be more so, and there are times he overplays the character beats. Much better is Auteuil who as Francois Schaar is delightfully evil to watch. He bears an altruistic face to the press, and a more sinister one in his personal life, but distinguishes the two personalities well enough for the audience to latch onto.

It’s unlikely that Galoux’s popularity will leap-frog from arthouse actor to Hollywood heart-throb. But Devos is excellent, providing a portrait of a woman calling out for salvation, from a marriage and institution that has shackled her with silence. Thankfully, that appears to be changing in the real world (as of the time of this review, four women have accused Brand of assault), and with a bit of luck, fewer women will have to suffer their demons in silence.

Un Silence (A Silence) just premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in the New Directors Section.

PÖFF’s Critics’ Picks Competition: The Aftermath

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

So, let’s start with the bad stuff. That terrible moment when you arrive for your flight from Gatwick Terminal 5 only to discover that there is no Gatwick Terminal 5, only a South and a North terminal and the helpful airport staff desk man you talk to, while your mobile phone decides to restart for five minutes at the exact moment you plan to show him your emailed airline ticket, gently explains that Terminal 5 is at Heathrow not Gatwick. Fortunately, the sinking feeling doesn’t last long: the flight notification says Gatwick Terminal 5 (so I haven’t misread it, at least) but the actual ticket says Terminal S. Something got lost in transcription, not unlike the French labelling the box of gold Eiffel Tower models with a letter pronounced differently in French and English in the Ealing Studios classic The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951).

The rest of the journey on Air Baltic proceeds without incident, except that I make the mistake of wearing heavy boots and a thick ski jacket borrowed from the neighbours back home, overheat en route and arrive at the Nordic Hotel Forum in Tallinn late at night with a filthy headache. By 3am I’m still not asleep, so I drag myself down to the main desk. The hotel staff aren’t allowed to give out medication, but the night desk manager in his capacity as a compassionate human being rather than a rule-bound employee helpfully gives me two of his own Ibuprofen, which I take and finally get off to sleep. I feel much better in the morning. (This is indicative of the generally high standard of service from the helpful and pleasant desk staff at the Nordic Hotel Forum.)

To backtrack: Before getting off the plane, I use the loo which means I’m last off and have a short walk through an almost empty Tallinn airport. I’m greeted by signs saying BEWARE STRANGER! YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE AREA OF INFLUENCE OF THE BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL, PURE MIND and the ubiquitous festival acronym PÖFF. Before even picking up my checked luggage, I feel I’ve arrived in the Festival; Tallinn is not that huge a city (compared, for example, to London, which is so big that the annual London Film Festival inevitably gets lost among myriad other, concurrent, urban cultural activities) and PÖFF makes a sizeable impact on the city for the best part of two weeks for which it runs. It clearly helps that the PÖFF team know how to pitch the Festival to give it some much-needed branding presence. Being quite a small festival probably works in PÖFF’s favour too.

The Wi-Fi at the Nordic is as good as I can remember Wi-Fi being anywhere. The room is a thing of beauty, although I have to improvise a bit using folded bedspreads to raise the height of the desk seating, a big oblong pouff. Anyway, it’s a good working space. Next time, I must remember to ask for a room facing outward as the view would be better, although on the sixth floor, I have a nice view of the fifth floor roof. After a few days, I get round to trying out the pool, steam room and sauna, all of which provide a welcome break to working.

The day after I arrive, the news comes through on the BBC that Russia has launched a missile at Poland, which landed in a field killing two people. Since I’m due to fly back with a stopover at Frederic Chopin Warsaw airport, this is a cause for some concern. But as the days pass, the Western politicians talk it down and it eventually turns out not to have been the Russians at all, but a missile fired from Ukraine which went off course and which they tried to blame on the Russians. There’s clearly no love lost between the international film community and the Russians at the moment: not a single Russian film in the catalogue. Let’s hope Putin falls soon and is replaced by someone who can take the country in a more sane direction.

Festivals often put on events for guests, to promote both their national and local culture and various films or strands within the festival itself. On the first count, I availed myself of a bog walk and a trip round the town. The bog walk turned out to be a marshland walk, for which we had to be loaned snowshoes, something I’ve never worn before. The day we went, the second day I was there, it had just snowed, so everything has a light dusting of white. We went through some woodland, all natural, no wooden walkways or anything man-made underfoot, then donned the snowshoes for the more open marshland. With a dozen or so pairs of feet going squish squish squish it was rarely quiet, but when we all stopped and stood still for a minute or two, as we did on a couple of occasions, the silence was palpable. Walking on this springy land was a curious experience: I was reminded of the landscapes of C.S.Lewis’ SF novel Perelandra a.k.a. Voyage To Venus (1938) as well as the movie Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). You couldn’t plan or book this happening on the first day of snow; it just happened that way, which turned out to be really good luck and I felt immensely privileged in that regard.

As for the trip round the town, we got a glimpse of cobbled streets, incredible medieval architecture and a look inside the Orthodox church (where various people were told off for not removing their hats). There was a marked difference in the area where the rich people lived, with the houses much bigger and more mansion-like. Our guide, a Mexican lady with a long-haired chihuahua, was supposed to take no more than twenty, but our numbers were maybe twice that. “It’ll be a shitshow,” she cheerfully declared as we set out; her upbeat attitude was infectious. As we worked our way round the town, the numbers dwindled, rather like a horror film where people in a touring party get picked off one by one, until there were only about four people left. I’d like to think those who vanished left to explore food or drink emporia, or sites of historical interest, or art galleries, or whatever caught their eye, rather than being kidnapped by some nefarious Estonian gang or bumped off by some terrible, dark monster lurking in the shadows – but, who knows?

On the second count, there are the parties and events put on by either the Festival or a company promoting a film or perhaps a particular country with a number of films in the Festival. My best evening this year was the Shorts Awards – I hadn’t actually realised that’s what it was initially, although the fact that preference was given to people working in animation and shorts sounded good to me.

So we meet outside the Metropole Hotel at the appointed time, have orders barked at us to stand in line at -4°, are marshalled to a tram stop, wait, get on, probably about twice as many people as should legally be a on a tram, so all the windows steam up, and you can’t see anything outside the tram, which doesn’t really matter, are handed shots of vodka (which quickly warms you up!) and beer, drive around for a while, people write PÖFF with fingers on the steamed window (pictured above), we come to a stop where we are marshalled off the tram on to a coach which drives out to the edge of Tallinn and this massive, unheated warehouse with weird blue light like something out of a science fiction movie (below).

Everyone goes down one end, where you can’t see the awards presentation properly because the stage isn’t high enough, but that’s immaterial because they project the recorded speeches of the winners on a screen up the other end of the warehouse. An amazing experience, forever etched on my memory, unlike any other awards ceremony I’ve ever attended.

That ought to be enough for one night, but to cap it all, back at the Nordic, I get introduced to the writer-director of one of the films I most enjoyed this year, Çigdem Sezgin of Suna (2022; pictured at the top of this article), and a number of us chat about this and that for quite a while. Her English is pretty good (my Turkish, sadly, is non-existent). Later on, the film’s lead Nurcan Eren, who hadn’t said much (I suspect she doesn’t speak English) and is a huge singing star in Turkey, is persuaded to sing a couple of songs impromptu at the hotel bar. Somehow, this seems to capture the open spirit of the Festival, journalists, talent and other industry types all mixing with one another. Altogether a memorable evening.

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The movie marathon begins

I had all sorts of ideas about seeing lots of movies in addition to the Critics’ Picks strand I was there to cover, but in the end I didn’t see that much beyond those. The first day, unplanned, I managed to watch the three Kids Animation Programmes as they were press screening back to back and was impressed by the high standard – not one dud in there, one of the best programmes of children’s animated shorts I’ve ever seen. I caught some other animation: the wonderful My Love Affair With Marriage (Signe Baumane, 2022, pictured below) in which a woman outlines her experiences with sex, romance and finding a life partner (or not) which deserves a wide release, the harrowing but brilliant Aurora’s Sunrise (Inna Sahakyan, 2022) which mixes animated recreation of a survivor’s testimony with fragments of a silent feature about the Armenian Massacre believed lost ‘til recently, and had a long discussion with Elisa Eliash the director of animation / live action hybrid Fever (2022), which hopefully I’ll catch before long.

I also managed to see a few Oriental entries, among them South Korea’s full on but ultimately disappointing The Other Child (Kim Jin-young, 2022) and Japan’s rather better, beautifully handled Double Life (Enen Yo, 2022). In the Critics’ Picks section, the best of the Oriental films for me was Kim Ki-duk’s decidedly weird Call Of God (2022), screening out of competition, while About Us But Not About Us (Jun Robles Lana, 2022) from the Philippines picked up the Jury Prize in the Critics’ Picks section.

Italian crime movie The Bone Breakers (Vincenzo Pirrotta, 2022) about people agreeing to have their bones broken in an insurance scam picked up a special mention. Unless you’re on a jury, you’re not privy to all the deliberations as to why one film was picked up rather than another, and I’ve often found that the films which win awards aren’t the ones that speak to me – I was far more affected by the other crime movie in the strand, Roxy (Dito Tsintsadze, 2022) about a German taxi driver and a killer dog. As well as the two crime movies, there was a good spread of work in the section, most of it strong – a comedy, an historical drama, films about identity and memory, films about filmmaking.

The other Critics’ Pick I particularly liked was the aforementioned Suna, a perfectly constructed and compelling essay on the plight of 50-year-old Turkish women. That doesn’t sound like my sort of thing, but it had me hooked from start to finish. I hope both Roxy and Suna catch the imagination of international – and UK!!! – distributors. As for the name directors, Typist Artist Pirate King (Carol Morley), Sparta (Ulrich Siedl) and Call Of God (Kim Ki-duk) all deserve to be more widely seen. Not one animated or part-animated feature in the section though – why not?

For the return journey, I had a half hour delayed first flight, and was worried I might miss my connecting flight, but was impressed overall by Polish airline Lot who did everything to put passengers at ease, including a choice of sweet or savoury Polish bun and free tea or coffee. Brexit meant that at Warsaw, Brits had to get passports stamped because we are no longer in the EU’s Schengen free movement area, a nerve-wracking experience as there is always the possibility that you’ll get stuck behind someone with an impossibly complex issue and as a result miss your connection. If you are one of the great gaslit who voted Leave, or didn’t bother to vote, this unnecessary, extra bureaucracy is your fault!

I was glad to be back in London, although it didn’t take long to be reminded that the UK is run by a government who hold most of the population in contempt, which is why we got Brexit (people believed that that contempt was the EU’s fault) and is also why various sectors are now going on strike. Friday night, the RMT union (whose cause generally has my sympathy) decided to remind everyone, on the anniversary of the Kings Cross fire, that current Tube staffing levels would make evacuation difficult if anything similar happened again. They did this by closing a number of Tube stations, including those intersecting with rail terminals on the Victoria Line. Sadly, no one bothered to tell this to passengers coming in from Heathrow on the Friday night (in order to avoid the rail strike scheduled for the Saturday) until an in transit Circle Line announcement informed the travelling public that trains were not stopping at Kings Cross.

So I got out at Euston Square only to discover that Euston underground station was closed as well as Kings Cross, something the announcement had neglected to mention. I promptly caught a 73 bus to Dalston, then worked out I could get the 259 home to Tottenham where I live from York Way, outside Kings Cross. Fortunately it wasn’t too crowded. We Londoners live with this kind of pandemonium all the time, which makes for an interesting comparison with Tallinn where for the 10 days I was at the Festival I felt very well looked after. People I talked to who lived there seemed to like it a lot. And the Black Nights Festival is a good size – not too large, most of the screenings within minutes of the Nordic Hotel and generally scheduled to avoid silly clashes or overlapping screenings (are you listening, London Film Festival?!!) Basically, a real pleasure; my first visit to Tallinn, and almost certainly not my last.

Critics’ Picks – In Competition

Critics’ Picks – Out of Competition

  • Call of God (Kim Ki-duk) ****;
  • Karaoke (Moshe Rosenthal); and
  • Sparta (Ulrich Seidl) *****.

Bonus – Kids Animation Programme

Critics’ Picks: a brand-new film selection hits Tallinn

Suna (Suna Kahevahel)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In a hotel room, sitting on two beds at right angles to each other, she says to him: “you won’t be too controlling, right? I don’t want anybody interfering with my life.” Then he sets out his own stall. “I’ll eat whatever you cook me,” he says. “When necessary, I’ll take a bath immediately.” You get the impression that that might not happen all that often.

Played by Turkish singing star Nurcan Eren, Suna craves the security of a relationship without any of the male domination that so often accompanies it. The man she has chosen, Veysel (Tarik Pabuccuoglu), has recently become a widower and wants a companion and partner in life. Not only that, he seems to want someone very like his former wife. He seems a kind, gentle man.

So they have an Imam wedding, a discreet Muslim ceremony with the local Imam present, which joins them in the eyes of Allah but may not have quite the same legal force as a regular marriage in Turkish society. For instance, if he dies, there’s no automatic legal provision that she gets the house.

With the help of the Veysel’s son Erol (Erol Babaoglu), Suna moves in to his house which is situated in a small, rural village. Veysel takes great delight in showing her his pair of caged budgies, which clearly mean a great deal to him.

She has worked as a cleaner and sets about cleaning up his house, which hasn’t been done for three years. A neighbour invites her to the local woman’s meeting, where you go along with a bit of money which Veysel, when asked, is happy to supply. But in the event, she goes out for a walk along the beach instead.

She enjoys walking outside, and on another occasion, when Erol is bringing the couple back from a shopping trip, she insists on being dropped off at the same place as Veysel and walking home alone. Walking home, a man hassles her, but fortunately another man comes to her rescue and sees him off. Her rescuer’s name is Can (Firat Tanış) , and they hit it off.

She seems to have more in common with Can than she does with Veysel, and often drops round to visit and chat with him. It turns out that he is a film critic, and in their conversation it emerges that she played parts as an extra in movies in Germany. She also visits a local restaurant bar, and one night stays there for sex with the owner, who, it turns out, has violent tendencies and likes inflicting pain on women during sex. It’s not clear whether Suna enjoys this, but given that she never goes back to the restaurant, one imagines not. She invents a cover story about being mugged on the way home from the women’s meeting earlier in the day to explain bruises on her face and neck.

As an independent, older woman in a deeply conservative society, Suna is in a difficult position: it doesn’t look like things are going to end well.

Fairly early on, a static image fills the cinema screen, a tapestry hanging on the wall with a picture of a peacock. On the soundtrack can be heard Veysel;s grunts and groans as he has sex with Suna. ‘With’ might be the wrong word: ‘to’ might be more accurate because we hear no noise emanating from her, the obvious assumption being that she is simply lying back as he takes his pleasure with no regard for hers. Aside from a shorter rerun of this scene, the other similar scene here is at the restaurant bar, where silhouettes of a rock band on a section of wall are shown while we hear the restaurant owner’s aural expressions of sexual enjoyment alongside Suna’s cries of discomfort and pain.

The sex scenes in this film are one of its great pleasures, although not in the way you might expect. All truly great directors reinvent the language of cinema and mould it to their own ends. Director Sezgin here has reinvented the cinematic grammar of the sex scene. It’s long worried me that actors and actresses (and more often than not, it seems to have been actresses, presumably because at least until recently, the vast majority of directors have been heterosexual men) have been required to expose their private parts to the camera and simulate coitus for it (and in rare cases, engage in actual coitus). I’m not being prudish about this, and I’m absolutely not talking about people’s personal behaviour outside of filming cinema, or morality, or anything like that – each to their own – but requiring actresses or actors to shoot sex scenes is, at least arguably, problematic. You shouldn’t be required to exposed yourself on the screen in that way, in my opinion.

Here, however, Sezgin has found an alternative way of portraying sex on camera without making any of those visual demands on her cast which works a treat (there’s a short clip of it in the trailer below, but when you watch the film, which unfolds at a very deliberate and measured pace, it has a greater impact than the little excerpt shown there). You could certainly argue that she’s borrowing heavily from the language of radio; sound, after all, is a significant component of cinema; I’d like to think that Orson Welles, in his Mercury Theatre on the Air days, would have been proud of her.

Also impressive is the portrayal of a film critic. I’ve seen this done in films before, but I’ve never seen a director get it right. On this occasion, however, I didn’t spot any gaffes, completely believed the character I saw on the screen and was delighted to have seen the film. (It’s not the primary reason I liked the film, and I realise this element is more likely to appeal to film critics than anyone else, but nevertheless, this element is a real pleasure.) The film is dedicated to the late Turkish film critic Cüneyt Cebenoyan.

I should add that personally, as a non-Turkish speaker unfamiliar with either the language or Turkish names, I didn’t immediately cotton on that the director was a woman – although looking at the movie’s subject matter about the plight of women of a very specific age in a very specific culture the fact of her gender would have been a reasonable guess. On one level I don’t care – it’s about whether a director is competent, has a vision and can realise it on the screen. If people can tick those boxes, I’m all for it – and if they happen to be women, then fine. Sezgin, in this film, ticks those boxes.

Given that half the humans on the planet are women, and that a good number of the rest of us humans are men who find women fascinating, the story ought to be of interest to a great many people. And it is so beautifully told, and the film so rigorously constructed and shot (on a minimal amount of resources, I might add) that it deserves to be widely seen. I can’t claim much knowledge of Turkish cinema, but Sezgin’s film reminded me of the poetic realism of the likes of English director Terence Davies (notably The Terence Davies Trilogy, 1983) and The Bill Douglas Trilogy (My Childhood, 1972; My Ain Folk, 1973; My Way Home, 1978, all directed by Scotland’s Bill Douglas).

There’s a similarity in the way these visual narratives are constructed via a series of small incidents to build up a compelling picture of the ordinary life of a character. Clearly Sezgin is a woman while these other two are men, so on some level her film is going to be very different from theirs. Yet, like these films by Davies and Douglas, Suna is a masterpiece.

Suna premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Typist Artist Pirate King

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In these days of US-style promotion, branding and media, it’s easy to think of artists as high profile, rich and successful. While some are, that’s not what an artist is: an artist is, quite simply, someone who makes art. (If they’re a good artist, they make good art. Whatever that is.) The subject of Morley’s new road movie is the artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) who, although she exhibited her work a number of times during her lifetime, received scarcely any recognition in that period. She suffered from mental health issues and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her life.

Audrey (Monica Dolan) is regularly visited in her London flat by psychiatric nurse Sandra (Kelly Macdonald). One day, she asks Sandra to drive her to an exhibition which has an open call for artists, as she’s never exhibited and feels the time has come. Sandra first turns her down, but on a later date after some consideration agrees – although she’s somewhat horrified en route when Audrey’s “local” turns out to mean “Sunderland”, the best part of 300 miles North.

Thus, the pair yet out in Sandra’s bright yellow car Sunshine band undergo a series of encounters with people from Audrey’s past. In reality, they aren’t the people from Audrey’s past, but she mistakes them as such in her mind. Just as she isn’t always convinced Sandra is really Sandra or even that she herself wasn’t taken over by an imposter at an early age (following a specific traumatic experience, which the narrative explores in the final reel towards the end of Audrey and Sandra’s journey).

There are many joys to be experienced on the way. A wise vicar (Gary Bates) breaks into a church lavatory after Audrey accidentally locks herself in and, unlike numerous media presentations of clergy, manages to say and do just the right things to help her. A hitchhiker (Issam Al Gussein), who turns out to be another artist, gets thrown out of the car after addressing Audrey as a “freak”. A van driver (Neal Barry), who gives Audrey a lift after a row with Sandra, seems a pleasant chap until he starts trying to take sexual advantage of her (a rare moment when this largely brave and original film lapses into cliché). Eventually, she visits unannounced her Sunderland-based sister (Gina McKee) who she’s not contacted for six years.

Dolan is fantastic as the woman who exhibits both a personality disorder and a talent for expressing herself visually; her performance is ably complemented by short bursts of little sequences showing three or four of Audrey’s works in rapid succession throughout. The role is a gift for an actor, not only because of the wide palette of motion and behaviour undergone by Audrey in the course of the film, but also because she has to interact with characters she believes to be a person from her past when in fact they are someone else she has never met.

Macdonald provides an anchor to Dolan’s out of control persona, while McKee, although she doesn’t appear until late in the story, proves a huge presence in the final reel, a good and generous sister.

There’s a fascinating religious (Christian) subtext to all this, too. Audrey wears a cross and, however messed up her life might be, appears to have a deep-seated faith in God as expressed in the Christian tradition. As well as the aforementioned episode in a rural church building (the name St. Christina The Astonishing can be seen on a notice board inside the premises), there are comforting religious words, there is one in-car conversation about Jesus, there are references to hymns and hymn singing which, as any Christian person will tell you, can carry and communicate great nuggets of spiritual truth, often in a clear and concise, albeit almost subliminal way. Not that the film is proselytizing, or anything like that: far from it.

Morley is far from your typical British director; she tends not to repeat herself, except for the fact that her films are consistently provocative. This new film is well up to par. As a bonus, it has a scene with Morris dancers.

Typist Artist Pirate King premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally. Its UK premiere takes place at the 31st Raindance Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, October 27th. On Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 8th.

The Rise & Fall Of Comrade Zylo (Shkelqimi Dhe Renia E Shokut Zylo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Comrade Demka (Donald Shehu) just can’t say no. It’s 1971, and he’s strongly in demand as a political speechwriter. As fast as he can churn out speeches, it seems, he’s asked to write more. His wife Zenepja (Xhoana Karaj) is fed up with him working all the time, feels he’s wasting his talent and anyway would rather he spent more time with her. And then, there’s Comrade Zylo (Aleks Seitaj), appropriating speeches Demka has written for others, such as the one on the tedious-sounding ‘Innovative Developing Elements in the spread of our culture throughout Albania’.

Watching Zylo read one of Demka’s speech through the circular windows of the auditorium doors, Demka listens to the praise for Zylo pouring from the mouth of Zylo’s wife Adila (Enisa Hysa). She’s impressed by the words her husband has written, unaware that Demka, not Zylo, actually wrote them. She’s less impressed, along with most of the audience, with the speech of committee chair Comrade Q (Petrit Malaj) – which Demka also wrote, on a tight deadline – going down rather less well. At the after-speech dance (with a traditional and very conservative Albanian folk band) she dances and flirts with Demka.

Q meanwhile, is less than happy, feeling that Demka could have written better for him. No sooner has he stormed off than Zylo, who clearly knows a good thing when he sees it, is asking Demka to come and work for him. He introduces Demka to one of his sons, the composer Diogenio (Samuel Vargu). Also in Zylo;’s circle are the playwright of The Storm Is Defeated, Adem Adashi (Amos Muji Zaharia), and his wife, the singer Cleopatra (Jorida Meta).

Zylo becomes obsessed with the potential effect of socialism on West Africa, and wants Demka to write him a speech for an upcoming conference there. The pair of them go to Africa on a delegation, accompanied by Cleopatra. There’s clearly something going on between Zylo and Cleopatra. No-one in the party pays any attention to the delegation, which proves something of a non-event. Except that it’s the beginning of the end for the career of Comrade Zylo.

The whole thing oscillates between a bureaucratic drama with Comrade Q, Zylo and various factions vying against each other to get ahead, an existentialist drama in which Demko struggles to write to deadline, a domestic drama in which Demko’s wife thinks he’s a great writer wasting his time on political speeches, and the occasionally very funny scene of satire about life in an Eastern Bloc socialist state.

Perhaps the best scene occurs when during a visit to a village, Zylo gets drunk at a gathering convened in his honour and starts talking about all men being equal, that they shouldn’t oppress their women like tyrants, and so forth. He starts waving his pistol about (not with the intent of discharging it, except maybe to put a bullet in the ceiling) while everyone around him is getting increasingly worried. He’s speaking out for an equality which can’t possibly exist under the current bureaucratic, socialist system, with its Party hierarchy, and it’s as if everyone is aware of the existing pecking order but him, the person in charge.

Overall, this is a film likely to make more sense or to appeal to those who have experienced life under a totalitarian leftist regime than those of us who haven’t.

The Rise & Fall Of Comrade Zylo premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

About Us But Not About Us

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

[dropca[]A[/dropcap]n older man meets a younger man in a restaurant. Both are gay. The older man, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), has recently lost his longtime partner Marcus (who we never see… well, not exactly) while the younger man Lance (Elijah Canlas) knew Marcus as his writing tutor, both elder men working as professors at the English language faculty of the university at which Lance is a student.

As the narrative plays out in real time, it moves through a number of difficult areas. Lance was having problems at home; specifically, being beaten by his stepfather, so Eric intervened by letting Lance stay at his place, bringing upon the pair rumours that they were lovers (although everything in the restaurant conversation suggests those rumours to be unfounded). It later transpires that Lance has written his first novel. When Lance presents the manuscript to Eric, Eric accuses Lance of plagiarism after reading the first few pages when Lance walks offscreen for a minute or two to take a toilet break.

Director Lana deploys a variety of theatrical and cinematic tricks in order to make the piece work. He has thought a lot about where to place the camera, and what each specific shot contributes to the whole. He deploys some bravura cinematic tricks. A clever combination of blocking, camera positioning and Lance cleaning his spectacles lenses allows Lance to temporarily transform into Marcus; a similar setup allows Eric talking to Lance to transform into Marcus talking to Lance, all acheived without lap dissolves, traditional flashback techniques, different actors or prosthetics makeup.

Whereas Hitchcock undertook Rope (1948) as a kind of stunt, which still delivered as a thriller, About Us But Not About Us doesn’t have any such genre trappings. It’s fundamentally a film about two people talking over a meal in a restaurant, something Hitch would have decried as “photographs of people talking”. To be fair, it does contain some bravura cinematic tricks, but somehow those look like trickery rather than enhancing the tale of the characters and making the audience feel for their plight. I, for one, didn’t really care about what the characters were going through. Unlike Rope, the film lacks Hitch’s understanding of the psychology of audiences.

Although no masks are worn, the pair are only allowed a 90 minutes because of the restaurant’s post-COVID policies and characters make references to the pandemic throughout. That’s not the subject of the film per se, but it’s good that it at least acknowledges the pandemic in passing when so many movies seem to want to pretend it never happened, that it’s business as usual. Whatever my other opinions of the film, this, at least, is something in its favour.

About Us But Not About Us premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Chambermaid (Sluzka)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Part British television drama Upstairs Downstairs, part illicit lesbian romance, this film undercuts fears of stodgy, conservative product to deliver instead a story full of fearless performances which, for all its faults, constantly disturbs and surprises. The action takes place in Prague before and during the time of World War I.

he late 19th century, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anka (Dana Droppová) is the bastard child of Eva. The pair are close until in Anka’s teenage years, her mother marries a man with three children who promptly finds a position for Anka to get her out of the way. Thus, the girl commences work as a chambermaid in a wealthy German household in Prague where she’s told to say Yes Milord and Yes Milady whenever anything’s asked of her by the master and mistress of the house.

She arrives when there’s a big social gathering going on, and is asked by Milady (Zuzana Mauréry) if she can sing. This leads to a her confident rendition of a Slavic folk song. You might think this is going to develop into a narrative thread but it doesn’t, an indication of the film’s major weakness: it constantly throws in new ideas some of which then don’t go anywhere, and there are even new ideas coming up in the final reel, for instance that Milord (Karel Dobrý) has been involved with various dodgy dealings (arms manufacture and sales, perhaps?) for which the incriminating paperwork needs to be burned when there has been no hint of this up to that point.

Likewise, she’s warned that the daughter Resi (Radka Caldová) can be difficult, but nothing quite prepares you for a sequence where Resi, on the pretext of not being able to find a brooch, orders Anka to strip off to prove she hasn’t stolen it. This seems to be primarily about humiliating the servants rather than any peculiar sexual fetish, and bears no relationship to their subsequent friendship and lesbian relationship either.

Other ideas thrown up by the narrative ARE however taken up to emerge as major story threads, and there are quite a few of them. Milord is partial to violently slapping those to whom he objects, which sometimes includes his wife should she dare to offer her opinion. As she later explains to her daughter when talking about marriage, you soon learn to keep quiet after you’ve been slapped a few times.

Milord is also partial to seeking temptations of the flesh elsewhere, something one of the older, more established maids Lisa (Vica Kerekes) is keen to exploit, working her was up to becoming his mistress with a house that he’ll pay for. The gardener is upfront about messing around with any woman who will let him, so when Resi is on the verge of marrying Gustav (Cyril Dobrý from All Quiet On The Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022)), she sends Anka to sleep with the gardener to obtain a full report. Anka’s verdict is, bearable and over quickly, but when she attempts to demonstrate this to Resi, it lasts longer, is far more satisfying and develops into a long-running relationship. So much so, that after Resi has birthed her first daughter, Anka becomes the child’s nursemaid until Milady bans her from that position after discovering Anka and Resi sharing a full bathtub together.

The cook Kristina (Anna Geislerová) is branded an old maid by Lisa, although she also possesses midwifery and abortionist skills which makes you wonder what happened to her in her past. Nevertheless, a memorable scene or Resi giving birth in which there’s a real possibility she might die is brilliantly conveyed in a lengthy reaction shot of Anka’s face. A later sequence has Kristina diagnose Lisa as pregnant and perform an abortion, with Anka required to drop a foetus-sized package of one of the city’s bridges into the water just as throughout the film she also empties chamber pots into street drains under the admonition, our employers must be allowed to think their shit smells sweeter than ours.

Resi, meanwhile, comes to despise her husband. He is sheltered and foolish enough to be delighted to get called up for active service in WW1, and Resi is so keen for him not to come back that Anka elicits details of how to curse somebody from Kristina so that Anka and Resi can perform a makeshift witchcraft ritual (basically, walking round a room stark naked with a broomstick between her legs) to curse him. He comes back from the war wounded, an embittered figure who has lost one leg, one eye and, perhaps more significantly, whatever self-dignity he previously possessed.

Anka is religious enough to pray nightly for her mother and the Emperor, so clearly her Christianity (probably Catholic or Orthodox) is of the state- and establishment-bolstering variety. It’s difficult to see what other impact it has on her life.

For all its veering around all over the place narrative-wise, this proves an engrossing two hours, far more so than you might reasonably expect.

The Chambermaid premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Wake Me (Zbudi Me)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A man wakes up in hospital, clearly traumatised. His head is bandaged. He has no idea who he is beyond his name, Rok (Jure Henigman). His girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) drives him home.

When the door of the social housing apartment opens, and the woman inside (who we later realise is his mother, played by Nataša Barbara Gračner) realises who it is, she tries to shut the door but not before he can get a foot in. He forces entry, and the lady social worker explains that this is the last address he remembers, that he should regain his memory in time. And already, he remembers a name, Jure (Timon Sturbej). Who turns out to be his little brother. His brother at his mother’s insistence makes up the bed in the brother’s room.

Rok hangs around on walkways in Jesenice, as the local railway station is named, walks through an underpass to a cafe where he asks after Damjan (Jurij Drevenšek), another remembered name, who he finds doing his day shift as a watchman in a school. Back at home, his girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) brings over some of his stuff. At night, he watches Jure spraypaint graffiti images. After the pair of them have a run in with the man whose wall it was, they watch an old video of people fleeing Rok as he wields an axe. Later, says Jure, who only heard the details second hand, things got really messy as Rok cracked a guy’s head open.

Rok calls in on Denana (Tamara Avguštin) and her wheelchair-bound husband Selim (Blaž Setnikar). Later, his mother tells him how he and Selim got in a fight which crippled Selim. Later still, Damjam suggests that now he’s Back, Rok will want revenge. This is news to Rok. He visits an Inspector Janežič (Jure Ivanužič) at the police station who tells him he’s forgotten that he was “a good guy who left all this”. That doesn’t stop him and his mother talking Jure into leaving for Austria, where life chances are better.

He watches a video of him and his girlfriend fooling around as she cooks dinner: happier times. He realises he has a key, so travels over to her apartment and lets himself in. She’s not pleased. So he returns the key. Later, he gets attacked on a covered pedestrian rail / road bridge after doing his grocery shopping by people who know him from before, and who Jure – who is now back – is with.

The whole thing benefits considerably from urban Slovenia locations, crisply shot by cinematographer Ivan Zadro. The shot towards the end when Rok gets attacked is particularly impressive: a long shot of the covered pedestrian bridge as he walks across screen left to right, two men running towards him right to left and one running from behind him left to right to deliver the knockout head blow with a handheld object.

You’ll also remember shots of railway stations at night, and trains passing through the city. There’s a clear sense of purpose to the whole film and Jan Vysocky contributes an eerie orchestral score that adds much to the overall atmosphere. As a picture of a man suffering memory loss trying to reconnect with his past, which is how it sels itself, the piece does what is says on the tin. It isn’t likely to want to make anyone move to Slovenia anytime soon, though.

Wake Me premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

A Childless Village (Sonsuz)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Twenty years ago, Kazem made a film about the village’s women being unable to bear children. As a result, they beat him up. And many of the men in the village divorced them only to feel guilty and remarry them some three times. Now he wants to make another film because the problem may lie not with the women, but the men. Who, reckons the narrator, are equally likely to beat him up. A visiting lady doctor, generally referred to by the locals as Miss Doctor, hopes to run tests on the villagers and establish the cause of childlessness.

Moslem, who is also the narrator, wants to learn how to be a director – and to just be in the film. He claims that all the women in the village are related to him, so he’ll have no problem getting them to talk on camera. But, of course, it doesn’t work out that way.

An hilarious running gag has people going up to local sound recordist Samad and asking him this or that while he’s trying to record sound. Director Jamali has a lot of fun with elements such as this – for instance, Moslem proudly proclaiming that he’ll use the clapper board so professionally that no-one will need to do any writing. Or tossing leaves onto a patch of ground in an unsolicited attempt to make the shot look more beautiful for the camera.

“When you show up,” one of the women tells Moslem, “there’s always someone dead or something wrong.”

Another episode has one of the oldest women in the village – Granny Nazi – about to give birth. Kazem wants to film her, but her menfolk are unwilling. Eventually a compromise of sorts is reached and Samad, having agreed to record sound after the birth, promptly installs himself on the roof to record the event itself.

The film abounds with gags about the art of filmmaking. Kazem screens a silent film for the men of the village, but they want to know why it has no sound. Elsewhere, one man wants to be recorded in sound only so his relative won’t know from whom the testimony comes. So Moslem borrows a frosted window pane from a local house to use to blur the on camera image while the man is being filmed. Only, he can’t resist moving the glass so that the camera glimpses the man’s face.

Like Italian documentary The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, 2020), in which the old men of the village prove so incredibly watchable on camera, both Moslem and, to a lesser extent, Kazem, bring an irrepressible humour to the film. Unlike that film, this one isn’t a real documentary so much as a film about three characters making one. Its heart is in absolutely the right place, though, with its story about a group of women who got a raw deal as a result of patriarchal prejudice that blamed them for infertility that turns out not to be their fault but the men’s.

Audiences will be drawn to it not because of what it has to say about male bias and injustice but rather because of the humour with which it achieves this. A quiet, gentle and genuinely funny little film.

A Childless Village premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It then shows at the 2nd Red Sea International Film Festival.

Call Of God (Kõne Taevast)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The following quote from the late director Kim Ki-duk comes right at the start of this film, the last one he shot prior to his death from complications arising from COVID-19.

“The closer they are to death, the more humans miss and reminisce about their youth. I miss my twenties, although I made many mistakes in my youth. So, if I go back to that time, I really want to do good. But life never comes back.”

Kim wasn’t alive to complete it, so what we have here is the film put together from colleagues who worked with him. We’ll never know exactly how close the film is to what he intended, but it will have to do.

It was shot outside his native Korea – not the first time director Kim has done this: his second movie Wild Animals (1997) was shot in France, Amen (2011) in various parts of Europe and Stop (2015) in Japan. In recent years, various #metoo allegations against him by actresses have turned him into something of a persona non grata at home, and he’s been forced to work elsewhere. This final film was made in two Baltic States – Estonia and Lithuania – as well as Kyrgyzstan, with dialogue in Russian and Kyrgyz. The two lead actors could pass for Korean.

It takes place in the dreams of its young woman protagonist (Zhanel Sergazina), an idealistic romantic in search of / waiting for love to strike, when one day, a smart young man (Abylai Maratov) asks her the way to the Dream Café. It’s a sunny day and they walk in the park. Suddenly a thief snatches her purse, and the man sets off in pursuit, getting punched in the face but getting her bag back. After this, they start seeing one another. He turns out to be an author, so she buys his book. The next time they meet, it turns out he was going to give her a copy.

She initially resists his physical advances, but that doesn’t last long, and images soon get pretty racy. She starts talking about trust and accesses his mobile phone, whereupon she discovers that he’s still communicating with an old girlfriend and makes him swear he will speak to no other women from now on.

The black and white photography (i.e. most of the film) ostensibly represents a dream state, but that’s somewhat complicated by a parallel framing narrative in which, also in black and white, the woman periodically wakes from her dream and gets messages on her mobile phone (presumably the eponymous call of God) informing her that what occurred in her dream will soon recur in her waking life and advising that if she wants to see what happens next, she needs to go back to sleep. While you’re pondering what it all means, at the end of the film, it starts all over again, but this time in colour as what happened in her dream recurs in her waking life.

It’s bizarre that the film should play like a dream state when Kim himself would shortly pass into the next life – while you’re watching it there’s a definite sense of the hallucinatory, walking through parks, or later walking through nature, and the naive. In other parts, it throws the extraordinary at you, such as the scene where the couple feed each other tidbits on the end of sharp, pointed kitchen knife blades. And as elsewhere in the director’s films, there are characters who from time to time step outside the realm of the politically correct.

There’s something compelling about all this, to do with the very nature of cinema: sitting with a bunch of strangers in a darkened space for a group act of collective dreaming. For a while, Kim was the bad boy of Korean cinema, if not world cinema, going beyond the pale and doing things considered unacceptable. This film represents an intriguing coda to a fascinating if uneven career which refused to play by the rules.

Call Of God shows in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, as part of the Critics’ Picks strand.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

This opens with a shot of a painting depicting a pig, a fire, an orgasmically ecstatic, scantily clad woman and more, elements which play a part in what follows.

In a smart, up-market apartment, a beautiful young prostitute (Wang Yun-zhi) meditates. Then she services her clients (shown to a soft-core degree of explicit detail). She gets the job done, but the men she services don’t seem to understand that sex is about two people, not just one person (them), so she endures it as a not especially enjoyable job rather than takes pleasure in it. She has a little grille in her door so she can see who’s there before she opens it.

Meanwhile, a young man (Yusuke Fukichi) rides a scooter through the streets, arrives at the building in the pouring rain, walks along the corridor. He’s delivering food to her apartment. His job done, he returns to his home. Home is a loose term; he’s technically homeless: he occupies a room in an abandoned section of a building with no fixtures and fittings, a basic, concrete shell. Some of the window panes are missing and the polythene sheeting covering them is attached, but torn in a few places and blowing uselessly in the high wind. He sleeps in a makeshift bed made from cardboard boxes.

The above two sequences are intercut, so that the footage constantly moves from one life to the other. The festival catalogue compared this to the films of both Wong Kar-wai and Kim Ki-duk. The former you could make a case for, but where Wong’s international crossover success Chungking Express (1994) revitalised cinema in both Hong Kong and beyond, the same can’t be said of the current film: its subject matter feels like we’ve seen it before. Both films, it’s true, deal with urban lives bumping in to one another, but Wong’s film was a game changer in a way that Wang’s current one is not. The Kim Ki-duk comparison is more apt, so we’ll return to that in due course.

In true, clichéd, tart-with-a-heart fashion, the whore opens her door and her heart to the delivery boy. They have sex and she enjoys it, the first time we’ve seen her take such enjoyment. During and after coitus, he is smitten with what can only be described as grief, first silently and then sobbing out loud. In a long, static and post-coital shot, she first (to my inevitably male gaze) tenderly touches and holds his hand, then enfolds him in her arms. (It would be interesting to see what a female writer would have made of this film: likely as not, she would have come down on it like a ton of bricks.)

As he’s leaving, they negotiate a deal down to 15 from 20 takeaways as the price for the evening. So he comes back, merely to deliver food, another 15 times. (This too recalls Chungking Express, with its narrative of stockpiling out-of-date cans of tinned fruit day by day only to later binge eat them all in one go.) Then, one day he comes back to find a real estate agent showing a well-heeled couple round the cleared apartment.

Before that though, on the back of the first night, the delivery boy takes the prostitute out for a romantic evening at a restaurant and they both have a really good time, with no attached obligation for coitus. He confesses to her his dream of starting his own food stall, and when he’s subsequently got it going, she comes down to visit him. On a later occasion still, she discovers that she is pregnant. And vanishes from the narrative.

Meanwhile, the delivery boy has been slowly finding the occasional piece of furniture for his makeshift home, transporting a cupboard from a building’s rubbish deposit point on his bike then up the stairs by hand to where he’s living. Here he runs into a lady Filipino resident (Jan Hui-ling) who appears to have a bona fide apartment in which she stores goods as if it were a small warehouse and has a fridge packed full with large, solid cuts of meat.

She takes pity on him, rescuing a blanket and taking it up to his place. After the young prostitute disappears from his life, this older woman comes and lies beside him, caressing his side tenderly, but he’s not interested and does not reciprocate.

Instead she must make do with the sleazy, local building superintendent (Jason King Jiah-wen) constantly coming on to her and soon forcing himself on her. It’s unclear to what extent this is consensual and to what extent she enjoys it – somewhere between the two. Some script ideas there (and you can write a script in pictures and or sounds, no-one’s suggesting it has to be dialogue) in need of clarity. Judging by Nina Wu (Midi Z, 2019), Taiwan has been as affected by the #metoo movement as much as anywhere else, so there’s really no excuse for such woolly portrayals of female sexuality.

This is as good a moment as any to invoke the spirit of the late Kim Ki-duk, the bad boy of Korean cinema whose final film Call Of God (2022) is also in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and who often plays around with notions like this. However, I would argue Kim does so as a deliberate provocateur who has thought things through and, however unpalatable others might find his conclusions, run with them.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort goes on to further episodes after the prostitute has vanished, in which the delivery boy works at a chicken farm and one night has a crash which leaves him half-blinded and covered with burn scars. The prostitute, meanwhile, comes back into her own strand of the narrative as a mother (now played by Ivy Yin Shin), with one terrific scene where she has sex with a client (Cres Chuang), doing everything for him while he does nothing for her, while she rocks her baby’s hammock style cradle with her foot, a scene and an image worthy of Kim Ki-duk. In another tremendous scene towards the end she discovers the former delivery boy, now scarred with burns, confined to a wheelchair and reduced to selling food from a tray and she buys him a meal from a stall to feed him, her young daughter also at the table, like an archetypal nuclear family. In an echo of earlier, she caresses his forehead and he, now barely able to see, breaks down in grief.

The film may have its shortcomings, however the deft way it juggles the lives of its various protagonists makes it worth a look. A handful of scenes are quite outstanding.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.