Tag: movie

The Good Person

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Hot shot film producer Sharon (Moran Rosenblatt) flies home from abroad only to discover that her husband won’t let her past the gate entryphone to their home on arrival. Furious, she borrows (or, technically, steals) his parked car so she can go about her business. On arrival at her empty office, her long-standing assistant Alma (Lia Barnett) informs her that the bailiffs have taken everything.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so she takes a meeting with another producer who under normal circumstancea she wouldn’t touch with a barge pole but who is snowed under with projects and wants her to take one of them off his hands. Thus, she becomes the producer of a comeback movie by a notorious womaniser who gave it all up to become an ultra-conservative rabbi, Uzi Silver (Rami Heuberger), a star who hasn’t worked for several years, i. The money is already in place from the Film Fund, so the project should be a piece of cake. It all looks too good to be true. And, as so often in life, when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

Her fears abut the rabbi are confirmed when she learns that he won’t allow any women on the set apart from herself, nor will he negotiate with her (female) line producer in the room. And there’s no script – well, adapted from 1 Samuel 18-31 (this refers to the Hebrew Bible, which is apparently chaptered and versed slightly differently from the Christian one), the script is the story of King Saul visiting the Witch at Endor prior to his military defeat and his falling on his own sword. All she has to do is get someone to write a script and he’ll rubber stamp it. He himself is to play King Saul while his wife, the star who played alongside him on the last film before they got out of the movie business, is to play the Witch of Endor. To write the script, Sharon enlists the help of her old friend Shai (Uri Gottleib).

To reveal what happens next would be to spoil the film, except to say that this is one of those films where if anything can possibly go wrong for the central character, then it does. Somewhat curiously, it was billed in the festival blurb as a screwball comedy, however, I personally wouldn’t apply that label to it and fear anyone seeing this with that expectation would be severely disappointed. Thinking about it in retrospect, there IS comedy here, but it’s black comedy of the wry observation variety which may make you smile after the event but won’t make you laugh at the time.

The film is shot in stylish black and white apart from occasional sequences in preview theatres watching parts of the movie (only the odd clip here or there makes it into the film that we, the audience, are watching) which are in colour. This is scarely a new trick (see, for instance, Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, 2021) but it’s a tried and tested one that does the job. Elsewhere, the piece is nicely paced: director Anner and his editor keep it moving along nicely and you’ll agonise alongside Sharon as she undergoes one terrible experience after another.

Set in present day Jerusalem, it presents the movie business as essentially areligious in a wider culture which is clearly steeped in one of the major world religions, i.e. Judaism. The movie business is almost portrayed as a religion with its own set of irrefutable tenets (no-one puts it in these terms, but, for example, thou shalt offer opportunities for employment equally to members of both sexes) which are challenged, for good or ill, by those of conservative Orthodox Judaism (men should not touch or even associate with women, for they are unclean – my paraphrase) with the members of the Film Fund just as shocked as Sharon with Uzi’s “no women other than you on the set” demand to the point where they momentarily consider cancelling the funding.

You could argue, though, that non-association with women is exactly what Sharon’s husband does to her at the start of the piece. You could also argue that the only way she gets her films made is because she has a rich husband who bankrolls her (until, at the start of this, he no longer does) which makes it quite a smart sideswipe at the idea of the film producer who has got there by dint of hard work and talent alone. No-one suggests Sharon isn’t talented (although she’s fallen on producer’s hard times and the Uzi Silver / King Saul project is clearly her selling out, making something in which she doesn’t really believe in order to get some easy money), but equally it seems that without her husband, she is (financially) nothing, itself an ultra-conservative idea.

There would apear to be many more layers to this film on reflection, which might reveal themselves on further viewing; on first watch, however, it comes across simply as a great ride.

The Good Person plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Beast

Posted on by victorfraga

The bomb disposal specialist said: “You never know what somebody might tell you. When they think you’re somebody else”.

The works of Elmore Leonard came to mind when watching Jung-Ho Lee’s crime thriller of familiar territory. Leonard wasn’t a filmmaker, but his novels read like he could’ve easily been one, or for that matter, an American variant to Jean-Pierre Melville. He had a seamless swift. The crime wasn’t so much the fuel of the narrative, it was more so the spirit of the crime, and the temporal proceeding between cops and killers. The characters were regular day-to-day people, behaving within and without the nature of their lives and in midst of a prolonging episode that may, by narrative arc standards, reform them. That line of dialogue from the specialist, Mankowski, echoed for every scene featuring both Jeong Han Min-Tae (Yoo Jae-Myung), and Jeong Han-Soo (Lee Sung-Min), two opposing cops with distraught pasts solving a murder.

Tae and Soo aren’t necessarily different, they’re two hard-boiled cops who cautiously break the law in order to seize it all. They both want a promotion, and whoever solves the grisly murder of a 17-year-old girl, first, will find themselves up above from the rest. In this hunt, it’ll be revealed Tae and Soo aren’t who they say they are, one attracts tabs from prior negotiated thugs, the other uses the template for licit rulings to manipulate the strategy of the other’s squad unit’s attempt at barricading members of a gang.

None of this is really as important as the murder, itself. Which, for a good 90 minutes of the film, descends in a threading of countless subplots. We’re introduced to a shady informant (Ho-jung Kim, from Kwon-taek Im’s Hwajang), and a sergeant (Daniel Choi) whose fate in an Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2004) inspired raid sequence determines the ties between Tae and Soo’s unit squad.

For the most part, The Beast isn’t a boring film. It is lengthy at its 132-minute mark but weighs in a lot of unnecessary action that could’ve been an opportunity to refine the two leads. There’s nothing singular in their nature other than both men must have this promotion for the sake of their own credibility and as a sentiment towards the commitment they’ve given for careers that have made them wallowed in despair. So much happens in this film for it to be boring, however none of what’s happening measures the significance of the originated crime. These characters only speak plot, their motives only serve the following moment, it is energetic and alive in its pacing, yet this is more of a ‘by-the-books’ within genre and plot.

What’s missing here is a sense of personality. Lee Jung-Ho has the pieces for a much more complex narrative put into one – not two, or four, or 10 storylines. The ambition by idea and vision gets in the way of a potentially well rounded arc between two rivals of similar notions regarding their own eventual vices. Both Lee Sung-Min and Jeong Han-Soo are experienced and formidable actors who give this straightforward material edge, while sparing the viewers of their own pedantic colloquy and moody facades we’ve seen so redundantly tried in American noir dramas like True Detective. The initial prognosis of The Beast, is every dog has its day. By the climax, none of the violence and the deception really have any meaning behind where both cops emotionally route to. That is to say at least the violence of this film has a blench effect only such violent South Korean films are capable of achieving.

This is not in the means of the choreography (as the kind of choreographed fighting is nothing particularly of sensation), but in the very barbaric and raw beatdowns several characters endure from Tae and Soo’s wrath. Broken teeth, faces being scrapped against a cemented stonewall, noses gushing against barstools, and the rotting ligaments of the murdered victim. The Beast is a visual splendor for the modernist new wave of South Korean noirs that lacks a distinction when set amongst other thrillers of this genre such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2003), A Bittersweet Life (Kim Jee-woon, 2006) and I Saw the Devil (Jee-woon, 2011). But almost like any of the relentlessly released juniors of this cinema, Jung Ho-Lee’s film comes from a place of ambition and a ferocious endeavour to keep this pulp desaturation of hard crime to prevailing existence. This is his directorial debut (starting out as a screenwriter for the 2017 Sik Jung and Hwi Kim’s period crime piece The Tooth and the Nail), so all he needs is a script of evolving and involving characters that are not traditionally mechanics of the auto-pilot syndrome. Characters who, for instance, like the character Chris Mankowski of Leonard’s world, who have an opinion on almost anything than just what’s there.

What his directorial debut The Beast further showcases, is the great potential he’d make for a mini series of similar means. There’s perhaps a story there nuanced of the fight and stillness these two cops inhibit, and a plot exposed to an enigma of the National Police Agency.

The Beast is available on VoD on Monday, April 6th.

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 Voluntary Year (Das Freiwillige Jahr)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A tale of adolescent indecisiveness, fatherly overbearance and the inability to communicate, A Voluntary Year is a painful, funny and slyly profound work. Spinning gold from the most basic of premises, it is also another fine addition to the “German awkwardness canon” (a phrase I coined myself).

In recent years, ranging from Maren Ade films such as Everyone Else (2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016), running through to elements of I Was At Home, But (Angela Schanelec, 2019) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (Marie Kreutzer, 2019), German-Language directors have been particularly adroit at mining social awkwardness and communicational failures for bitterly dark comic effect. A Voluntary Year follows in this recent, rich vein, creating moments of genuine comedy from relatable, personal failures. They work because no one acts like they are in a comedy. By treating everyone’s issues very seriously, the comic beats land harder, making you laugh while you cringe.

It starts on the way to the airport. Urs (Sebastian Rudolph) is driving his daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) there so she can take a flight to Costa Rica, where she will spend a gap year in a hospital. She looks less than pleased, still roiling from the breakup with her boyfriend Mario (Thomas Schubert) and nervous about what this future halfway across the world will bring. Not that her father notices. He thinks she’ll have a wonderful time.

A Voluntary Year

“You can’t please everyone all the time,” Urs lectures his unsure daughter, all the while showing how disastrous it is trying to be an expert on everything. An early scene involving a changed lock quickly establishes Urs as an unreliable father; panicking over nothing instead of taking the time to think rationally. Meanwhile Mario turns up to say goodbye, throwing her central conflict into sharp relief. Perhaps she won’t catch that flight after all?

In the hands of a less confident director, these personal issues would’ve been more obviously telegraphed through endless backstories. This limited viewpoint works wonders for the film, which is all about how the desires we project onto others affects our own lives. The flight to Costa Rica is the central metaphor here, seen by Urs as an escape from small town life and by Jette as a great plunge into the unknown away from Mario. The conventional script of teenage escape versus parental provincialism is flipped, the film expertly blurring the lines between the generations.

Sebastian Rudolph does fine work as the hubris-laden father, fully chewing into a screenplay that allows him to be arrogant, stupid, naive and caring all at the same time. Whether it’s his strained relationship with his brother, his joyless affair with his married secretary, or his negative attitude towards his own patients at the clinic, he cannot seem to maintain a truly wholesome relationship with anyone. He’s not a stereotypically bad person, yet his myopic viewpoint — stressed by the film’s use of limited perspective — blinds him to the real issues at hand. Klenke is equally game, flitting endlessly between rash decision-making and indecisiveness, sometimes in the same scene, showing that even if father and daughter have different viewpoints in life, they deal with their issues in often the same way.

Ulrich Köhler keeps the viewpoints close, never cross-cutting, only following characters from one point to another if they have met in the same space. This is a particular effective technique as it truly lays bare how easily miscommunication can happen. Taking place over only a couple of days, A Voluntary Year provides a convincing snapshot of German provincialism. Complemented by overcast skies, sodden fields and barren woods, A Voluntary Year makes a good case for escaping the complications of small town living, but only if you can escape yourself first.

No release date has been set yet for A Voluntary Year, which debuted in the Concorso internazionale at Locarno, but expect a warm release in Köhler’s native Germany.

Maternal (Hogar)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

What constitutes motherhood? Is it something that is hereditary or something that can be earned? This is the question wrestled with in Maternal, which slyly reimagines the story of the Virgin Mary for modern times. A deeply Christian tale, both in its sense of empathy and its themes, Maternal is a precise chamber Italian-Argentinean co-production that wrestles with the meaning of motherhood, finding no easy answers yet imploring the viewer to bring their own faith and meaning to each scene.

It takes place almost entirely within an Italian nunnery in Argentina which doubles up as a sanctuary for single mothers. Either through abuse or paternal neglect, these women, some heavily pregnant, others already taking care of several kids, are given a free space to find their life anew under the patronage of the Catholic Church.

Maternal

Luciano (Agustina Malale), however, seems to be more concerned with meeting up with men than taking care of her own child Nina, who she tells to leave her alone while applying her make up. Her best friend, the heavily pregnant Fatima (Denise Carrizo), is rather different, hewing to the rules of the institution and finding solace in the comfort of the nuns. When the young Sister Paolo (Lidiya Liberman), a novate from Italy, arrives to take her final vows, and gets closer to Fati, the two women’s relationship is strained.

Like many Argentinian films, Maternal is a quiet and thoughtful movie, more dependent on implication than express, underlined meanings. To highlight this point, there is no non-diegetic score telling us how we should feel in any given moment — even the credits are simply accompanied by the sound of traffic. This is a movie of faces, shot with soft light and tender appreciation; we are invited to look and feel as they feel, to imagine what goes through their mind even if they won’t tell us. As we are given such a clear overview of the nunnery — a place awash in pure white cotton, soft billowy curtains and muted candles — and its various rules, it is easy to understand the implications of each scene. Additionally, there are no speaking role for men in this movie; their affects upon these woman more pronounced through their absence. By focusing solely on these women and their life within the nunnery walls, debut director Maura Delpero treads a delicate and focused line right up until the final frame.

Maternal

There is no judgement here. Instead Delpero equally weights the runtime between all three women, giving us ample time to understand their point of view. The central conflict is between the nuns, who are by nature celibate, and the mothers themselves: asking if they can really understand what it’s like to be a mother if they don’t have children of their own. This dramatic tension is heightened when Sister Paolo gets rather close to the neglected Nina, acting as a kind of mother figure herself. Is this right? Can she even be a mother? It’s worth considering that Mary, The Mother of God, herself was a virgin. Yet by resisting easy diagnosis, Maternal leaves it up to the viewer to decide.

Maternal debuted at Locarno Film Festival in the competition slate, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Ghost Stories

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a sceptic who hosts a TV show named Psychic Cheats. Any paranormal activity can be explained away, as he demonstrates time and time again to his studio audience. But then, out of the blue, he receives a strange package containing an audio cassette recorded by his former mentor Charles Cameron who mysteriously disappeared some years ago. The latter’s rationalist world view was profoundly shaken after he encountered three paranormal episodes he couldn’t explain away, so he points the former in their direction.

Thus the good professor sets off in pursuit of three separate ghost stories, convinced he’ll be able to debunk them. But each of the three episodes defies explanation outside of the paranormal. In the first, night watchman Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) of a supposedly unoccupied warehouse comes up against an unearthly presence. In the second, young man Simon Rifkind (rising star Alex Lawther) has some unnerving experiences in his car in a forest in the middle of the night. In the third, city trader Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman) experiences the terrors of becoming a father. And then there are matters relating to Philip Goodman himself and an enigmatic, hooded figure…

This movie began life as a theatre play inspired by writers Dyson and Nyman’s love of portmanteau horror movies, three men on stools telling scary stories to a live audience. It proved a huge hit so the offers to film it rolled in. The writer-director duo had other ideas, however, and have made it themselves, retaining a down-at-heel British sensibility to the proceedings. More impressively, while the original worked on the stage, the pair have taken their material, stripped it down to its essentials then rebuilt everything from scratch for the moving picture medium.

Adaptation can so easily be a recipe for disaster. Your scribe has lost count of the number of movies he’s seen adapted from great plays or books which fall flat in screen adaptation because they’re exactly that: filmed books or filmed theatre. Happily, Ghost Stories avoids that common pitfall to prove highly effective as a cinematic outing. Parts of it will creep you out even as it delivers its fair share of effective shocks and surprises. In short, it does everything it claims on the tin. The casting is spot on and you’ll find yourself completely caught up in the three stories and the elements that link them together. Don’t miss.

Ghost Stories is out in the UK on Friday, April 6th. It’s on all major VoD platforms on Monday, August 20th.