Tag: terrorist

One Year, One Night (Un año, una noche)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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A tale of two performances: Noémie Merlant as Céline, fresh off A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) and Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, 2020) with a credible, affecting portrait of trauma denial; and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Ramon, suffering severe panic attacks right from the start without enough depth to properly pull it off. A tale of a couple, navigating the aftermath of the 2015 Bataclan attacks together, with the finer and cleverer performance being dragged down by a messy one.

One Year, One Night is based on the true recollections of two French-Spanish couples who went through unimaginable horror when escaping from the horrific terrorist attack, where 130 people were brutally killed by Islamist terrorists. Using a back-and-forth narrative technique, starting in the aftermath before giving us piecemeal cutbacks to the attacks themselves — tastefully shot so as to avoid any depiction of the gunmen — the result is a touching portrait of trauma and the pains of trying to live within its shadow.

The film works best when explaining the ways that life goes on even when you have suffered a severe event, with Ramon and Céline going back to their jobs; Ramon is in some kind of financial services while Céline is a social worker at a foster home, mostly working with Black and brown kids. With a manner reminiscent of Jean-Marc Vallée, edits come through these scenes like intrusive thoughts, showing us the difficulty of trying to move forward. But while Céline’s arc, telling no one what happened and hoping the negative feeling just goes away, seems more fascinating, Ramon’s everything-on-the-table reaction, vacillating between grief and encounter and moments of strange enlightenment, required subtler execution from Biscayart, who can’t quite pull it off.

Naturally, their relationship, told over the course of a year, comes under great scrutiny, whether they have drunk too many beers in Spain, stressed from work, or try and plan the future together. At times the attack itself fades from view and we are left with a handsome-enough relationship drama. But the dramatic line of the film is left severely wanting, with little shape given to each character’s development or conflict: arguments in rooms and cool dancing scenes can be fun, but they have to actually mean something; instead it just feels like padding.

And at 130 minutes, what could’ve been a neat Panorama film is given the bloated self-importance of a competition entry. While the experiences of the Bataclan survivors deserves a fair telling — with their input and consent, of course — One Year, One Night doesn’t live up to the importance of the task.

One Year, One Night plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

Hotel Mumbai

Posted on by victorfraga

During much of Hotel Mumbai’s engrossing two hours, director Anthony Maras makes sure the viewer understands the savage details of what occurred on 26/11, the coordinated atrocity that saw 10 Pakistani terrorists attack a railway station, hospital, café, Jewish centre and two hotels – the Oberoi Trident and the iconic Taj Mahal, the latter of which became emblematic of the attack and the setting of this film.

Brief research will tell you that over 170 people died – an awful statistic. But Maras’s film gives you a stark idea of what that level of slaughter actually looks like, and it does so in an appropriately sickening manner – harsh, brutal and without any stylisation. Hotel Mumbai also raises hard questions about the depiction of real life tragedy. It is a skilfully made production with an understanding of both the thriller genre and docudrama, but it is precisely that genre dexterity that may seem exploitative to some. For example, a sequence in which a nanny smothers a baby’s cries as they hide in a wardrobe will cause knuckles to whiten and teeth to grind – it’s expertly crafted – but this scenario is such a staple of thriller and horror cinema that it blurs the line between re-enactment and entertainment.

The most important thing to consider here is veracity, and Hotel Mumbai gets mixed marks. The characters, while fictional, are composites of real individuals. Arjun (Dev Patel), the lead hero of the story, is an amalgam of one of the Taj’s waiters and an unarmed security guard; while Zahra (Nazanin Bonindi) and David (Armie Hammer), whose relationship is the lead emotional interest, are based on two different couples who suffered similar circumstances. Even the character of Vasili (Jason Isaacs), a Russian quasi-gangster, is drawn from a wealthy businessman and ex-special forces operative who were present at the attacks. The only real character is Head Chef Hemant Oberoi, who is played with charismatic aplomb by Anupam Kher.

Maras stated that blending fact and fiction was out of respect for victims’ privacy, and this may have been the right decision. However, it prevents Hotel Mumbai from attaining that chilling authenticity found in Paul Greengrass’s work, namely Bloody Sunday, United 93 and 22 July. Yet, I do not feel its mild artistic licence – or litany of gunfire and bloodshed – amounts to exploitation.

There are some occasional issues, though, especially with dialogue. The most egregious example of this occurs during a brief respite from the chaos in the locked up Chambers Lounge, where Lady Wynn (Carmen Duncan) starts hysterically accusing anyone vaguely South Asian of being complicit with the terrorists. This compels Arjun (Dev Patel) to take her aside and carefully explain the importance of his turban and his willingness to remove it to appease her. It’s an awfully contrived moment that serves as a token gesture to the audience that effectively says, “look, they’re not all like that, y’know”. Yes, we know.

Thankfully, cliché and contrivance are few and far between, for Maras’s skill as a filmmaker is displayed with full force. The script, despite the occasional bump, is tight and economical, introducing us to the main characters with pace and brevity. But it is the way Maras establishes the geography of the Taj that is most impressive, familiarising us with the hotel’s myriad corridors as he creates a pervasive sense of terrible danger.

Ultimately, Hotel Mumbai achieves what all good historical films do – it serves as a vivid gateway into the past that leaves audiences better informed. After all, following the atrocities across Europe in the mid-2010s, what do you remember of 26/11?

Hotel Mumbai is in cinemas on Friday, September 27th. On VoD in April!

22 July

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The date is July 22nd, 2011. After detonating a bomb in Oslo, a far-right terrorist traveled to the island of Utøya to massacre teenagers attending a youth leadership Summer camp. Once he was apprehended by police, the country had to come to terms with his actions while the survivors had to rebuild their lives and, if they chose, confront the terrorist in court.

Not to be confused with the bravura single take, Norwegian language film U: July 22 (Erik Poppe, 2018) about the massacre on the island itself, due for UK release two weeks after this one, 22 July is the English language film by UK director Paul Greengrass using a Norwegian cast and crew which covers not only the massacre but events leading up to it and its aftermath. It’s based on the book One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and its Aftermath by Åsne Seierstad, a renowned Norwegian war correspondent whose expertise Greengrass says he found invaluable in making the film.

Greengrass’s background in journalism and documentary led to feature films like Bloody Sunday (2002) and United 93 (2006), about the 1972 Derry, Northern Ireland ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings and one of the commercial flights involved in the 9/11 US terrorist attacks respectively, which dramatise actual historical events with documentarian accuracy. He uses this approach again in 22 July, which shares a great deal with United 93, another film about a terrorist attack perpetrated against a Western democracy.

Whereas 9/11’s terrorists were immigrant Islamists from a culture beyond the target country, the lone operator behind the Oslo and Utøya attacks was a far-right extremist and a Norwegian national, the enemy within. Both United 93 and 22 July start with the terrorist preparations and follow them as they put their plans into action, but where United 93 followed both what went on in the aircraft and events on the ground e.g. in air traffic control up to the point the aircraft was destroyed in mid-flight, 22 July covers not only the Oslo bombing and the Utøya shootings in its first third but also the survivors – both teenagers and terrorist – up to and including the point where the former group confronted the latter individual in court.

Thus, in addition to one plot line following far right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie), another follows two teenage brothers at the camp Viljar and Torje Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli and Isak Bakli Aglen) in their attempts to survive. Viljar, who helps his younger brother flee to safety, receives a gunshot wound to the head and shoulders and for months after the incident must undergo hospital treatment and therapy. As he does so, he must face his own demons: will Viljar be able to confront the terrorist in court and show the world that there is a better way? A third plot strand involves the Norwegian PM Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth) as he struggles to deal with the unfolding terrorist incidents.

It’s gripping and terrifying material, impressive not least for the huge amount of research that Greengrass, Seierstad and team have clearly put in. On a really big screen it’s visceral and harrowing – apart from Viljar’s sustaining his injuries there isn’t a great deal of graphic detail shown, but the fact that these are carefully crafted recreations of actual events that took place in recent history lends the representation considerable gravitas.

Controversially, Greengrass has chosen to make this film with online movie streaming service Netflix and while we would encourage you to see it in a cinema with a decent sized screen if you possibly can, those with Netflix accounts may, understandably, choose to watch it on that platform instead. (Hey – go and see it in the cinema first!) The teenage survivors are the next generation, so Greengrass’ stated intention of reaching that audience via a familiar streaming platform makes complete sense, much as I hate to have to write that this is the case.

In short, this is a well researched, realised and performed and to boot a highly effective docudrama about devastating events that remind us to be vigilant in combating and confronting terrorism, whether perpetrated by right wing extremists or anyone else. It would make a terrific double bill if preceded by United 93 for those that have both stomach and stamina to cope with both at once, however it’s undeniably an effective piece of cinema in its own right. You might wonder why Greengrass would need to make a 22 July after having already made a United 93: the answer is, the Islamist terrorist atrocity and the right wing extremist terrorist atrocity are two sides of the same coin, so the pair of films presents us with some sort of wider, balanced view. The new film is absolutely essential viewing in much the same way that the earlier one was. Don’t miss.

22 July is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, October 10th as well as on Netflix. Watch the film trailer below: