Fierce Hearts in Icy Climes

One of the similarities between today’s two movies is that they take place in isolated places.

The first, How I Ended This Summer, takes place on an island in the Arctic circle; the second, Ondine (out on DVD now), takes place in a remote Irish village.

Summer features two meteorologists, a senior and his junior, Gulybin (Sergei Puskepalis) and Davilov (Grigory Dobrygin), respectively. Their only connection to the outside world is a radio.

To say they are isolated and dwarfed by this hard, icy landscape doesn’t begin to explain it. Think of your index finger on your local cinema’s screen and you more or less have the scale.

Gulybin is a bear of a man, a boor and a bully. Davilov makes mistakes, he retreats behind his earphones and earring, and gets the odd smack when he makes wrong readings. So when he hears a bit of bad news about his boss, via the radio, he keeps it to himself. It’s the only power he’s got, and this simple omission gives the film its freezing tension.

The key to all of this is the pace. Nothing happens quickly in the Arctic wastes. The first third of the movie is all about their dull routine, but it’s fraught with expectation. Why, for example, doesn’t Davilov take a rifle with him when he goes outside? Does he not think there are real bears out there too? Or is he so bored, if not unhinged, already that he doesn’t care anymore?

Of course, a slow movie has to deliver the goods as much as a fast one has to. If the former has to reward our patience the latter has to convince us that it’s not just trying to bedazzle us.

How I Ended This Summer, directed by Aleksei Popugrebsky, delivers in a way that becomes a masterful display of deliberate, chess-like patience. There are no quick moves, nor are there any wasted ones. Every cliché is avoided as the film slowly becomes a metaphor for the old and the new Russia, with an endgame and conclusion that is startling in its simplicity.

***

Still on the theme of that country, Colin Farrell starred as a Russian recently, in Peter Weir’s The Way Back (also out on DVD now). If the others are political prisoners in the wastes of Siberia, circa 1941, he’s a lowdown Moscow gangster with comrades Stalin and Lenin tattooed on his chest. At least they care about his circumstances, Valka says.

When these escapees reach the border he cannot conceive of a life beyond Mother Russia and stays behind. The movie dies a kind of death at that point, because he is without a doubt the most interesting character in it.

In Ondine he plays Syracuse, a simple Irish fisherman who is divorced and has a daughter who has to have kidney dialysis. One fine day, however, he catches a woman in his nets and his daughter thinks she’s a mermaid.

The key here is that Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview With the Vampire), is the director: he who can make a woman getting dressed look as sexy as a woman getting undressed is cliched.

If his smart young protagonist, Annie (Alison Barry), looks a little like a fish in the most beautiful possible way, then he adorns his gorgeous leading lady, Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), in a dress that not only accentuates her considerable curves but also her "mermaid-ness".

After all, when she sings her strange songs, out-of-season fish seem to magically appear in Syracuse’s nets. So who says his daughter’s belief is so far-fetched? And there are many who say that when the Atlantians left the ocean, the first land they stepped on to was that of Eire.

That may be one truth, but it’s not the only one. The “real” truth is as much in the headlines (Eastern Europeans flocking to Ireland during that short-lived boom) as it is in How I Ended This Summer (nuclear radiation, poisoning the food of “traitors”).

If Ondine is a bit too long, though Summer is longer, then they have another similarity: they both beat with a fierce, original heart.

More Notes on Rabbit Hole and Chess

Last week I mentioned that Nicole Kidman had to fight to get Rabbit Hole made. Due to the pressure of a ridiculously self-imposed deadline, it only occurred to me afterwards that producers probably objected to her character’s opinion about God in a country obsessed with creationism.

During a group session of bereavement a woman says God wanted her little angel. Becca says if he wanted an angel he could just have made another one – he’s God, after all. Later on, in a conversation with her mother, she calls him “a sadistic prick”. Talk about a woman scorned.

Nor would the PC brigade have liked the fact that Becca’s husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), and another woman, played by Sandra Oh, smoke a joint before a session and burst out laughing as someone talks about losing a child to leukemia!

So more power to Ms Kidman for making a very brave, quietly subversive movie.

***

Moaning about a doccy during the recent New Zealand Film Festival, I forgot to mention that there is an excellent film that captures the independent spirit of something mentioned in Bobby Fischer Versus the World. That is, after the sixth game his opponent, Boris Spassky, joined the audience in applauding the American genius’s victory, Cold War or not.

That spirit is perfectly captured in The Luzhin Defence (2000) as a whole and in a moment when an Italian GM is offered a bribe in order to win. Fabio Sartor’s look of withering contempt is a cinematic moment to savour for life.

Directed by Marleen Gorris and starring John Turturro and Emily Watson, the film is based on the novel by that lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, who was also clearly obsessed with chess. Like the man who made the bribe, of course, he was Russian.

Neil Sonnekus

Fire in the Hole

John Cameron Mitchell’s first feature film concerned a transsexual punk rocker, his second film started off with a very flexible man giving himself a blowjob, and his third film deals with a middle-class couple losing their child.

Some may say he’s gone soft and others might say he’s matured. What is certain is that he’s extremely talented. His treatment of sex is frank without being offensive, which is quite a feat in puritanical America.

In his latest film, Rabbit Hole, there is no sex, yet it is all about sex. More about this later.

Apparently his executive producer and leading lady, Nicole Kidman, had to fight to get this project off the ground, which is commendable, and chose Mitchell to direct it, which is just plain smart. She should have won her Oscar for it rather than Natalie Portman, who can act but not dance. But then Kidman won the statuette for playing Virginia Woolf, which was a mistake on all fronts through no fault of hers.

Kidman, whom a lot of woman don’t like, interestingly, plays the kind of role in which - from a male point of view - she excels. That is, a repressed woman. You could see it in the hugely underrated and terrifying The Others and you can see it here. The more she keeps it in the more she oozes one thing and one thing only. Sex.

As for the story, Mitchell takes us from the obscure to the known in startling ways. Kidman’s Becca sees a boy in a bus and effectively starts stalking him. It’s only much later that we realise he’s the boy who accidentally killed her son. That technique applies to the truth about losing loved ones too. It takes her mother, played by the superb Dianne Wiest, to finally deliver the sad, hard truth that the pain of loss doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.

Aaron Eckhart’s Howie wants to hang on to every visible reminder of his dead son but, eight months on, he also understandably wants sex. Becca, however, wants to get rid of every reminder of her son, because she doesn’t frankly need it to remind her of a child she can see and feel everywhere, but is not interested in sex, whether for its own sake or replacing her dead son with another child. So there you have your classic marital stalemate.

Unfortunately we don’t get to know what Howie does for their rather ideal lifestyle, except that he works in an office that brings in enough moola to afford a double-storey house by a lake and two very expensive German cars. This weakens and limits the drama a little because a lot of people would simply not be interested in what could be described as their comfortable misery.

But as a portrait of a marriage in difficulty it is spot-on, yet it is also more sexual than Mitchell’s second feature, Shortbus, which is as explicit as you can get. After all, even Kidman has said that “you don’t have to be naked to be sexy”.

Exactly, Nicole. Exactly.

***

Also out on DVD now is Restrepo, a documentary featuring an American platoon in the Korengal Valley, apparently the most dangerous area in war-torn Afghanistan.

Made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya this year, we spend a year with these soldiers in what is described as the real The Hurt Locker, about which I beg to differ.

The latter, though fiction, is unbearably tense, and it is set in Iraq. Those are two vastly different “theatres of operation”, but neither addresses the question of why their soldiers are there.

This means they implicitly legitimise the American presence, rightly or wrongly, but therefore the latter especially fails, since it’s supposed to be a journalistic work. We have seen enough films that give us the “feel” of war – Platoon, Full Metal Jacket – to want to know more.

Restrepo, named after one of the soldiers who was killed during that year, doesn’t have a voice-over but gives us the basic facts in text on a black background. Other than that, the soldiers speak directly to camera, mostly after their “tour” is over, which further diminishes the so-called tension.

The camera also annoyingly stays on their eyes, in close up, waiting for these boys to cry. It is a particularly nauseating journalistic technique, which was handled well in the New Zealand doco Brother Number One, reviewed a few weeks ago.

If Junger and Hetherington should be commended for getting as close to the line of fire as possible, then the reason why Inside Job got the Oscar was because it showed us - often entertainingly - just how corrupt the upper echelons of American society are while their working-class compatriots kill and die for them in faraway, oil-rich countries.

Neil Sonnekus

Loving the Americas

Florian Habicht is a German-New Zealander who spent a year’s residency in the Big Apple in 2009 and, though he was under no obligation to make a film, he did.

What is the film “about”? Well, it concerns this guy who sees a woman walking in the street with a slice of cake on a plate. He becomes obsessed with the Russian-born actress, Masha Yakovenko, and starts filming their “relationship”.

Having no idea for a plot he asks people on the street to help him with it, so Love Story becomes just that about a city, too.

Startling things come to light. One man says he believes we come back as animals after we've died. A black woman gives us a philosophy of joy that is sounder than most philosophy. Another man says he doesn’t like New Zealanders. A tramp tells us about his first love. A muscular transvestite, like most of his/her fellow New Yorkers, has a proclivity for romance. A female stockbroker tells Florian to go real slow – that way he’ll get what he wants.

A lot of people suggest that when the sex scene comes (sorry), he should discover that she’s a he, because he wants it to be a letdown. That scene is one of the funniest and also gives us the biggest fright in the film.

At one stage Florian seems to be truly falling for Masha, but by then we don’t know what is “real” or not. He looks genuinely let down when she tells him that he must realise she’s only acting, and she does it with such naturalness – singing a Russian folk song half naked - that you couldn’t exactly blame him if he really did.

Also there to help him with the plot is his very open-minded and enthusiastic father back in New Zealand or Germany, dispensing encouragement from that cyber country, Skype. His enthusiasm has clearly rubbed off on his lanky, dishevelled son, whose offbeat goodwill keeps the film running through the slow spots, and they are there occasionally.

The whole project is helped along by a wonderfully moody soundtrack from other films and eras, and you do come out of the film feeling much better about most things – including Americans, if New Yorkers are indeed such. 

***

About a month ago I missed a festival film and thought I’ll see Copacabana with Isabelle Huppert as an alternative. I like her (lots) and the title promised something bright and, well, festive - which I needed.

But I should have known it was a trap. After all, it’s a French movie, directed by Marc Fitoussi.

The film is set mainly in Oostende, a grey harbour city in Belgium, which is as pleasing on the eye as an old wet rag. I felt a little cheated, but the story has stuck with me.

Huppert plays a freewheeling, middle-aged woman who has travelled the world doing odd jobs. The problem is she had a daughter during those wandering years and Esmerelda (played, I think, by Huppert’s real-life daughter, Lolita Chammah) is so embarrassed by her mother that she doesn’t want her at her wedding. Esmerelda’s going to marry an accountant and settle down to a boring little middle-class life.

Mama decides to prove that she can hold a job and ends up trying to sell timeshares in Oostende, one of those places Keith Richards would call the arse end of the world.

Whence the title, one might ask. Well, Mama wants to go to the country and city of samba once she’s made some money, which she proves she can - rather well. And she does go there in the end, kind of.

But her natural deviance, if not humanity, gets in the way, and if ever there was an indictment of capitalist greed then it’s this droll little comedy, which shows us that it can be as grey and nasty (but sexy, in the guise of chief saleslady Aure Atika) as any socialist dystopia.

Try to remember watching it if you ever see it in your specialist video store. It’ll stay with you like that mother or daughter you neglected. 

Neil Sonnekus

The Sweet Here and Now

Who would ever have thought of Clint Eastwood wondering out visually what happens to us after we die?

More than that, who would ever have thought he’d make a Claude Lelouch-like film about fate bringing three people together?

Knowing nothing about the film, out on DVD now, I wasn’t expecting it to invert Sam Goldwyn’s famous dictum that you should start with an earthquake and build towards a climax.

Well, Eastwood starts off with the result of a quake, a shocking tsunami, and builds towards A Man and a Woman handshake.

You can only do that kind of thing in Hollywood because you’re Eastwood, who delivers the goods as usual in that steady, assured way of his. Only he can take two comedy actors, Richard Kind (of Spin City fame) and Jay Mohr (of Gary Unmarried fame) and cast them in serious roles.

Eastwood and Matt Damon obviously clicked on Invictus and here Damon plays a San Francisco psychic who doesn’t like seeing into other people’s lives. After all, most of it is misery anyway. So he works as a labourer at a sugar mill instead.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays a smallish part as his cooking partner and proves, once again, that she’s a very good (and very beautiful) young actress.

The third strand to the story is a young boy whose mother’s a London junkie and his twin brother is killed by a truck after running away from a gang of young louts. He also misses a metro train bomb thanks to his brother’s cap being swept off his head.

So there you have it. Five things you’ve seen on your TV set recently. A tsunami, talking to the dead via a “medium”, a cooking masterclass, gang warfare on the streets of London – though a knife death would have been more pertinent right now - and terror bombs.

How will le directeur bring a laid-off American labourer with a strange talent, a high-powered French journalist who’s had an after-death experience (played by Belgian-born actress Cecille de France) and a sad little Pom together?

That creates about the only tension in this story, whose premise you either buy or don't, but it's really about unimportant things – politics, career - falling away and finding your inner courage. And that is still firmly Eastwood territory.

If the little-boy section of Hereafter is not entirely convincing, it’s still a gentle, slyly witty and highly original romance that doesn’t ignore the ugly realities of early-21st century life. But then neither does it celebrate or indulge them.

Neil Sonnekus

Stealing Beauty

One of the horrible truths the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa produced was the knowledge that many of the perpetrators and victims of atrocities were never punished or compensated appropriately, if at all.

If an apartheid-era assassin still languishes in jail after more or less full disclosure, then the man he represented, ex-Chief of the Defence Force General Magnus Malan, was acquitted for lack of evidence in 1996 and died peacefully in his sleep on Nelson Mandela’s birthday this year.

Still, the perpetrators and the victims got their chance to disclose their deeds or express their pain, respectively, and that is better than nothing. Just. So, too, the War Crimes Tribunal in Cambodia concerning the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, many of whose cronies still serve in the present government.

The New Zealand connection is the horror story of Kerry Hamill (pictured), whose boat was blown into Kampuchean waters in 1978. He and Englishman John Dewhirst were captured, tortured for two months into making absurd confessions about being CIA spies and “crushed”, meaning executed.

When Kerry’s brother, transatlantic rowing champion Rob, was offered the chance to give a victim statement in Phnom Penh, he jumped at the chance to do something for his "beautiful brother" and director Annie Goldson documented that journey, and more.

This would obviously be an emotional trip and how she treated that arc would to a large extent determine the power of the film. There is nothing more embarrassing than a camera relentlessly waiting for someone to cry, but Goldson clearly built up such a good rapport with Hamill that it feels perfectly natural and non-intrusive when he does.

Another plus of Brother Number One is that it is not just about Hamill but also his Cambodian translator and a handful of survivors. The former, for example, is very clear about what should be done to Comrade Duch. He should be crushed, like most of her family was.

On a purely formal level, the film is attractively shot, well structured and effectively scored by ex-South African and Bright Blue guitarist Tom Fox and his musical partner, Marshall Smith.

But has any good come out of this depressingly familiar tale, in which Duch only got 19 years instead of life? Well, yes. If he might still one day leave jail alive, then at least four more killers have been brought out of the woodwork, including a woman, as a result of this trial: the work of some very dedicated human rights lawyers. Some truth, at least, will out.

Secondly, as long as trials like these exist and persist, political killers will know that there is a possibility that they might be indicted and live out their last days in confined shame, however comfortably.

And, on a personal level, it brought into perspective a friendly young barista who asked me about my accent. When I grumbled about how I was struggling to find work, Michael chun Long Yip told me about how his pregnant mother fled the killing fields of Cambodia and how he was born in a refugee camp in Mairuth, Thailand, in 1980.

Today their family runs the Espresso Workshop in Epsom, Auckland.

***

The Bobby Fischer Versus the World doco more or less tells us what we already know in the “troubled genius” vein. Granted, it does explain what makes the game so addictive to chess nuts (guilty, your honour), but it never attempts to defend the man. Some of his early comments are deeply astute, and if fellow world champion Mikhail Tal called him a perfect chess gentleman, then I’m more inclined to believe him than this film's maker, who doesn't seem prepared to explore that observation.

***

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams also doesn’t quite work for me, mainly because his philosophical musings are somewhat dull and the amazing 30 000-year-old images of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc caves are repeated once too often. But he does come into his own in the postscript, showing a nuclear power station not far from the caves producing albino crocodiles in an artificial jungle powered by steam from the plant. Maybe if he’d played the two off against each other throughout we’d be on more solid, Herzogian ground.

***

Lastly, there is the problematic Australian feature film Sleeping Beauty.

In it a student goes to strange lengths to make money. Starting arrestingly with Lucy (Emily Browning) putting a thin medical pipe down her throat in a lab and almost choking, she "graduates" to being drugged so that rich old men can do anything with her except penetrate her naked, sleeping figure, hence the title. These lurid and often violent fantasies are then shown.

(It didn’t help that some prick next to me insisted on squeakily rubbing his bus ticket and ignoring me when I asked him to stop it. No one supported me either. Tolerance is one thing, slavish good manners another).

But how this non-penetration is monitored is never explained, since we never see these acts being observed by a third-party or their camera. Trust hardly seems to hold much currency here. Maybe that makes us, the viewers, the “guardian” or even “censor”, certainly the voyeur, which opens up a multitude of questions.

Place is not particularly important either. The Italian-style house Lucy goes to could be anywhere in the world, though the accents are obviously Australian. 

After these sessions she goes home to her very passive boyfriend. When he takes an overdose she does not try to help him but holds him and weeps until he’s “gone”. She gets upset, too, when an old man decides to commit suicide next to her sleeping body, but otherwise nothing fazes her. 

Jane Campion, who mentored author Julia Leigh in the making of this film, seems very much to favour the idea of passive or shackled males and called the film “sensuous”. One critic said it could not be made by a man, though whether that’s because the man would be “unafraid” to make it or be accused of sadism is another matter.

Entering the arena of (male-made) films like Eyes Wide Shut, Never Let Me Go and David Cronenburg’s Crash in tone and surreality, if not consistency, it’s difficult to gauge what the film is saying. Is it art or is it just a well acted, high-class excuse to look at a marble-like beauty?

There are certainly plenty of young naked female and old male bodies in it, but whether this constitutes sensuality free from any ideological biases is moot. Just because a woman shows us her sex as being fascinatingly compliant and men as disgusting pigs doesn’t necessarily make it art, liberated or liberating.

It is an "intriguing" if rather slow film, but the box office might not be quite as forgiving, and beauty without viewers tends to equate what viewers of porn tend to do with themselves, doesn't it? 

Neil Sonnekus

Incomparable

One shudders to think what was going through the mind of those judges who had to decide which was the best film for the foreign Oscar this year.

Would it be that piece of paternalistic claptrap in which a Danish doctor helps the starving black masses, or would it be a masterpiece like Biutiful or the apparently brilliant Dogtooth from Greece -or Incendies, a Canadian film which stays with you like a dream that is so disturbing and important that it doesn’t have to be written down.

The judges obviously settled for In a Better World with its comfortable, anti-Muslim view of Africa just dying to be helped by a good bwana. But there is nothing comfortable about Incendies, which roughly means scorched, having just finished at the New Zealand International Film Festival and coming to cinemas next month.

It's a devastating metaphor for the Middle East, but the judges probably didn't like the fact that it's finger isn't pointed at Muslims this time, but Christians. As if it matters, for God's sake. Fanaticism is fanaticism.

What starts off as a slightly strange reading of a will in a Canadian notary’s office leads us slowly and surely  into a maze of horror in the Lebanese south that, as one character later on says, it would be better not to know about. But by then we are so far into this journey, so mesmerized, that we can’t let go.

To say what exactly the film is “about” would be doing it a great disservice, not because it would be spoiling the plot but because the subject matter is so delicate and can so easily sound trite – or sensational - that it would cheapen it.

Director Denis Villeneuve steers his actors through this emotional labyrinth with a sober, steady hand, using no fancy lighting, and gets performances that are breathtaking. It would be almost unfair to single anyone out, but Lubna Azabal’s performance as the central character is so good that her haunted look, like that dream, will not go away.

If at the beginning we might think she’s having a slightly over-dramatic moment at a public swimming pool, when we finally know why it seems like an act of superhuman restraint. How can she not burst, let alone live, having been through so much?

One of the great ironies of the film is that “civilized” Canada is shown as dark, cold, rainy and sterile, whereas rural Lebanon is depicted as sunny and passionate – but rotten with religious and moral depravity. As for those who think film cannot convey depth,complexity and catharsis, here's proof to the contrary.

See this film if you want to know what’s happening in the Middle East, from whatever point of view. It’s all the same. But its greatest accomplishment is that if the audience was making audible sounds of disbelief and horror, not one of us left. We couldn’t. It’s too vital, like a Greek tragedy, to walk away from or to avoid.

Incendies has to be seen. Period.

Neil Sonnekus

Knock, Knock, Who's There?

The New Zealand International Film Festival only really starts today, so I had to decide what to review before a host of mainly foreign, not-such-mainstream movies hit Auckland.

It was a toss-up between Robert Redford’s two-hour-long history drama, The Conspirator, or Unknown, another Liam Neeson Euro-thriller, out on DVD now.

Redford’s drama didn’t seem to have much to do with contemporary matters like the trials of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners in a way that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible echoed the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, so I decided to go with Unknown at the shorter “approximately 109 minutes”.

Neeson’s previous outing in Taken had him as a retired American special agent tracking down his teenage daughter, who gets abducted in Paris, and saving her from those throat-slitting damned Ayrabs. It was a really slick thriller and quietly racist too.

Now Dr Martin Harris (Neeson) and his wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), go to Berlin to attend a biotechnology conference, but when they get to a fancy hotel he realizes he’s forgotten his briefcase at the airport and catches a taxi back there without telling his wife. He’ll call her, he thinks, but – ta, da – his phone’s been disconnected. Something’s up. The music tells us thus.

Before you can say Sturm und Drang the taxi crashes and he knocks his head badly, but fortunately Diane Kruger is the taxi driver and saves him from the city’s icy river. Now, however, nobody believes that he is who he says and thinks he is. Cool idea. This could be good.

When Harris does finally track down the able taxi driver, Gina (Kruger), she avoids him like the plague because she is a gastarbeiter who doesn’t have her papers in order, but her one colleague, Biko (Clint Dyer), will play the nice black guy who can always be relied upon in these situations. Biko? Look, it’s not unusual to name your children after this or that hero, but a little context might have helped. Anyway, Biko goes the way of all nice, reliable black helpers.

One of the big clues in the movie is that this scientist turns out to be quite able with his fists and driving skills, but the best lines are given to veteran Swiss actor Bruno Ganz playing an ex-Stasi official. “We Germans are very good at forgetting. We forgot the war, we forgot forty years of communism…”

At least he doesn’t have to contend with Harris’s line to him: “I need you to help me prove I’m…me.” You can see Neeson had to do that one quite a few times. He seemed to be grimacing too when he asked Gina whether he could "crash" at her place. You could just imagine a typical Germanic response. "But we've crashed already once, why again?" But then she is Croatian and they know exactly what that old Sixties word stands for.  

Things are not what they seem, of course, and when Frank Langella’s Rodney Cole visits Ganz’s Ernst Jürgen it becomes the best scene in the movie, fraught with tension and a clever surprise by cleverly  echoing what Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann allegedly did in the same city, circa May 1945.

Don’t read further if you don't want more plot giveaways, because Harris turns out to be an…assassin, whose knock on the head actually had him believing he was really married to Liz, loved her and was a biotechnologist. It’s all been a brilliant set-up, or such are the attractions of the bourgeoisie.

Now Harris, who has killed numerous others, suddenly decides to save a German scientist who is about to give the world free, pesticide-resistant grain - with the generous backing of an Arab prince, almost as if to make up for that other bit of anti-Muslim filmmaking.

So you see what a knock to the head can do for you. You can change your personality, get exonerated for all the people you killed and then hop on to the bullet train with a new identity and great-looking blonde babe as the end credits start rolling. Simple.

Neil Sonnekus