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RATING
SCALE
2.5 or more for a noteworthy film
3.5 for an exceptional film
4 for a classic.
2.7
-- THE
DEATH OF STALIN, Armando Iannucci
[reviewed by Oslavi Linares]
"I have nightmares that make more sense than this,"
mutters Anastas Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse) as he plots with
Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and Vyacheslav Molotov
(Michael Palin) in this absurd palace intrigue by director
Armando Iannucci (Veep and In The Loop). The year is 1953,
Stalin terrorizes the Soviet Union by the hand of the sinister
Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Rusell) and his NKVD secret police.
No one is safe, not even the highest Soviet ministers .
. . until the dictator suddenly dies. Then the race for
power is on. Reformist Khrushchev and sadistic Beria start
an unscrupulous rivalry where everyone is a pawn in their
game: their fellow council members, political prisoners,
the secret police, the red army, Stalin's children, and
the whole Soviet Empire as they confusingly struggle to
play each others' loyalties or just carry the dead man's
body. Set to the mood of Russian choirs and Mozart, the
film revels in Moscow's architecture from Red Square to
the shitty apartments, economizing long-shots and opting
instead for medium and close camera takes, along quick paced
cuts or fade to blacks that convey the terror of blacklists
and political sanctimony. Indeed, the film's real narrative
aesthetic is that of the political purges where concert
halls and cowboy films coexist with night raids and torture
chambers. Death is sudden and illogical while those that
dispel it are grotesque caricatures of power. But as silly
as it may be, this satire arrives at a (surreal) time in
global politics. As Vladimir Poutine elects himself for
a fourth term, the US president is embroiled in Russian
conspiracies and plans to hold talks (or nuclear war) with
a totalitarian dictator. In light of our real absurdities,
The
Death of Stalin infuses current political
farces with a touch of humour and reminds us of the ridiculousness
of high level power.
2.9
-- THE DEVIL'S
SHARE, Luc Bourdon
[reviewed
by Mathieu Bédard]
Luc Bourdon's The
Devil's Share gets its title from the constant political
turmoil that its images show and it bears its name well,
as close to a hundred films made by the NFB during the 60s
and 70s are fractured and re-edited into a monumental and
vertiginous work. The result is a convincing and impressive
homage to civil rights activism and national cinema, but
one that remains rooted in populism and nostalgia albeit
lacking a truly insightful perspective that could connect
it with the cultural and political now.
That said, credit goes to Bourdon for making this relationship
between cinema and 60s and 70s politics in Quebec feel particularly
organic and alive. This is in part due to the spectacular
work of restoration that his team has conducted, which brought
the best of the NFB's past production to today's HD quality
standards with dazzling results. But the fluidity of the
montage itself is also an important reason for the film's
success, as it assembles a diverse range of people, landscapes
and public events with a strong sense of unity that remains
throughout. The end result does not feel like a patchwork
but rather like a tapestry where the viewer becomes an active
participant as well.
Through montage and archives, Bourdon achieves what filmmakers
like Pierre Perrault did best with direct cinema: creating
a sense of palpable immediacy and collectively articulating
speech, giving the people body and voice. The choice of
such source material was ideal indeed as direct cinema positioned
its documentary ethics somewhere between observation and
instigation, becoming an active witness.
Documentary filmmaking therefore seemed to be present at
every key moment that defined Quebec's history, be it the
October crisis, the massive strikes of the 70s, the Olympics,
or just to get a pulse of the everyday, with a visual artistry
unmatched by any television crew. Bourdon lets the images
speak for themselves and refrains from commentary, letting
the viewer become totally immersed in them.
The Devil's Share, however, is not without its
flaws, as it more or less repeats the same discourses and
points of view that those films themselves had adopted then.
As the end credits state, the film is an homage to the artists
and technicians who worked for the NFB during its golden
days, not a meditation on history and archives. The major
tropes of the Quiet Revolution are therefore reprised with
nothing very new being added to the mix: the enemies of
the people are English Canadian capitalists and the Church,
and René Lévesque comes off as a sensible, very humanized
leader while Pierre Trudeau is an antipathetic man of steel
and Jean Chrétien a buffoon.
Furthermore, as with most populist depictions of Quebec's
past, the film fails at documenting the inner divisions
and differences within the population that could foretell,
for example, the victory of the No after the first referendum,
incidentally where the film ends. And yet, addressing this
split is what creates one of the best scenes of the entire
film, when the voice of a newscaster announces the assassination
of Labour Minister Pierre Laporte while a woman softly falls
apart in an anonymous café. This scene is an example that
shows all the ambivalence of a revolutionary discourse that
couldn't bear its own commitment to action, and it creates
a devastatingly poignant moment in the film.
If we can't entirely blame Bourdon himself for all this,
as it reflects the historical bias of past filmmakers who
more or less equated the 'people' with left-wing unrest,
his lack of a more personal or essayistic approach remains
a little disappointing. For better or for worse, Bourdon
sticks to the period and does not connect it to the political
and cultural now. The film, for instance, does not sufficiently
address how fighting for collective justice and building
a nation state have become separate issues over time. Not
many traces or signs of this are found, as the past is not
re-imagined so much as it is creatively restaged. This affects
Bourdon's film in many instances, which becomes a rather
uncritical and nostalgic discourse.
This is not to say that The Devil's Share is not
without its own sense of poetry. Many images and symbols
are striking and are well worth a watch, such as the re-editing
of Derek May's Mother Tongue where a bilingual
couple fights over P.O.V shots of an emergency vehicle rushing
through the city.
But now that the French-speaking population of Quebec thrives
and has occupies the key positions of power that were being
contested in the 70s, are these images of the past still
relevant to understand the present? As filmmaker Jeanne
Crépeau wrote on the contemporary reception of past 'revolutionary'
works: "Antagonistic representations of bad English Canadians
and good French Canadians seem to me tragically inadequate
today. Do you really think today's problems are settled
just because the bankers are named [Pierre-Karl and] Julie?"
As much as the fight for progressivist social institutions
is inspiring, nay, galvanizing in the film, the inscription
of an Other as the source of evil and the feeling of an
homogenous Quebecois people that does not know internal
class division is problematic.
In other words, The Devil's Share situates an idealistic
past that saw important battles being fought, but it didn't
anticipate the neoliberal where the Other is not the English
Canadian boss anymore but the Muslim woman. Is Bourdon's
historical narrative just a comforting tale that the Quebecois
like to countlessly retell themselves, even as they are
pulling away from it? Or is it the story of a different
time and a different people which the director offers to
the present in the hope of reassessing its direction? There
is no definite answer here, but in any case the viewer will
certainly respond with strong emotions to such questions,
especially if the history of film and Quebec is an interest.
2.8
-- SUBURBICON,
George Clooney
[reviewed
by Oslavi Linares]
Co-written with the Cohen brothers and frequent collaborator
Grant Heslov, George Clooney's sixth film is a typical loss
of innocence thriller but also a political response to American
racial tensions. The plot is relatively simple and predictable:
a home invasion leads to the gradual disarray of an iconic
1950's family in an equally iconic dysfunctional suburbia.
Despite the collection of 50's types portrayed by celebrities
--Matt Damon as Gardner Lodge the corporate executive, Julian
Moore as aunt Margaret the lovely housewife, Oscar Isaac
as the clever insurance agent, and others -- the real protagonist
of the film is Gardner's son, the boy named Nicky (Noah
Jupe). In the wake of his mother's death, Nicky's loss of
innocence serves as a metaphorical vehicle for the nostalgic
50's image that many contemporary right-wing Americans cling
to. Perhaps the child's unmasking of this false memory would
have sufficed but the addition of racism and segregation
as subplots, however well-intended, does not convincingly
integrate with the film. The story of racist neighbours
against a middle class black family runs parallel to that
of the Lodge's, but it serves more as a counterpoint to
the main story. That said, certain elements of the film
are skilfully integrated as performative or visual allegories:
Gardner's blood-stained shirt, the recurrent use of poisons
in the plot, Margaret's died hair, the skeletal structures
of houses under construction, or the confederate flag. In
one scene, the camera comfortably follows one of the characters,
withdraws to reveal the environment, lighting the episode
with soft golden tones that shift to starker white illumination,
and a treacherous chiaroscuro that suggests the film noir
genre. Indeed, in this regard, both stylistically and narratively,
Suburbicon
recalls other loss of suburban innocence films ( David
Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), Alfred Hitchcock's
1943 Shadow of a Doubt), however, unlike these
precedents, Clooney uses the Cohen's script to address the
current swing towards racist ideologies in the US.
2.0
-- AMERICAN ASSASSIN, Michael
Cuesta
[reviewed
by Oslavi Linares]
USA! USA! Anymore patriotic and American
Assassin would feel like a parody. Based on the novel
series by the late Vince Flynn, the plot, in short, plays
with contemporary threats to the US (fundamentalist terrorists
and nuclear weapons) and downsizes them to a personal drama
of father and son figures. Set in Turkey, the East Coast
of the US, and Rome, the plot revolves around Mitch Rapp
(Dylan O'Brien), a US vigilante on a quest for revenge against
the Islamic terrorists who killed his girlfriend. Rapp is
recruited by a CIA black-ops unit and sent to train and
work as a counter-terrorism agent for cold-war veteran Stan
Hurley (Michael Keaton). With these protagonists, the film
plays as vehicle for the American myth of individualism;
as Rapp constantly disobeys orders but gets the job done,
and as Hurley tries to rein him in but concedes to Rapp's
patriotism and skill. The rest of the cast feels like props
for the pseudo father-son relation: rivals, enemies and
lovers appear and/or die to advance Rapp's 'hero's journey.'
Still, it is worth mentioning that the Iranian government
is presented as both potential enemy and unlikely ally,
and allusions to the Iran nuclear deal refer to those in
Iran that are for or against such deal. But even the attempted
complexity of the story's geopolitics falls prey to personal
drama of family grudges (the Iranian femme fatal avenging
her family, the former agent resentful of Hurley). Besides
these thematic elements, the film includes the regular dosage
of action sequences, gun fights and last minute salvation.
It is more restrained in its gimmicks than the Bond franchise
and aims for the realism of the Bourne ones, but its camera
work and locations resemble those of videogames like Metal
Gear Solid or Call of Duty Black Ops. Perhaps more interesting
is the film's release date (September 15), just a few days
after 9-11, with a US president calling the Iran deal "the
worst in history," and North Korea threatening nuclear war.
Thus, while as a movie it is as cookie-cut as they come,
it is representative of current American anxiety.
2.8
-- GOOD
TIME, Benny and Josh Safdie
[reviewed by Oslavi Linares] Good
Time offers the standard adrenaline
crime drama with a twist in its plot and a cinematic emphasis.
The story's premise is a simple one: low-life Constantine
'Connie' Nikas (Robert Pattinson) and his autistic brother
Nick (played by co-director and co-writer, Benny Safdie),
try to rob a New York bank and fail. After Nick is captured
in the heist, Connie tries to rescue his brother through
every means at his disposal; manipulating, stealing, impersonating
and evading the police, and in the process encountering
the outcasts under and at the margins of society as the
night goes on and wrong. Connie's quest is shown through
personal close-ups, moving shots following his escapes,
and aerial shots of the sprawling metropolis at night. He
and the environment are illuminated in a manner suggesting
the tension of the moment or the nature of the place, employing
the diegetic sources of light (or colour) to give oneiric
dimensions to fast food joints, low-income housing, empty
amusement parks, and even Connie himself. While this combo
of artistic takes and Nick's autism takes the film out of
the usual boundaries of crime films, at times the characters
feel like social types or genre archetypes. Perhaps this
also makes it interesting to see Pattinson portray such
a rogue as Connie, especially because of his teenage idol
status for the Twilight film
series). Nevertheless, the film made was nominated for Cannes'
Palm d'Or and premiered with great acclaim at this year's
Fantasia. With Good Time,
directors Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie continue their tradition
of modern day social dramas (Daddy
Longlegs, 2009, Heaven
Knows What, 2014), featuring fringe
characters and situations.
3.5
-- THE GIRL
WITHOUT HANDS, Sébastian
Laudenbach
[reviewed by Oslavi Linares]
In
The Girl Without Hands director Sébastien
Laudenbach uses a fragmentary drawing style to animate an
adult version of the well-known Brothers Grimm tale. The
story centers on a young girl whose father makes a deal
with the devil and loses her hands on its account; while
she escapes; the devil is far from letting her go, and her
perilous voyage leads her to loneliness, love and her own
self-determination. Although a fairy tale, Laudenbach's
treatment of the story deals with themes of female emancipation
and embodiment, as well as the girl's sexuality and bodily
functions. The protagonist's misadventures put her at odds
with her father and later with her prince, however she ultimately
learns to overcome her handicap through self-reliance. But
the most notable aspect of this feature is the style chosen
to tell this tale. Described by its maker as a style that
is "light and strewn with holes, that is often not coherent
except when moving . . . " Laudenbach relied on his personal
style to convey an open and fragmentary animation. Minimalist
yet figurative, at times very elaborate and at others abstract,
it reminds one of Jankovics Marcell's Sisyphus
(1974) or Frederic Back's The
Man Who Planted Trees (1987) for their
craft and subject matter. Moreover, Laudenbach's use of
space is also evocative, as he often composes through several
layers to create forests and palaces, but most often relies
on the blank page to convey a sense of incompletion that
invites the viewer to fill in. Add to this the polymorphic
character of his traces and the image becomes a canvas for
movement of and movement through space, and thus it becomes
a canvas for the mental states and moods of the characters.
Laudenbach has developed this style through his 19 years
as an animator of shorts. An auteur, he animated this tale
in its entirety with little planning and limited budget,
rendering his ink drawings on paper with only the original
tale as guidance. With this, his feature debut, he offers
an alternative to modern techniques of computer graphics
and big budget features, reminding us of animation's basis
in drawing and concretion in movement and narrative. The
Girl Without Hands will be screened
Aug. 18th in Montral at the Cinematheque Quebecois.
2.5
-- THE GLASS
CASTLE, Destin Daniel
Cretto
[reviewed by Oslavi Linares]
Based on the autobiographical book by Jeanette Walls,
The Glass Castle is a somewhat predictable
nostalgic family melodrama. Well constructed but with few
surprises, the plot alternates between Jeanette's present-day
life as an engaged gossip columnist (played by Brie Larson)
and her poverty-stricken childhood with her siblings and
their free-spirited parents, Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) and
Rex (Woody Harrelson). It is largely through Rex that most
of the drama unfolds, as he is both an anti-establishment
dreamer and an alcoholic constantly moving his family to
flee bill collectors or the authorities. During Jeanette's
adult life he still holds up to his ideals, squatting with
Rose Mary in New York, and posing a disruption to Jeanette's
wedding plans to a well-off financial analyst (Max Greenfield).
This disruption parallels the highs and lows of her upbringing,
using conventional but well-placed match cuts, dissolves
to illustrate the passage of time or the act of remembering.
This editing highlights the similarities between Jeanette's
past and present life, evoking a sense of nostalgia into
what would otherwise be just examples of parental neglect.
At times, this feels too emotional, as we are reminded multiple
times (not just through the parallel cuts but also through
the close-ups, music, acting) of the difficulty of Jeanette's
relation with her father. Because of the plot's foreseeable
resolution, The Glass Castle's
narrative turns its story of soul searching into a feel-good
movie.
3.2
-- DJANGO,
Etienne Comar
[reviewed
by Oslavi Linares]
An
apt opening act for this year’s Montreal International Jazz
Festival, Django is as much a biopic of guitar
legend Django Reinhardt (Reda Kateb) as it is about music
in times of conflict. The plot can be summed in the dichotomy
of the persecuted gypsies playing music for their Nazi oppressors
and surviving thanks to their talent. This reality leads
Django to try to escape to Switzerland aided by a duplicitous
former lover (Cécile De France), while relying on his talent
to safeguard his family and fellow gypsies, or, in the words
of his wife (Bea Palya), "make crowds dance and enchant
snakes." And the snakes dance to the tune of swing, blues
and jazz.
Indeed, music plays a large part of the film; from the opening
scenes of persecution to the closing memorial, it weaves
through Django's and the audience's worlds, borrowing from
the musician's power to at times speak for him, illuminate
the scene, or simply induce clapping.
Django's technique is so brilliant that the movie barely
mentions the fact that at the age of 18, after suffering
extensive first and second degree burns over his body and
left hand, the doctors not only wanted to amputate one of
his legs, but his fourth and fifth string plucking fingers
were paralyzed. Django rejected the surgery, left the hospital
shortly thereafter, and was able to walk with the aid of
a cane after a year. Although the doctors were convinced
he would never play guitar again, through sheer will and
talent, he learned to play with his thumb and two fingers
- and the rest is history.
But the film, thanks to its up-close cinematography, is
also an effective portrayal of the artist and the gypsy
community. The camera purposely closes in on its subject,
marking in a series of vivid portraits Django's change in
attitude from a care-free self-centred spirit to a concerned
member of the Roma community, and an aid to the Resistance,
while never loosing his sense of humour. To better render
the stages of Django's journey and the many confrontational
scenes, eye level shots are preferred over the more conventional
aerial perspective, while the highs and lows of the artist's
life are effectively evoked through creative lighting. The
atmospheric shots of the different cities and locales (from
gypsy camps to concert halls) breathe life to a period that
does not seem so distant in today's world of rising xenophobia
and ethnic violence.
Director Etienne Comar is no newcomer to ethnic conflict,
having co-written with Xavier Beauvois the tale of two religions
in Of Gods and Men (2010), winner of the Grand
Prix at Cannes. For the occasion of his directorial debut,
Django, the very first biopic of the legendary
guitarist, was chosen to open the 67th Berlin International
Film Festival.
The film and its spot-on script effectively and seamlessly
blend fact with fiction, altering the outcomes of his (second)
attempt of escape, mixing the concert at Amphion-les-Bains
with the French Resistance, or completely creating new characters,
as in the case of his fictional lover, Louise de Klerk.
Comar's film joins the ranks of World War II films like
La Vita è Bella (1997, Benigni) and Train
of Life (1988, Mihaileanu), while touching on the lesser
known facts of the Roma genocide where it is estimated that
a half a million gypsies were slaughtered by the Nazis.
But in contrast to these films, or even The Pianist
(Polanski, 2002), Django is not just a story about
survival but about the artist's power and responsibility.
The film reminds us of what stands behind music and what
it can endure.
