11

Mar

Harvey Weinstein’s production, “Bully,” being itself bullied by the motion picture raters

Harvey Weinstein, the legendary man behind The Weinstein Company, and Miramax before that, is talking about his film “Bully” being itself bullied by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).  That’s America’s largely anonymous movie rating organization.

The crisis: bullying in itself is even more barbaric and cruel in our social media epoch than it used to be.   It devastates youngsters in their formative years.  For a myriad of complicated reasons schools seem disinclined to punish the bullies.

This film aggressively exposes the crisis, and the filmmakers aren’t timid with the profanity that the children use.  The politico-artistic problem: the MPAA disputes how appropriate the profanity in the film is, and in-turn gave “Bully” an R rating.  Historically subtlety is not their friend.  The vital subtlety is about why the use of the “F-word” in different contexts, and stories, for different reasons can have different meanings.

What’s provincial about the MPAA’s sensibilities: consider the words of Chicago Tribune film critic, Michael Phillips.

In the interest of fairness, I am opining without yet having seen the film.  But concerns about the rating associations’ usefulness have persisted at a low hum for years.

This specific dispute has made headlines from Los Angeles, which is often conflated with Hollywood, to the world.

Here’s one argument more potent and memorable than Mr. Phillips’ words: this 2006 documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated.”

Before the MPAA came, movies were censored by the Motion Picture Production Code, aka the Hays Code, which reigned from 1930 through 1967.  And, then, in 1968, two years after its birth, the Association established and offered basic sense ratings.  But that basic sense got lost when it came to films being judged beyond the MPAA’s provincial standards.

Why do so many Americans still heed our movie ratings system?

Why should or would a nation-wide standard reign when every region, and state in-general has and abides by its own sensibilities?

464 days ago Short URL Comments

criticism/Film/Homosexual/Gay/independent/media criticism

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06

Sep

“Higher Ground,” from Vera Farmiga, shows us a different, personal struggle toward Christ

Each of us searches for personal meaning in life, a purpose.  Some use a holy book in that search.  “Higher Ground” tells a story of a woman, Corinne’s, walk with her faith, from elementary age into middle age.  Hers is a stuck in coming-of-faith story.  When you finally feel a firm grip on how life works, your place in the world and how you’ll work that, that’s one definition of coming-of-age.  Coming-of-faith is when you feel that with your faith.  To be stuck in coming-of-faith is when you’ve not yet found a firm ground or steady conviction when it comes to your faith or god.

A young, critically thoughtful Corinne (Courtesy: Sony Classics)

This interesting, profound drama, adapted from the memoir, “This Dark World,” by Carolyn S. Briggs,  opens at the Edina Cinema on September 9th.

“Higher Ground” is a feature-length film, directed by and starring Vera Farmiga, about how a girl, raised in a verbally abusive household, sticks with a choice after having committed herself to a conviction, Christ, without being convicted. She’s hungry for a church to guide her; maybe jumping the gun will be the catalyst?

Corinne wants to write fiction and live immersed in a world of art and critical thought.  A man and a moment of sexual hunger overtake that: she clicks with Ethan (Joshua Leonard), a like-minded, sensitive musician, concedes her virginity, clings to and finally marries him, in time for her pregnancy to show.  He’s provincial, with a level of curiosity that leaves him content with family and without questions that challenge or test him.

Another sign and symbol of their disconnection: shortly after marrying, they commiserate about opportunities lost in having a child: he wants to perform with a band.  She, a resolute, practical dreamer admits that she’d love to write novels, but hasn’t the time.  And kisses her baby with adoration.

Ethan flails in one last gesture of rebellion.  He takes his band, and Corinne and their daughter on a music gig – ill-fated.  His band mates are sophomoric, and want neither Corinne nor a baby sharing the band bus.  Straining to be a diplomat, and good sport, she’s at her wit’s end.  Their daughter needs a play or nap space in this Animal House setting.  Ethan screams for her to use a cooler!  Soon after stowing the baby, Ethan is distracted and crashes their bus.  They all bolt from the bus, Ethan dragging Corinne along with him.  She alone remembers that their daughter’s in the cooler – on the bus!  Once safe, Ethan declares “God saved her.”  A hasty conclusion?

A happy young marriage? (Courtesy: Sony Classics)

Corinne poses questions, which no one around her is ready for, or leave them comfortable.  As her children grow, Corinne becomes increasingly chafed by her husband, Ethan, and the church’s disinterest in her questions and spurning of her obstinacy.  Neither of them considers pursuing an examined life, as Aristotle extolled, and which she wants.  This clashes with who she wants to be, but at the same time, she tries to focus on what God wants from her.  She still wonders: how to submit to God when vital, incisive questions nag her?

“Higher Ground” is a quiet, patient story about a girl-come-young-woman’s spiritual search and yearning.  It resembles a chronic, persistent chafe similar to many of those in Martin Scorsese’s stories.  “The Last Temptation of Christ” is the obvious one. There Jesus is offered the option to simply live a human, mortal life, with a family, instead of living with the sacrifice and selfless service.  Corrine has already sacrificed her idea of a happy life in order to appease her church.  And she’s losing herself.

At the end of a scene Ethan sees, written on the wall, how far she has drifted from him, and how impotent he is in the face of that.  He finally sees a chasm between them.  He just doesn’t get her.  While talking about their children, and a petty complaint about her, she runs to their station wagon and away from him.

A man, different from Ethan, makes her glow? (Courtesy: Sony Classics)

She’s fed up with him, or how far he has drifted from her.  She locks the driver’s side door. He takes the seat behind her, and tries to convince her to stay docile, to be Godly, but doesn’t know how to fight that without hitting her – he seizes her throat from behind, and squeezes, more to vent than to hurt her.  But that’s it!

She needs to try life independent of Ethan, and maybe find God again that way.

Later, after leaving Ethan, she has just testified to her church about not yet having found home within God, after more than 20 years.  The final shot is potent and subtle: Corrine looks back at the congregation with hope and uncertainty.

Religious movies can be difficult when they paint outside of the lines, whether those are bound by belief, outright doubt or vice.  The zealous Christian probably wants a movie that’ll affirm their convictions and submission to God’s will.  Those on the other, secular, side want something that’ll confirm theirs; they’re tired of hearing dramatic, dogma of their imminent damnation.

“Higher Ground” is a good film.  If you demand a fast-paced, metropolitan take on religious life, this might refresh you.  If you sympathize or are comfortable with tough questions left dangling for Corrine or with the way she pursues her faith, then this’ll suit you.  If not, still try it.  Thoughtful, even-handed stories about religious or spiritual life are rare.

651 days ago Short URL Comments

Film/independent

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02

Sep

What would happen if you recorded your “Life in A Day?”

“Life in A Day” is a documentary directed by Kevin MacDonald.  Video cameras were given to more than 80,000 people and families from more than 190 countries.  Each recorded their lives for a single day, July 24, 2010.  Doing a chronicle like this is a production gauntlet.  A thankless one.

The film begins slowly.  How many people are patient enough to watch the waking moments of a dozen people from across the planet?  It’s not bad, but best bits follow the waking opening.

A teenager shaves for his first time with his dad on-hand

This opens at the Film Society of Mpls./St. Paul on September 2nd.

As happens with the occasional film, this has no plot, nor story, but has characters.  The storytelling method reveals character and characters in ways no other films do. There are people, whose points of view or sections stand out.  The randomness might remind you of the “Visions of Light,” the American Film Institute’s documentary, from 1992, about movie lighting.

A great moment: something is giving birth, but you can’t tell if she’s a mammal or not.  And then the point of view starts to teeter and slumps to the floor.  A man has fainted.  He’s now a father!

The magic comes when the subjects answer any one of four questions like “who do you love?,” “what do you love?” “what do you fear?”  On the part of fear, one woman flaunts her fat boy.  Another mentions loneliness.

“Life in A Day” is worth watching.

656 days ago Short URL Comments

documentary/Film

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17

Aug

“Point Blank” is a French thriller that gives good chase. Good smart chase.

“Point Blank” starts just as its title does, without foreplay.  The first shot jolts us into a story, of smart escapism.

On a typical workday Samuel (Gilles Lellouche), a nursing assistant in France, tries to stop a suspicious hospital visitor in a lab coat from messing with an injured criminal, Hugo Sartet (Roschdy Zem), being treated after having fled an attack.  He pursues the man in a lab coat, but merely shoos him.  In another world that wouldn’t even be a blip.

Too bad he and his pregnant wife, Nadia Pierret (Elena Anaya), are in for the shock of their lives: someone breaks in to their apartment and seizes her before he can see or sense anything.  But why?

Sam leaps into a situation well beyond him

“Point Blank,” from director Fred Cavayé, opens at Minneapolis’ Lagoon Cinema on August 19th.

This event up-ends loving pregnant couple, Sam and Nadia’s, work-a-day urban life, like a chainsaw.  Sam must deliver a dangerous package – that seasoned, violent criminal – to the man who has taken his pregnant wife.  His pregnant wife is in the middle of a volatile pregnancy.  The stakes couldn’t be more grave or personal.

This resembles a familiar, iconic character, right?  Smart and ambitious, Samuel is an ordinary man who’s thrown into extraordinary circumstances of crime, betrayal and corruption.  Remember Roger Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 “North By Northwest,” or simply 1993′s “The Fugitive.”

The worlds of Sam, the abductor, and Hugo, his hostage, collide; the irony is that the innocent one is the abductor, pushed to desperation, to muscle and hustle a real criminal away from his guarded hospital bed to freedom.

The biggest irony is probably that these two disparate men amount to a good pair!  They cooperate with each other when one of his agendas – Hugo’s safety, or Sam’s, but particularly Nadia’s – is jeopardized.  This, while they spend most of their time tugging and yanking each other into opposite, rarely natural directions.  Against the American stereotype of non-Anglo criminals, Hugo is consistently calmer than Sam.  He’s also a complex, thoughtful semi-compassionate criminal, with copper skin and wooly hair.  In American crime stories, the brown, black or beige criminal is either foolish or viscious, if not both.

"Hostage" Hugo isn't to be trifled with

At 83-mins, “Point Blank” is just long enough to be seen as a feature-length film, but it still feels like a full movie.  When as an American, you think of a French thriller, “La Femme Nikita” pops to mind, and even “Taken,” although the latter merely takes place in Paris.  “Point Blank” is fast-paced, and has wit.  For a thriller, a chase thriller that’s rare.  It provides more than the basics: characters we care about and a gripping plot.

Another interesting surprise: when’s the last time you got opera music in a thriller, it fit and worked for you?  “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” with Jimmy Stewart, had an orchestra scene, hmm almost a motif, but that’s different.­  Well, after an intense chase scene (one among many) we get this vocal, which let’s the pace and our hearts slow down.

“Point Blank” borrows music and specific shots from “The Bourne Ultimatum” and takes cues from Bernard Hermann’s music, which marked a few different Hitchcock oeuvres, such as “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”  It’s worth noting that family, the protection of family is at the heart of both that film and “Point Blank.”  That’s atypical for a thriller.

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672 days ago Short URL Comments

Europe/Film/foreign/French

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29

Jul

“Crime After Crime” is a moving documentary about a woman’s perseverence, and the sausage-making in “justice”

“Crime After Crime,” a feature-length documentary by Yoav Potash, about a troubled young woman, Deborah Peagler, who was convicted of homicide more than 25 years ago.  This, after having asked neighborhood gangsters to make her abusive lover stop beating and terrorizing her.  While a 2003 California law would only demand six years of her life in prison, her 1983 sentence took more than 25.  This is her story.

This suspenseful true story will show at the Film Society of Minneapolis/St. Paul starting on July 29th.

Ms. Deborah Peagler awaits justice and freedom (courtesy Sundance)

Two lawyers, Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran, stepped up to take her case, pro bono, after a 2003 California law was passed that changed the game for victim/survivors of domestic abuse who are convicted of homicide, and free her.  In doing so they found a sympathetic client, and a District Attorney’s office, run by Steve Cooley, that has committed and is committing “Crime After Crime,” as Mr. Safran described their conduct, to save face and keep careers.

When you picture justice, this isn’t it: not “Crime After Crime.”  It’s a spectacular story, where the themes and stakes will remind some of you of the activist 1970s movie trend with such titles as 1980′s “Brubaker,” 1979′s “…And Justice for All,” and 1975′s “Dog Day Afternoon,” of the underdog.

Winston Churchill, an extraordinary political icon of the United Kingdom, once said that “Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms…”  As it goes with that, so this seems to with justice: she was denied parole at least thrice.  At one point Safran describes how the parole and appellate process work in ways, which ignore or preclude the convict’s promise for doing good.  Ms. Deagler had been an ideal inmate, had earned a two-year degree, become a mentor to junior inmates and served far more time than 2000s laws demanded.  So the case requires Herculean efforts even when the law, precedent and rhetorical are on their side.

Lawyers Josh Safran and Nadia Costa guide Ms. Peagler toward freedom, if not justice (courtesy Berkeley Side)

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office does so many things that clash with the public’s interests or Ms. Peagler’s.  It makes you wretch and doubt America’s commitment to justice, or equal justice.  Originally she was sentenced via a legal perspective that lumped women, who lash out is desperation at their abusive husbands or lovers, with those women who kill in cold blood.

The stakes, offenses and perversions of justice, and morals in this story make it a crackerjack whodunit.  What makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand is that “Crime After Crime” trains its crosshairs, more and more, on the prosecutors misconduct.  The DA’s office conceals a pivotal document, uses unreliable and impotent witness testimony and reneges on compassionate agreements.

California's masses support Peagler's cause (courtesy LATimes.com)

“Crime After Crime” boasts as many plot twists and is as fast-paced as a sweeps week episode of “Law & Order.”  In some ways this is similar to 1993′s “In the Name of the Father,” even though that drama, which was based on a true story, exonerates justice in the United Kingdom.  In both stories, convicts languish in prison for crimes, and with sentences, more heinous than the evidence warranted.

Ms, Peagler’s odyssey is even more trying and dramatic than another documentary, POV’s “Presumed Guilty,” from 2010.  That  indicts the Mexican version of justice – and a very non-Western.  That candid and uncomfortable exposé provides excellent and telling comparison to Ms. Peager’s story.

Alongside being a splendid true crime drama, this documentary pushes us to consider several uncomfortable questions: what is justice?  what color is it?  why must it not only have a price, but one that makes our noses bleed?  Finally, what do we expect from it vs. what America’s founders wanted us to expect from it.

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691 days ago Short URL Comments

African-American/documentary/feminist/independent/national politics/suspense & thriller

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22

Jul

“If a Tree Falls” preaches to the leftist choir as it tells us about a group of “environmental terrorists”

“If a Tree Falls” is a feature-length documentary, by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, about a group of environmental activists who go way beyond the call of duty – to a violent edge of it.  They are the Earth Liberation Front. “If a Tree Falls” clearly sympathizes with this group, which the FBI calls “domestic terrorists.”

The Environmental Liberation Front acts (courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories)

This film doesn’t run down a history of the movement, or even the psychology behind that.  It describes some incidents that led to the domino-effect arrests of a cell.  The film concentrates on the cell’s principal personalities: Dan McGowan, Suzanne Savoie, Jake Ferguson, and one or two other outstanding ones.  This story tells of the offenders on the extreme left, and not the offended.  Those offenders may feel that the mainstream media had taken their foes’ side.  The question of who’s the offended may be disputable.  But those whom the ELF attacked are barely heard.

“If a Tree Falls” may be righteous.  But also self-righteous.  This film shows at Minneapolis’ Lagoon Cinema for a week starting on July 22nd.

A clear bias toward the extreme leaves the film’s point-of-view weak. The bias is about 60-40 or even 70-30 in voices in favor of the extremists or terrorists.  The centrist viewers, who are against violence with this cause, are left with valid, yet open questions. Those centrists won’t be convinced by a tale of how a docile McGowan slipped into this conviction.  Objective, non-partisan voices would keep viewers’ attention.  How will they respond when they find that in fact, with one battle, McGowan, Savoie and their compatriots torched a lumber location based on false information?

Mr. McGowan describes a few cracks in his reasoning and decision-making.  Several voices, including his, explain why he, the focal character, decided that confrontation was a superior, more potent path to waking-up the offenders than mid-20th-Century tactics: marching, singing, chanting, picketing and the like.

Poster image (courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Only a few voices discuss the innocents who are bunched in with the worst violators, and hurt.  Only a couple of voices consider the lumber industry’s efforts to do good.  Some of the best documentaries may not carry an agenda, but instead a reportorial, objective point of view.  This one informs, entertains and might enlighten viewers, especially in terms of “preaching to the choir.”  The want for a moderate and balanced voice is disappointing.

With the film’s faults, it’s a good, clear, almost well told story of this sect’s work.  This film is worth watching, but DVD will suffice.

It’s easy to sympathize with the zealots’ desire for faster, more satisfying results: those, which are more progressive and aggressive than typical 20th-Century tactics.  Faster than diplomacy.  But it takes a certain gut and heart to move from the fantasy of revenge to urban or guerilla combat.  I doubt that many or even most viewers share that one with these former ELF members.

“If a Tree Falls” uses interview footage with the characters almost exclusively.  It’s a late 20th-Century story of violent protestors; other than news clips, there isn’t archival or behind-the-scenes footage.  It provides reenactments of specific details shots; it uses animation, in lieu of banal, traditional live-action reenactments of some criminal scenes, in an amusing, playful, refreshing way.

This film poses large ideological, legal and moral questions: who is a terrorist?  What is terrorism?  Does each form of terrorism pose an equal threat.

698 days ago Short URL Comments

criticism/documentary/Film/independent

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08

Jul

“Rejoice and Shout” spreads the good news – Gospel’s history

“Rejoice and Shout” is a feature-length documentary, from director Don McGlynn, about the history of Gospel music.  It’s described as a rhythmic, ancestral pillar that African-Americans used to sustain themselves and to keep sane during their centuries in slavery.  It told the audience that, at least at church, beyond the anglo gaze, “I am Somebody!”

One of the Blind Boys groups (courtesy Magnolia Pictures)

A staple of the documentary genre is cutting between archival and interview footage.  This film does that.  It tells an interesting, surprising and entertaining story, omitting any dogma that you might expect.  It runs down the time-line of the genre and its innovations, some typical, others “unholy.”

It shows at the Edina Cinema for a week starting on July 8.  This documentary provides a who’s who of the indelible and most potent Gospel artists, also dredging up memories of folks who time might have forgotten.  “Rejoice and Shout” makes clear that as long as the music is understood as honoring God, then it should please Him and in-turn his followers.

It tells about Gospel music’s pivotal personalities, trends and game-changing innovations, it tells about clashing sensibilities of faith and styles of music.  At the heart of some innovations  is a question:  isn’t it unholy marry rap with gospel, or blues with gospel, or any popular music with that pious one?

Mavis Staples (courtesy Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

This story tells us how Thomas A. Dorsey, while ultimately revered, caught hell for having mixed the blues with Gospel, making what some considered heretical.  (Ray Charles had similar clashes when he took those chances.)  It tells us how Rosetta Tharpe, who may be less known than Mavis Staples, inspired the latter to take up the guitar; before Ms. Tharpe did it, Ms. Staples hadn’t known that it was possible.  And without the Dixie Hummingbirds, The Temptations might not’ve been.

Many documentaries are more creative, with editing, location and other choices, and take chances with their storytelling.  “Rejoice and Shout” is a strong, competent film.

712 days ago Short URL Comments

African-American/documentary/Film

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17

Jun

“Bride Flight” is a great romantic drama about three disparate 1950s brides who reunite in 2000s

“Bride Flight” is an engrossing, dramatic romance from the Netherlands, and director Ben Sombogaart.  According to the film’s website, the story was inspired by 1953′s Last Great Air Race, from London to New Zealand.  Three eligible & engaged women meet on the bride flight, and in the process are touched and beguiled by a magnetic outdoorsman, Frank de Booy (Waldemar Torenstra when young, Rutger Hauer when old).

Marjorie (Elise Schapp) is photographed for record-breaking posterity (courtesy Music Box Films)

Each is bound to meet a man, other than him, who is all but a stranger to her, and choose between doors one and two à la “Let’s Make A Deal.”

This plays at the Edina Theater for a week starting on June 17th.

The flight’s turbulence ensures moments that attach each of them to the other for a generation to come, and more, whether they think they want to or not.  That’s where they click with one another; the flight leaves them shaken and stirred!  It sparks fears of flight, mortality and other equally profound personal qualms and questions.  Each of these beauties and their stories is drawn and portrayed fully, beyond being simply one-offs of archetypes or stereotypes.

Frank de Booy (Rutger Hauer) beguiles each woman while marrying neither of them (courtesy Music Box Films)

We find a sheltered, pregnant and buxom blonde beauty Ada van Holland (Karina Smulders when young, and Pleuni Touw when old).  who’s also sweet and provincial.  And she’ll find a polite, self-righteously religious man who’s morality is rigid.

Another bride is a pretty, flamboyant fashion designer, Esther (Anna Drijver, when young, and Willeke van Ammelrooy when old), She’s an independent-minded Jew who lost all biological ties in WWII; her persona and sensibility are out–of–time and –place for mid-20th-Century New Zealand – or anywhere.  She finds an affable, but conservative conformist.  Quickly she knows that, as he chafes her, she will him – much more so.  She ditches him and gets into “trouble” as pregnancy was called then.

This leads to a complex subplot with the final woman, Marjorie (Elise Schaap when young, and Petra Laseur when old), a beautiful, cheery brunette who hasn’t yet any backstory or baggage.  It’s she who winds up with the most conventional path.

This is a story more about the detours that these women’s lives take incidentally, than whatever plan that any of them had laid out on a map.  They get to know Frank better than they do either of their fiancés; Frank shuffles the playing cards in their minds.  As John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy doing other things.”

This film makes images from 1994′s “Legends of the Fall” and 1995′s “The Bridges of Madison County” bubble up in our minds: Frank is both the disrupting and uniting force in these beauties’ lives, like Tristan Ludlow in “Legends of the Fall;” Ada is like Francesca Johnson in “The Bridges of Madison County,” which takes place around the same time.  She’s cruelly torn between obliging love for her children, and erotic love for that flight connection.  Like Ludlow, Frank is the rock that each of these women though broke themselves against.

Esther (Anna Drijver) and Frank (Waldemar Torenstra) remain connected despite life's storms (courtesy Music Box Films)

There’s a power in the details, the nuances, the moments, which tell what dialogue, no matter how precise or eloquent, can.  It shares this with Robert Redford’s sensual and attentive visual style.  For example: the glances and body language between Ada and Frank.  In a scene where she tries on Esther’s wedding dress in the plane’s bathroom, and he walks in to check it out (airborne bathrooms must’ve been roomy then!).  This’s a great, chuckle-worthy scene.

In another, later in the flight Frank dozes off seated beside Ada, with has hand resting in a lewd spot.  When she wakes up, she blushes but doesn’t budge it.  In addition upon landing there are moments between Esther and her betrothed, which show they are clearly mismatched!  The mismatch is subtler between Ada and hers.  When she meets he and his father, one of her blouse buttons is unfastened.  The flight was rocky!

That rockiness leaves us wondering about and hoping for a continued spark between Frank and Ada beyond the airport.

After the pivotal flight, Esther and Marjorie make a poisonous pact, creating a dilemma.  On one end, when Esther is pregnant and her daring goals preclude her from keeping it; and on the other, Marjorie yearns for a child, but finds troubling news, that it’ll nary happen.  She and her husband take on Esther’s baby, but she holds chip on her shoulder because of how they got it.  That grabs us and creates a key subplot.  But when Ada’s story comes back in to play, after having begun with plum gusto before our characters land, it feel like when need to ask why this cherry star-crossed romance was put off.

The climax comes up as an afterthought – flacid – against these women’s great dramas.  But that criticism is petty against a strong drama with the quality of characters and portrayals that we receive, and the glimpse that “Bride Flight” gives us into the bounds of women’s opportunities in the middle of the 20th-Century.

733 days ago Short URL Comments

criticism/criticism/dramatic romance/Europe/Film/New Zealand/romance

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10

Jun

“Applause” deserves a round. Paprika Steen shows an actor’s humanity within the tumult of redemption

“Applause” is an almost feature-length movie from Denmark, and director Martin Zandvliet.  It’s about a well-known, middle-aged actress, Thea Barfoed (Paprika Steen), who’s struggling to move beyond her toxic personal life.  She’s a recently divorced, recovering alcoholic who yearns to see her children again after having literally struck fear into them.

Paprika Steen needs "Applause" to keep up appearances

“Applause,” showing at the Film Society of Minneapolis/St. Paul from June 10th, is good.  You feel for Thea even when you don’t want to.

We see her in two settings: as an actress on-stage arguing with an unseen foe and as a mom off-stage fighting addiction and fighting to spend time with her two sons, William (Otto Leonardo Steen Rieks) and Matthias (Noel Koch-Søfeldt).  The bits we see of her performance on-stage are deftly used two-fold: to show her power as an actor and to show how that performance can reflect her broken, needy “former” self.  Because while she plays someone else, that character is no fiction, but her as she was before daring to recover.

She’s angry, bitter and has a lot of regrets or at least a few big ones.  She keeps those reigned beneath a skilled mask of friendliness that she struggles to hold still.  Her ex-hubby Christian (Micheal Falch) is wary of her, and weary after having left her and taken their sons away from her violent hands.  But he knows she’s made progress.  This story is about what unfolds after a key conversation.

Even if you’re won by the poster or DVD case, you might underestimate “Applaus” if you see how brief it is; you might assume that such a brief story would be mediocre.  85-minutes is as a short as a film can be and still be a feature.  This film could be short and succeed because it’s about the woman, and those in her immediate life.  The characters, other than she, her ex-husband Michael and their sons and his new wife, are minor.  As she’s a constellation – they don’t matter.

As she tells Christian that, away from the stage (where she isn’t herself) she sits or paces in her apartment, she has nothing else – no anchor, apart from alcoholics’ meetings, for her life.  She’s a mess.  Her life’s a mess.  Having contact with her sons would give her a life – or a reason for one.

Thea clings to her ex's new wife, and hopes of time with her boys.

Most movies are concerned with placating, and amusing, but not challenging viewers.  Maybe the messy movies are the most potent.  The story’s strong as are the performers.  Most people know someone just as screwed up as Thea.  They’re probably related to their own version. Those stories, which put us off because they’re too close to reality, they make us shift in our seats.  That’s good.  Why not?

“Applaus” is simple in many ways.  The best stories have simple premises.  It has a petty problem: its look.  Maybe it’s not a “problem,” but something literally foreign to North American viewers.  While the lighting is awkward and even off-putting, you can’t ignore the look – definitely indie.  But you get used to it.

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740 days ago Short URL Comments

Europe/Film

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09

May

“Love During Wartime” is a tense, political “Romeo and Juliet” story for millennials

“Love During Wartime” is a political “Romeo and Juliet” story for millennials.  It’s a documentary from the Sweden and Israel, and director Gabrielle Bier.  This is about two young artists, Jasmin, an Israeli Jew, and Osama, a Muslim Palestinian who have to fight against their home states in order to keep their love.

Assi and Jasmin in love, and against the state

Osama’s nickname is Assi.  He and Jasmin fall for each other around 2007 and want to make it official, against the odds – generations worth of political angst.  She is a working ballet dancer, and former soldier.  He is a visual artist.  Neither of their home countries can comprehend interfaith love.

This was shown during the 30th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.

The byzantine bureaucracy of each war-weary and wary country treads a paranoid path that reaches Kafkaesque levels of absurdity.  This tense love story is very talky with meager action:  the lovers either talk or argue with each other.  Or Jasmin argues with or confides in her German parents about warring states and the stakes, or Assi does likewise with his friends.  Assi and Jasmin struggle, loving and living separately for several months while waiting for either Israel or Palestine to treat them as people in love instead of wartime talking points.

Jasmin and Assi (courtesy Mpls St. Paul Int'l Film Festival)

Each of them visits the other under temporary permits.  One time is in Germany: Jasmin wants him there so they may marry and he may become a citizen because she already is.  And then he may start working.  Just then he holds a student visa, lives off of her, and aches to work.

To some extent “Love During Wartime” resembles Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” from 1995.  Except that the levels of political and social angst leech the fun from Assi and Jasmin’s love.  Those tensions lift their romantic stakes, and the drama, above the banal ones that were involved in “Before Sunrise.”

This documentary is interesting and worth watching, although maybe it’s only “fun” for those viewers who really dig this.

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