REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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DANES OF DEATH

If the 2014 taught us all just one lesson, I'd like it to be that Eva Green is an international treasure. It's one thing to be, allegedly, the one spot of pure bright light in the TV show Penny Dreadful (of which I have not seen a single episode), but quite another to survive two different Frank Miller-related comic adaptations with her dignity as a human and woman intact, particularly when both of those films demanded extensive, inconsequential nudity. Survive and, indeed, provide such vitality to the barren rocks of the script and the filmmaking and the whole rest of the cast that she manages to make 300: Rise of an Empire into a movie that I actually feel okay about recommending to people.

By no means is it as impressive to save a Danish art Western as to make 302 into something with any merits whatsoever; but here in The Salvation, what do you know, Green is once again the best thing about a movie that, frankly, doesn't have any right to be as much of a boondoggle as has turned out to be the case. And this while playing a character whose tongue was cut out, and so she is only able to use her flaming eyes and tensed-up shoulders to do all her work.

Certainly, the rest of the film isn't as dire as all that - if nothing else, Mads Mikkelsen is strong, though not unusually so, as the grim-faced hero - but if anything, the individually strong elements of the movie all feel like they should add up to something much more than the whole. The film is your basic tragic revenge job: one day in the 1870s Century, a Danish immigrant who has settled in the American West, Jon (Mikkelsen), along with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) eagerly await the arrival, after seven years, of Jon's wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius) and young son Kresten (Toke Lars Bjarke), left behind when the brothers fled Denmark after serving on the losing side of the Second Schleswig War. And all seems like it should be happy struggle to carve out a home in the New World, except that the family's stagecoach also boasts a pair of obviously bad ruffians, who spend a little time insinuating and making veiled threats, and finally pushing Jon out of the coach. He follows for miles, eventually stumbling upon his son's body, and thence to the camp where the goons have raped Marie to death. And so he kills them, mercilessly and angrily.

The wacky, almost farce-like twist, is that one of the men was the beloved brother of infamous gang leader Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and he's out for revenge himself. The deal he makes with the only nearby town, in the person of its craven mayor/undertaker, Keane (Jonathan Pryce) is that the townsfolk will find the killer, or Delarue's men will leave a wave of blood and despair behind where the town once stood. And you can pretty much put things together from there. Oh, and Green plays Delarue's mute lover, Madelaine, though it's clear from the dissembling looks and barely sublimated anger that flashes across her face that the only thing she really loves is her own sense of security.

Adherence to broadly familiar plots is no sin for a Western, one of the genres historically best suited to stories of conscious self-mythology; and while I think that The Salvation in its gutturally violent way, would like to think of itself as a contrast to the moral simplicity of the classic Hollywood Western, it's really only substituting one kind of myth for another. And not, let's be honest, a terribly new myth: the film's tone suggests that it thinks of itself as being in some way shocking or subversive, but the hyper-violent nihilistic Western has been with us long enough to serve as a cliché in its own right. The Salvation, which is clearly taking its marching orders from Sergio Leone's filmography in everything from the way the violence is staged to the slightly yellowed color timing, comes to us a full fifty years after A Fistful of Dollars exploded itself over the world, and it doesn't really see fit to add much of anything to that model.

Within this entirely classical framework, parts of The Salvation work amazingly well: director Kristian Levring (one of the Dogme 95 filmmakers from back in the day, though nothing about this resembles the Dogme aesthetic even superficially) and cinematographer Jens Schlosser build some awfully fine gloriously iconic images for us to gawk at, not romanticising the landscape (which is played here by South Africa, incidentally), but treating it as both grand and dauntingly empty and cruel. And there are, throughout, moments of incredible potency: Jon cradling his son's dead body by the hard silver light of the moon, the use of accusatory close-ups and dusty lighting during the town's first encounter with Delarue. The film's colors are harshly digital and almost metallic, and his gives every single frame of The Salvation a kind of vividness that's not realistic, and not exactly "beautiful", though it's surely very piercing and memorable, giving a sharp, unforgiving tinge to the images that feels exactly right.

And yet the thing doesn't cohere. Partially because it is, at the end of the day, just one more damn film where a husband turns into a zoned-out killing machine because his family dies, and partially because Levring and his co-writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, are really eager to keep ladling on the depravities, the wide range of characters who are no damn good, the overall sense of hopelessness and agony and violence as a way of life. You need to temper that somewhat if it's not going to feel just egregious, and that hasn't been done here at all. But even that's not as distressing as the lack of insight or discovery: the film is dolorously pleased to inform us that some people are just awful, awful, and they can turn good people awful in their wake, and let's run through the 2500th variation of Walking Tall and Death Wish to demonstrate that fact. It's a nice, fleet 89 minutes, so at least its overfamiliarity doesn't leave it boring, but if I'm going to watch this much suffering for this long, I still want to have some sense that I learned something after all that. All I learned from The Salvation is that the Danes are about 40 years behind the revisionist Western curve.

6/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: PUNK ROCK GIRLS

“Scandinavian social realism” and “fluffy character-driven comedy” are what you might call non-overlapping magisterial. But that’s not the sort of thing to stop Lukas Moodysson, whose seventh feature We Are the Best! marries exactly those two genres and does it with surprising ease and charm. As one of European cinema’s foremost humanists, Moodysson has always been prone to treating his characters with particular generosity and forgiveness, and the jump from something like Together, and its deft lightness of touch, to a full-on comic exploration of human behavior at the edges, is not such a very long one, perhaps. At any rate, We Are the Best! works like gangbusters; it’s perhaps a little bit too similar to the writer-director’s big breakthrough, Show Me Love from 1998, to feel as fresh and insouciant as it wants to, and it has the inevitable roughness that comes when a movie builds itself completely around young actors, but it’s so likable in its storytelling and so earthbound in its observations about the travails of early adolescence that it could overcome much stiffer problems than it has facing it.

Set in the early 1980s, the film is about the dream of punk, then on its last legs as a meaningful cultural force. The heroes are a pair of tween girls, androgynous Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and mohawked, politically riled-up Klara (Mira Grosin), the latter of whom provides all the angry passion that drives the two friends to turn listening to music into an act of defiance against the system, the cultural rise of disco and new wave, and the old punks like Klara’s brother who gave up on punk when it started to fade out of fashion. On a whim, and to screw with some asshole teen boys playing clamorous rock in the local community center’s rehearsal space, the girls form a band to give vent to their disgust with the state of things. When it turns out that they can’t, between them, play a single note on any instrument, they finagle a talented religious schoolmate, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) into serving as their lead guitarist and teaching them about music on the way.

That’s about it as far as heated drama goes. There is, eventually, some small conflict between the three when boys enter the picture and Bobo and Klara set their eyes on the same one, but this is all in the grand tradition of European art house drama. That means low stakes, limited plot, and a focus instead on watching people’s behavior in an unforced, naturalistic state. The success of We Are the Best! comes, then, from its terrific depiction of three contrasting (but not conflicting) personalities, and their outsider status: as young people trying to force adults to treat them with any kind of dignity, as young women in a cultural context that favors men, as political activists surrounded by comfortable conformity and apathy. It’s clear enough from the way Moodysson, adapting a comic book by his wife Coco Moodysson, treats them that he’s pro-punk, pro-political engagement, and pro-feminism, though We Are the Best! never remotely turns into a tract. In fact, one of the best successes of the film is that it looks on the girls and their enthusiastic naïveté from a clearly adult perspective. There is a point at which their passion shades into silliness, and the film knows it; while it admires the fervor of youthful ideology, it also recognises the limited scope of that ideology. The tone doesn’t eulogise punk rock, but merely acknowledge that its passing left a void in which those who had a driven certitude that society wasn’t working needed to find their own voice, since that voice wasn’t being provided by the culture at large.

Ultimately, it’s a film about children becoming young people and finding their identity, rather than about the particular meaning or merits of those identities, and it adopts a most forgiving and loving position to the mistakes and dead-ends that process can consist of. It’s a coming-of-age story that’s honest and moving without being nostalgic in even the smallest degree, an enormously difficult pitfall for the genre to avoid, though one that the roughness of the film’s realistic aesthetic and its caustic punk soundtrack help to keep at bay even if Moodysson’s writing wasn’t so clear-eyed.

An altogether delightful, intimate character study that’s consistently funny without being flippant or insincere (the tone is overwhelmingly “we can laugh at these kids now because we did the same goofy things once upon a time”), and limited only in smallish ways. The acting could be better, is part of it: some of that is inherent to the writing, since the most overwrought character, Klara, results in the most frequently mis-aimed performance. There’s a lot of grounding that needs to be done to keep her political rants sounding like passionate beliefs instead of just repeated gobbledygook, and Grosin has some problems making that happen consistently. And then on the flipside, we have Hedvig, the most quiet and reflective of the girls, the one who is most based in watching and thinking and responding, and LeMoyne’s performance is the best, or at least the most stable. To be fair, the acting is, across the board, very good more often than not. But when the young performers are missing the mark, it’s pretty distracting and debilitating.

The other problem, and oh, how “problem” is a leading word, is the style: in the middle of the 2010s, we’ve hit a point where the low-fi handheld docu-realist aesthetic of European stories about the life of people of limited economic means has entirely run out of anything new to do or say. The script, the tone, and the acting are the important things here, and they are all solid and doing what they must. But We Are the Best! simply isn’t very interesting or enlightening to look at, feeling like the camerawork and editing are on autopilot for most of the time, and serving only to give a good foundation for the script to do its job. There’s of course nothing wrong with any of that, but for all its real pleasures and its touching, accessible humanity, if anybody responded to the first five minutes of the film by sighing “not this again?”, I would have to reply that, yes, that’s pretty much exactly right. It’s a film for seeing familiar things being done well, not for being surprised or challenged.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LARS AND THE REAL GIRLS

And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film's project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the vaguest possible way like a vagina. But Nymp()maniac is cumbersome to type out and a bit pretentious so I will, not without regret, let it go.

At any rate, the film is the latest project by international cinema's most important and reliable provocateur, initially came to us in the form of two volumes of about two hours each that debuted, with all possible showiness, on Christmas Day in 2013 in Denmark, before the director's preferred cut surfaced piecemeal over 2014. And it is this longer cut, coming to a total just shy of five and a half hours, that we shall be considering now. For Antagony & Ecstasy believes in honoring artistic intent, even in the case of artists who we do not much care for.

I will say this much for Nymphomaniac, though: it wasn't nearly as diabolically unpleasant as I was prepared for it to be. It finds von Trier in a surprisingly overt comic mode; for those of us accustomed to viewing most of his films with a dispirited "he has got to be kidding, right?" reaction, this is the film where he pretty clearly admits that he is. The film takes the shape of a memoir in eight chapters, narrated by a middle-aged woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, reigning von Trier muse) to the older Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård, reliable von Trier mainstay), the man who found her bloody and bedraggled in an alley by his home one snowy night. The story is about her life as a nymphomaniac, ever since the fateful day she began to perceive her own sexuality; "I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old" begins her narrative, delivered over a shot of a bare-chested toddler staring down out of the frame, because Lars von Trier does not believe in starting slowly. For the rest of the night, Joe tells Seligman of her lost virginity to the dashing Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), who is in and out of her life forever after); her teenage adventures in casual sex (Stacy Martin takes over for the pre-30 version of Joe); the way that having sex constantly with a broad variety of men came to dominate her young adulthood; the crisis that happened when she lost all feeling in her clitoris and began to seek out more extreme ways of coming to orgasm; and eventually her career as a mob extortionist. And in all of this, we see so, so much genitalia.

But the real purpose of Joe's tale isn't to convince Seligman that she's insatiably addicted to sex, but to convince him that she is a morally unjust person, and therein lies the comedy. Throughout her long recitation (which increasingly seems to be made up, Usual Suspects-style, of the things that come into her head while she sits in Seligman's empty rooms - not a reading the film insists upon, but certainly one it welcomes), the action frequently reverts back to the two of them sitting across from each other, with Joe asking some variation on "didn't that bit completely offend, shock, titillate, or disgust your?" to which her audience responds with labored theoretical frameworks justifying her behavior. First, he eagerly compares her sexual hunting to his own beloved hobby of fly-fishing, and by the time dawn roles around, he'll also have dragged into polyphonic theory and the history of the Eastern Orthodox church, among many other random tangents. Eventually even Joe seems to find him fatuous and boring and over-written.

These cutaways with Seligman offering baroque readings of Joe's life are, for one thing, the funniest part of a movie that's often prone to going for weird comedy rather than the sober drama of most of von Trier's work, especially in the first three hours. For another thing, it doesn't take knowing that the director has basically admitted that he views the women in his films as his authorial stand-ins to realise that we're watching Joe-as-von-Trier trying to provoke Seligman-as-film-critics, with Joe's life including several obvious references to the director's past work, whether in images or plot points, and even to the details of his public life; there's even time to have a chat about the morality of the Nazis, recalling the most famous controversy of von Trier's career. Through the characters' dynamic, von Trier is both repeating his claims to telling something important and challenging that must be said, and also asking, somewhat aghast, "do you people actually buy this shit I'm selling?"

Which, for as impenetrably self-regarding as that it is, it definitely gives Nymphomaniac a peculiar goofiness that makes it far more watchable than the story of yet another woman mortifying herself to find transcendence ought to be, especially at such a monstrous running time. And, throughout, Nymphomaniac also reverts to more traditional von Trier territory: there is much that is visceral and angry, whether the melodrama of a spurned wife (Uma Thurman, in a disorienting, almost cartoonish depiction of rage that's perhaps the film's single best performance); or the frequent explicit sex scenes in which there is no hint of eroticism, only the compulsive movement of mechanical beings; or what has to be the most gut-wrenching abortion scene in cinema history. Or the atrocious final scene, a violation of all character and story logic that exists, as far as I can tell, solely for von Trier to laugh at us on the way out of the theater, having ruined anything resembling a character or thematic arc across the whole immense beast of a movie.

In all of its modes - self-regarding, absurdly comic, clinically unsexy, violently distressing - Nymphomaniac never quite gets around to justifying the why of all this. Any insights into human interaction, sexual behavior, or gender politics are filtered through so much visually staginess and tonal insincerity that they hardly feel authentic in any way; the film is so long, repetitive, and predictable in its arch-European sexual chilliness that it doesn't even work as a provocation. It makes outrageous sex look absolutely tedious, and while I am sure there are those who would be shocked and outraged by this, and whose prudishness would thus give the film some merit as a "gotcha!" exercise, they wouldn't ever end up watching it. Besides, the idle emotional punishments von Trier ladles out on his characters for the sexuality is prudish enough on its own.

Essentially, it's a hollow plaster cast of a movie, acerbically funny enough to give it some personality, but devoid of any real meaning; it is an artificial construct of suffering than hardly feels painful even when we're watching it, an exercise in watching the director demonstrate once again that he can push buttons, even as he announces right there in the dialogue that he's just pushing out buttons for the hell of it. There are plenty of impressive shots throughout, some comic, some moving, some astonishing; and the way sound is used (especially the way it gives the film a broad structure) is clever, though the songs that crop on the soundtrack frequently are virtually never anything but obvious and dopey. So it's not poor cinema. And it's certainly varied enough that even as slow as it moves and as long as it lasts, it never feels pokey. But it's self-referential and self-rewarding to the point that it has virtually no other content. Although, in a film with this many close-ups of human orifices, I suppose it makes sense that the film basically takes place up Lars von Trier's ass.

5/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: FORCE MAJEURE (RUBEN ÖSTLUND, SWEDEN / DENMARK / FRANCE / NORWAY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/12
World premiere: 18 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival

There's an entirely great film living solely within the footage that makes up the complete Force Majeure, and plenty of people would apparently argue that the great film is the final cut. Hence the film's victory in the Un Certain Regard program at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, its selection as Sweden's official submission to the Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars, and a general wave of goodwill that has never slowed down in the months since the film's premiere. And I suppose I'm glad: it's never the case that I particularly want people to be unhappy in watching movies, and if there are folks for whom this has risen to the top of the heap as one of 2014's most important and accomplished and emotionally resonant film, that pleases me. Myself, I walked out of the film, having gone into expecting the best thing I'd see at the Chicago Film Festival this year, and my response was a resolute "Okay, so that was fine. I don't regret having seen that movie".

Simply put, Force Majeure suffers from a script by Ruben Östlund, who also directs, that assumes that we're... well, not dumb. But a little addle-minded, and not entirely paying attention, so over the course of a two-hour movie, we need to get the exact same information presented in almost exactly the same way, multiple times. And then reiterated once we're past the point that it would seemed even slightly possible that we might need to have it confirmed that yes, patriarchal hierarchies are untrustworthy and broken, and yes, romantic relationships start to break apart when they start to be based more on lies than respect, and yes, human beings are torn between an animalistic desire to survive at all costs versus a humanistic drive to protect and be kind even at the price of our own safety. Basically, the film sinks so much time and energy and a pair of really tight, focused performances by Johannes Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli into confirming some deeply musty old gender-based clichés about how women are better with children than men are, and then tries to retrofit it into a kind of thriller about married life. And while parts of it are very good - parts of it are, in fact, impeccable and flawless and heart-stopping filmmaking genius - the whole thing is not as good as the sum of its parts.

The plot: a Swedish family is vacationing in the French Alps on a skiing trip: on the second of five days, a controlled avalanche gets too close to the outside patio where they're having lunch (and this film-defining incident doesn't play for me, honestly: what the hell drives any halfway sane person to eat outside in below-freezing weather? But then, I am not a skier, either), and briefly douses them in frozen mist through which it's only possible to see a few inches. When the air clears, Ebba (Kongsli) realises that while she immediately dove to protect her children, Vera (Clara Wettergren) and Harry (Vincent Wettergren), her husband Tomas (Kuhnke) could barely stop long enough to grab his iPhone before running the hell away. This betrayal, which he denies ever happened, colors the rest of the trip and makes for some rather uncomfortable interplay in the family's small hotel room; things get even worse when Tomas's friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and his 20-year-old girlfriend Fanny (Fanni Metelius) show up, and Mats's bumbling attempts to smooth things over between the couple makes things even more awkward and defensive.

No synopsis can ever reveal Force Majeure's greatest strength, which is how frequently hilarious it is. From the opening scene, in which the family tries to position themselves as a perfect little collection of winter gear models in front of an unseen, exuberant photographer, Östlund frequently finds the most dizzingly funny possible angle on the rather severe material; it shouldn't be possible for a scene in which a married couple has a tear-filled fight in a hotel hallway, observed by a bored janitor, to be laugh-out-loud funny, but the bone-dry editing scheme and the detached compositions inside the hyper-sleek skiing lodge are ironic enough to make even the most sober and devastating moment feel sneakily sarcastic, laced with a black wit that turns the characters' distress against them a little bit. It stakes out a level of superiority over the couple - the craven Tomas, obviously, but even over Ebba, whose desire to just return to bourgeois comfort is something the film hardly respects her for - that makes the whole thing more of a caustic analysis of their relationship than a close and intimate exploration of how it feels, and this at least makes it rather different and more biting than most European marital dramas.

Meanwhile, it's spiked with a few moments of true magnificence: extreme wide shots of the ski resort at night as a remote neverland, something inscrutable and dangerously fragile; or a climactic sequence in a thick snowstorm, where shapes and muffled sound create a beautiful feeling of sustained caution and fear. And absolutely everything that happens between Hivju and Metelius is brilliant, sparkling awkward comedy that makes one long to know why these weren't our protagonists.

So with all that in its favor, why am I cool towards the film? The repetitiveness is a big thing: the same conflict keeps playing out with little or no variation, either in the stakes or in the way the actors approach it, and it frankly gets boring. The flopping last act is another: after one apparent ending that would have been horrifyingly unresolved but artistically sound, and one that would have been coolly ambivalent and just about perfect, the film plugs right on through to a weird, protracted sequence involving a bus, and it's the most aimless damn thing, making a hash of all the characters arcs to that point and attempting to randomly score one last "by the way, this guy is a bad father" point that's not connected to anything else. Even in its very best, the film isn't "special" - the "Euro-art about a tense marriage falling apart on vacation" genre is pretty well-established at this point, and Force Majeure has nothing on The Loneliest Planet, just to name the most obvious comparison - and its structural missteps don't help at all in compensating for that, no matter how terrific most of the acting is, or how beautiful individual shots of the mountains can be. It is, again, resolutely fine, but try as I might, I can't convince myself it's any better.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: OF HORSES AND MEN (BENEDIKT ERLINGSSON, ICELAND / NORWAY / GERMANY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/19
World premiere: 28 August, 2013, general release in Iceland

From its 2013 release in its native Iceland all the way to its present international festival run, the pitch for writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson's terrific debut feature Of Horses and Men (the original Iclandic title, which is universes better in its tongue-warming poetry, is Hross í oss) has focused with pitbull-like intensity on one single moment in the film: come for the horses fucking, stay for the horses fucking. And, more to the point, horses fucking while one of them is being ridden by a human who looks positively dismal at realising that he has just gotten wrapped up in the worst three-way ever.

The reasons for focusing on that scene, from a marketing standpoint, are beyond obvious, but it does the film a great disservice to reduce it to its most prurient elements. If, indeed, it's accurate to refer to horse-fucking as "prurient". Beyond its obvious surface elements - including not just equine sexuality, but an ironic relationship to sudden, violent human death, and the kind of dry, warped absurdist comedy that Scandinavian cinema delights in so very much - it's got some surprising tenderness and respect for the physical and emotional delicacy of horse and human alike. Even when that tenderness is expressed in bent moments like a man's insensate jealousy that his prize mare would screw a stallion, or a horse quietly standing over its owner after he's puked himself to death on bootleg hooch.

It's a kind of anthology film, though made entirely by one filmmaker and with a lot more bleeding through of its segments than "anthology film" suggests. The setting is a rural valley in Iceland where all of the gossipy, voyeuristic townsfolk are united in their affection for and reliance on horses (indeed, outside of the purchase of that alcohol the only economic activity we ever see centers on the care, handling, training, and renting of horses), and over the course of the film, we get to meet many of the people in this valley, spread over the course of six short segments (the total running time is around 80 minutes) which introduce us to six individuals in particular. There's master rider Kolbeinn (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), who's so miserably caught in the middle of that iconic sex act; Vernhardur (Steinn Ármann Magnússon), who rides his horse out into the ocean to catch up with the boat where his precious booze awaits; Grimur (Kjartan Ragnarsson), furiously ripping down fences throughout the region until tragedy strikes, and then that tragedy is compounded; Johanna (Sigríður María Egilsdóttir) doggedly working to tame her new mare; Juan (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada), an Spanish tourist whose poor equestrian skills lead him stranded in the middle of nowhere during a snowstorm; and bringing it back home, there's Solveig (Charlotte Bøving), the owner of the stallion that despoiled the honor of that mare in the first place, doing her best to find some kind of human connection in amongst all the horse obsession and caricatured weirdness of the people.

It would be entirely possible to ding the film for being slight: even with as much interconnectivity as the segments have, this is still essentially six short films with a couple of interstitials tying them together, and most of them are structured like jokes, though the punchline is disturbing or tragic as often as it's funny (by which I mean, it's almost always disturbing or tragic, but usually in a blackly comic way). The result is a film that lingers in the mind more as a collection of individual moments than as a single flowing conception of people occupying a space. Those moments are frequently ingenious: among other terrifically-constructed incidents, the film possesses the most quietly mournful scene of horse castration that you have ever seen in a movie. I am absolutely willing to guarantee that.

The film balances a grandiose, almost spiritual bleakness with snitty comedy, and fable-like tales of human cruelty with precise little cameos of singular human lives at their most beautiful. It's a marvelous balancing act that Erlingsson carries out, flying between tones and letting a small amount of information stand in for a great deal of storytelling and character building. The films works by implication rather than exposition, letting the character's behavior stand by itself, with every carefully-chosen shot and even moreso, the smart, frequently less-than-obvious editing by David Alexander Corno, which links moments using a logic that has little to do with explicitly clarifying the story, but instead allows the quirky humor to flourish and draws connections between characters' feelings and perceptions. It is, in fact, a scheme of assembling the movie that treats the humans much the same way as it treats its horses: as figures that need to be described and studied from sideways angles. And that, more than anything, makes this exactly the film the title promises: a study of how humans and animals interact with each other, and not simply a movie about what people think about horses. It's clever, wonderfully complex in ways it doesn't appear at first, and beautifully picturesque on top of it. The film is small and fussily exact, but then again, gems always are.

8/10, though I can easily see it rising up to 9/10 if I'm ever lucky enough to see it again.

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: 1001 GRAMS (BENT HAMER, NORWAY)

Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Cinematography
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/16 & 10/22
World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival

1001 Grams is, first and foremost, a precious movie. It has a darling little shadowbox of a plot in which heightened characters move through immaculately quirky setpieces on their way to a conclusion that is both absurdly obvious and impossible to predict, on account of being slapped so indifferently onto the framework of a movie that had been telling a very different story to begin with. For a certain kind of viewer, not necessarily an uncommon one, it's absolutely easy to see how this is all very charming and very appealing, oddball enough to be funny, laced with enough actual pain and sorrow to avoid being frivolous. It's a good introduction to austere Northern European cinema for anybody who misses all those clumsy Wes Anderson knock-offs from the middle-'00s. As far as your present reviewer goes, the only thing that kept me from wanting to claw the skin off my face was the film's happily skewed visual humor: director Bent Hamer and cinematographer John Christian Rosenlund craft some really enjoyable compositions that are just about the drollest damn things you could imagine, frequently borrowing from the Jacques Tati playbook (a shot that apparently gives a globe a shapely pair of legs is the most obvious example, but there are more subtle ones: a sequence of people lining up to stare with ritualistic solemnity at an undistinguished but historically important chunk of metal particularly called to mind Mon oncle, though I do not know if I could explain why).

The bone-dry comedy of the imagery at least throws some real wit into the proceedings; mostly, Hamer's direction and writing are going for a far less ambitious and more generic register of genial fun times without much of any kind of weight behind it. It's a drowsy, nice movie about a woman, Marie Ernst (Ane Dahl Torp), who needs to loosen up and relax a little bit. She's a researcher at Norway's top science institute, whose ailing father (Stein Winge), an esteemed scientist himself, dies before being attending an international conference in Paris at which the country's official kilogram weight is to be recalibrated. Marie goes herself in his place,and it is apparently the most interesting thing that has happened to her in an immensely long time, which speaks very little of the interesting things in her life: the conference is a stilted, staid affair, and its staging is by far the funniest, liveliest part of the film.

In the style of many a quietly absurd Scandinavian comedy, 1001 Grams spends most of its time hanging back and watching (figuratively hanging back, that is; unlike many quietly absurd &c, it doesn't rely quite as heavily on wide shots that go on forever). There's hardly anything to the story, and most of the film consists of protracted character scenes, present mostly to showcase the limited range of Marie's life in its current, somewhat falling-apart state (she is going through a toxic break-up/divorce, and the impression one gets is that her work and caring for her father are solely responsible for filling her days). Eventually, she stumbles her way into a thoroughly generic romantic comedy scenario with the underdeveloped French scientist-gardener Pi (Laurent Stocker), and that at least give the film any kind of shape at all; the first half of the movie or more is astoundingly formless, relying entirely on the visual wit and the heavily controlled use of lighting and color to give any kind of personality to the material whatsoever.

It would certainly be possible to get behind all of this if it felt like there was anything behind it: certainly, Hamer isn't making a film about a woman without direction feel so directionless itself by sheer accident. But Marie's problems and ultimately, the direction she takes out of them aren't really compelling at all, despite all of Torp's heavy lifting to make the stretched-out arc feel genuine and spontaneous rather than preordained.

As obvious as the film's scrawny, shapeless narrative is, the worst thing by far is its horrifyingly obvious symbolism and the Hallmark card sincerity with which it mouths that symbolism as theme. By the time it becomes clear that the film will primarily be about a woman carrying a weight left to her by her dead father, I'm honestly not sure that 1001 Grams could have done anything to win back my goodwill, even despite the regular pauses for arch, wry comedy, which at least suggest the possibility that Hamer & Co. have some sense that a good dose of irony might be necessary to punctuate their film's overburdened and cloying use of obvious metaphors.

It's a crowd-pleaser kind of a film, ultimately, spelling out everything and making sure that it remains unfailingly pleasant, with enough comedy to avoid being depressing and enough sobriety to avoid feeling weightless. That's the idea, anyway. In practice, 1001 Grams is too meandering and too superficially thoughtful to be anything other than a sleepy, boring amble. And, for the record, the title's similarity to 21 Grams is no accident: honor prevents me from spoiling anything, but it does pull out that whole "weight of the soul" routine, and it does in the corniest way possible: by the time the film reached its last ten minutes, I wouldn't have thought I could be more annoyed with it, but golly, did it prove me wrong.

5/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: MISS JULIE (LIV ULLMANN, NORWAY / UK)

CIFF Opening Night Presentation, 10/9
World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival

Time for fun with coincidences! What has been, till now (and I suspect it will remain so), the most prominent film adaptation of Swedish playwright August Strindberg's massively important 1888 play Miss Julie was the 1951 Palme d'Or winner directed by Alf Sjöberg, the Swedish filmmaker who was Ingmar Bergman's primary mentor. And now we have a new adaptation (in English, and not set in Sweden) of the play, this one directed and adapted by Liv Ullmann, whose primary mentor was Ingmar Bergman, with whom she made so many all-time great works of cinema in her capacity as one of the all-time great actresses in the history of the screen.

What she is not, mind you, is one of the all-time great directors; but that's okay, neither was Sjöberg, whose satisfactory but not masterpiece-level film took extensive liberties with the text, changed the ending, and added a longish flashback. Maybe Miss Julie is just one of those plays that inherently resists being filmed - it's impact, I am told (not having seen it performed live), is inextricable from the physical act of its staging, being drawn into the actual world of the manor kitchens where the action exclusively takes place. Ullmann doesn't do anything to counteract that impression in her solemnly literal blocking, resisting all but a handful of attempts to re-imagine the play's emotional stakes in any kind of visual language (the one major exception, viewing the underground tunnel leading from the kitchen to the outside world as a long vaginal tunnel leading to pure white light, is not coincidentally the only thing in the film that's interesting to look at).

Miss Julie, for those of you whose working knowledge of essential 19th Century European theater is rusty, is a story about class resentment. It is, I mean to say About class resentment. It is about class resentment in the way that One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish is about piscine taxonomy. Miss Julie (Jessica Chastain) is the indecorous daughter of a titled landowner, whose offscreen antics open the plot by thoroughly humiliating her father's valet, John (Colin Farrell) on Midsummer Night. She was, he angrily tells his fiancée Kathleen (Samantha Morton), parading around and dancing and drinking at the servant's party in a barn, where the whole point of the thing is that they could all relax on this night of celebration and merrymaking without having to think about the nobs they work for every day of the year. Julie's antics have only started, though; she follows John to the kitchen, and proceeds to act in strange and sexually predatory ways, violating the sacred code separating servant from employer not just in terms of showing up uninvited (and unwelcome) in the kitchen, but also by breaking down the rules of propriety between ranks. And John, who secretly lusts after her almost as much as he secretly despises her, is more than willing to to take advantage of her weirdly open behavior. All of this now takes place in Ireland, which doesn't not make sense, and that's pretty much the nicest compliment I have for it.

For a contemporary audience, the limitation of Miss Julie, the play, is that it's predicated on a social construction that doesn't really exist any more, and while like all great literature, it boasts its fair share of shattering insights into the human condition, it's incumbent upon the director (onstage or onscreen) to find ways through the period trappings of the play into something more workable and accessible, both for the person watching and the actors playing it. This is very much not done. While it's fair to say that Ullmann's control over the film tightens in the more overtly confrontational second half, even in its best moments, this Miss Julie is always a bit stuffy and tacky in its approach to costume drama theatrics. Rather than bringing fresh, living energy to the 19th Century, the film pushes it even further away with weird camera angles and arbitrary cutting that make the spatial relationships between the characters and with regions of the set much harder to parse than they should be.

And if the film's visual language is stiff and difficult to read, that's nothing on the acting, which is a legitimately outrageous disappointment, given the caliber of the cast. Morton is head and shoulders above her colleagues, emerging almost totally unscathed with a performance that accepts the most perfunctory reading of the play's smallest part, but at least she does a capable job of executing it. The leads are, honestly, quite dreadful: Farrell probably has the more to be ashamed of, both because his choices are more generic, and because he's so horribly lost at sea in the part, throwing out one emotion after another and being quite loud with almost all of them, and never bothering to tie them together, like he wasn't only thinking of scenes in isolation, but of individual lines as well, figuring out what to with every beat, but never tying them up into a cohesive performance.

Chastain is the heartbreaking one, though. Three years after her breakthrough annus mirabilis, it was was to assume she was some kind of cast-iron goddess, incapable of making wrong decisions even when she was in dubious films; Miss Julie puts paid to that idea. The only defense I can think of is that Chastain is certainly fearless here, committing to her decisions and riding them out, even when they are as vague and out-of-phase as her slinkiness in the early scenes, or as bombastically off-putting as her approach to Julie's mad, violent outbursts in the back half, which are played in something rather closer to a horror movie register than I would have ever expected to see in any version of this play. These are not "bad" decisions, maybe; but they are bad in a version of Miss Julie as convention-bound and generic as this.

The movie has a slapdash feel, a sense that it wasn't ready to go, like we're watching a filmed version of the final dress rehearsal and first table read simultaneously. The play will survive the movie, of course; so will the cast, and so will Ullmann. But hope does not survive: this cast, this director, and this material were, on paper, a terrific mixture of talents and content, and it is tremendously disappointing that all they were able to scrape out of it was this… this

4/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA

For the English-speaking critic, the comparison between 2012 Danish prize-winner A Hijacking and 2013 American prize-courting Captain Phillips is as easy to make as it is spurious and unenlightening. The one is a psychological drama about the unfeelingness of corporations and hostage negotiations, the other is a politically-minded high-energy action film, and similarities of scenario aside, there's absolutely no reason to compare them. So I shall hereafter not do so.

A Hijacking is the sophomore effort and first broadly-available film by director Tobias Lindholm, who's a bit better-established as a screenwriter; he co-wrote Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, and appears to have picked up a few stylistic tricks in doing so. For if there's any easy, reductive way to describe A Hijacking in generic terms, it would be as "a Scandinavian realist thriller". It's not quite as ascetic in its realism as the most Dogmetic of Vinterberg's movies, but still palpably free of Hollywoodised gloss and polish, to the degree where it's hard to say that it really qualifies as a "thriller" at all, except that nothing else seems to work. The film concerns the Rozen, a Danish cargo ship attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia; it divides its attention between two protagonists, one onboard, one back in Denmark. The man on the boat is Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk), the ship's cook, who we first meet shortly before the attack looking haggard and worn and eager to get the hell back home. The man back at the corporate offices is Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), an executive selected to be the company's primary negotiator, speaking with the pirate ambasador Omar (Abdihakin Asgar) over a crappy phone connection and over fax. With hideousness slowness - the number of days that the film proposes for the total length of the hijacking is stupefying - Ludvigsen and Omar hash out a deal, as the hostages grow increasingly frayed and dead-eyed.

If I had to come up with an adjective for this, I'd go with "sinewy". There is precious little wasted in A Hijacking, a film about one agonising process stretched out by corporate deliberations on both sides (the Somali pirates take on the aura of an unseen bureaucracy), with virtually every line and narrative beat focused only on how that process plays out. It's not a movie that wastes time on melodrama (Mikkel's family is pulled in for the most pragmatic of narrative reasons, but never for any kind of weepy "the family waits" moments), nor on broad concepts of How the World Works and how this story Reveals Truths of That World. Perhaps, arguably, there is something of greater social import in its implicit themes of corporate coldness versus human passion: the central conflict of the Denmark-bound plotline is between Peter's heavily rational approach to crisis management as a professional being coached by a hostage negotiation expert (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), and his increasing frustration at being impotent to actually do anything as days turn into weeks and eventually months. Malling is deliriously good in these scenes, capturing all the tightly-coiled tension of his character's situation such that you can almost watch him shaking from nervous energy at points.

And of course, there's another conflict as well, between the men in Denmark and the men in the boat, who grow increasingly ragged and weathered as the story crawls on, eventually forming a kind of comradship with their captors that has less to do with Stockholm Syndrome and more with a sense of "fuck it, we're miles at sea, might as well do things to pass the time". I will confess to finding the hostage half of the movie not as compelling, largely because there's no character as sharply and originally defined as Peter (Mikkel is a good Everyman, but not a particularly groundbreaking figure - not to compare it to Captain Phillips like I said only a jackwad would do, but he's not as compelling a "captive human under stress" figure as that movie's titular character), but it's still pleasingly straightforward and free of trumped-up action: it is the most realistic, unforced part of a most realist motion picture. In fact, all of the acutely "tense" moments in this laconic thriller take place in the offices: wondering why the phones went dead, trying to decode a cryptic fax, wondering if somebody just got shot on the boat. It's kind of astonishing how much tension Lindholm is able to scrape out of everyday officework being applied to a life-or-death situation. Even the simple trick in the audio, in which the speakerphone that Peter uses to talk with Omar introduces an echo so that everything Peter says is repeated and muffled, adds considerably to the feeling of ominous frustration.

I presume that there exists a viewer for whom all of this low-key, realist genre work would come across as boring rather than excitingly unconventional and fresh, but I think most of us would agree that the film's ability to keep the stakes so high and potent even in the face of the bureaucratic shuffling that drives the story. Lindholm isn't quite able to sell the chronology as well as the film might need: other than the use of title cards, nothing actually makes this seem like it couldn't be two or three weeks as easily as anything longer. And that saps the film of some of the ravaging hopelessness that might have given the scenes on the boat a little more impact.

Still, whatever is or isn't great and whatever is or isn't nail-biting and exciting to people who need more or less obvious thrills from their thrillers, this much is undeniably true: the last several minutes are dynamite. After a film that has been so good at contrasting bureaucratic wrangling with human suffering the last few story beats in A Hijacking are strictly about the human fallout from traumatic experiences, and it's like being punched in the gut for several minutes running. In the absolute best way, of course. The film isn't perfect, but anything that could earn that climax is getting a whole lot of things right, and pridely ekes out its place as an entirely essential viewing experience.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: PERSECUTION SIMPLEX

Director Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 sophomore feature, The Celebration (or Festen; I'm never clear on which is the preferred U.S. title), is one of the agreed-upon masterpiece of 1990s cinema. That being said, I don't personally have much use for it at all, owing in part to it being the flagship of the Dogme 95 movement, for which I also don't have much use at all. So the awestruck praise that swirled around his latest, the apparent return-to-form The Hunt, at its 2012 Cannes premiere inspired, I will confess, very little in the way of confidence. Also, disliking The Celebration is one of those things that makes you a cinephile pariah, so I've put it up here first just to make sure that nobody reads this and only finds out at the end that I'm a huge asshole whose opinions aren't worth noticing.

That all being said: The Hunt works better than The Celebration, at any rate. I'm not absolutely certain how much it works, and my suspicion is that without the sobering performance of Mads Mikkelsen in the central role, it wouldn't end up working at all.

The story, as co-written by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, is not unlike Arthur Miller's The Crucible, updated to modern Denmark: it is a story about how one person's off-the-cuff lie can whip up a community's paranoia and bigotry to destroy one person's life solely on the basis of rumor and scandal. In this case, Lucas (Mikkelsen), is a kindergarten teacher of the absolute best sort imaginable: he treats his students with dignity and respect, talking to them at a level that they can fully comprehend and appreciate, making sure they are cared for in all respects. This has made him a beloved fixture among the adults in the country village where he lives, and an icon to the children, especially a little girl named Klara (Annika Wedderkopp). To express her passionate crush on the teacher, she has made him a small present, which he very gently and kindly and in the most respectful way possible declines; this pisses her off, and - armed with the knowledge of a porno she saw her brother watching - she mentions oh-so-casually to a member of the school staff, Grethe (Susse Wold) that Lucas was in the habit of exposing his erect penis to her.

We have, at this point, hit the first point where I can't quite shake the feeling that the film is having me on; not that I spend too much time around five- or six-year-olds, but Klara seems to be acting with a degree of calculated, malicious intent that I really can't wrap my head around (the story most directly comparable to this that I am aware of, Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, situates its resentful student at a much more reasonable 12 or 13). But let's not get bogged down by plot logic. Vinterberg and Lindholm didn't, after all. Suffice it to say that Klara's father, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen), who is also Lucas's best friend, doesn't stop to wait for evidence, any more than the blabbermouth Gerthe does, and in very little time at all, the whole town is convinced that Lucas is a habitual child-rapist. The ostracism and ice-cold hatred he receives is bad enough, in no small part because of its Kafkaesque arbitrariness; but things get really bad when Lucas's teenage son, Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm) starts to be caught up in the witch hunt against his father, and then the physical intimidation starts to kick in, and Lucas finds himself in the bottommost pit of a nightmare, utterly confused about how he got there and horribly aware that he has no way out.

Mikkelsen is great. Let's just clarify that, and keep on doing it. When The Hunt triumphs, it is absolutely due to the way that actor captures the panicked fear of being caught in a wrong man thriller, as well as anybody ever did in the most severe of Hitchcock films. The title already suggests, and the opening scenes state it outright, that there's symbolism at play between the deer hunting that makes up one of the only forms of entertainment in this community, and the way Lucas is flushed out and abused by his former friends. And this, too, Mikkelsen captures gorgeously: the flitting, nervous energy of a prey animal is in the subtext of every part of his coiled, wiry physical performance.

The parts of the film that aren't Mikkelsen, though, are... problematic? Ineffective? Grimly one-note and miserabilist? Oh, so one-note and miserabilist. It's not fair to compare anything to The Crucible, one of the most iconic of all midcentury plays, but The Hunt courts those comparisons so readily, and it doesn't come out good from it. Vinterberg's approach to the story is unusually uniform and inflexible, and it doesn't take very long after the big pedophilia scare kicks in (about a third of the way into the movie) for it to become clear that The Hunt is a film with one single idea, that it rides into the ground and deep into the soft earth below the surface. Much like The Celebration, it isn't so much cynical as nihilistic, so involved in the worst of human behavior that it feels as much like a celebration of suffering as an exploration of it. It lacks any nuance in any character besides, arguably, Lucas's doubting girlfriend Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport) - even Lucas himself possesses no subtleties but those that Mikkelsen provides to him, for he is otherwise a cardboard martyr propped up for our sympathetic veneration, but not remotely our appreciation of human behavior, except in its most extreme and repetitive form. It's too emotionally vicious to be a slog; but it's not nearly varied enough to be much of anything else.

A few things redeem the film a little bit, enough that I feel a bit wobbly deciding between a passing and a failing grade. One of these, of course, is Mikkelsen. Another is Charlotte Bruus Christensen's cinematography, which has its problems - far too much of that damnable handheld camera "realism" that European cinema has been very slowly weaning itself from in the last several years, and the filmmakers are much too reluctant to try anything that isn't a close-up - but is far more nuanced and atmospheric than strict realism would permit for (let alone the dictatorially stringent Dogme 95), attaining a sickly kind of intimacy that allows us to fully experience Lucas's miseries along with him. And the first thirty minutes, when the film is strictly observational and interested only in how this community hums along in its resting state, is genuinely engaging and solid character studying and world building. Stacked up next to things like the unremitting, manufactured bleakness of the plot, the ludicrous epilogue, and the shallow characterisations, that's not much, but it's something.

Anyway, there's not doubt that the film gets a big emotional reaction. It might not be fair, it might not be truthful, and it might not have any discernible point, but it's there. So that's something too.

6/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: MURDER WILL OUT

It's not unutterably perfect - and who the heck wants a completely perfect movie, anyway, they leave nothing to talk about - but even better, The Act of Killing is the most unique and essential movie I have seen in 2013. It is maybe the only thing I have seen this year about which I would say that it is genuinely important; and not for the reasons that it telegraphs, because it confronts directly and painfully a history of violence that has been largely hidden by a society with a strong stake in never confronting that history. It would still be, I suspect, the most bruising and intelligent movie of the year even if it took place in a made-up fantasyland; that it instead involves real human beings and real moral crimes that took place in Indonesia in 1965 and '66 is hardly incidental, but it's certianly not the be-all and end-all of the film's justification for itself, and that alone is enough to make it stand out among both fiction and non-fiction films that address themselves to such self-consciously serious content.

The proximate subject of the film is the purge of identified Communists following a failed coup in September of '65 (the actual subject, now that's the question), though "Communist" is a word that, we are told by the men who committed the purging, meant something closer to "undesirable person" than anything legitimately ideological and political. At least 500,000 people were killed before all was said and done, and half a century later, the members of the gangs who perpetrated these acts are revered as heroes by the Indonesian people.

Director Joshua Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and an anonymous co-director who is one of a great many crew members whose fear about giving their right name in the film's ending credits speaks more eloquently than anything else in the film about the state of contemporary Indonesia and how active and alive the issues explored onscreen remain decades later, rounded up a number of men who were involved in the purges in their youth, and have parlayed this into political careers, positions of idolatry among the young members of the paramilitary gangs which remain vital even now, or simply keep the memory alive in the manner of old men throughout the world who believe themselves to have lived a life well-spent. In addition to giving these men a completely safe space to talk about their histories, Oppenheimer encouraged them to recreate their killings in the form of a movie, which could be made any way they wanted to. It's not entirely clear from The Act of Killing whether all of the short film scenes we see are meant to be part of a unified project, or just fragments of individual psychologies, but the one thing that is unabashedly clear regardless is that the old men creating them are severely broken people.

Preeminent among the many things I was not expecting of The Act of Killing: that far more than a document of a mass slaughter that has never been faced within or outside of Indonesia, it would be an investigation into how media consumption creates behavior and is in turn created by it. There's little wonder why Werner Herzog threw his name recognition behind the film as executive producer (above and beyond its surface-level resemblance to his Little Dieter Needs to Fly), for this is a film about how we engage with cinema, and the personal of creating an image. Certainly, just looking at The Act of Killing reveals it to be a film like nothing else: the movies created by the former killers are hallucinatory reductions of Hollywood genres (film noir, musical, war movie) into arrestingly distorted copies that feel like somebody remembered having a nightmare about classical Hollywood cinema, but cannot remember having seen any of the films in his waking life.

And one of the main things we learn about the killers, and especially about Anwar Congo, the film's most consistent subject, is that they loved watching movies. Multiple people pridefully describe how watching violent American movies game them new ideas for how to more effectively - or just more playfully - execute their victims; one man brusquely suggests that it's hypocrisy to speak ill of the death squads if you've ever watched a film about Nazis, since the only reason anyone ever would is to pornographically indulge in the power and sadism displayed therein (in a film absolutely rotten with revealing statements, this is by far the most revealing thing that anyone says). In particular, there was a clear fetishisation of gangster films, which Congo still speaks of in glowing, rapturous terms; the gangsters idealised the figures they say in those films as free men (and the word "preman", their preferred slang term for "gangster", was etymologically derived from the Dutch for "free man").

Having thus taken their behavioral cues from movies, it is through the movies that these men engage with their past, seemingly for the first time ever. It is stunning, mesmerising stuff. Without ever having to indulge in sad-faced moralising, Oppenheimer and his colleages have managed to make the most brutally effective takedown of the unexamined system of institutional violence of Indonesia past and present that I can imagine, simply by stepping just far enough back from their subjects that they end up seeming mentally fragile at best, totally divorced from reality at worst. Congo, at one point, slides effortlessly from remembering the time he saw an Elvis movie at a certain theater to recalling the building where he used to take people to kill them, one of the most abrupt of the film's many bitterly ironic reversals, all of which build up a clinically outraged depiction of the gangsters as men whose violent past has left them incapable of the most basic rational thought (and the wild, weird, off-putting, magnetic films they make do absolutely nothing to counteract that impression). It is a film that does all of its work by trusting in the viewer's own humanity, being troubled not just by the acts being discussed by troubled by how untroubled the onscreen subjects are, and letting us draw our own conclusions about how dangerous it is to let history go unexplored and unchallenged, not just for the potential victims of a repetition of that history, but for the perpetrators of it, who have clearly not come out fully intact.

This is great, complex filmmaking, presenting visions that are as totally original as anything I have seen this year in service of a shattering depiction of inhumanity. It leaves itself open to only two serious criticisms, as I see it: the one I am prepared to agree with is that it's redundant, and a 90-minute version of the film would probably not be meaningfully less profound than a two-hour version. The other is that the film does a shit job of contextualising the history involved; this is absolutely true, but I don't think it's an accident, nor a problem. Oppenheimer isn't telling a history lesson, he's presenting a scenario in which brutal acts poison individuals and societies that valorise them. If anything, by leaving the historical specifics, I think that the filmmakers leave their film significantly more universal in its reach: the Indonesian killings are the entry point, but the themes are not tied to any one place or time, and those themes are explored with unbelievable richness, sophistication, and horror, in the most clear-cut masterpiece I have seen in quite a long time.

10/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: THE MIRACLE (SIMON STAHO, DENMARK)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/20
World premiere: 26 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival

The question: how many shots of gorgeous cloudy skies with intensely augmented color correction that leaves them looking even more dramatic and powerful and just exactly perfect for an inspirational poster does it take before a movie starts to become extremely silly as a result? The answer: fewer than there are in The Miracle, in which a satisfying if arguably contrived infidelity drama is more or less ruined by cinematography that does everything in its power to romanticise every last minute of the film in gorgeously over-lit compositions that are literally handsome enough to pull focus from the plot, for which they are a bad fit anyway (no cinematographer was credited in the print screened in advance for critics, and so I cannot apportion blame for this where it belongs).

The linchpin of the romantic triangle about to erupt is Johanna (Sonja Richter), who many years ago had a promising career on the competitive ballroom dancing scene before a car accident left her without the use of her legs. A few years after that tragedy struck, she met and married a Protestant priest (Peter Plaugborg), who has since made proclamations that the miracle of her restored legs will be the proof of God's love for them and their congregation the cornerstone of his preaching; by the time we meet them, after ten years of marriage, it's hard to imagine that she ever felt particularly loved, or like anything other than a meat puppet, because that's certainly all she is now.

And things would go like this forever and ever until the sweet release of death, but somebody else dies first: Maria, the owner of a dance school where Johanna occasionally helps teach, in a limited capacity. This is a shocking, tragic event for the woman, all the more when it turns out that the new owner, Maria's long-absent son, has no interest in keeping the school open. And way more when it turns out that son is Jakob (Ulrich Thomsen), Johanna's first lover and dance partner, who she dropped when it became clear that his moderate talent was holding back her professional prospects. By this point, Jakob has become almost entirely devoid of happiness, but meeting Johanna again is all it takes to restart the spark of life in his heart and soul and primarily his crotch. The two put up a good fight, but in hardly any time at all they're sharing a bed and doing a pretty bad job of keeping it hidden from Johanna's husband, or their young son (William Lønstrup).

The only thing about this scenario that's meaningfully original is the addition of material surrounding a deeply pious man whose faith is only a mask for his authoritarian lust, his nominal affection for his wife merely a blind from which he can exert power. And that ought to be enough to tell you what "meaningfully original" even means in this context; it means that when you take two ancient clichés that aren't necessarily seen together every day of the week, and mash them up, the end result feels marginally fresher than it actually is. Still, the details of how the relationships play out are strong enough, with enough individualised insight into human behavior, that the thing feels accurate, if nothing else (the mind games involving their son that Johanna's husband plays in the last phase of the movie have an especially bracing sense of ugly authenticity, legitimate, relationship-sized cruelty that doesn't always get depicted in movies as unapologetically as it does here). Thomsen and Richter are both pretty fantastic, playing the slowly rekindled feelings between them as a slow dance (ha!) rather than just a plot-convenient burst of erotic desire.

So back to the beginning we go, to the one element which does the film in: its unmodulated visual scheme. Initially, it seems like director Simon Staho is playing a simple, obvious, but largely effective game: the times when Johanna is sad and suffocated are filmed in somewhat flat tones with plain lighting, and her moments of emotional intensity, especially when she recalls her passionate youth with Jakob (they are played here by Emma Segested Høeg and Allan Hyde, who exude charisma and chemistry, but are largely pantomiming), are represented by more flowery, lush cinematography. This doesn't end up holding true, though, and the film isn't very old before it becomes clear that nope, that's just how the filmmakers want to do things: the present and the past, moments of misery and moments of joy, shots favoring the lovers and shots favoring the cuckold, all of them are handled with painterly lighting techniques that are the very definition of "handsome", and the best we can say is that the color palette changes a little bit every now and then.

Maybe I'm picky but I just don't want my tales of emotional strangulation to be "handsome". Certainly not as unmitigated and surface-level as the handsomeness of The Miracle, an oppressively uniform movie in which all feelings are lacquered in an undifferentiated glossy coat. It's prestigious as all fuck, but only at what I'd call an unacceptable sacrifice of meaning.

6/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: A THOUSAND TIMES GOOD NIGHT (ERIK POPPE, NORWAY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/16
World premiere: 31 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival

There is, at this time, violence and rapine afflicting various countries in Africa and central Asia that goes almost totally unremarked in the news media of the developed world and unnoticed by the inhabitants thereof, and for the most part, the governments of the developed world make not the smallest hint of an effort to do anything positive to change this situation. As far as that goes, I'm only stating fact. I will assume, though, that you'll agree with my opinion that this is an incredibly sad situation, because I will assume as well that you're not a colossal asshole.

It is, in other words, a very noble and necessary argument to make, that Westerners should and can do a great deal more to alleviate suffering in the developing world, and no two ways about it. I wonder, though, if it's possible to make that argument in a less effective, more self-negating way than Erik Poppe does in A Thousand Times Good Night, which finds the photographer-turned-commericial-maker-turned-feature-director making a fiction film about a crusading photojournalist, Rebecca Thomas (Juliette Binoche), whose desire to explode the comfort of the ignorant West with her fearless, in-depth reporting on the grueling life in the darkest places for humanity puts her in conflict with the needs of her family, who are terrified every time she leaves their cozy home in Dublin, that this is the time she's going to end up blown apart, butchered, or otherwise dead. The idea, I think, is that the film is telling us that one must make hard choices and that doing good for the world is a worthwhile goal that requires personal sacrifice. In practice, though, I think that the film's real argument is a much simpler one: political activist journalists should probably not have children.

Regardless of whether or not it's even telling the story it intends to, the film's failure at consciousness-raising goes deeper than its success at making Rebecca's husband, Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and their two daughters, Steph (Lauryn Canny) and Lisa (Adrianna Cramer Curtis), seem considerably more level-headed and reasonable than she is (though Curtis is such a shrilly over-enunciating young actor that nothing she says or does can truly be called "reasonable" in any global sense). There's no squaring the circle here, of saying that Rebecca is a brave fighter for the good and true, and showing that she's selfish and harmful to her family. It is, bluntly, a bourgeois art piece both aesthetically and morally, about how bourgeois attitudes are bad for humanity, which is, if not exactly "hypocritical" in any useful sense of that word, awfully self-defeating, and it leaves the film feeling polished and handsomely dull where it needs to be challenging and severe.

At one point, Rebecca gets word from her publisher that a series of photographs she took of a female Mujahideen suicide bomber preparing herself on the last morning of her life have been rejected after pressure from the U.S. government, which considers the pictures to be "glamorising" suicide bombing. And we are, of course, meant to understand that this is nonsense, that the point is to reveal a woman's desperate act and not to praise her determination, and that moments like these are part of the culture that insulates Americans and Europeans from having to consider the humanity of people living in Afghanistan. Well and good. Later, Rebecca and Steph are visiting a camp in Kenya, documenting the rough lives of dislocated refugees, and do you know what cinematographer John Christian Rosenlund's lush colors and graceful shadows, and composer Armand Amar's pensive, emotion-tugging music do to the wretched Africans? I will give you a hint. It starts with "glam" and ends with "fuck you Erik Poppe".

It's too bad, because there are pieces of the movie that work really well: the opening sequence is a terrific fake-out that sets up the suicide bomber's preparations so cleverly and inductively that it's actually hard not to gasp at the reveal when it finally comes: a funeral in which the corpse wakes up and climbs out of the grave, and minutes go be before we understand why, exactly, this was being staged before her death, minutes of delicious ambiguity and the exact kind of objective, journalistic remove from the material that is meant to be Rebecca's stock in trade. Binoche herself is quite good, though it's not always easy to tell with a role as floppily-written as this, with its scattershot interchange of motivations. Generally speaking, she attempts to play Rebecca as an alienating obsessive, which is probably the only choice that could be psychologically justified at all; and this helps to level off the movie as it trucks along to its weird hybrid of domestic drama and social issues piece.

It would take a lot more than that still to fix the movie though, and its oversized self-regard relative to the milquetoast way it approaches its message transcends any vague niceties of performance, which are limited to Binoche and Canny in any case. This is a lukewarm film across the board: foggily-expressed human drama sitting uncomfortably next to ineptly-argued social issues, and not a bit of it is truly memorable more than a few minutes after it's over.

5/10

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