Film Reviews by CH

A hard hitting film, a very hard watch.  Predators circle the unwary and naive new city dwellers, where human life is cheap and red in tooth and claw….everyone is dispensable prey in the Manila food chain.

Don’t even try to guess the direction, ulterior motives or outcomes in this tense Danish drama…it’s a yarn and a half, let the film slowly unravel to reveal itself to you. The brilliant Mads Mikkelson as inscrutable as ever.

Another excellent tense and bleak slow burn drama from Russia (directed by Popogrebsky). Out on the furthest, fringes of the Russian arctic circle, at an old Soviet weather station, an inexperienced student is partnered as summer assistant to a surly meteorologist to relieve the lonely tedium of taking readings and logging statistics. The scientist simmers with rage at the boy’s careless confidence, but finally entrusts to this student, the daily routine readings, enabling him to take (illicit) time off to go fishing. The isolated archipelago has a dark recent history that leaks and seeps into the inexorable descent of the relationship between the two, (not unlike the madness and menace that grips in the recent British film ‘The Lighthouse’) 

The Banishment based on a novel by William Sorayan, interpretation by Russian film maker  Zvagyntsev opens in a starkly silent  and claustrophobic industrial city, then moves to wide open grassland locations reminiscent of the paintings of American artist Andrew Wyeth. The story is an uneasy one, the unraveling of a marriage  that suddenly turns a sharp and unexpected corner, descending rapidly and inevitably to tragedy. Blood is thicker than water….the bloody theme opens the first chapter with the shady mafia bloodied brother……keeping the blood brothers family honour is what must be preserved and ultimately avenged.

If Bresson had lived a few more decades he might have made films about the morality of some Virtual Brave new world of unfettered Global online fraud, scam phishing, Bitcoin (and Nigerian Romance scammers constantly defrauding silly old Ladies into sending their pensions and entire life savings.) Sadly Bresson’s film L’Argent is a victim of the passage of time, and we are that Virtual Brave New world, now inundated by the tsunami of cashless exchanges thundering under the technological bridge of total unaccountability.

A meandering modern quasi Chekovian scripted film set in outskirts of Marseille with some gritty locational detail…..noisy trains cross the rail viaduct built into the cliff face, security police constantly scouring the coves for illegal immigrants..The reluctant return of (ageing and quarrelsome) siblings to the deathbed of their sick father, is a chance to pick at old familial sores and settle old scores. The actress (d’un certain age) consummates her stay with a one night stand with a young fisherman, the pretentious and depressed old writer’s young girlfriend elopes with a local doctor, whose elderly parents have quietly decided commit suicide rather than become a burden to encroaching modern society. Not feelgood French fare

Rather overlong melodrâme that meanders around the coquettish and tedious past history of a cloistered nun and her slavishly devoted and equally depressed admirer (recently returned from the Napoleonic wars.) I may give this film another go sometime, but suspect that Balzac’s book may be a better read.

Much to admire in this gloomy and dark humoured film. The mounting irritations of relatives overstaying their welcome is a theme Ceylan explored in his film Winter Sleep and he does so here in Uzak…..the claustrophobia of a sudden and unwanted domestic intimacy, the petty disruptions of banal daily routines and constant mirror of encroaching loneliness and desperate, useless orbiting of the other.

Initially quite a gripping understated  film…..but about 90 minutes in I wondered if I should definitely know by now, who this collection of malingering characters are and how relevant or irrelevant are they to the plot? I lost the plot altogether during the final blue lit cabaret scene….was everyone on drugs? Was some unseen overlord spiking their green juice? Too obscure, surreal and clever for me to follow.

This gently comic film takes its time to link one small tableau with the next scenario,, overlayed with what the French might describe as ennui or lassitude and Turks might refer to huzun (world weary acceptance of fate in all its tedium and banality). There were so many interwoven comic moments, the simple man child with his beloved nameless pet donkey, a boutique owning uncle trying to bring chic fashion to the menfolk of the town (with a single improbably busty female display mannequin and a range of clothes that seemingly fit no-one.) A grumpy Turkmen musician travels around with a photographer searching for that ideal location to create a tourist brochure and a lovelorn chicken factory worker makes a final last ditch attempt to court the object of his desire. I loved this Iranian film of closely observed tristesse and mal de coeur of daily life in the flat Borderlands.

Another bleak panorama of lost childhood in modern Russia…….this is a theme that Soviet film makers worryingly return to, time and time again. The neglect and invisibility of a young boy during a vicious divorce (where both parents have taken up with new love interests) the child disappears, we the viewers hardly notice, that like a passing shadow he is gone.

Yes a little overlong, but some brutal and searing observations are made about the annual summer coastal invasion by gite owning middle class Parisians who want the boho togetherness experience, but in this film the mounting tension between individuals and couples reaches breaking point……..(we’ve all been there). Those existential questions about the meaning of life, should personal happiness be pursued no matter what cost to others and all misery and unhappiness be avoided? When should we soldier on clutching our long held beliefs and delusions and when should we give up and accept defeat and change?

As a fan of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Winter Sleep did not disappoint (less enthusiastic viewers than myself admitting to a sort of catatonia or hibernation throughout this long slow film) The cavelike rock dwellings of Cappodocia have been renovated to draw tourists but as winter approaches and the last guests leave, a sullen lassitude descends on the hotel initially broken by the perennial irritation of surly problem tenants with a resentful young son, who has lobbed a rock at the car window of landlord Aydin and his rent collecting agent. Aydin’s divorced sister has come to stay indefinitely and she cruelly mocks his casual air of studied erudition in his weekly column of the local newspaper. The atmosphere sours further when Aydin unwisely offers his wife (unwanted) practical advice running her local charity and from here the metaphoric snowball of simmering resentments just keeps rolling on, gathering  more and more tensions, aggravations and heated rivalries. Just like Christmas then. Marvellous !

France (much like the British and Dutch) colonised parts of Asia in the name of a crusade to bring European civilisation to the indigenous populations. The rewards were allegedly bountifully cheap land grabs, control of cheap labour, trade and new land owner prosperity. Seawall shows the follies of these Western incursions into unknown foreign territories, where farming and agriculture on this newly acquired land can be like gambling, a fools game with more losses than gains in the battle with nature. Isabelle Hupert stars as a careworn debt ridden incomer.

2 brothers under one roof in a shabby tenement block are violently divided by opposing political views and activism. The pretentious intellectual Marxist v sullen (yet strangely sensitive) thug Fascist. The atmosphere between the two boys is a seeming tinderbox of hatred, but from under the facade of eternal conflict something deeper begins to take root.