Germany Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Perfect Days (2023)

February 1, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Japan

****/****
starring Kôji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Tomokazu Miura
written by Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) notices little things. Like the sunlight dappling the trees. Or the doomed sproutling, too close to its mother to survive, pushing its way out of the ground. He gestures at the park’s caretaker, asking if it would be all right for him to rescue the plant, and carefully transplants it to a piece of newspaper he’s folded into a cup. Hirayama works for Tokyo, cleaning its network of public toilets. He listens to his collection of ’60s and ’70s music on cassette tapes in his municipal van–dark blue, same as his jumpsuit, the colour playing counterpoint to The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” which provides the soundtrack for our first ride home with him during magic hour. (I have to imagine the character of Niko (Arisa Nakano) was not accidentally named.) Once he returns to his spartan flat, he plants the sapling in a pot and puts it in a room full of its spiritual brothers and sisters at various stages of thriving. Hirayama goes to his favourite restaurant stall in the subway, then a bathhouse, where he soaks and listens to other men converse. Then it’s off to bed reading Faulkner. The first lesson of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is that it is possible to live a full and beautiful life, at least for a while, in a small space: watered, fed, warm, cared for…and wanted, though it isn’t clear at first that anyone is thinking about Hirayama.

Afire (2023)

December 18, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Streaming

***½/****
starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Walter Chaw In their fetishization of hopelessly pretty women on bicycles. there is a hint of Claude Chabrol in Christian Petzold’s films; and in their obsessive deconstructions of interpersonal interactions, a touch of Arnaud Desplechin. Both echoes are filtered through a specifically Teutonic social brusqueness that reminds me now of Paul Verhoeven’s early Dutch thrillers. Petzold’s latest, Afire, is, in other words, a wonderland for film nerds looking to engage in another of this filmmaker’s beautifully wrought bits of cinematic nostalgia, though I confess Afire flayed me close to the bone more for its depiction of a lumpen, lachrymose writer named Leon (Thomas Schubert) than for its rich, multi-textural references. (It’s Ozon that Petzold most resembles, isn’t it? Or is it countryman Fassbinder, the master of the social-realist melodrama?) The picture opens with Leon and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) driving to Felix’s father’s house in the woods by the ocean when their car breaks down. Wandering along a trail, Leon asks if they’re lost, and Felix, in response, sprints deeper into the forest with promises to scout out the road ahead. “It can’t be far!” he says. Afire sets itself up immediately to be a folk-horror movie where Felix never comes back and Leon is left to fend for himself against cultists or witches or wildlife. But Felix does come back, and all those immediate feelings of dread linger like a chill over the remainder that no amount of the film’s wildfires can completely chase away.

TIFF ’23: The Teachers’ Lounge

September 9, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

Das Lehrerzimmer
***/****
starring Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer
screenplay by Ilker Çatak, Johannes Duncker
directed by Ilker Çatak

by Bill Chambers At first, I thought the form of The Teachers’ Lounge might be too classically sedate for a quasi-thriller with the dyspeptic energy of an Uncut Gems, but as elementary-school teacher Carla Nowak, a young idealist who’s hyperconscious of power imbalances (a Polish immigrant at a German school, she’s the kind of person who doesn’t like speaking her native tongue with another Polish teacher because it alienates their colleagues), Leonie Benesch is so keyed-up she’s practically an aesthetic unto herself. After a teacher is pickpocketed at school, presumably by a student, Ms. Nowak’s first priority isn’t to the faculty: She doesn’t like that the kids are being encouraged to rat on their own and bristles at the racial profiling of one of her sixth-graders when he’s singled out for having a large sum of money in his wallet. Later, she thinks she’s caught the real thief on camera, long-time receptionist Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), whose son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in her class. She confronts the woman in private with every intention of letting her off the hook, but she underestimates the gulf between them in terms of age vs. experience, perhaps, or teachers vs. clerical staff, or spinsterhood vs. working single-motherhood, and Ms. Kuhn’s indignant reaction scorches the earth, forcing Ms. Nowak’s hand. When Ms. Kuhn is put on leave, Oskar tries to pay his mother’s tab with his meagre savings, but the debt, of course, has ballooned past any dollar amount. He demands she make some sort of retraction to clear his mother’s name. Again, not that simple, and it probably wouldn’t do any good, though he’s adamant: “You will apologize in public or you’ll suffer the consequences.”

Telluride ’23: Fallen Leaves

September 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Telluride

Kuolleet lehdet
***½/****
starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw I adore Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan, live-action Bill Plympton of Finland, who tells his small stories, little romances and tiny tragedies, with a style one might call rigid but that for me plays like the legacy of Fassbinder carried through into our dotage. (Mine and his, had he lived.) Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves, reminds me a lot, in fact, of Fassbinder’s winsome Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a young Tunisian immigrant who falls for an older cleaning lady in West Germany. Its story of star-crossed lovers, separated by culture and generation, race and creed, is presented with the kind of simplicity that’s all the more emotionally lacerating for its reserve. Fassbinder’s slow, mannered pace allows his actors to find their breath, to expand into the skins of their characters so that we register every minute change in expression, every tightening of the skin by the eye, every roll of the muscle in the jaw when a small slight lands like a blow. Kaurismäki’s pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

August 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Italy, Malta, Theatrical, UK, Vampire

**½/****
starring Dracula, Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham
screenplay by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw I like André Øvredal movies. I liked Trollhunter, and I loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, along with most of The Autopsy of Jane Doe. They deliver exactly what they promise and do so with an at times striking sense of how to convey the poetry of the beginning of things. His movies feel like mythology, in a few cases are mythology. And like mythologies, they’re earnest, direct, and deceptively simple in narrative but rich with subtext. He makes sense for a Dracula prequel–not a Vlad the Impaler creation story, but a picture extrapolated from the “Captain’s Log” portion of the Bram Stoker novel that details, in just under 2000 words of the seventh chapter, the fate of the doomed freighter tasked with bringing Dracula’s stuff over from Transylvania to England, whose crew became provisions for the grand fiend en route. Murnau’s Nosferatu covered the voyage in a few swift, expressionistic strokes (coffin play, hilariously), allowing Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter to expand on the circumstances while paying homage to that film’s character design. As played by Javier Botet, Øvredal’s Dracula is barely humanoid at all.

One Fine Morning (2022)

February 10, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

Un beau matin
***/****
starring Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Angelo Muredda “You can be for and against at the same time,” a woman says of her capacity to vote for Emmanuel Macron while supporting the young activists who agitate against him early in Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning. That seemingly throwaway statement about holding contrary feelings and priorities in tension speaks to Hansen-Løve’s ambivalent ethos in her latest and most affecting work so far. Translator Sandra (a sublimely sad-eyed Léa Seydoux) finds herself pulled in two directions at once over the course of about a year, between her ties to her ailing father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a philosopher whose neurodegenerative disease now necessitates full-time care, and the promise of a new affair with the married Clément (Melville Poupaud), a cosmo-chemist from her past who she meets again in a chance encounter at their kids’ school. Though it’s largely par for the course for Hansen-Løve’s cinema of minor-key, semi-autobiographical middle-class family chamber dramas, One Fine Morning feels like a refinement rather than a mere retracing of thematic and aesthetic steps, gelling into a moving, novelistic array of scenes from a life in motion, where old and new frequently collide.

Bergman Island (2021)

October 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Theatrical

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer’s cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman’s compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony’s having a much easier time of it, and it’s revealed they’ve been invited to this unusual writer’s retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it’s possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it’s clear that Tony’s work is very different from Chris’s. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö–in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There’s a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it’s not.

Telluride ’21: Spencer

September 8, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman’s excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage–a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It’s one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England‘s afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain’s impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana’s tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain’s previous examination of a woman encased–and left adrift–in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman’s takedown of Thatcher’s England, and all three left me a mess.

Telluride ’21: The French Dispatch

September 5, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
**/****
starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw Out of three sections, not including a framing story, there is one that gets what it’s after with the soul of wit and a tug of the heart along the way. It’s the middle section, the one concerning a brilliant modern artist incarcerated in a French prison for dismembering two bartenders who falls in love with one of his jailers. He is Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his eternal Beatrice, his jack-booted muse, is Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the pas de deux they perform together encapsulates a range of lovely nuance that crystallizes what it is that Wes Anderson does very well, if only occasionally these days, in brief flashes glimpsed between the metric ton of artifice and affectation. For many, the chantilly is the point of Anderson–those gaudy elements that make him one of the most satirized filmmakers of his generation. For me, and up through The Darjeeling Limited, what I liked best about Wes Anderson was his sometimes shockingly effective grappling with absent fathers and broken families. His twee quirk used to be a delivery system for emotional squalls. Now, if those crescendos are there, they’re gasping for air.

Siberia (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 27, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Greece, Horror, Italy, Mexico, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parents’ bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldn’t make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldn’t see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didn’t know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferrara’s Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though I’d already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, you’re confronted with two beginnings–two approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called “First Years”). In the prologue, Jung writes:

TIFF ’20: Notturno

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Gianfranco Rosi

by Bill Chambers Notturno, meaning “nocturne” or simply “night” in the original Italian, opens with an epigraph stating that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of WWI left the Middle East vulnerable to violent power-grabs in the decades that followed. What we’re about to see, we are told, was shot over a period of three years in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, during the recent campaign of terror by ISIS forces, and one of the bones I have to pick with Gianfranco Rosi’s latest observational documentary is the unresolved friction between this pithy summary of how the Middle East became a global blind spot and Notturno‘s conflation of those four Islamic countries on screen into one endless desert. Hypocritical might be too histrionic a word for it, but I can’t think of anything better in that ballpark. The film begins with a cluster of older women garbed in jilbaabs, I believe they’re called, filing into an abandoned, cavernous building and snaking up the stairs in a way that feels ceremonial. Is it a place of worship? The surroundings are difficult to parse. The women reach a small, cell-like room, and one of them cries out for her son, who died there while being held prisoner. Her anguish echoes across the next few passages, including cryptic shots of a guy staked out in the wilderness with a rifle, scenes of soldiers perhaps running drills, and rehearsals for some kind of play that the movie soon adopts as a framing device.

Guns Akimbo (2020)

February 27, 2020****/****, 2020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu, Rhys Darby
written and directed by Jason Lei Howden

by Walter Chaw One of my favourite stories–much-embellished, probably, by its author–is Fritz Lang’s account of being called into Propaganda Minister Goebbels’s office in 1933 to be told that Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was going to be censored, alas, but would Lang like to be in charge of Nazi-run movie studio UFA? It’s funny because Lang had bankrupted UFA six years prior with the colossal flop that was Metropolis–an event that made UFA vulnerable to its eventual takeover. For context, during those last days of the Weimar, Leni Riefenstahl was the freshly-installed head of the Nazi Film Commission and had that year shot the annual Nuremberg Rally on behalf of her greatest admirer, Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl was a genius-level filmmaker eventually given more resources–the support of an entire industrialized nation–than arguably any other filmmaker received before or since. She used it to coin new ways of looking at things. When you watch a professional football game now, well, Riefenstahl set the stage for that. Star Wars, too.

TIFF ’18: High Life

September 19, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Poland, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Geoff Cox
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda If you took Twitter's word for it after the gala premiere of Claire Denis's High Life, which was apparently conceived in an off-the-cuff conversation with Vincent Gallo about life at the end of the world and briefly tinkered-with in the earliest days of its inception by Zadie Smith, you'd think the singular French filmmaker abandoned all her instincts to make an edgy sci-fi sex farce with the dildo chair from Burn After Reading. What a relief, then, to discover that High Life is indeed a Claire Denis film. A step removed from the spoiler-saturated breathlessness of the first hot takes, one finds something every bit as rattled and mournful a late work as Paul Schrader's First Reformed, and, like Trouble Every Day, no less structurally elusive or visceral than the rest of her oeuvre for being a work of genre.

TIFF ’18: Transit + Shadow

September 11, 20182018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Romance, TIFF

TRANSIT
*½/****
starring Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman
screenplay by Christian Petzold, based on the novel by Anna Seghers
directed by Christian Petzold

Ying
**/****
starring Deng Chao, Sun Li, Zheng Kai, Wang Qianyuan
screenplay by Li Wei & Zhang Yimou
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Bill Chambers If Christian Petzold's previous film, Phoenix, felt like a joke reverse-engineered with the slightest of pretexts to get us to a killer payoff, Transit feels more like his version of "The Aristocrats!", a shaggy-dog story intoxicated with its own brutal rambling–here almost literalized by third-person narration from a bartender (Matthias Brandt), who paraphrases conversations he had with our hero that are comically steeped in minutiae–on its way to a glib punchline. In Paris during the Occupation, Georg (Franz Rogowski, a downmarket Joaquin Phoenix) is entrusted with delivering two pieces of mail to a renowned novelist squirrelled away in a hotel: a letter from the man's estranged wife, and papers that will help him escape to freedom. The writer, alas, is but a stain when Georg gets there, and soon after he agrees to smuggle a dying man (Grégoire Monsaingeon) into Marseilles, where he can kill two birds with one stone by taking care of the author's unfinished business. Transit generates a moment of real frisson when Georg hops off the train in Marseilles: everything is modern, or at least postwar, including the melting-pot citizenry. I'm sure there's a definitive answer as to whether this is WWII as modern-dress Shakespeare, but for the rest of the movie, whenever something as benign as a contemporary bus advertisement appears, the film briefly and instantly becomes a "Man in the High Castle"-esque work of speculative fiction that curdles the blood, given how frighteningly close we are to resurrecting Hitler with the rise of nationalism on the world stage. One might ask why the characters are still dealing with "letters of transit" like they're in Casablanca (i.e., where are the computers?), but I took that as commentary on the dinosaur ideals of fascism itself. If fascism does one thing well, it's "rolling back" progress, currently the Republican party's favourite pastime.

FrightFest ’18: A Young Man with High Potential

August 31, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Germany, Thriller

***/****
starring Adam Ild Rohweder, Paulina Galazka, Pit Bukowski, Amanda Plummer
written by Anna de Paoli & Linus de Paoli
directed by Linus de Paoli

by Walter Chaw The storyline goes like this: Rey, the young woman in the new Star Wars trilogy, is a "Mary Sue"–a term used to describe a female character who is born fully-formed and, therefore, undeserving of her status as the hero of the story, any story. It's an argument made by mediocre men, usually mediocre white men, who have gathered together over social media to share their frustrations about how, essentially, their own worthiness has never been recognized by a world designed, now, to overlook and disdain them. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The parallel storyline is that women are usually murdered by men they know–ex-lovers or spurned would-be lovers–and that the best indicator for murderous gun violence is a history of domestic violence. We hold these truths now to be self-evident. And suddenly these mediocre men who used to get pushed into lockers and demeaned for their solitary interests are the masters of our culture, our industry, our government. There were warnings about this in films like The Last American Virgin and Revenge of the Nerds, remembering that the triumphant happy ending of the latter entailed one of the nerd heroes raping the girlfriend of the lead jock…and the girlfriend liking it a lot. Masculinity has always been this mash of the tragic and the toxic. It's irresolvable, though at least there can be better awareness.

Hot Docs ’18: The Night of All Nights

May 6, 20182018, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Die Nacht der Nächte**/****directed by Yasemin Şamdereli and Nesrin Şamdereli Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Basically the interstitial interviews from When Harry Met Sally... writ large and given an international twist, The Night of All Nights sees four elderly couples reminiscing on their marriage--though as the film opens Americans Bill Novak and Norman MacArthur, who've been together since 1962, are only finally getting to tie the knot. Germans Hildegard and Heinz-Siegfried Rotthäuser are probably the most sitcom-perfect subjects,…

Isle of Dogs (2018)

April 9, 20182018, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Germany, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There's a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. It doesn't have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson's whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there's about to be a joke at Sumo's expense–Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It's like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we're about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there's not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it's that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it's those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film's depictions of Japanese culture–including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"–are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It's not "okay," I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola's erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don't think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don't know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I'm also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.

TIFF ’17: Man Hunt + Happy End

September 18, 20172017, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, TIFF

ManHunt
**/****
starring Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ha Jiwon
screenplay by Nip Wan Fung, Gordon Chan, James Yuen, Itaru Era, Ku Zoi Lam, Maria Wong, Sophia Yeh, based on the novel Kimiyo funnu no kawa wo watare by Juko Nishimura
directed by John Woo

HAPPY END
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bill Chambers About five seconds into John Woo’s Man Hunt (no relation to that Fritz Lang movie with George Sanders in a cave), there’s a freeze-frame. Followed shortly by another. It’s glorious. Digital filmmaking has no doubt made it easier for Woo to be himself, as has being back in Asia: Hollywood never did warm to his Peckinpah flourishes, nor his melodramatic flair. But something is off in Man Hunt, which finds Woo returning, a touch desperately, to the Heroic Bloodshed genre in the form of a gloss on The Fugitive. (Officially, it’s a remake of a Ken Takakura vehicle variously known as Manhunt and Hot Pursuit.) Chinese Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is a hotshot lawyer for a pharmaceutical company that frames him for the murder of an alleged lover (Tao Okamoto, bestowing her iconic look on a role that doesn’t thank her in return) to protect its secrets; Japanese Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hotshot Inspector sent after Du when he escapes custody. Du repeatedly eludes Yamura’s clutches, but over the course of the chase they build a rapport that transcends lawful and cultural barriers and, à la Hard-Boiled, unite against a common enemy, corrupt CEO Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura). I should mention the two female super-assassins hot on Du’s trail, since Woo’s daughter Angeles plays one of them. For better or worse, this is personal filmmaking.

A Cure for Wellness (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 12, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness is lurid unto beautiful, exquisite pulp, just barmy enough to attract a cult and just smart enough to deserve it. The central conceit is that humans are only really good as biological filters for pollutants; in place of the batteries of The Matrix, the film sees people as distilleries for some sort of immortality potion. The process kills them. I learned when I was young that rabies is a kind of fear of water: its sufferers die of thirst even surrounded by water. The old, rich, white/white-collar victims of A Cure for Wellness entomb themselves in an alpine sanatorium invested in hydrotherapy in hopes of feeling, you know, better. Their sickness is of the soul, alas. The irony of the water cure offered by their ostensible saviours is that the patients become desiccated, mortally. There seems to be a message in there about how the illness of soulless acquisition is self-inflicted, and the amount expended in solution only exacerbates it. Money is bad. The making of it is incestuous, perverse, and insatiable. It’s a strange thing to say in a movie that cost a lot of money, but the point is well taken. Especially now.

Personal Shopper (2016)

March 24, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eisinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw There’s a brilliant song by Patty Griffin called “Every Little Bit” that, among other piquant turns of phrase, includes the lyric “I still don’t blame you for leaving, baby, it’s called living with ghosts.” At around the 30-minute mark of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, our survivor Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tells a confidante she had made a vow with her late twin brother to make contact from beyond the grave should one pre-decease the other. “And then?” he asks. “I guess I’ll live my life and let it go.” Then a long, gliding shot of Maureen riding her moped through the Parisian nighttime scored to simple, haunted strings that are augmented towards the end of the sequence by percussion, which reveals itself to be a pencil against parchment. Maureen works as a personal shopper for a German fashionista who never seems to be home. In her off moments, she helps her brother’s “widowed” girlfriend Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) try to suss out if his ghost is unquiet and lurking in the house they shared. Maureen’s a medium, you see, or at least she and her brother played at being mediums–a morbid pastime informed by a heart ailment, unpredictably mortal, shared by the siblings. A doctor warns her against any strenuous activities or emotions. She’ll suffer both before the end.

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

February 19, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

TIFF ’16: Elle

September 10, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The first thing you hear in Elle, after Anne Dudley’s giallo-worthy (and, thus, slightly misleading) overture, are some violent sex noises, but the first thing you see is a cat, a good ol’ Russian blue, who is watching his owner get violated with daunting ambivalence. Meet the director. Migrating from his native Holland to France this time, Paul Verhoeven has made a movie fascinated with rape at either the best or worst cultural moment he could have chosen. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is depicted being raped several times over the course of the film by the same ski-masked stranger; my own reaction was a complicated gnarl of disgust and desensitization that led to more disgust. Eventually, I think, Michèle’s relationship with her attacker becomes S&M in all but name, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Michèle is a well-to-do Parisian with a videogame company that seems to specialize in hentai (meaning you also get to see tentacle rape, Verhoeven-style). Family members–including a mother (Judith Magre) who’s into much-younger men and a layabout son (Jonas Bloquet) who’s fallen under the spell of a pregnant gold digger (Alice Isaaz)–orbit in close proximity despite her abrasive candor, which at one point finds her telling her friends and puppyish ex-husband (Charles Berling) about her rape over cocktails after work. They worry, but because she’s the alpha dog, they probably don’t worry enough.

Hot Docs ’16: Sonita

April 29, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Iran, Switzerland

***½/****directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's…

Code Unknown (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 2016****/****, 2000s, 2016, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Romance, Romania, The Criterion Collection

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Sepp Bierbichler, Ona Lu Yenke
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer In the vignette that opens Code Unknown, a young girl in pigtails, maybe 9 or 10 years old, cowers against a plain wall, trembling before director Michael Haneke’s static camera. If you know Haneke’s work–his previous film at the time, Funny Games, had depicted the torture and murder of a bourgeois French mom and dad plus their fair-haired moppet–the image is more than a little disturbing. But Haneke immediately pulls the rug out. Rather than cry, the girl suddenly stands and smiles, looking expectantly towards the camera. Haneke then cuts to reverse angles on different children, in close-up, also looking towards the camera. The girl has an audience, and so we understand that she was giving a performance. In this case, it’s a game of charades among deaf children, with the spectators attempting to guess, using sign language, what the girl was trying to convey. “Alone?” one girl signs. The girl in pigtails shakes her head. Another signs, “Hiding place?” No. Nor is she trying to convey “guilty conscience,” “gangster,” “sad,” or even “locked up.” In the face of so many impassive classmates, the girl in pigtails finally looks weary and maybe on the verge of tears for real. With that, the screen goes black, and the title appears: Code Unknown.

TIFF ’15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

September 9, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance, Switzerland, Teen, Thriller, TIFF

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15's Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most 'problematic' of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He's Moroccan, she hangs with "the Black Bronx," whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he'd feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there's a double standard, then reassuringly points out they're both African. Within days they're a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan's posse to their clubhouse to be gangraped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela's does not, and though I don't condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn't make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.