“Cinema Six” is the definition of average, which is strange considering it was probably the most pumped film at the festival. You couldn’t walk an inch in the press lounge without stepping on one of their little yellow adverts. To begin with, it’s obviously Mark Potts’ first film, as narratively, it’s derivative of so many other, better, things. A lot of the emotional ennui that the filmmakers are trying to convey about working at a movie theater, particularly one that feels so run down and little visited – something that, yes, I can currently attest to as a popcorn pusher in my spare time – are culled from “Clerks” in a way that’s a little too far in the direction of laziness rather than homage. Its attempts at male conversation and camaraderie are part and parcel of the produce of Judd Apatow and his ilk – a lot of “fucks” and a lot of empty vulgarity about balls that doesn’t really feel natural, even though the film makes a great attempt at putting that impression forward.

Yet, while superficially it looks like a lovechild of the aforementioned — those movies at least made an effort to have an arc, to tell a genuine story about disaffected twenty-somethings who come to some real conclusion about their lives through trial and error — “Cinema Six” ultimately feels like a big, floppy let-down. The ending arrives suddenly and the most interesting moments, which should have comprised the better part of the narrative, happen in only the last few scenes. It feels like the director gathered a crew of people and rented out a movie theater and just let them goof off for a while with the camera rolling, and then realized he was making a movie and scrambled to fashion some kind of coherence out of the chaos. Yes, goofing off is what we do most of the time behind the concession counter. It’s not an exciting job. But, that don’t make for good cinema. Six.

****

“Compliance”
Director: Craig Zobel
Writer: Craig Zobel
Starring: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Pat Healy

Craig Zobel’s “Compliance” was among the strangest screenings I’ve been to in my four and a half years writing semi-professionally. There was such a feeling of tension in the air – people were audibly responding to the screen in full sentences, and there were moments where it almost came to blows, as one gawky teenager continued to laugh in a room full of pin-drop silence until the whole theater rose up and intimidated him into shutting the hell up. This is perhaps the strongest compliment an audience can give a film intended to provoke intense reactions.

Shot in a claustrophobic and harried fashion, the film depicts the true story of the 2004 serial prank caller who posed as a policeman, made a mockery of the manager of a McDonald’s and sexually abused a young girl. The story is told with such a sharp sense of narrative precision that by the end, the rest of my party was asking me (the only guy who’d followed the story when it happened) just how true it was, because so much of it seems outside the realm of possibility. But, yes, this happened, and it’s to the film’s credit that it refuses to give the audience any distance from the events it portrays, because it forces us to watch the whole thing spiral out of control not as a quiet spectator but as an involved assailant, leaving us breathless because – up until the final twenty minutes – we’re refused exit from that manager’s office, and we’re left questioning after just where exactly it all went wrong. The answer is not in a specific point in the narrative, but in the compliant (haha!) minds of the people, all the people, involved. It’s an effective film made up of uncomfortable people not necessarily being forced into an uncomfortable situation, but going along with it of their own volition and – well, very human stupidity. And, that’s the point, and that’s why it’s so affecting, something the film knows and acknowledges with the last coda against black before going to credits: the events reenacted here happened seventy times in the course of a year. It wasn’t just a fluke of happenstance, and it’s not at all surprising to me to learn that this is being called the most divisive film out of Sundance.

But, to be fair, the manager and company who were at the heart of the incident don’t seem like the brightest people. There was a line that the filmmakers surprisingly didn’t keep from the original proceedings that would’ve only added to this subtext, from the girl who’s life was turned into a shambles at the heart of it all, when she was questioned as to why she even when along with it in the first place rather than raise ire and storm out of the restaurant. She said something in
response that was similar to: “I was raised in a house where you did what you were told, without question. So, that’s what I did.” With this soundbite in mind, the film could also be a pretty damned funny black comedy on the nature of blind acceptance – and, I could understand why that little fuck in the row in front of me couldn’t stop laughing.

****

“Faith, Love and Whiskey”
Director: Kristina Nikolova
Writers: Kristina Nikolova, Paul Dalio
Starring: Yavor Baharov, Lidia Indjova and John Keabler

Kristina Nikolova’s surprising and refreshing “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is a film my brother and I picked out of the festival book on a whim, partially because it felt like one of the notable movies of the festival and that it probably would do well to cover it in some measure or another.

At the outset, I had no real interest in seeing it, because the way it was being promoted was on all sides very much that of a conventional, empowering chick-flick. Indeed, even the words of the promoter at the beginning of the screening said as much, because it boiled down to, “you’re about to see a great film about women! And Bulgaria! And women in Bulgaria!”

But, a man can be wrong – “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is probably my favorite of the feature length films that I saw at the festival, this year. Not a little of that is due to it feeling like the only truly independent film at the festival, the only one out of the crop that I saw that made no real concessions toward the type of bland and disposable main-stream that so many of the others were aiming for.

It’s uncomfortably raw and real, and warm. It’s a such a beautifully naturalistic, unconventionally raw examination of relationships, of femininity and masculinity, combined with a photographer’s eye toward the landscape of Bulgaria, a strange and almost magical combination of the urban and the rural seeping into each other, where the boundaries are never defined between either.

It would really be pointless to talk about what “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is about in a narrative sense, because at its real core its about simple human things expressed with a feeling of great, palpable humanity and lyrical grace, and with surprisingly little in the way of dialogue. Most of what’s here is made known through a sort of constant visual collage of snippets – eyes, faces. Expressions. Winding roads. Glances. Glass bottles on a window sill, growing ever bigger. When there are words spoken, they’re either hushed tones of reluctant acceptance given pin-drop weight by their emotional importance to a scene or drowned out by the blaring music of the sweaty night-clubs that make up a good portion of the film’s background.

So much of this goes into what the film does so well, which is make a film that is actually “universal,” a buzzword that so many films make a claim for, by dealing in emotions and feelings rather than the artifice of genre, something I saw too many other films fall before than I’d like, this festival. That feeling of being romantically trapped, and wanting a last fling before its all concretized, and in that old dilemma it finds something more personal and complicated, being stuck between the comforts of a familiar and juvenile fling, or the burgeoning adulthood that marriage promises, and the feeling of hidden guilt when this marriage is crowed about by family in front of the other man’s face. The euphoria that comes with a reconciled love, and the unabashed shame when it turns out to be merely a temporary thing, and you end up being the one who has to leave the room. Days drift by, more and more until reality suddenly returns to returns the main character Neli back to the world she’s resigned herself to – but, just how reluctantly, we’re never made clear.

****

For more information on The 2012 Dallas International Film Festival go here.

Hugo Dillon and Molly Ryman in "Things I Don't Understand"

Someday, everyone you know won’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t matter until it’s today. No one makes it through life unscathed, in one way or another.

These are just a few of the lessons found in “Things I Don’t Understand,” a small indie rumination with big pretensions. In his follow up to his debut feature “…Around” (2008), director David Spaltro gets ambitious and tackles life’s essential questions: what happens when we die? why are we here? what does it mean to love? how can we accept death?

Violet is an aloof grad student hoping to discern life’s indiscernible mysteries through her study of death and beyond. Along the way she’s befriended, challenged and enlightened by a terminally ill woman and a cagey bartender, and faces the realities of adult life with her boisterous artist roommates.

As in his debut “…Around,” Spaltro again focuses on the volatile, transient period of uncertainty so commonly associated with young adulthood. These characters are on their own, several years removed from mom’s basement, yet they have neither the wisdom nor the perspective that comes with age. They’ve just begun the journey of self-discovery and existential examination that will last the rest of their lives.

Aaron Mathias and Grace Folsom, the mysterious bartender and terminally ill patient, respectively, anchor a strong supporting cast, which adds flavor and dynamics to Violet’s quest. Molly Ryman, who also starred in “…Around,” has the face of a star. Her portrayal of the intrepid, sporadically abrasive protagonist holds the entire enterprise together. She is ready for the big time.

The film, though visibly low-budget, is nevertheless technically accomplished. Small nitpicks such as a too-wide shot in the therapy sessions, the occasional acting misstep, and a dull, homogenous lighting scheme aren’t enough to overshadow its refreshing earnestness and relatively low-key approach to decidedly high-key themes.

Though he occasionally overreaches, or makes too obvious an observation, Spaltro generally handles the weighty material deftly. “Things I don’t Understand” smartly avoids the preachiness plague, and serves as the audience’s companion rather than its teacher. Too often, burgeoning writer/directors pour the bulk of their energy into the craft of filmmaking, getting bogged down in blocking, framing, lighting, etc., and neglect the emotional side of storytelling. Spaltro has sidestepped this problem and seems poised to have a big impact on indie film in the coming years.

From April to May, the UK is being treated to a retrospective Jiří Trnka’s animation,  through a collaboration by the Czech Centre London, the Czech National Film Archive and specialist cinemas in London, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Known as ‘The Walt Disney of the East’, Trnka was the father of Czech animation, which really only came into existence after World War II. Although he was initially influenced by Disney’s animated cartoons, it was in puppet animation that Trnka ultimately developed his own style and became influential in his own right. He founded his puppet film studio in the 1940s and his first feature film, The Czech Year (Špalíček, 1947) was immediately successful with both domestic and international audiences.

Typically containing no dialogue, Trnka’s films are easily accessible to viewers young and old, all over the world. Although animation is popularly associated with children’s entertainment, most of Trnka’s films were aimed at adults. Many of his shorts and features were literary adaptations drawn from diverse sources, including Czech folk tales and fables (Old Czech Legends/ Staré pověsti české, 1953), contemporary domestic fiction (The Good Soldier Švejk/Dobrý voják Švejk, 1955), and international literature from authors such as Hans Christian Andersen (The Emperor’s Nightingale/Císařův slavík, 1949) and Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream/Sen noci svatojánské, 1959). During the 1960s liberalisation period in communist Czechoslovakia which triggered the birth of a cinematic New Wave, Trnka’s own work also became more political, culminating in his kafkaesque final feature, The Hand/Ruka (1965), made just four years before his death.

I was able to catch a programme of ‘Trnka Shorts For Adults’ at the British Film Institute on the final day of the Trnka Retrospective in London. The selection brought together a delightful range of films that gave a broad overview of Trnka’s career: his early cartoon satire of Nazism, Springman and the SS (Pérák a SS, 1946); his playful Western Song of the Prairie (Árie prérie, 1949); the cheeky Boccacio adaptation of The Archangel Gabriel and Mrs Goose (Archanděl Gabriel a paní Husa, 1964), a whimsical study of man’s lifelong addiction to speed in Passion (Vášeň, 1962) and his final political film mentioned above, The Hand. While all but Springman were stop-motion puppet animations, this collection of films is marked by its diversity. The puppets in Song of the Prairie come across as innocent dolls, like children’s toys, whereas those in The Archangel are far more sexual, from the wiggling hips of the bejewelled female puppet to the disturbing tactility of the wizened priest, lurking inside a hessian cassock. Passion is different again: not taking its inspiration from either literature or live-action narrative cinema, its structure is much freer. Like The Hand, Passion is more symbolic, and gives fuller scope to the flexibility of Trnka’s imagination: to name just one example, an old man steals the knights from pensioners’ chessboards and feeds them into his motorised wheelchair to increase its horsepower. The Hand effectively brings Trnka’s career full-circle, echoing the political criticism of his early cartoon Springman, but with an important difference: whereas the 1946 film celebrated the end of Nazism, The Hand targeted a state censorship which still existed, and which would reassert itself following Trnka’s death and the end of the Prague Spring.

In addition to the imaginative ingenuity and playful humour evident in the visual detail of these films, I was struck by two elements of Trnka’s aesthetic. First of all, I noticed its dynamism. In animating puppets, the temptation (and easiest option) would be to concentrate on the motion of the puppets and keep the camera static. In Song of the Prairie, there is an incredibly dynamic shot early on: the stagecoach is racing through the desert, the drivers shaking the reins to spur on the horses, the fringes on the coach blowing in the wind, and a female passenger leaning from the window to sing a duet with a cowboy riding alongside. Co-ordinating all these different types of motion is already a huge challenge, but Trnka creates an additional one: the camera is in motion too, panning  across the scene. It gives the audience the magical impression that the puppets are living their lives in their own autonomous world.

A second notable feature of Trnka’s work is its combination of expressivity and tactility. The aesthetic of many of Trnka’s films can feel dated, the puppets and sets too grubby for twenty-first century tastes, like toys already old even in Trnka’s time. This patina of age is not reassuring, but speaks of a childhood long past, by definition dead. Yet there is a timeless vitality in the puppets’ gestures combined with the textures of real materials, brought to life by stop-motion animation. In an all-too familiar gesture, the cowboy in Song of the Prairie takes the time to self-consciously comb his shock of red hair, even in the midst of a chase. In The Archangel Gabriel, the tip of the repulsive priest’s cassock gestures ominously, as clearly as a real hand: the crudeness of the material adds to the impression rather than taking away from it.

The tactility and lifelike gestures of the puppets can create a sense of the uncanny, and the programme of Trnka Shorts for Adults frequently made me think of the work of Trnka’s compatriot Jan Švankmajer, another influential and much-admired animator. While Švankmajer’s dark humour and strong grounding in the realm of the physical are also characteristic of a particular Czech sensibility, his skilful stop-motion animation with its strong element of tactility also speak of the time he spent working in Trnka’s puppet studio. Trnka’s influence extended to other present-day animators including the Quay Brothers, so that going to see his films is not only a pleasure in itself, but will help audiences appreciate the historical context of stop-motion animation in general.

Remaining screenings of the UK Jiří Trnka retrospective will take place at Glasgow’s Film Theatre: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (6 May) and the programme of Trnka Shorts for Adults (13 May). For those who can’t make it, some shorts including The Hand and Springman and the SS are available to watch on YouTube.

After the last two weeks’ blogs on highlights of Toulouse’s Cinélatino film festival, this week will conclude with a selection of films which, in my opinion, should be avoided at all costs. First of all, Alejo Franzetti’s The Destruction of the Ruling Order (La Destrucción del orden vigente), which wanted to be a thriller/murder mystery. Unfortunately, wooden acting made it more like a failed comedy. From the very first moment, the film felt passé, the style of its music and title sequence vaguely evocative of Almodovar’s early work: a film of La Movida, 30 years late. It was as though the film itself were on ketamine, the protagonist’s drug of choice. Clara tries to find out how her boyfriend died. At the same time, she receives mysterious fake newspapers with headlines warning her to investigate her mother’s death—‘it was not a heart attack’, they say cryptically. Clara’s mane of blonde hair was the most versatile presence in the film, able to appear up or down, messy or controlled, nuances which eluded the actors entirely.

In the Sky (Al Cielo, 2012), meanwhile, was unwatchable not because there was so little action (which was also true), but because of the director’s literally nauseating style. Like Gabriel  Mariño, director of A Secret World, it seems that Diego Prado wanted to use the camera to suggest that the teenage Andrés is living in his own world. However, where Mariño trained the camera on his protagonist’s profile, Prado focused most often on the back of his protagonist’s head, leaving everything around him blurred. Combine this with a handheld camera following the character around, and it’s guaranteed that some spectators will feel sick well before the end of the film. The idea behind Al Cielo had great potential: the lead singer of the protagonist’s favourite punk band, Noche Nero, dies. Concerned that Andrés will become depressed and get into trouble, his mother pushes him to join a church youth group. He agrees to go, even though he clearly doesn’t fit in with the other kids and their earnest discussions. By chance, he does meet some people more like himself at the church: a punk band which is allowed to practice on church premises since one of its members regularly attends services. Andrés’s relationship with one of the band members is one of the few elements of beauty and hope in this otherwise disorienting and dull film.

Most banal of all, though, was The Last Elvis (El Ultimo Elvis, 2012, dir. Armando Bó). While it was technically professional, unlike the other two films it did not even try to do anything new, different or contemporary. It is the story of a man in his 40s, separated from his wife, and father to a 6-year-old girl. Rather than stepping up to his responsibilities, he indulges his fantasy that he is Elvis Presley, insisting that people call him by this name rather than his real one. The audience is subjected to his performances as an Elvis impersonator, which are not terrible but not specially good either. The film is intended as a comedy, but it is hard to have much sympathy for this selfish man: if the audience doesn’t care about the central character, it is hard to engage with the film as a whole. There have been great tragicomedies about would-be music legends: these prove that audiences can sympathise with characters who struggle, however absurdly, to live their dreams alongside their everyday reality—Anvil: The Story of Anvil! (2008) was a superb example. Most of us wish that our lives could be more glamorous, and try to follow our dreams in a small way. Elvis wants to do more, though, living his life exactly as if he were The King himself. The redeeming element in the film is his daughter, a wry and endearing little girl. Initially she is contemptuous of her father, but when fate forces her to live with him for a while, she immediately adapts, warming to both her father and his lifestyle, and demonstrating a heartbreaking degree of acceptance and affection for a man who has little love for anyone but himself. Where it ought to have focused more on the little girl, the film follows Elvis, cheering him on for his selfishness rather than condemning it. This is a film which divides opinion, though: while there are those who will agree with me that it is banal, the French critics’ jury at Cinélatino awarded their ‘Discovery Prize’ to The Last Elvis.

Like A Secret World (reviewed last week), Southwest (Sudoeste, 2012, dir. Eduardo Nunes) was a flawed film. But audiences are more likely to be forgiving of A Secret World’s flaws because the director was wise enough to keep it short. Audiences might be prepared to be mildly bored for an hour and a half, but over the two hour mark a film has to work hard to keep the audience engaged. At a screening of Southwest at Toulouse’s Cinélatino film festival earlier this month, at least six people walked out. This was in a city where audience attendance is surprisingly high for films that might be classed as difficult, and audience questions in Q&A’s with directors tend to demonstrate a great sensitivity to cinematic language.

That people should walk out of Sud-Oueste was a shame: it was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow film, but it was equally clear that the director had taken as much time over the film’s aesthetics as he was taking to tell the story. The film is in black and white, a little over-grainy, making some parts of the image a little ‘busy’ for my liking. But Nunes composes his shots with exquisite care, often incorporating unusual angles which emphasise diagonals. Most intriguing of all is the film’s format: wide screen, but very narrow from top to bottom, like a panoramic postcard.

When it comes to evoking texture and developing atmosphere, sound is more important than image in this film. It opens with the haunting, near-musical sound of a squeaky windmill, which for many viewers will inevitably evoke The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). Southwest is similar insofar as it takes place in an untamed, austere new world landscape: coastal Brazil, with its salt plantations and scrubland, continuously swept by a whistling wind and baked by the sun’s molten gaze. Unlike a western, the film focuses less on hardened male pioneers, more on women and children. The latter introduce a vulnerable element of softness, compassion and wonder, and they discover the more delicate aspects of this landscape: the soft sand, the lapping water, and the delicate shells that the ocean deposited before it receded.

I mention the film’s aesthetic and atmosphere first because it is the most reliable element in a film where the narrative sometimes falters. The story itself is a very strange one: a woman named Clarissa dies before giving birth to her child. The midwife is left alone with the body, and returns home with a baby. The story in the village, though, is that mother and child were buried together. The midwife lives in a hut on stilts in the middle of a lake, and is considered by the locals to be a witch. The next time the baby appears, she has grown into a little girl of about 10, who comes to shore alone. Yet no time appears to have passed, as Clarissa’s parents have just learned about her death. The little girl is strange: she is slim and delicate, and wears a white lace dress like the one her mother wore when she died. Initially, she barely speaks, and greets the villagers with a tiny smile hovering permanently around her mouth. Eventually she becomes more involved with Clarissa’s family, attempting to comfort her mother and little brother Joao.

The story is engaging insofar as it encourages the audience to figure out what is going on, relative to the little girl and the passage of time. As the midwife is nowhere to be seen after the baby has grown into a girl, has she somehow worked her magic on the baby, joining their two forms together, so that the baby has aged 10 years in a day? Or was the baby, who logically ought to have died along with her mother, granted a brief respite from death, so that she lives her entire life in the space of a day? (This seems the most likely explanation). Or was it not just a baby that the midwife brought back, but the spirit of Clarissa, who is given a day as a ghost to visit with her family? Towards the end of the film, the absence of further information or real developments means that the audience has little new information to add to their understanding of the film, and must merely passively watch as the film goes on just that bit too long. Still, the film’s outstanding visuals, its haunting atmosphere and the originality of its premise have twice earned it the FIPRESCI prize (at Rio de Janeiro in 2011, and at Cinélatino this year), marking out Southwest as a film worth watching in spite of its flaws.

A Secret World (Un mundo secreto, 2012) was among 14 films in the fiction feature competition at Cinélatino, Toulouse’s Latin American Film Festival. The film received a special mention from the French critics’ jury. Perhaps more important, though, it also received the ‘Prix lycéen de la fiction’, an prize for best fiction film as awarded by a jury of local high school students: their approval suggests that director Gabriel Mariño did an excellent job of capturing the teenage experience in this film.

The film centres on Maria, a strange young woman who lives in a world of her own. She has just graduated from high school, and has sex with anyone who asks her to. Far from being a seductive glamour girl, though, she dresses in the relaxed uniform of the adolescent: baggy jeans, tank tops, ragged scarves and hoodies. As she heads off for her last day at school, her hair still wet from the shower, her mother tells her that she ought to make more of an effort. Finished with school, Maria immediately sets off alone on a trip across her native Mexico, without telling her mother.

The title of this film made me immediately wary. Taken literally, it offers the promise of entering a private, perhaps magical realm. More often, such a title is metaphorical, and it was the case with this film. Much of Maria’s secret world remains secret: she speaks very little, unwilling to reveal her true thoughts except in her notebook, which she fills with skilful sketches and strange messages, addressing herself as though she were another person. Maria reads these messages aloud to the audience, as slowly as she writes them. Even the notebook reveals little about her, except that she sways between typical teenage extremes of self-love and self-loathing. More commonly, and most maddeningly, Maria’s ‘secret world’ is conveyed through long takes of her face in profile, with an expression of docile distrust, staring into space. These shots often leave the background out of focus, as if to emphasise Maria’s complete absorption in her own world.

The interest that this film holds is, above all, in its cinematography. A very promising director, Gabriel Mariño grabs the audience from the get-go with striking, beautifully composed shots of Mexican landscapes, both urban and rural. These lyrical shots, characterised by their sensitivity to detail and seductive patches of bright colour, entrance the audience in the absence of a more involving, better-developed narrative. For Maria herself is an exasperating character: we feel sympathy for her, but it is irritating when a protagonist keeps nearly everything on the inside. She meets three different people on her trip, people who take care of her, take advantage of her, or a bit of both. It is surprising that anyone approaches her at all, as she is so begrudging in her conversation: it is always someone else who has to take the first step.

Maria does finally meet a gentle young man, Juan, who gets to know her before sleeping with her, and actually makes her smile when she has sex, rather than lying bored and passive as she does with every other partner. Yet even with him, she is only slightly more talkative. Juan tells Maria his own story: a harrowing explanation of why he has had to defy his parents’ wishes and head to the US to earn a living. In return, Maria tells him about a dream she had, in which a whale plays a magical role and her mother a sinister one. Juan confronts the unknown in America, going to work in a country he has never previously set foot in. He asks Maria, who visited the States as a child, what it is like, but her experience was quite different from what his will be: she is only familiar with tourist attractions like Disneyland and shopping malls. Although the director says that he wanted his film to convey the uncertainty of the future for today’s youth in an increasingly violent Mexico, Maria’s experiences seem much less compelling than Juan’s, making the audience wonder why the movie wasn’t about Juan instead.

Exactly why Maria appears so detached from the world is never made clear. Her problems with her mother seem fairly typical for an adolescent. Of greater concern is her combination of solitude and sexual passivity: a girl on her own, there for the taking, with no friends to guide her or give her support. Although she does achieve a victory of sorts at the end of the film, Maria remains solitary and her inner thoughts mysterious—too mysterious. The director had a noble objective in using Maria as a symbol of aimless youth, but the other problem, that of violence, remains very much in the background. There is no reason to wish for more violence in a film, but if the director wanted to confront this particular problem, it was not enough to introduce Juan’s brief account of it. While Maria’s attitude and experiences may correspond to that of Western youth in general, her life is too turned in on itself to speak about Mexico’s own wider problems.

Slow, meditative films that were thin on plot dominated the awards at the16th Sofia International Film Festival. Grand Prix winner Stories Which Only Exist When Remembered (dir. Julia Murat) centred on a young photographer’s stay amongst the elderly of a small village, while Jaffe Zinn’s Magic Valley traced the discovery of a crime in a quiet town. Konstantin Bojanov won four of the festival’s ten prizes for Avé, a film about two young people hitchhiking across Bulgaria.

Given this general trend in the festival’s prize-giving, it was disappointing that the juries overlooked a film which was of a similar spirit in terms of its plot and pacing, and which treated an important subject in a nuanced way. Özcan Alpek’s Future Lasts Forever concerns Sumru, an ethnomusicologist on a research trip. Her mission is to record Kurdish women singing elegies for male family members who were killed when their villages were attacked by Turks. In the city of Diyarbakir, she meets Ahmet, a film-lover who sells world cinema DVDs at the market. Ahmet becomes drawn into helping Sumru with her work. Together, they listen to women who, before singing their elegies, give horrifying accounts of their experiences. Ahmet and Sumru also work together at a local library to re-organise a large existing archive of atrocities, in readiness for an official investigation that has yet to take place.

Audiences may tend to shy away from films which incorporate talking-head accounts of atrocity. On the one hand, the viewer naturally wants to empathise with the speaker on a personal level, but the horror is such that most can never comprehend the full extent of the speaker’s pain. On the other hand, the violence becomes banal and depersonalised, as the viewer thinks of how many similar events have taken place across the world, now and in the past: the viewer becomes depressed thinking of the inhuman acts that humans have been, and are still, capable of. Comprehending an overwhelming history of suffering becomes even more difficult than confronting it on an individual level.

Future Lasts Forever takes a very balanced approach to its subject matter, however, and this is part of its originality. The film does not simply follow its fictional protagonist’s quest as an ethnomusicologist; it also confronts difficult questions about why she is doing this research. Ahmet is the first to raise the question, muttering darkly about Kurds now being of academic interest. As a Kurd himself, he has been touched by the stories and songs which Sumru is recording. As Sumru is not Kurdish, there is automatically an underlying question of motive. If she were looking at the atrocities per se, it would be easy to see how her research could be motivated by the suffering of fellow humans. The fact that her interest is in elegies, which are a step away from the atrocities themselves, leaves her open to accusations of academic distance from her subject, or worse, of morbidity in her avid interest in sufferings that she is not personally connected with.

Future Lasts Forever incorporates only one short sequence of documentary-style footage of an attack on a Kurdish village, and even this merely hints at the summary executions that took place. The film as a whole is strangely lyrical and peaceful considering its sombre and violent subject matter. Its images of natural beauty, from mist on a wooded mountain road, to rain in a small church courtyard, sent tingles up my spine in a way few films ever have. It is possible that the director intended to reflect the calming, cathartic impact that nature’s beauty, like human art (elegies for the dead, in particular) can have. But the film does not presume to suggest that elegies can neutralise the loss of a loved one. Its title, ‘Future Lasts Forever’, can refer to the fact that the future, as it is always ahead of us, offers a feeling of eternity: it can be a happy place, when you make plans with someone you love, but it can also be an eternally lonely place when you have lost that person forever. When Sumru mourns her own loss, the audience, like the film’s other characters, remain distant from her. The film’s final shot of her walking alone, slowly vanishing, along the edge of a snowy lake, acknowledges loss as something personal, which isolates the individual.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis were both released in 1970, both based on novels (by Alberto Moravia and Giorgio Bassani, respectively) and both set during World War II. De Sica’s film covers the beginning of Fascist atrocities, while Bertolucci’s film covers the end. The two films are also complementary in terms of their central characters: while the eponymous conformist joins up as a Fascist hitman, the Finzi-Continis are potential victims of the regime. Perhaps it is for this reason that De Sica’s film so easily carries the director’s gentle and engaging mark, while much of Bertolucci’s feature is as cold and charmless as Fascist architecture.

Fans of De Sica will find in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis both beloved characteristics of the director’s famed neo-realist approach, and stimulating new additions such as warm colour photography, intimate extreme close-ups and effortlessly soaring long shots. At its opening, the lush, bright images of privileged youth may seem far from his work of the 1940s and 50s, with its gritty focus on society’s underdogs. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis follows a group of friends who orbit a local aristocratic family and their expansive estate. Reminiscent of the privileged world of Oxford or Cambridge, the film’s title sequence shows the friends dressed in tennis whites, riding bicycles through the cobbled streets of Ferrara, flanked by high walls and wicket gates, or the sun-dappled forests of the Finzi-Continis’ expansive garden.

The Finzi-Continis’ situation is not as secure as it seems, however, and this is made clear early on in the friends’ conversation. Micòl, the daughter of the family, says that she could spend her whole life in the garden, while her brother Alberto says that he wouldn’t mind going out if you could control who you meet, and how they look at you. One of their friends, a Communist, comments that he is a persona non grata in Italian society at the moment, just like ‘you Jews’. As a Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis are at risk: for the moment, their garden is a safe haven, and they invite Fascists as well as opponents of the regime to join them for tennis matches, as if hoping that friendship and normality can prevent future prejudice and hatred. As anti-Semitic laws are introduced, the Finzi-Continis’ world appears less a rambling place of privilege than a tiny sphere of safety, one that is increasingly under threat.

Like Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (1966), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis successfully recreates something of the reality of war by demonstrating that everyday life will still go on, as long as possible, even in times of crisis. In Menzel’s film, a new recruit at a train station eventually fights for the resistance, but first he’s more concerned with losing his virginity. Similarly, against the background of increasing political repression in Ferrara, Micòl’s childhood friend Giorgio, who is also Jewish, longs to transform their friendship into romance. His brother, forbidden to study in Italy, goes to France for university, and Giorgio goes to visit him. A devotion to learning, while particularly significant in unenlightened times, also represents a victory for normalcy: Micòl keenly pursues her doctorate on Emily Dickinson, while Giorgio, excluded from public reading rooms, asks to use the Finzi-Continis’ private library to continue his studies of poetry. The Finzi-Continis shower him with murmurs of approval and the father of the family offers him every assistance.

Learning and foreign travel are also key motifs in The Conformist: Fascist agent Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant, of My Night at Maude’s fame) agrees to go to Paris to meet his former lecturer and current enemy of the regime, Professor Quadri, and eliminate him. In the peculiarly masculine, unforgiving world of fascism, a feminine presence can provide relief. Marcello’s fiancée, Giulia, is an affectionate airhead, who at least offers some comedy, but Professor Quadri’s elegant wife Anna (Dominique Sanda, who happens also to play Micòl in de Sica’s film) shares her husband’s principles, and adds to it a canny suspicion of Marcello. Like Micòl inviting Fascist tennis players round for a match, Anna seems to hope to appeal to the humanity of Marcello, not understanding that he lacks it entirely.

Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) was made in 1963, but is set just over a century earlier, during the Risorgimento, when Garibaldi fought for Italy to be united into one kingdom, free of foreign control. To give a personal dimension to the changes taking place in the region, the film portrays their influence on one aristocratic family in Sicily. Burt Lancaster plays The Prince of Salina, the family’s grizzled patriarch, who seems to adopt a practical attitude to the changes. As the wealth and influence of his class slowly declines, he sees that it is wise to support unification, progress, and the rise of the middle class. At the same time, his aging but still handsome face expresses a quiet melancholy as he sees that aristocratic traditions of piety, dignity, fastidiousness and seclusion are going to die with him. He is too old to take part personally in his family’s reinvention, and he seems sorry about this too. The family’s male heir is the prince’s young nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), who embraces politics and a vulgar but beautiful bride named Angelica (Claudia Cardinale): his dynamic life among the general population will be far different than his uncle’s—and perhaps better for it.

Visconti based his film on a novel of the same name by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: it is a rare example of a film that rivals, if not exceeds, the achievements of the original literary work, taking a time and setting that a reader might have difficulty imagining, and bringing it beautifully, vibrantly, to life. The film also shows the influence of opera: a restricted set of orchestral leitmotifs intervene regularly; narrative developments feel clearly demarcated as though they were acts and scenes; and abundant long shots allow the audience to take in the action of entire battle grounds, ballrooms, and drawing rooms, as though gazing at a stage set. Yet Visconti skilfully draws on opera without allowing it to take over the film. The Leopard maintains its specificity as a film: static long shots are balanced by elegant camera movements which gracefully deliver the audience into close-up with key characters. Combined with a series of conversations, in which characters discuss their own feelings or speculate on the feelings of others, close-ups of the actors’ powerful expressions manage to re-create the interiority that is so easily lost when adapting a novel for the screen. Rather than looking for artificial ways to make cinema ‘tell’, Visconti makes use of cinema’s superior ability to ‘show’ emotions through facial expression, tone of voice and physical juxtaposition: for example, the contrast between Angelica’s laughter at Tancredi’s lewd army stories, and his former sweetheart’s visible shock, as they sit on either side of the young man at the dinner table.

In an interview at the BFI nearly 10 years ago, Claudia Cardinale recounted what it was like working with two directors on two films at the same time: Visconti on The Leopard and Fellini on 8½. Visconti and Fellini had a completely different working style, and the differences in production couldn’t come through more clearly in the finished films. Where Visconti took a rigorously controlled approach, certain of everything he wanted from the very beginning, Cardinale said that Fellini’s sets were like parties, and his films were inspired by the chaos. While improvisation was forbidden in Visconti’s films, in Fellini’s it was the rule. Freedom and abandon arguably have their place in creating a joyful and spontaneous cinematic experience, but it is hard to imagine Fellini making such a success of a film like The Leopard: Visconti’s sense of calm control fits perfectly with the film’s theme of calm melancholy in the face of inevitable decline.

Judging from a conversation I overheard before the start of the screening, it seems that there will always be people who haven’t seen Casablanca (1942). ‘I can’t believe you guys have never seen it,’ said the man to the two friends he’d brought along. ‘How did that happen?’ Even the friends were probably wondering. Because if you haven’t seen Casablanca, you may feel as though you have: as with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it’s hard to start fresh with Casablanca, so prevalent are certain images and lines from the film. A foggy night, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman gazing at each other from underneath the wide brims of their hats before the plane takes off. The stylishly dressed customers in ‘Rick’s bar américain’, Rick the most stylish of all in his white double-breasted dinner jacket. ‘Play it, Sam’, ‘here’s looking at you, kid’, ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’: it’s one of the most referenced films in history.

A digitally restored version of the film is being screened at the BFI to celebrate the film’s 70^th anniversary. Critics are giving the film five stars, and for once I can agree: Casablanca achieves the difficult trick of balancing beauty and intrigue. To its further credit, it’s a World War II film with subtlety made while that war was still going on. When Paris came under German occupation (the film’s prologue explains), many fled to the free zones of France, which included its North African territories. In the film, Casablanca has become an international holding tank: people from all over Europe rush there, intending to carry on to North America, but are forced to wait to obtain the necessary visas. A few, like Rick, have resigned themselves to never leaving Casablanca. The American presents himself as a pragmatist, resolutely neutral on the subject of the war, and committed only to looking out for his own interests. But when an old flame arrives in the city with her Czech dissident husband, and both are under threat from visiting Nazis, Rick gradually becomes forced to choose sides.

In the past ten years, there have been World War II films which reject the simple template of angelic Allies, demonic Nazis, and passive concentration camp inmates: to avoid making the same films over and over, and to acknowledge the complexity of the human character, directors have made films featuring a good Nazi (Milos Radivojevic’s How I was Stolen by the Germans), a bad ally (Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book) or a concentration camp prisoner who escapes (Wolfgang Murnburger’s My Best Enemy). Michael Curtiz’s film was daring as a World War II film featuring sympathetic characters who sail close to the wind ideologically: Rick, who claims to be neutral, and the French police captain Louis Renault, who keeps a cosy relationship with the Fascists in case they end up in charge. Curtiz would go on to create an even more compelling character dynamic in Mildred Pierce (1945), another rightly revered classic of cinema: the film centres on a mother (Joan Crawford) who devotes herself entirely to providing for her daughter, but is ultimately forced to confront the kind of daughter she has raised—should she be blamed for her devotion, or was her daughter bad to begin with? Or was it an unfortunate combination of factors? Like Casablanca, Mildred Pierce is a film that no lover of cinema should miss.

A romance and a historico-political thriller with a touch of comedy, Casablanca has something for everyone. There is the tension of secret meetings between members of the resistance, all under the watchful gaze of Captain Renault and his Nazi guests. There is Rick’s history with Ilsa, their days in Paris recounted in a perfectly concise flashback, prefaced by their haunted, emotional gazes across the bar, while ‘As Time Goes By’ plays in the background. The judicious lighting, the beautiful black and white photography of Bergman’s and Bogart’s faces in close-up: it is emotionally stirring to see these images from seventy years ago, still so clear and beautiful. Even if you know how much work will have gone into restoring the print, it gives an impression of timelessness.

Casablanca is screening at London’s BFI until February 23^rd.