Short Round: About Elly (2015) ****/*****

Back in 2011, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi turned heads and won awards with his tense drama A Separation, which not only featured great performances and subtle writing, but was particularly interesting to Western viewers because of the way it mined Iranian culture for dramatic moments that just wouldn’t be all that dramatic if they happened over here. Watching it felt fresh. Well, it turns out he also made another film that was first screened in 2009, About Elly, which has slowly been playing the festival circuit ever since, and which is now finally getting a regular release in the US.

How does this earlier work stand up to A Separation, which amazed everyone with how affecting it was able to make the dissolution of a marriage by exploring its conflict from each opposing point of view, while obscuring the truth of the inciting incident being squabbled over from the audience? It’s not quite as good, doesn’t feel quite as assured in its filmmaking, but it’s still really great, and it has a lot in common with the later film (e.g. awkward interactions aplenty). 

The story sees a group of young parents and their children traveling to the sea alongside one of their kids’ kindergarten teacher (Taraneh Alidoosti) and a single male friend (Shahab Hosseini), with the duel purposes of having a relaxing weekend and hooking the teacher up with the friend. The chill vibe collapses when the teacher, Elly, disappears though, and nobody is quite sure if some curious behavior led to her suddenly bolting without telling anyone, or if she drown in the sea while trying to save a young boy. Thanks to some judicious editing, we don’t know her fate either, so we’re left just as confused as the characters as they panic, try to process the situation, and eventually fall apart as their conflicts bring various lies and indiscretions to the surface. About Elly is human drama in capital letters, and well done human drama to boot. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need more of in theaters. Go see it, if for no other reason than to see the performance given by Golshifteh Farahani, who plays the story’s matchmaker, who clearly took herself to hellish emotional places to properly play the role, and who deserves the recognition.

Two Days, One Night (2014) ****/*****

Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (La Promesse, The Kid With a Bike) are known for making movies that are grounded in reality, gritty, and steeped in basic human drama in all of the best ways. They tell simple stories that shine a spotlight on the inherent struggles that exist in the lives of normal, usually lower class people. Their films manage to resonate while still defying the expectations of how “cinematic” a story needs to be in order to make for a good movie. It should be said though that their work is often slow to build to a climax, once that climax happens it’s generally a personal one that affects only the protagonist and not the greater world around them, and the places their films take you can often leave you feeling a little down. If you’re the sort of person who can get on the Dardenne wavelength, then their movies are always easy to appreciate—and Two Days, One Night is no exception there—but they’re certainly not for everyone. So beware my praise.

Two Days, One Night focuses on a very important weekend in the life of a blue collar mother of two named Sandra (Marion Cotillard), who’s recently had some troubles at work thanks to a bout of depression leading to her having to take a leave of absence. Turns out the forced time off was just the beginning of her professional troubles though, as her boss has recently made the decree that the company she works for can’t afford to both give everyone bonuses and also keep on 17 employees, so if everybody wants to get a bump in pay, somebody’s going to have to get fired, and it’s Sandra’s head on the chopping block—a true problem, because she and her husband depend on her salary in order to pay their rent and feed their kids. When we meet Sandra it’s at the beginning of a weekend where she’s informed that there will be a vote on Monday to decide her fate—bonuses for everyone else or she keeps her job, everyone in the company gets a say, and she only has the weekend to visit each one and convince them to make a personal sacrifice for her well-being. It would be a daunting and awkward task even for someone who wasn’t prone to depression.

The Raid 2 (2014) ****/*****

Gareth Evans’ buzz-creating martial arts film The Raid—which was released in the US as The Raid: Redemption—basically showed up the last twenty years of Hollywood action filmmaking in embarrassing fashion. Heck, The Raid was so good it might be the most thrilling action movie of all time. It hedged its bets by being solely about the action though. The structure of that film, which consisted of a hero fighting his way up a building full of bad guys until he got to the main boss, was so simple that it might as well have been the basis for an 8-bit video game, and not the plot of a feature film. The Raid made it clear to the world that Evans was a top-notch director of action scenarios, but whether or not he could handle the other aspects of making a good movie was still a big question everyone who was new to his work had. Well, seeing as The Raid 2 is a sweeping crime epic with a near two-and-a-half hour run time, it looks like we now have our answer. That answer being a resounding yes he can. 

The Raid 2 picks back up with our hero from the first film, Rama (Iko Uwais), pretty quickly after his surviving of the raid of the criminal stronghold from the first film. The basic plot sees him getting inducted into a super-secret faction of the local police force meant to root out corruption, and the basic plan is that he’s going to be thrown into jail, gain the trust of a powerful crime lord’s son, gain entry into said crime lord’s criminal empire, and then find out what public officials he’s been doing business with. Things don’t end up going as smoothly as planned though, and there ends up being about a half dozen other competing interests that all poke their noses into the proceedings, so by the time everything hashes out, The Raid 2 ends up being a fairly involved film. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with movies as ambitious as this one is, but thankfully Evans is able to avoid all of the usual pitfalls, and he’s also able to make that two-and-a-half hours of movie fly by so fast that you don’t even notice your butt getting numb. I guess it’s helpful when half of it is hanging off of the edge of your seat though (seriously, that’s not a cliché, this movie will affect your posture).

Like Father, Like Son (2014) ****/*****

Hollywood has been awash for decades with movies about overworked dads who put their careers in front of their families and who need to be taught the lesson that their children are what really matters when it comes to their happiness and their legacies. So when the first few scenes of writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda’s latest film, Like Father, Like Son (Soshite chichi ni naru), seem like they’re going to be delving into that well-worn territory, you might find yourself worrying that you’re about to watch another cookie-cutter domestic drama. Thankfully, though it does contain a career-obsessed dad subplot, Like Father, Like Son is no Hollywood movie, and it’s no ordinary family drama.

Instead it’s a layered and effective piece of cinema that explores what it is to be a parent, what it is to be a child, and that ponders where exactly the love bonds that tie us together come from, and how permanent and unconditional they really are. It’s a story about being human, in a broad sense, whose particulars involve a successful young couple named Ryota and Midori (Masaharu Fukuyama and Machiko Ono) who find out that their six-year-old son, Keita (Keita Ninomiya), was actually switched at birth with another child in the country hospital where he was delivered, and that he’s not really their son at all. What this means is that Ryota and Midori need to meet with the other couple (Rirî Furankî and Yôko Maki) who mistakenly took home their biological son, Ryusei (Shôgen Hwang), set up some sort of program where both sets of parents can meet their long-lost progeny, and then all four have to come to some sort of decision as to whether they’re going to stick with the kid they’ve been raising as their own for six years, or swap them out for the one that actually shares their blood. 

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. This movie is emotional as shit.

Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) ****/*****

It’s not so very often that a character-heavy French film gets a largish release in the United States, especially when its director (Abdellatif Kechiche) and its stars (Adèle Exarchopolous and Léa Seydoux) aren’t names that most Americans know. But when a film wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes and generates a bunch of buzz because of its lengthy and explicit lesbian sex scenes, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out why it’s an exception to the rule. Blue is the Warmest Color is the name of the exception we’re currently discussing, and you’ll probably be relieved to hear that it’s definitely the sort of movie that’s moving and beautiful enough to deserve the Palme d’Or, and it’s definitely a movie with sex scenes steamy enough to earn all of the blushes and whispering that it’s produced. Basically, it’s exactly the sort of thing that we turn to the French for.

The story introduces us to a high school girl named Adèle, who lives something of a normal middle class life, but who begins to find her normal existence turned on its head when a chance encounter with a comely, blue-haired lass in the street (Seydoux’s Emma) has her suddenly fantasizing about salacious encounters with the opposite sex. One thing leads to another and eventually we follow Adèle and Emma as they develop a relationship, which for Adèle is not just her first flirtation with lesbianism, but also her first experience learning to deal with all of the powerful, destructive emotions that come along with first love. For Emma there’s clearly love in the relationship too, but she’s a few years older, and her main conflict seems to come from the hardships of staying in a relationship because the sex is good, even though her partner is little bit high maintenance. Also, there’s a pretty substantial subplot wherein Adèle makes her way toward being a teacher of small children. But to pretend like Blue is the Warmest Color is about plot or story would be disingenuous.

Amour (2012) ****/*****

Michael Haneke has the reputation of being a master director, but one whose work tends to be cold and cynical. Funny, then, that his new film, Amour, is one of the most complex and affecting portrayals of love and devotion that has hit the big screen in years. Haneke being Haneke, he isn’t telling a tale of romance and roses though. Instead, Amour is about a couple in their 80s and the hardships they’re forced to endure once the woman has a stroke and begins the steady but painfully protracted march toward death. When deciding whether or not to watch this one, it’s important to remember that there are a handful of moments here that are so beautiful and touching they’ll make your heart feel like it’s going to swell and burst, because the rest of the movie—damn—it can be pretty rough to get through. The slow death of a loved one is probably the worst thing that a person can endure in this life, and Haneke uses every trick in his considerable playbook to make you feel every possible bit of the pain that comes along with it. 

Haneke’s master touch is clear from the opening image: a deep focus shot on a theater audience that allows you to see the whole crowd’s faces in crystal clear detail. We watch them watch, and slowly we’re eased into the deliberate and difficult experience that is Amour. The scene seems to tell you to slow down and get comfortable, because this film isn’t so much a journey as it is a meditation. The reason we’re watching this audience is that our two protagonists, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), are a part of it. As the film opens they’re a couple of normal retirees enjoying a night out, casual in their culture and capability. There doesn’t seem to be a single thing wrong in their world or their marriage. Then Haneke starts to put the screws to us.

The Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) ****/*****

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are best known for making subtle, realist films. They play out slowly and deliberately, and they can be stark and relatively difficult to navigate because of their bleakness. But, if you stick with them, and if you put in the work of getting to know their characters, they always sneak up on you with how much drama they’ve built, and they always culminate with something affecting and worthwhile. Their newest film is no exception. A depressing tale about a young boy trying to process the fact that his deadbeat father doesn’t want him, The Kid With a Bike starts off small, as a mini detective tale following the boy as he tries to figure out where his dad has moved. It develops into something of a domestic story, when he’s taken in by the kind-hearted local hairdresser, and we see how they spend their days together. And then it becomes a petty crime tale, when the boy is roped into committing a small time robbery by a local hoodlum. It doesn’t sound like much, but by the time everything comes together in the end and the characters reach the point where they’ve grown and changed, you’ll be glad that you stuck it out.

Let me extrapolate the difficulty of watching this movie a bit, so that you don’t think I’m listing it as a criticism. Our protagonist, Cyril (Thomas Doret), has a difficult life. He’s been abandoned to a boarding school, emotionally neglected by his absentee father, and he wants nothing more than to find somewhere he belongs, and to feel like he’s loved. Because of this he frequently acts stupidly and stubbornly, and putting up with his outbursts can be something of a challenge. It also means that this film constantly puts an uncomfortable amount of vulnerability on display. Much of the movie concerns itself with the boy running from place to place, gangly limbs flailing awkwardly, with a panicked look on his face. He’s searching for something we know he’s never going to find. And we know he doesn’t have the emotional tools the deal with the eventual consequences of his inevitable failure. You’re always shifting in your seat, nervous, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Watching Cyril clumsily and unsuccessfully navigate his young life is a raw experience, it hits a nerve, and it’s going to be a trip to the movies that some squeamish audience members aren’t going to be able to endure.

The Raid: Redemption (2012) ****/*****

Too often action movies fall into the trap of focusing too much on their spectacle. Before an idea for a story is even brainstormed there are elaborate plans for four or five action scenarios, and then writing a script just becomes a game of connect the dots, where you come up with excuses for your protagonist to run through the gauntlet of stunts that you’ve planned. The heroes of these tails are lantern-jawed and squinty-eyed, stalwart and brave, because that’s all you need to be in order to get involved in a series of action scenarios. Things like character and humanity get left by the wayside, and the big action scenes can often end up playing as empty and hollow as a result. Even the most breathtaking stunt doesn’t amount to much if you don’t care about the players involved. Or, at least, that’s what I used to think. Then a movie like The Raid: Redemption comes along that’s so much fun, story and character were the furthest things from my mind while I was watching it. The Raid is wall-to-wall action and little else. It’s structured less like a story with twists and turns, and more like a series of violent bullet points. Here, somehow, that’s enough. It’s more than enough. It’s so awesome.

I say that there’s no story here, but clearly that’s a lie. So what’s the story? Rama (Iko Uwais) is a member of some sort of tactical police squad. He’s a good man, and he’s insanely skilled at hand to hand combat. He and his crew of compatriots are faced with the task of bringing down a big time drug dealer named Tama (Ray Sahetapy). He’s arrogant, ruthless, and basically just a bad dude. He lives on the fifteenth story of an apartment building that’s populated entirely by criminals who are loyal to him. It’s the job of Rama and his fellow officers to infiltrate said building, battle their way up to the fifteenth floor, and take him out. The whole thing is pretty cut and dry, except for all of the shootouts, explosions, machete duels, and martial arts battles that complicate things along the way.

Le Havre (2011) ****/*****

The story that director Aki Kaurismäki tells in his latest film Le Havre is very simple. A shoe shine man living in the port city of Le Havre, France meets a young boy who has come to the country illegally, and who is the subject of a hunt by immigration officers. With the help of some locals, the shoe shine man hides the boy away in his home until he can arrange a way to get him out of the country and to London, where his mother awaits. The story is simple, but it’s not in the story where the charms of Le Havre lie. To get to the good stuff you have to get to know the characters, become acquainted with the setting, and acclimate yourself to the strange beats of Kaurismäki’s mostly deadpan humor. Le Havre is something of a unique filmgoing experience, and it has a small learning curve, but once you orient yourself there’s a lot to get out of it.

The story here is one of immigration, and how France’s strict policies affect those that have come in illegally from poorer countries looking for a better life. But that’s not really what the movie is about. The movie is about celebrating humanity, basking in the warmth of shared relationships, and enjoying life’s simple pleasures. It’s about the importance of being kind to the people around you and appreciating the good things you have rather than constantly striving for that which eludes you. Or, at least, that’s what it was about to me. Le Havre isn’t a preachy film that tries to tell you how to live your life. If just creates and delights in it’s own world and characters, and then allows you to take from the experience what you will. 

Biutiful (2010) ****/*****

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful is a film that is, in a lot of ways, hard to watch. Not only is the subject matter grim, the setting unattractive, the characters morally compromised; but it’s also just way too long. There are a multitude of plot threads, a bevy of characters, and Iñárritu takes his time exploring all of them. There are a lot of similarities between this and the director’s other films. It is pretty similar in subject matter to Amores Perros, telling multiple stories about a certain class of people in the underbelly of a city. And it shares some similarities with Babel, reaching further than it can manage and becoming a bit of a mess. I liked Amores Perros and I really hated Babel. As I was watching this film I felt a constant push and pull of reactions as I tried to decide what I felt about it. But, even at its worst Biutiful is never boring. It’s a film that leaves you plenty of time to catch your breath, but always confounds you enough to keep you from getting your bearings. During the second half of the film I was very aware of how long I had been sitting there, but it never got to the point where I wished that it would just end. At its best, Biutiful is a film with a few shining moments that work completely and are good enough to make the experience of getting through all of the tough stuff well worth it.

Enter the Void (2010) ****/*****

Explaining what exactly this film is or even what it sets out to accomplish is harder than you might imagine.  Explaining who Gaspar Noé is as a filmmaker and what he did with his 2002 film Irreversible only begins to paint the picture.  It lets you know that you’re going to be walking into something “artsy”.  Probably the content is going to be controversial and at times hard to watch.  The camera work is going to be, at times, challenging to watch due to it’s refusal to adhere to aesthetic norms, but will be at other times astoundingly beautiful due to it’s technical wizardry.  Ultimately, I would say that you shouldn’t have this film explained to you whatsoever.  Watching it is about the discovery.  What is Noé trying to show me?  Where is he trying to take me?  Enter the Void is a piece of visual art first and a narrative second, maybe third, or not even at all.  Probably you shouldn’t even read this review.  Just go and see this film and get back to me later.   Unless you’re easily offended.  Or really, able to be offended at all.  You should probably be warned before you go into this one that you’re going to be seeing pulsing, maybe seizure inducing visuals, tons of sexuality and nudity, incestual tension, graphic images of an abortion, tons of explicit drug use, and who knows how many other things that I can’t remember to mention right this minute.  So if all of that sounds good to you, stop reading now; go, take in this unique film going experience.  If not, maybe keep reading and see if I can entice you to sit through this one anyway.  Or probably, more likely, leave this page and head over to Youporn for the rest of the night.  Let’s be realistic. 

Lebanon (2009) **/*****

First off, here’s a bit of background info for orientation purposes.  Lebanon is a film by an Israeli filmmaker set entirely inside a tank during the Lebanese War.  The writer/director Samuel Maoz made this film to comment on his real life experience serving inside a tank during this war as a young man.  I take it he didn’t much like the experience.  The film opens on a still shot of an endless field of sunflowers and lingers there for a moment.  This is the last time the camera will be outside the tank until the film’s end.  After a moment we are in a dank hole, see a portal door close above us, and remain sealed in, just like the main characters, for the rest of the journey.  The inside of the tank is dark and grimy.  There is an inch of standing water on the ground.  It’s claustrophobic, uncomfortable.  Any view of the outside world we get from this point forward comes through the gunner’s scope.  Everything we see is seen behind crosshairs.  The world has, from this point forward, ceased to exist as anything more than a potential target.  The four men that we are introduced to inside of the tank have no further purpose but to move and shoot on command.  They are less people and more pieces of a machine; necessary components of a weapon in the Israeli army.  Conceptually, the film is very strong.  Its conceit is unique enough to be intriguing, and it is pulled off strongly enough to create a strong sense of place and mood.  You feel dirty, you feel enclosed; you really get put in the same place as the soldiers and feel like you’re experiencing the war right alongside them.  Thematically, the script knows what it wants to accomplish and sets everything up towards achieving that goal.  Unfortunately, a strong concept isn’t enough to completely anchor a film.  Somewhere along the line good characters and good story are going to need to come into play.  And for Lebanon, they never do.    

I Am Love (2010) ****/*****

I Am Love is a film that I’m having a hard time attacking as a review.  It’s a detail rich, meticulously thought out, finely crafted piece of art, for sure.  Every moment that you sit in its audience you will be engaged with challenging images, symbolic depth, and the intricacies of fine acting.  When I left the theater I had a mini novel of notes on all of the things that struck me during the viewing.  But then I realized that they weren’t notes appropriate for a review, but more for an academic dissecting of a literary work.  I had catalogued a multitude of cases of imagery and symbolism that tied into the themes of the film, multiple bits of foreshadowing that pointed to where the film was heading, tons of visual cues to help illuminate you about the changes the characters were going through.  But, was any of it going to be of any use?  Can you talk about the themes of this film without giving the entire thing away?  Can you catalogue bits of foreshadowing without delving into that always dreaded “spoiler territory”?  When everything in a film builds, very specifically and skillfully toward an emotional catharsis, what can you give away without spoiling that moment of catharsis for your reader?  Honestly I’m not sure, and even now I’m not totally certain what I’m going to write after this paragraph, but what I can say for certain is that I Am Love is a complex, well crafted example of cinema as art that any lover of film would be foolish to pass up checking out.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009) ****/*****

A very dark, moody, tale of mystery from director Niels Arden Oplev, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of the latest foreign films to get distribution in the US and start making the rounds in limited release.  The current state of foreign releases in this country is a bit of a double-edged sword.  We don’t get much, and it can be frustrating to people who want to consume all different kinds of cinema; but when we do get something you can rest assured that it had to have created a lot of buzz somehow in order for someone to pay to bring it over here.  You can almost always count on a film from another country playing in an American theater to be well made, or at the very least interesting enough to be worth giving a try.  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is no different.  Adapted from the novel Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women) by Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo plays out like a lot of the other serial killer centric thriller films that you have already seen, but it is presented with an intelligence and a touch of artistry that lifts it a notch above other entries in the genre and makes it a ride worth taking.

Un Prophète (2009) ****/*****

Currently in limited release in the United States as A Prophet, French director Jacques Audiard’s latest details the rise of a young Arab criminal named Malik (played by film newcomer Tahar Rahim) from clueless 19-year-old inmate to gang-king of a maximum-security prison.  A lot of people have been comparing the film to classic American crime films like The Godfather and Goodfellas.  It’s not a hard leap to make, as the film presents Malik’s rise to the top in a very crime glorifying, typically Hollywood fashion.  Here the tough choices Malik makes, the lucky breaks he experiences, they all have horrifying and violent consequences, but we can’t help but cheer him along as he murders and deals.

Gomorra (2008) ****/*****

The best way for me to describe director Matteo Garrone’ s Gomorra, released in the US as Gomorrah in 2009, is as a cross between Gummo and HBO’s The Wire set in Naple’s organized crime community.  Realist in style, and told generally without injecting much drama into its proceedings, Gomorra is a sweeping, complicated look at life in and around a mafia syndicate known as the Camorra.  Like Gummo, the characters are presented in a bleak, starkly accurate, almost documentary style that leaves you wishing that people like this didn’t actually exist, but nauseous due to the realization that they must.  Like The Wire, Gomorra looks at crime from a multi angled approach, telling the tale of not just the glamorous bosses, but also the child recruit drug runners, the corrupt politicians, and the “legitimate” businessmen whose actions all add to the total view of organized crime life in modern Naples.  The plot structure of the film jumps back and forth between five violence soaked stories featuring five different protagonists and how their lives are changed for the worse due to their brushes with criminal life.