LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Beti and Amare (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Beti and Amare is a difficult film to categorize – a war romance set in 1936 with science-fiction elements made for only $7,000 in Ethiopia – and most likely one the likes of which you probably haven’t seen before.

Set during Mussolini’s Abyssinian war, a young woman, Beti (Hiwot Asres), escapes to her grandfather’s (Atrsaw Wisenbet) remote hut. They lead a meagre existence. Beti is threatened with rape by the local militia, a band of three young men in search of Italians to kill. When their goat dies, Beti’s grandfather leaves her alone in the hut, where she encounters a stranger, Amare (Pascal Dawson), who may be from outer space.

The film begins with an old-fashioned newsreel, which, despite being oddly upbeat in the face of some very real suffering, does make one pertinent observation – in times of war, it is the most vulnerable who suffer the most. The film then is an attempt to address Mussolini’s war from the perspective of those who suffered the most. Beti is a refugee, forced into a meagre life in a remote hut, living alone and under threat from men riled up by war. Beti dreams about a spaceship crash-landing on Earth, a dream that seems to come true when Beti is most in danger. Beti and Amare strike up a strong wordless friendship, one that helps Beti through her suffering and her loneliness.

The film is about suffering rather than battles and war, and it is a valuable film in this regard. Asres gives a strong performance, conveying both Beti’s vulnerability and strength without the use of a lot of dialogue. The film is well directed, particularly when one considers that it was made on a shoestring. However, the film seems to be more interested in being a festival oddity, rather than an honest and emotional story about how a young woman copes with the horrible world she finds herself in. Instead of making Beti’s retreat into fantasy the focus of the story, the film uses it as an excuse for extended flights of fancy, which ultimately overwhelm the drama at the film’s heart.

The film sacrifices coherence for strangeness, leaving one wondering what exactly was writer-director Andy Siege trying to say with the film. The film purports to be about the suffering of the most vulnerable (a fact that sets it apart already), but it loses a certain truth by focusing on oddity.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: The Way He Looks (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

The Way He Looks is writer-director Daniel Ribeiro’s feature debut. Adapted from his own 2010 short film Eu Não Quero Volta Sozinho, the film is Brazil’s official entry for the 2015 Academy Awards.

Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) has been blind since birth. His best friend, Giovanna (Tess Amorim) helps him out and seems to have developed a crush on him, one that he is unable or unwilling to notice. When a new classmate, Gabriel (Fabio Audi), arrives and almost immediately strikes up a friendship with Leonardo, Giovanna begins to feel left out.

The Way He Looks is a film about disability, but it manages to transcend that often patronising and mawkish subgenre. Ribeiro and Lobo make sure that Leonardo is a three-dimensional, even somewhat complex character, not simply a figure of pity or a medium for a message about disability. The film works best simply as a film about the difficulties of romance in high school, a coming-of-age film with villainous bullies, romantic misunderstandings and a soundtrack that makes good use of Belle and Sebastian’s “There’s Too Much Love.” The blindness is present but it rarely takes centre stage and it is easy to imagine that the film would not have been significantly different without it.

That said, Ribeiro shows great versatility in conveying a burgeoning romance without the use of visuals. Leonardo’s growing affection for Gabriel is presented through sounds and smells, particularly in one touching scene in which Leonardo finds Gabriel’s jumper. Ribeiro is ably assisted here by great performances from his three young leads, all of whom offer complex performances rather than the types usually seen in high school dramas. Eucir de Souza and Lúcia Romano are both very good as Leonardo’s parents, trying to reconcile Leonardo’s maturation with their continuing worries about him.

The film is not flawless, but it works as a likable and funny indie film about growing up and discovering one’s sexuality. It is an honest and largely non-judgemental depiction of young love – although Isabela Guasco’s Karina, is too quickly written off – and a sensitive portrait of a blind person’s attempts to fit in.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Still The Water (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the London Film Festival.

A film of love, life and death on the island of Amami, south of the Japanese mainland, Still the Water attempts to represent the traditions of a small island community as two children come to terms with death.

The film follows Kyoko (Jun Yoshinaga) and Kaito (Nijiro Murakami) as they both come face-to-face with death. Kyoko falls in love with the moody Kaito, who is significantly less mature than she is. Kaito’s parents have divorced and neither seems to spend much time with Kaito, who suffers in silence. Meanwhile, Kyoko is trying to come to terms with her dying mother. Then Kaito finds a corpse floating in the sea.

The film has a real human warmth to it, and there are many scenes that manage to convey some universal truths about life and death and our inability to fully grasp these big questions. The main problem with the film is that its success or failure may depend on the degree of one’s sympathy for films that juxtapose the permanence of nature with the human struggles playing out in its midst. In this respect, the film is much too long and somewhat conventional for its own good. A more experimental or vibrant film might have better represented these themes more successfully than a lot of sober looks into the middle distance followed by shots of wind blowing through foliage. Oftentimes it feels cold and intellectual when it should be emotional and the graphic goat slaughtering scenes seem to paradoxically suggest that the kind of natural grace the film represents is only open to humans. Similarly, the film’s triumphant ending, thanks to a judicious use of blur, seems to unintentionally suggest that an embrace of nature should only go so far.

The film ends with a typhoon, which both threatens to engulf the humans or bring some sort of clarity, but the film remains somewhat vague. The character’s emotional journeys are clearly mapped out (almost too precisely) but we are left with a feeling that we have not learnt anything we didn’t know before. One death scene is presented lyrically and rather movingly, but only because it totally ignores the pain and the discomfort of the act of dying. It is a warm film, but it feels only surface deep – a film betraying the influence of Malick, Herzog, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi but few ideas of its own.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Oxi: An Act of Resistance (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Oxi: An Act of Resistance is an essay film by Ken McMullen and it takes a unique and experimental view of the economic turmoil in Greece.

The film strives to draw a parallel between Greece’s economic problems and the tragedies of Sophocles and Aristophanes, suggesting that Greece, and the EU in general, have departed from the values of the past and that this is what has lead in the current crisis. The Greek classics espoused democracy and a politics based on love and understanding rather than a politics of economics and party lines, as shown by the democracy of Pericles, which was, among other things, the original welfare state.

The film is interspersed with quotations from Thucydides, which remain remarkably relevant for a text that is two and a half thousand years old. The film opens with one quotation which claims that human nature, being the way that it is, is always going to repeat itself – indicating, first, the historical precedents for the inequalities of today and, second, suggesting that these classics contain important lessons for today. This point is made succinctly as the camera lingers on some ancient Greek landscapes, suggesting a permanence between the past and the present. Several interviewees argue for the return of the values of these ancient writings, often passionately and with inspiration.

The film is at its best, then, as an extended lesson in classical literature and its relevance today. But where it is less successful is in its attempts to restage scenes from these plays, updating them for a new audience. It becomes an exercise in performance, which looks a lot more artificial and cerebral than the impassioned and moving testimonies of real people. Worse still is the fictional element in which a detective, Inspector Pinon (Dominique Pinon), horrified that anyone would dare ‘steal’ the words of Sophocles and Aristophanes and make them relevant for today, castigates writers and actors. The point is that these classics are not set in stone, but live and breath today, but the way the film attempts to demonstrate this is both pretentious and somewhat contradictory.

The film works best as a dialogue between classic Greek literature and the current problems in the world. The people interviewed call for the return of the principles of the past and the film is a moving and fascinating testament to what we have lost. But it often uses too much artifice to tell a plain and simple truth.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Kelly and Cal (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Kelly (Juliette Lewis) has just had a baby with her husband Josh (Josh Hopkins), and is now wandering around her house, trying to get used to the idea of motherhood and domesticity. She meets Cal (Jonny Weston), a teenager in a wheelchair, whose rambunctious past and trapped present mirrors her own. They strike up a relationship that will threaten everything Kelly has.

Kelly and Cal is yet another American indie film about a lost middle-class woman torn between her materialistic friends and a more anarchic past. Kelly used to be in a band – a Riot Grrrl band called Wetnap – though her mellowing is typified by an embarrassed nostalgic fondness for Bryan Adams. As it goes with films like this, she finds release in an outspoken younger man whose hatred of all compromise and tradition represents first what she has lost and then, when the film begins to re-establish the status quo for its safe ending, his dangerous immaturity. Jen McGowan and Amy Lowe Starbin, the director and writer respectively, ensure that their film about repressed non-conformity hits all of the typical beats, smugly mocking Kelly’s in-law (including Cybill Shepherd) and friends for their wholly blinkered and materialistic view of life and yet re-establish these very things for the ending in which Kelly finally embraces motherhood and domesticity. Kelly’s fears and her attempts to escape from her big house and tightly knit family are revealed as something rather selfish, rather than something truly self-fulfilling, and the film ends triumphantly (to the upbeat twangs of an indie song) with her having learnt her lesson.

The actors are all rather good, but they are never given anything to do. McGowan and Starbin prefer dramatic scenes to end with one character storming out while the other looks on, agape, shaking their head in sadness and confusion. The viewer can be forgiven for wishing that they would simply yell and scream at each other until all of those not so subtle nuances were laid clearly out in the open, instead of this series of barbed, pointed statements followed closely by a slammed door. When Cal drowns out Kelly’s complaints by playing the drums, one wants her to toss the drums out the window. Instead, she leaves.

Films such as this, presumably about repressed emotions, are much too often repressed themselves. It is a half-decent film well acted, but there doesn’t seem to be any real heart in it.