REVIEW: The Past (2014)

With About Elly and A Separation, Asghar Farhadi proved himself to be one of the most interesting and exciting cinematic talents to come out of Iran. With The Past, his first film made outside of Iran, Farhadi has made another powerfully humane and non-judgemental drama about people.

The plot of The Past, like that of any Farhadi film, is difficult to describe since it is best to watch the film with no prior knowledge, all the better to appreciate how intricately the story unravels. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris from Tehran and is picked up by his wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo). Ahmad has returned in order to sign divorce papers so that Marie may marry her new boyfriend, Samir (Tahar Rahim). However, there may be more than one reason for Marie’s insistence that Ahmad return. Equally, there seems to be something wrong with the three children living under Marie’s roof – her two daughters Lucie and Léa (Pauline Burlet and Jeanne Jestin) and Samir’s son Fouad (Elyes Aguis). Ahmad, playing the peacekeeper, slowly but surely unravels a whole host of dark secrets and resentments.

Not the best synopsis ever written – and that is primarily because I don’t think they really matter – but the joy (if it can be called that) of a Farhadi film has always been in their unravelling, challenging the presumptions that the viewer may place on the plot and the characters, only for him or her to realize that they are completely wrong and things are much more complex than their simplistic, and possibly prejudiced, generalisations would suggest. As in A Separation, in which the apparent villain (played by Shahab Hosseini) castigates his accusers – and, hence, the audience – for finding it so easy to blame him, The Past challenges the audience to rethink their initial impressions of each character. As a result, the badly behaved Fouad is revealed to have been deeply disturbed by something he has witnessed, the seemingly unstable Marie is helplessly trapped with a horrible dilemma and the tough Samir is suffering from either extreme guilt or extreme remorse. The Past is a very well constructed and moving drama, but it is also a call for greater communication and understanding – Ahmad is often seen telling people to sit down and talk things through. As in A Separation, there is no overtly guilty party, simply a group of people trying to do what they think is right.

With The Past, Farhadi in some ways hones his craft even further. Large parts of the film are set under one roof and the film’s focus is on the difficulties of one family – albeit one extended and complicated by divorce. The film begins slowly, with everyday arguments about being late and bad parking giving an initial clue that everything is not quite all right in this household. Ahmad and Samir’s first meeting is subtly played as a comic macho challenge as Ahmad fixes a blocking pipe, irritating and offending Samir. Ultimately, the entire drama is based on the repercussions of a stained dress – a seemingly mundane object, which causes a deeply volatile situation to explode out in several directions.

The performances – as can be expected now from a Farhadi film – are uniformly excellent. Bejo won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, doing very well with a role that is, frankly, underwritten. A Separation has already proven Farhadi’s ability to get great performances from child actors, but one scene set in the subway in which Samir has to tell Fouad some difficult truths contains a brilliant performance from Elyes Aguis, particularly when one considers the difficulty of the scene and the fact that it is filmed in long takes. Rahim and Mosaffa are also both fantastic as well. Everyone plays what are clearly intended to be ‘real people’, with great subtlety and honesty and without patronising or mocking.

Arguably, The Past is simply a film about people in difficult situations – it does not really have the contemporary significance or national critique of About Elly or A Separation (although its presence in these two films may have been exaggerated by a Western media preferring to see everything from Iran as a comment specifically on Iran). It is a humane and sympathetic drama, tightly structured and scripted, emotionally draining and full of great performances. Though ultimatley less successful than Farhadi’s previous two films – both of which have better developed female characters – The Past is a great drama about the need for compassion, trust and understanding.

See also:
This is Not a Film
Like Someone In Love

REVIEW: The Great Beauty (2013)

Paolo Sorrentino returns to Italy or, more specifically, Rome following This Must Be The Place, his US-Irish set film with Sean Penn. I must admit that I have only seen Il divo, his critically lauded film about ex-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, which, for me, was an overrated film that attempted to show the self-indulgent and vacuous life of Andreotti whilst being itself self-indulgent and vacuous. The Great Beauty is his latest film and the crane and tracking shots and musical montages remain, but is there a point this time?

If Il divo is Sorrentino’s Goodfellas, then The Great Beauty is very obviously – too obviously – Sorrentino’s La dolce vita. Toni Servillo again takes the lead, playing Jep Gambardella, a once great writer whose life of near endless hedonism has done for his writing career. He makes ends meet by writing puff pieces for a magazine. The film begins (after a long, pointless sequence wandering around the Janiculum Hill) with his 65^th birthday, during which Jep is the victim of an existential funk. Why did he never write a second novel? Why did he stop writing? And where has that youthful idealism that inspired his much loved first novel gone? Jep searches for fulfilment, maybe even love, and goes on an odyssey through a surrealist Rome packed full of characters, incidents and memories.

The Great Beauty is unapologetically close to Fellini’s great films of the 1960s (as well as a hint here and there of Roma), but instead of making a gesture or a tribute, the film is stuck on them. It doesn’t really say or do anything that isn’t done in La dolce vita or 8 ½, put together with a style that recalls both Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick and a sense of humour that evokes the Coen brothers and Pedro Almodóvar on a lazy day. Quirky and cinematic but empty – it refers to emotions without bothering to try for drama. We know a character is sad, because Sorrentino plays loud, sad music over the scene. One character that we have been encouraged to laugh at throughout is suddenly given a tracking shot to melancholic music and a tragic backstory, and then never seen again. It is a film of bits and pieces, some aiming for comedy and some aiming for deep existential drama, all edited together with a MTV/ ADD aesthetic.

All of the themes of La dolce vita are lifted – the boredom of hedonism, the loss of innocence, the inability of recapture the creative spark, unfulfilling relationships and the feeling of disappointment once the night is over. Sorrentino updates the setting but he does not go further or deeper, often recreating moments from the original film in a slightly different register – a wander through an old building at night, the protagonist getting sidetracked by a young girl who gives him an ambiguous smile, a trip to the Trevi Fountain, a strip tease. The party sequences remain vacuous and freakishly carnivalesque though Sorrentino likes his camera to get involved in the debauchery and then comment on it later. The overriding idea is one of shallowness – the incidents are shallow, the characters are shallow – and this is mirrored by the medium. There is a lot of stuff about tricks but it doesn’t really go anywhere, or if it did, I couldn’t be bothered to think about it. A quirky sensibility and an oh-so bizarre sense of humour help to make the whole thing seem even more pointless. The strongest impression I got out of it was a feeling of being trapped; thinking, an hour in, “There’s another bloody eighty minutes.” Since it is about little and it is 140 minutes long, it is also tediously repetitive.

The worst thing about the film, however, is that it is pretentious. We laugh at people who talk about Proust, Dostoevsky and Pirandello because the film encourages us to think that these oafish characters have never read them. Meanwhile the camera lingers on an art exhibit long enough to telegraph that while its characters might not appreciate this sort of thing, it certainly does. The ending is typically, blandly unresolved and ambiguous. It is a film that mocks, but it does not suggest anything lest it be mocked itself. It muses on the waste and the self-indulgence of the 1% while it flaunts its budget and giving its party sequences as much vibrancy as possible.

The Great Beauty is often beautifully photographed, but it is horribly dull and irritatingly pretentious. It doesn’t say anything, relying instead on its soundtrack to suggest mood. It encourages us to laugh at these horrible, vacuous people but it is the kind of film that they would love – bright, flashy, full of incident with a few high art references here and there to remind them they have brains.

REVIEW: Reality (2013)

Big Brother made a big impact on reality television when it began, but the response of filmmakers has been fairly sparse – only the Charlie Brooker-scripted Dead Set and the Christmas special to Extras has dealt with it in any interesting way. Now Matteo Garrone, whose previous film Gomorrah took a comprehensive and fascinating look at the underdogs of the Neapolitan crime world, has made a film about the ‘Big Brother effect’, in the process winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

Luciano (Aniello Arena) is a fishmonger in Naples who lives modestly with his wife (Loredana Simioli) and kids. Always looking for a way to improve his situation, he is involved in a few petty scams, aided and abetted by his wife. Urged by his family to try out for Grande Fratello, the Italian Big Brother, because of his ability to entertain everyone around him, he auditions. However, during the selection process and the long periods of time waiting for the phone to ring, Luciano becomes obsessed with the bright future that is surely coming…

Opening with a fantastic aerial shot surveying Naples before zoning in on the carriage of some newly-weds on the way to their plush, over-the-top wedding reception, Garrone is playing from the beginning with fantasy and reality. The first few frames look gritty and urban but as the camera starts to follow the wedding carriage, there is a hint of airy extravagance. Anyone familiar with Fellini will recognise the sound of a breeze on the soundtrack, marking the passage from reality to fantasy. And then Alexandre Desplat’s score kicks in – quirky and ridiculous but somewhat recognisable.

The wedding is tacky and overdone with ribbons being cut and pigeons being released, a crowd of well-wishers bustling and shouting and taking awkward group photographs. However, as the wedding ends and the guests return to their homes, the film moves again into a more sombre, more realistic style in a nice touch suggesting that Garrone is in a more compassionate, humanist mood. The exterior of the apartment building looks stagy and brightly, cinematically lit, but when the camera enters each apartment, everything is a Lynchian green and mundane, even bleak. Public events, like a wedding, are opportunities for everyone to escape from reality, and as a performer it is here where Luciano excels, but in the end we all have to return to the everyday drudge. That Luciano, having caught a glimpse of fame and fortune, cannot settle back into his everyday routine is the main subject of Garrone’s film.

Luciano is an unusual character and the fact that he is likeable to entirely down to Arena’s fantastic performance and Garrone’s careful, sensitive handling of the film. It is very similar to Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, except for the key fact that Anna Magnani is obnoxious and irritating while Arena is thoroughly endearing and tragic. Luciano gives up his fish stand and more, all his long term prospects sold in pursuit of his five minutes. Garrone romanticizes Luciano’s hopes and dreams - Desplat’s brilliantly adaptable score recalling here the good times of Cinema Paradiso – managing so well that you end up hoping that Luciano gets the call even though you know that the show is awful and Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a former Big Brother contestant, is clearly having a tough time of it. At one point, we see Enzo suspended ridiculously from a wire, swinging above the dance floor in a nightclub, something that might be approaching caricature if it were not so grimly plausible. Even though we know that Big Brother is not ideal for Luciano, we nonetheless wish him luck because he wants it so much.

Hence, a very funny prank midway through the film is, in a way, infuriating – every disappointment takes a toll and every silver lining rekindles one’s hopes. This is beautifully expanded into a comment on that ultimate ‘hope’, the afterlife, when Luciano mistakes two mourners for Big Brother scouts. Raised on Hollywood films, just like Luciano (one can imagine), we are unwilling to come to terms with the possibility of failure, again, just like Luciano. Ultimately, the film is about everyone’s hopes and dreams – the comment on today being the fact that our dreams are often as shallow as reality TV fame.

However, despite the somewhat garish colour scheme and the skewed perspective, Reality is a deeply compassionate film which does not laugh at Luciano, instead sympathizing with him, since his ambition is such a long-shot. Even Enzo (Luciano’s future) is a tragic figure, hurriedly visiting two weddings almost at once, always working and always surrounded but nonetheless he does seem to genuinely help Luciano, taking photos with Luciano’s daughter and helping him get an audition even though he is already late. And though the film takes a darker turn during the final act, it never judges or mocks, delivering an ending that is graceful, kind and note-perfect.

Reality seems like a typical satiric look at our obsession with celebrity and there are moments when it is – when one auditioning hopeful is asked why she wants to be on Big Brother, her reply, “to be rich and famous”, is rewarded for being a rare sincere answer. However, Reality proves to be unexpectedly likeable and kind-hearted, an insight into a man who becomes obsessed with celebrity (he is briefly, horrifyingly glimpsed in a DIY diary room) which aims for universal truths rather than easy targets. Against expectation, it makes you care.

DVD REVIEW: City of Women (1980)

Federico Fellini was one of the best filmmakers in the world – particularly due to his ability to make purely cinematic films without plots and many of the other things that lesser film directors might fall back on. Fellini was not a storyteller but he was a filmmaker. Juliet of the Spirits and Fellini Satyricon are prime examples of films that succeed on visual and tonal inventiveness alone. Neither have stories. City of Women was one of his later films and while it does show a certain unevenness, it has enough of the old Fellini touches to make it entirely worthwhile.

Plot is a pointless word to use but as far as it goes City of Women is about a businessman, Snàporaz (Marcello Mastroianni, often used as Fellini’s filmic alter ego in his best work, including La Dolce Vita and 8½), who steps off a train and ends up caught up in a feminist convention. As Snàporaz wonders through this world dominated by women, his own relationship with women is interrogated and criticized. He is also frequently humiliated. Eventually, he will escape to the apparent idyll of Dr. Xavier Zuberkock (Ettore Manni), who is celebrating his ten thousandth conquest, until the feminists arrive and stop the party.

As with a lot of Fellini’s work, one has to look for meaning in the subtext rather than in the actual onscreen action. City of Women may reflect Fellini’s own ambivalence and bewilderment about the feminist movement that was gaining influence at the time. In the feminist convention sequence, the film is certainly mocking the women. They are hopelessly disorganised and discussions are likely to descend into a cacophony of propagandist sloganeering. Similarly, the sheer range of arguments lead to a slew of contradictions and in-fighting, all hilariously captured by Fellini’s freewheeling camera weaving through the carefully designed sets. These scenes angered many when the film was released, the film in general being regarded as misogynist. However, while Fellini does undoubtedly poke fun at the radicalism of some of the feminists, he is hardly complementary to men. Mastroianni is hilarious here as a lecher who wanders around with a dirty grin, pretending unconvincingly to be sympathetic to the feminist cause. When the women turn on him and thoroughly cut him down to size, the rest of the film becomes a chase as Snàporaz tries to escape from these vengeful women, who are justifiably tired of being treated like pieces of meat.

Like 8½ and Juliet of the Spirit, the resulting journey takes place much more logically inside Snàporaz’ head than outside of it. A lot of the rest of the film concerned itself with Snàporaz’, and Fellini’s by extension, attitudes to women. Zuberkock’s villa is decadent and sexist, but it remains Snàporaz’ dream house – it also recalls the harem sequence from 8½ or the orgy sequence from La Dolce Vita. Zuberkock’s gift to Snàporaz of two women for the night plays out first like a Hollywood musical with Snàporaz gleefully channelling Fred Astaire and moves into the bedroom. Here, however, it morphs to a nightmare for Snàporaz when, instead of two busty, mothering bikinied women, Snàporaz finds himself in bed with a sexually forceful and animalistic incarnation of his previously distant wife Elena (Anna Prucnal). He desperately avoids sex with her and then regresses into childhood via a portal under his bed and a slide – a beautifully orchestrated sequence in which Snàporaz revisits his sexual history through brightly lit windows (read rose-tinted spectacles). As a result, far from being a reactionary diatribe against feminism by an aging sexist, City of Women is a semi-biographical confession and critique of men and their positioning of women into either passive or nurturing roles.

Similarly, the film reflects back on Fellini’s own back catalogue with many scenes that refer back to his previous films, 8½ and Amarcord most frequently. It is open to interpretation if Fellini is inviting us to look back and consider how he represented women in his previous films. This adds a further layer to the film as one gets the impression of an artist reconsidering his legacy – remaking some best known sequences from his other films but with a further level of insight. As a result, City of Women, far from being one of Fellini’s least successful and significant films, is one of the key films in his oeuvre.

As fun and inventive as City of Women undoubtedly is, it is also overlong and some of the sequences just do not work – particularly Snàporaz’ encounter with some young women who drive around listening to techno and doing drugs. It’s a long sequence, which doesn’t really seem to have much to say. A two-hour cut would stand the film in good stead, but otherwise City of Women is a brilliantly made, beautifully lit interrogation of men’s attitudes to women. It might also be Fellini’s funniest films. City of Women is one of his most ramshackle films; yet, for this director, a hint of chaos is always a sign of great inventiveness. Fellini’s films have always worked thanks to their close proximity to disaster.

REVIEW: Cosmopolis (2012)

     

  As we have seen with David Cronenberg’s last great film, Crash, a world saturated with modernity and objectification (read shiny, metallic surfaces) is a world devoid of warmth and emotion. Where Crash works as a moody, almost-futuristic fantasy, Cosmopolis tries to be broader and, oddly, more recognisably down to earth.

  Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson, doing rather well despite being cast presumably only for marquee value) is a young billionaire who has everything he wants. He jumps into his cork-lined and impenetrable limousine and travels through the city in search of a haircut. On the way, he has one-on-one meeting with a variety of advisors, their talks becoming increasingly philosophical. He also meets his new wife Elise Shiffrin (Sarah Gadon) for a variety of meals, their relationship unconsummated and stalled. He also meets Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), a disgruntled ex-employee who is dedicated to killing Packer in order to give his life meaning.

  Like Cronenberg’s previous, A Dangerous Method, the film is primarily a talking piece. Cronenberg has lately become committed to the idea that film need not especially be a visual medium and that images of people talking are of equal import. The conversations in Cosmopolis are stilted and deeply intellectual, taken largely from Don DeLillo’s original 2003 novel – which now seems remarkably prescient in view of the subsequent economic collapse. The film contains a philosophical and economic critique of the modern world in which young billionaires have two elevators, which they choose between depending on their mood and everyone keeps an eye on the rises and falls in the stock market like more spiritually-minded people would keep an eye on tea leaves. The intellectual conversations range from the fascinating to the almost incomprehensible, delivered with a palpable coldness and near total insincerity. His theory coach, Vija Kinski (Samantha Morton) trains him on philosophical matters, pointing out that money has become so abstract that “it talks to itself”, and, hence, people are almost obsolete. She criticizes a society fascinated by wealth, but she does not seem to be bothered by it all that much, her intellectual talk becoming exactly that. That Packer might slowly be returning back to humanity is reflected in how he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with other peoples’ inane conversations.

  The film is about a world in crisis, on the brink of economic ruin but with no alternative and no place to go. Even the protesters are ineffectual with one particularly destructive and anarchic riot quickly cleaned up and forgotten. Even the famous André Petrescu (Mathieu Amalric, delivering one of the film’s few funny performances), an anarchist prankster, acts for his own camera crew, but does not have any valid point to make. The view of the world from inside Packer’s sound-proofed limousine seems faraway and unreachable, the life outside moving in a graceless silence as if it is all playing from a television on mute. If Packer is getting tired of his lot, the film makes clear that there is little else for him to do. Though unreachable, however, the world outside feels remarkably and horridly familiar as it clearly refers to the economic collapse and the Occupy movement, even to the notorious incidence of the self-immolation of the Vietnamese monks. Unlike Crash, it becomes increasingly clear that Cosmopolis is about our world and not necessarily some post-human future.

  The film is a hard film to like, ultimately because there are none of the typical pleasures associated with escapist cinema nor are there any clear-cut messages or arthouse gimmicks. Cosmopolis is a very esoteric and somewhat unique film, which is difficult to categorize and even harder to qualitatively appraise.

  However, the film does reach a fascinating and rather moving climax, with an extended conversation between Packer and the Mark Chapman-like Levin, introduced with Levin actually saying, “Let’s sit and philosophise together.” Silly as that may sound, the film develops into a conversation about finding meaning in one’s life and gaining the ability to feel again. Giamatti gives the film its sole believable and human performance, capturing with great honesty and subtlety a man who has nothing and who no longer knows himself. It all sounds very arch, but in the context of the rest of the film, coming as it does at the end, it works very well. The arthouse prerequisite ambiguous ending notwithstanding, Cosmopolis does develop into something much more thought-provoking and, surprisingly, moving, something more than the rest of this very strange and very cold film. It feels almost triumphant in a weird and incalculable way.

  Cosmopolis is practically impossible to like and it is far from entertaining, but it is a work that reminds us that film is a versatile medium, one that is expressive in more ways than we would probably want. Cosmopolis does not really tell us anything encouraging about our world, or ourselves but it is a film with courage behind its convictions and a near fearless rebuttal in a mainstream film culture that is becomes increasingly safe and unsurprising. Cosmopolis is ultimately a film that is hard to get out of your head after you have seen it, whether or not you are willing to engage with its ideas.

REVIEW: La Dolce Vita (1960)

  La Dolce Vita is arguably Federico Fellini’s best remembered work and his best hit. The film was the first arthouse film to appear in the US Box Office Top 10 during its release. Americans were awed by its taboo-breaking spectacle and by decadent Europe in general. A wave of lesser imitations followed and Fellini gained his reputation as one of the prominent voices of art cinema.

  When it came to plot, Fellini was a modernist, preferring a more abstract approach. Instead of a conventional narrative with a beginning, then a middle and then an ending, Fellini constructed an episodic structure which recalls poetry and the cubist paintings of Picasso. In other words, there is a story but not one that can be simply written down. Keeping it short, the film follows Marcello, a celebrity columnist, as he wanders around Rome, alternately attracted and repelled by the people he meets all living “la dolce vita”, or the “sweet life”.

  From its opening image of a statue of Jesus being flown into Rome by a helicopter, the themes are flying. Throughout the film’s long yet rewarding 167 minutes, we are introduced to a variety of lost people. Celebrities tired of the attention, bachelors always on the prowl and the paparazzi that follow them. We meet people confronted with Rome’s rich history who have no idea how to emulate the glories of the past and people clinging to a religion that is rapidly losing its power.

  La Dolce Vita is the very definition of the word zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. Its well-paced episodes uncover the attitudes and beliefs of Rome at the start of the Sixties. The myths and superstitions of the past are mere decoration to a Rome that is becoming increasingly secular. In the film, a miracle is just another excuse for another media circus and a priest hears a confession during a late-night party in which boredom leads to stripteases and orgies.

  Marcello Mastroianni is great as the columnist who strives to escape his cynical and decadent lifestyle, but who sees no alternative. The film is almost effortlessly stylish and plays best on a big screen. While portraying all the inadequacies of this lifestyle, the film also retains its vibrancy and energy

  However, while the film does have a lot to show and tell, it can’t help but feel over-stretched. Unfortunately, a zeitgeist film such as this can’t help but be almost hopelessly dated. Many of the scenes, so shocking when they first played, are now not much worse than the stories one sees after a cursory glance at any tabloid. The final image, as evocative an image of innocence lost as it may be, rings of preaching. It is that oddest of films, the entertaining, horrible and attractive work of a man who is repulsed by the world he has found himself in as well as being intrigued by its vigour and its joie de vivre. A deep film about a shallow world.