Marigold

Literary cinematic boredom on the Baltic with with a suspiciously small thought displacement.

A nice and impressive story that, however, has a contrived screenplay. In the high school scenes, Aldis Hodge comes across a bit like a goofball in a classroom comedy. The theme of systemic injustice is conceived in such a way that it only tangentially touches on racism in general terms. Despite the film’s overall formulaic nature, however, Brian is undoubtedly a charismatic and interesting character that actually works in this near hagiography of a victim of American justice.

Peter Berg made a film that captures the cruelty of high-school football, a sport in which adolescent players can tough the sky, reaching a level that they will never come close to again. Berg attempted to combine a character study with the narrative/filming style that we know from Michael Bay and his blockbusters. The restless, dynamic camerawork with changing perspectives, collages and ellipses halfway works, like the post-rock noodling of Explosions in the Sky, which seemed to belong to a slightly different film. The protagonists don’t hold onto the ball long enough for us to really get to know them, their stories are sketchy to the point of being formulaic and the film itself is not very well constructed dramatically. Some themes (for example, the racial tension between the Panthers and Cowboys) are utterly half-baked. With respect to the football scenes, however, it ranks among the best and most realistic, if only the linebackers and running backs didn’t have to fly through the air like Superman. There is something appealingly ’90s about Friday Night Lights, but as a drama, it doesn’t quite get into the red zone. And the end zone remains far out of reach.

It’s fine that Disney is keeping old dads in mind, even though the mouse lost his shirt on this film. No, it’s not Logan with a whip. Mangold made a safe, old-fashioned movie along familiar lines that is already a bit long in the tooth in the action scenes and, hand on heart, is reminiscent of a conversation with an old man who’s telling you the same old war story for the five hundredth time,  a sure sign of encroaching senility. The pace and gradation fall off after the fine first third and the film thus needs a defibrillator in the form of nostalgia, which fortunately comes so forcefully in the final minutes that the whip regains its crack. And no, I don’t mean that beautiful crisp metaphor of a person who lives from/in the past, but rather that tender scene of two people who are probably hurting all over. I can relate to that!

A cautious and selective Wikipedia entry that replaces psychologising with affected external “pictures from history”. Brothers is the most effective when it abandons its simple moral universe and focuses only on survival and determination, which perhaps best defines both Mašín the director and Mašín brothers in the film. It’s not as foggy as other Czech attempts to reflect on the bad old days of the 1950s, but it suffers from similar shortcomings in its characterisation of the period and the servants of the regime. Brothers too reverentially zigzags and hides behind what might be defined as “historical necessity” for it to really say something about the problematic issue of violent resistance and moral choices. Nevertheless, no one can deny that it offers solid directing, cinematography, editing and acting.

Scenes from National Socialist married life and a film whose concept is drawn so tight that it left me feeling oddly indifferent. The idea of transforming a death factory into a 2D backdrop, which Łukasz Żal’s camera literally pushes through the depth of field to the Hösses’ “garden of paradise” is suffocating and oppressive, but it also leads to a certain monotony and risks making the viewer get used to it just as the characters get used to the ubiquitous stench, screaming and moaning. The central couple cannot be humanised to a sufficient extent to form a psychological counterpoint to the horrors of the Holocaust, so I found that there was something mechanical in the Hösses’ routines that made it easier for me to disconnect from the urgency of Glazer’s world. The banality of evil is precisely and literally illustrated. I was reminded of Markus Schleinzer’s similarly conceived and distanced film Michael, which, however, started to be truly impressive at the moment when the character of the blasé paedophile rapist gets an adversary in the form of the victim in a powerful reverse shot. Glazer chooses a similar principle at the end, but in doing so, he breaks the fourth wall in a way that has more intellectual calculation than natural power. Was Höss aware of the moral implications of his actions or was he able to conceal them in the rhetoric of industrial production and historical necessity? This is where the possibilities of Glazer’s film reach their limit. In the ever-powerful deluge of “Holocaust porn”, The Zone of Interest is important for its differentness and its courage to change the perspective, to expose the viewer to the “cognitive dissonance” experienced by the direct perpetrators of evil. It is also an interesting reflection on the central ideological concept of Lebensraum, which in the portrayal of Frau Höss takes the form of a neat garden fertilised with the ashes of the dead. Nevertheless, I enjoy reflecting on the film from a distance significantly more than experiencing it directly on the screen. In that respect, I give preference to the concept of Son of Saul…and to reading the immensely monstrous The Kindly Ones, which went much deeper into the psyches of the architects of the Holocaust than The Zone of Interest.

A textbook example of good intentions, from which excessive formulaicness, hollow screenwriting and directorial/creative affectedness brought into being a perfect exploitation flick. The core situation and the web of moral trials are presented so spectacularly clumsily that the character of Wil comes across rather as an empty vessel going through model choices and dilemmas, by means of which the filmmakers demonstrate the complexity of the occupied nation’s situation. The protagonists is not consistent and is thus not believable, just as the director’s concept is not believable, as it unclearly veers between naturalism and exaggerated visual stylisation. The period and the characters thus seem to be nothing more than the delusions of an average screenwriter and their trajectory merely a puppet show put on by a mediocre director. Black Book from which someone has torn out all of the good chapters, Son of Saul deprived of all its disquieting energy. What remains is a shaky moral thriller whose urgency is made up of exclamation marks without meaning.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s greatest hits (coloured and expressively remixed). At its core, Poor Things is Dogtooth part II with the layout of an emancipation drama. Here we have a similar constellation – father-creator, who tries to protect a woman-child from the dangers of the world and foster in her a pure being, which makes him a god and a tyrant. Here we have a heroine who moves strangely, which reflects the twisted nature of the world and the attempt to free herself from conventions that others have imposed on her. Where Dogtooth ended, however, Poor Things begins. Bella and her journey of initiation through the world are reminiscent of a sexual and social bildungsroman with several stops along the way to discovering that her body belongs to her and her alone. This is a realisation that the heroes and heroines of Lanthimos’s previous films came to only painfully and with difficulty, usually ending in an embarrassing misunderstanding. The clumsy rebellion against convention, the arbitrariness of social rituals, the ego of men who try to remake women in their own image – in Poor Things, these Lanthimos trademarks are made more digestible because the film externalises them and caricatures them to an even greater extent. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sacrifice a certain amount of unpleasantness and the ability to put the viewer on the edge of their seat. I would place Bella and her escapades in schools instead of sex-education classes. Everything essential is there. Unfortunately, I only half believe Yorgos’s inner Zeman/Jeunet. I have always seen him as a brutalist and cinematographer Robbie Ryan as a realist. I find their pastel colouring books to be borderline kitschy – “attract with originality” recklessly overlaps with “make faces in every close-up”. Lanthimos’s originality has always consisted not in any spectacularly eccentric outward presentation, but in creating a picturesque initial situation, twisted realism and working with actors as if they were living marionettes. Of course, the actors are magnificent; I would point out the wonderful cameo by Hanna Schygulla in the role of an old woman who doesn’t shy away from talking about her sexuality. We can interpret Poor Things in various ways and probably every interpretation will have its own vague truth. Personally, I interpret the film as a metaphor for Lanthimos’s work, which began with warped and manipulative experiments on human material in an ugly laboratory and grew into comprehensible and mainstream catharsis in colourful settings. In my heart and soul, I will always have a greater affinity for his older, scarred dystopian freakshows about people dragged along by conventions than for his pathological fairy tales about poor wretches who have become masters of their own bodies and fate.

Toledano and Nakache are experienced hitmakers, so they know how to shoot a film with ease, how to help themselves with music and how to get actors to turn in performances that are easy to consume. Despite that, their new film comes across as dramaturgically clumsy, as it has problems with the characters’ basic motivations and the logic of their actions. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the film is a satire about the confusing present and its climatic and social anxieties. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t entirely clear where and at whom A Difficult Year is aimed. It’s a sort of standard comedy-sedative. Problems are used as backdrops and humour as an opportunity to avoid thinking about serious issues. Furthermore, that humour is largely superficial, completely lacking the polished, relaxed and apt humanism of The Specials and The Intouchables. Compared to those two films, A Difficult Year seems perfectly detached from reality. This is (being fully aware of the stereotypical nature of the statement) a lazy piece of work by French guys in their fifties who don’t want to think too much about what they are actually making. So they build a sort of safe space full of clichés and situations that don’t make sense in the end and lead only to a bland, midcult climax. The hypocrisy of consumerism is dumbly and arrogantly parodied by a work that is itself a perfect product of consumerism. And round and round we go.

A likable film with a likably unlikable protagonist driven by wounded ambition. The Promised Land blends a serious historical epic with some penny-dreadful twists that ultimately prevent the film from forcefully crowning Kahlen’s fate as an entirely tragic and self-destructive character. The Promised Land comes across as a film in search of itself on the heath. Fortunately, Arcel elevated his directing above that in the slightly TV-like A Royal Affair, Rasmus Videbæk beautifully captures the chiaroscuro and Mads Mikkelsen plays his unapproachable father character with his usual precision. The film wants to throw a powerful jab with its ending, but it winds up choosing a safer route that doesn’t offend, but it doesn’t satisfy either.