Life is Beautiful

1997 Director Roberto Benigni

This Italian heart-warmer is on course to become the most commercially successful foreign-language film of all time. It won three Oscars, including Best Foreign-Language Film and Actor. It will be adored by millions, and just as heartily loathed by others. Why? mainly because it is an attempt to find humour in the Holocaust.

In the first half of the picture, set in 1939 Tuscany, an impulsive romantic and would-be bookseller (played by the director, co-writer and Italy's favourite comedian, Roberto Benigni) learns to become a waiter in a grand hotel. He also woos Dora (played by Benigni's real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi), who's the beautiful schoolteacher fiancee of a local fascist. Although the background is of rising Italian nationalism, the atmosphere is sunny, carefree and about as realistic as an open-air production of The Marriage of Figaro.

Benigni's physical clowning recalls the heyday of Jacques Tati and verges on brilliance in such scenes as the one when he absent-mindedly carries a poodle on a tiny tray. He also has a verbal dexterity reminiscent of Danny Kaye, improvising his way out of emergencies with speeches of mounting outrageousness.
Unfortunately, his view of the ideal woman is reminiscent of Chaplin at his worst. Dora is a bland, bovine creation, whose role seems simply to gaze adoringly at Benigni and laugh at his jokes. The first half is likeable but very corny, ultra-romantic comedy, as Benigni strives to portray the Thirties as a cute, pastoral idyll.

Then the tone darkens. We are reminded that the waiter, now married to Dora and the owner of a bookshop, is Jewish. He tries to explain to his son (Giorgio Cantarini) who looks five or six, why Jews and dogs are not allowed in a local shop. It's a game, he says, in which shopkeepers arbitrarily exclude one sort of person or another. They must remember to put up a sign in their bookshop, saying No Visigoths And Spiders.

Is the father patronizing his son by telling him lies, or preserving his innocence? Either way, this is a foretaste of nastier things to come. Our hero is transported to a concentration camp with his son. The gentile mother bravely follows to another part of the camp, out of love for her family.

In the camp, the father continues his policy of preserving his son's faith in humanity at the same time as trying to save his life. Our hero learns that old men and children are the first to be taken to the gas chambers, so he teaches his son to hide and be stoical in the face of hunger and hardship. He pretends they are part of a game, the object of which is to earn enough points to become the winner of a tank.
Even in this darker second half, there are hilarious set-pieces, notably one where Benigni acts as interpreter to a German guard and explains the rules of his invented game to his son and a bewildered audience of fellow-inmates.

Some of the best moments that follow are echoes of The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin ridiculed fascism. Unfortunately, the worst moments reminded me of a justly forgotten Jerry Lewis comedy from 1972, The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown whose job was to entertain Jewish children on their way to the gas chambers.

I can well understand why anyone might be offended by Benigni's portrait of a concentration camp. The brutality, racism and hopelessness are all underplayed. The prisoners don't even look very underfed.

But it's all part of Benigni's grand design. He has to soften the realities of the concentration camp slightly, or there could be no laughter. Sophisticated audiences will realize that Benigni - like his hero - is playing an elaborate game with us. He is asking us to go along with him, and suspend our disbelief.

After all, it is incredible that Benigni's character could enlist his suffering colleagues into preserving the illusions of his small son. Equally far-fetched is the moment when Benigni nips into an empty office and serenades his wife through the camp's loudspeaker. It is meant to charm, but it's just plain silly. He may be an impulsive romantic, but would he endanger his own life and that of his son, to make such a grand but futile gesture? And why does his action have no repercussions?
Life Is Beautiful never sets out to be a realistic representation. As the voice-over makes clear from the outset, this is a fable. Yet the reality and the horror lurk all the time in the background, as when Benigni rounds a wall in the camp and comes across a pile of corpses.
The reason for the film's huge success is that it works marvellously as a romantic, comic allegory about the resilience of the human spirit, about how people use humour to save them from going mad in the face of horror.

Most of all, it is a moving portrayal of fatherly affection. It reminds us of a time when parents worked harder than they do today to preserve their children's innocence.
Benigni may take the idea of preserving that innocence to ludicrous extremes, but he does so with a purpose. He shows us an idealised portrait of parental selflessness. In doing so, he shows us something of value that has gone largely missing from our society.
Parts of Life Is Beautiful made me cringe, and some of its sentimental over-simplifications struck me as wilfully dishonest. Yet it is often funny, and - love it or hate it (I felt both emotions) - it is an extraordinary, if slightly barmy, achievement.

La Jetee

1962 Director Chris Marker

This film is one of those rare landmark films who's influence will recur for decades. It was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and draws quite heavily from the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The claustrophobic atmosphere brings to mind Orson Well's The Trial. A haunting score by Trevor Duncan completes this little gem.

Simply shot using black and white stills it weaves an hypnotic and disturbing tale of cause and effect in just 28 minutes. Set in a post apocalyptic Paris, its focus is on a man haunted by a childhood memory of a man being shot on the viewing platform at Orly airport. Because of the strong memory scientists use this to project him back in time where he befriends a woman. He is then projected into the future to obtain a power source that will be used to rebuild Paris. Upon return he works out that this knowledge will lead to his execution. Given the option of escape to the future he chooses the past to rejoin the woman with tragic consequences.

The whole film is narrated leaving little for interpretation. However, there is a small tell worth watching for. The whispered conversations between the scientists is in German and adds greatly to the underlying menace of the film. Sadly they are not subtitled. So if you understand German you will enjoy this more. This is a real gem and one that gets better with multiple viewings.

The Edge of Heaven

2007 Director Faith Akin

This film is about the tension between Germany and Turkey, to whom postwar West Germany opened its doors for "guest-worker" labourers, thereby getting an economic boost but creating for itself an unacknowledged quasi-imperial legacy of guilt and cultural division. And it is about the gulf between the first- and second-generation Turkish-Germans, conflicted about their identity and their relation with the old country, itself conflicted as it prepares to join the European Union.

At the movie's centre is Nejat , a second-generation Turk who has attained what might be the greatest distinction Germany has to offer: he is a university professor, lecturing on Goethe. His rascally old father, Ali, also in Germany, has offered cohabitation rights to the Turkish prostitute Yeter for whom he is a regular, and who is only too eager to escape the bullying Muslim activists who patrol the red-light district - but doesn't see Ali's yet unrevealed darker side.

Having established this fraught, tense family relationship, Akin spins the narrative thread off sideways to investigate the situation of Yeter's fugitive daughter  and her relationship with an idealist young German who between them are reviving the spirit of Baader-Meinhof for a new generation.

It is a glitteringly confident narrative pattern, gesturing at the globalised, historical forces that govern individual lives; in some ways it is like a very, very much better version of Alejandro González Iñárritu's mediocre film Babel - there is some similar business with a handgun - but not as schematic and superficial. The web of happenstance and dramatic reversals of fortune may teeter on the brink of unbelievability, but it is a measure of Akin's confidence as a storyteller that his world so plausibly enfolds us.

Room and a Half

2009 Director Andrei Khrzhanovsky

This touching and amusing movie is a biography, both imaginative and imaginary, of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), the self-taught poet, critic and translator, raised in Leningrad, the son of a Soviet naval photographer, and persecuted by the state for his independence of mind.

In 1972 he was driven into American exile where he achieved intellectual eminence, and he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987.

Brodsky never returned to Russia and apparently once said that "such a journey could only take place anonymously". Khrzhanovsky takes Brodsky on a journey back to Leningrad, dreaming about his youth, upbringing and early life as he takes the ferry from Helsinki to Leningrad before being reunited with his elderly parents.

The director uses animated sequences to elegant effect, and his affectionate, nostalgic movie brings to mind the autobiographical works of those other exiles, Vladimir Nabokov and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Three Monkeys

2008 Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan

At the beginning, Three Monkeys looks more like a slow-burning thriller than anything else. Servet  is a middle-aged politician who accidentally kills a pedestrian in his car, at night, on a remote country road. Panicking and fearing scandal with an election imminent, he flees the scene and later desperately persuades his long-standing driver to take the rap. Servet promises to keep paying his salary into his bank account while he endures the short spell in prison and to pay a lump sum in cash on release. Deeply troubled, but utterly dependent on his employer's goodwill, the driver agrees, and the swallowed humiliation of this shabby deal worsens the already troubled family environment he leaves behind. His wife is a beautiful woman, though hardened and careworn by money worries, and by a family tragedy yet to be disclosed to the audience; his son is a young man in his early 20s who is worrying his parents by flunking out at college and getting in with a rough crowd.

There are aspects of Three Monkeys that look very much like Ceylan's earlier films: he creates wonderful, painterly, yet unsentimental visions of the Istanbul waterfront, and the cinematography and colour-palette this time have a mannered, desaturated look. The passing of the summer and the imminent arrival of winter are important, and there are some domestic images that are something of a motif for this director: people sitting around watching television.

The humble family flat at the beginning of the film is to be the venue for a clever "reveal" from Ceylan, which I suspect other directors may wish to pinch: The wife is asleep on the couch late at night with the TV on; the son, who had promised to be home long before this, creeps in very quietly so as not to wake her and, in shadow, goes to his room. She awakes and is baffled by a drop of blood on the floor; she pulls open her son's bedroom door and she - and we - are shocked to learn that his secret is not merely that he is a dirty stopout; he has been very badly beaten up. It is only now that Ceylan shows us her face in closeup, and we see how beautiful, and how troubled, she is. It is a quietly stylish film-making coup.

The rigour and intensity of Three Monkeys is invigorating - it is nourishing in a way few other films are. And the moments of metaphysical revelation, the arrival of ghosts, are stunning. But I couldn't help feeling that Three Monkeys was an over-egged pudding, a film trying to be too many things in too many styles and moreover poised on the edge of implausibility: a certain murderous act, and subsequent cover-up, are left rather conveniently unexplained. Ceylan has certainly produced an ambitious movie. But this kind of intensely worked drama is a creative cul-de-sac.

The Sun in a Net

1962 Director Stefan Uher

Fuelled by a quirky jazz jive and recorder motif soundtrack, world class cinematography and a few interesting stylistic choices, 'The Sun in a Net' makes for intricate, sensual entertainment.

A film like no other, its soundtrack constantly overlaps narration, dialogue and (sometimes jarringly annoying) music while its camera seems distracted from them all. It's like when you're surrounded in a busy city but you can't remember where you're going; none of the numerous distractions actually guide you but they greatly inform the atmosphere.

In the same respect, the entire film blends two distinct styles into one - there's the 'Mean Streets' independent approach with all its actual cityscapes and cramped apartments housing its minimal worldview, but then there's also a level of arthouse aspirations as cameras pan up to empty skies, glide around mirrors and frame its cast with incredible awe.

There isn't much of a plot to speak of and reiterating the brief threads that hold the story together would miss the point - this is thematic. It's a film of ideas - loss, hope, yearning, sexuality, political challenges, dreams, family and more - and it hits its targets by mixing the ordinary and the extraordinary into something unique. 

'The Sun in a Net' is one of those rare films that is what you, the viewer, make it. If you're looking to sit down and be drip-fed entertainment and a story, you'll find its net to be empty. Other viewers may just catch the sun.

Boca do Lixo

2010 Director Flavio Frederico

Boca is a thrilling gangster film based on the real-life events depicted within the pages of the 1977 autobiography of the feared gangland overlord Hiroito Joanides de Moraes, freely adapted by Mariana Pamplona and director Flavio Frederico.

At the age of 21 Hiroito was accused of murdering his father, who was violently stabbed over 40 times with a razor. Hiroito was never charged, however two months after his father’s death, he bought two guns and moved to Boca do Lixo, becoming one of the regions most dangerous criminals.

The biggest problem with Boca is that it glosses over the surface of its storyline, failing to provide a proper insight into the man behind the madness. Hiroito spends the majority of the time on screen, and Oliveira’s performance suggests that he’s up to the task, but key sequences are rushed through, and Boca’s impact lessens with every fleeting glance. Hiroito’s story certainly has potential, and the filmmakers are keen to present him in a certain light, but the viewer is given very little insight into how he became the man he was. Key events take place at regular intervals but we’re just expected to go with it, there’s no rhyme or reason, just continuous forward motion.

Take the relationship he forms with Alaide (Hermila Guedes) as an example. In one scene he is encouraging the new girl on the block to work for him, and in the next he is asking for her hand in marriage. She smiles, job done. It’s hard to care about the characters without any kind of depth or emotional input. People come and go but none of them stick around long enough to make a lasting impression. Frederico spends too much time focusing on the action, whether it be regular sexual escapades or violent run-ins, and too little time developing the characters at the heart of the tale. It’s not like he doesn’t have time to delve deeper, but when a film comes in at just over ninety minutes, I find it hard to believe that anyone can do the full story justice.

Hands over the City

1963 Director Francesco Rosi

This was the beginning of a series of political dramas about crime, corruption and exploitation in Italy that occupied Rosi for a decade. Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City), took him back to his native Naples and a collaboration with an old friend, Raffaele La Capria.

Most films in this series (Salvatore Giuliano, The Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano, Christ Stopped at Eboli) centre on real-life characters. Hands over the City has a harsh, documentary look, but involves the conflict between two representative figures, both fictitious: the ruthless property developer Edoardo Nottola (Rod Steiger, whom Rosi had admired in Richard Wilson's Al Capone) and the outspoken communist Neapolitan senator De Vita (played by Carlo Fermariello, a real-life local politician, whose vital presence had impressed Rosi while he was researching the picture). Both are excellent.

The two men go head to head during a fudged inquiry into the collapse of a building under construction and an election in which Nottola's role in municipal corruption is a key issue. Rosi's art lies in his ability to draw us into heated debates in the legislative chamber, committee meetings and devious backstage political confrontations and make us understand and care about the outcome without resorting either to melodrama or oversimplification.

Hands over the City (the title is both a metaphor for corruption and a realistic account of the dramatic role of body language) won the Golden Lion at Venice. Like Salvatore Giuliano it is stunningly photographed by one of the great black-and-white cinematographers, Gianni Di Venanzo.

Mado

1976 Director Claude Sautet

In a corrupt, ruthless, dog-eat-dog world, are the bonds of friendship and loyalty more important and reliable than the fleeting connections of passion and romantic/erotic love? That is the rhetorical question posed in Claude Sautet's Mado, a clear-eyed, sombre, yet surprisingly sweet drama masquerading as a sort of noirish thriller.

The film recounts the misfortunes of Simon Léotard and his unique relationship with Mado, a prostitute whose services he avails himself of, who also acts as his buddy, moral conscience, and advisor in difficult times. Simon is a real estate developer whose business partner has committed suicide after having irretrievably indebted them to Lépidon, a corrupt competitor who means to undermine their enterprise by any means necessary. A toughened, world-weary old hand at the vicious games of the business world, Simon finds himself in real need of Mado and her loose group of idealistic, unemployed or wage-slaving acquaintances who can offer him ideas, knowledge, and aid as he manoeuvres to save his business and turn the tables on Lépidon.

 

Sautet is remarkably successful at smoothly shifting our attention away from the obligatory material aspirations and dealings of his characters and toward their human feelings, the responsibility they feel for one another. He ends the film not with any resolution or reassurance that our dreams and ambitions can work out, but with a gentle, empathetic sense of half-hopeful resignation. The characters cannot even come close to doing all they would really like to, for themselves or each other; but despite that disappointment, they will do what they can, and there is some small, unspoken glory in that.

Le Pont du Nord

1981 Director Jacques Rivette

This nearly lost film captures the visions and moods of a nearly lost Paris and of a mode of thought that was also on its way out.

It starts as a whimsical urban riff on the theme of chance connections: Marie, a toughened woman of a certain age, heads to Paris after getting out of prison and is joined by Baptiste (her real-life daughter), a long-limbed and fiercely determined dark angel who travels by scooter. Marie reunites with her boyfriend, Julien, a pathological gambler whose mysterious briefcase entangles him in big trouble that Baptiste decides to unravel.

The women’s poetic excursions through the ruins of industrial sites and Impressionist landscapes morph into a spy-versus-spy caper involving left-wing terrorist plots and government infiltration. The labyrinthine city of recondite romanticism and the bloody ideals of revolutionary heroism appear fated to vanish together, even as the chill of rational order reveals another shimmery layer of ingrained authority.

All that said in deference to experimental cinema; this is a truly awful film especially in post production. The sound is unedited which is jarring when going from cut to cut. There are numerous continuity errors. The plot is needlessly convoluted. The acting is hammed and over the top and the characters appear to have no motivation whatsoever. Unsurprisingly the ending is predictable and inconclusive. Really one to avoid.