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.

The Turin Horse

2011 Director Béla Tarr

This film, in some ways, is the most extreme of Tarr's films and yet the simplest. Co-written, once again, by novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Turin Horse is a minimalist distillation of Tarr's cinema: little more than a man, a woman, a horse, a house, some wretched weather, and very few words. The narrative content is so slender that it's barely even an anecdote, yet the film has the disturbing resonance of some ancient imponderable fable.

It all begins in darkness, as a narrator intones the apocryphal tale of how Nietzsche went mad – supposedly after seeing a horse beaten in Turin. After this incident, the German philosopher lapsed forever more into silence. The punchline: "No one knows what happened to the horse".
Thereafter, it's as if the film – indeed, the whole world – turns to near-silence. The story is told with few words but strong images, shot in long, sinuously executed takes.

This is a film of uncertainties – and because there's nothing solid to grasp in the narrative, what we cling to is the texture of the film itself. We become attentive to the ritualistic repetition of actions, to the prowling camera moves that map out the contours of this enclosed but oddly elastic universe, and to the eerie sound design – along with Mihaly Vig's creaky, dirge-like score, a ghastly three-note refrain has been mixed eerily into the sound of the wind itself, not just hauntingly but fit to drive you mad.

Shot in ascetically beautiful black and white by Fred Kelemen, this could almost be a documentary about 19th-century peasant life at its most challenging. But there's a mysterious metaphysical resonance about The Turin Horse that makes for the enigmatic numinousness of a Kafka parable. This is cinema so spare and silent it's on the verge of being Trappist cinema – and that is eloquence indeed.

Rebellion

2011 Director Mathieu Kassovitz

This film is something of a comeback for Mathieu Kassovitz, an intelligent political drama, part thriller, part war movie, and informed by something of the anger against established authority that fuelled La Haine.

Rebellion is based with some fidelity on a 1990 memoir by Philippe Legorjus, a captain in the GIGN (Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale), an elite unit of the armed forces charged with counterterrorism and hostage negotiation who took part in the brutal repression of an insurrection by inhabitants in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. Legorjus, a man of probity torn between doing what is right and fulfilling his duty as a military man, is sensitively played by Kassovitz himself. Legorjus's book is called La morale et l'action, the film was released in France as L'ordre et la morale, and both titles are superior to the commonplace one under which it is being shown here.

At times Rebellion brings to mind Apocalypse Now (and, indeed, there are several references to Coppola's movie). It's an exciting, complex story about a government committed to realpolitik and convinced that national interest can justify any kind of sacrifice (including the truth) in order to retain influence. And it's about a man involved in a morally and politically complicated event that is ultimately beyond his control, but from which he doesn't believe he can escape. It's all the more interesting because the incident has been so rapidly forgotten, and indeed failed to become a cause celebre in its time.

Lemon Tree

2008 Director Eran Riklis

Based on a real story, "Lemon Tree" explores the painful human detail of life in a society warped from within and without by terrorism. It charts the plight of a Palestinian woman desperately trying to hang on to the lemon grove her family has tended for decades. As she tells us, she's suffered a lot in her life -- the loss of a husband, the absence of her children, the pain of loneliness and, as director Eran Riklis subtly suggests, the double disempowerment of being a Palestinian among Israelis, and a woman among Palestinians.

And now, with the Israeli defence minister moving in next door, she is about to lose her precious lemon grove, which thuggish security agents deem a potential hiding place for terrorists. Even the neglected wife of the minister, considers the order to chop down the trees arbitrary and unnecessary. But the two women live on opposite sides of the Green Line, in different worlds, and her sympathy from afar can do little to help.

Riklis has made a powerful film, but can a powerful film change anything about the fatalistic culture of powerlessness that is felt throughout Israel and the West Bank? Or does it merely clothe it in poetic garb, aestheticize it, render it as art, to be savoured as something deeply sad and tragic and beyond hope of repair? The irony of "Lemon Tree" is that what it achieves as film -- nuance, complexity, ambiguity -- only adds, in the end, to the sense that nothing can unravel this mess. That's a dangerous feeling to leave in your audience, when there are real lives and trees at stake.

The Apple

1998 Director Samira Makhmalbaf

Shot in 11 days, The Apple is everything a Hollywood film is not, and that’s a major compliment. This understated and poetic, yet refreshingly simple, exercise in filmmaking raises urgent and difficult questions, but refrains from giving us stereotypical and moralistic answers. Rather than making judgment calls, Samira Makhmalbaf challenges us to reflect on the contradictions emerging from the clash between traditional values and the ones propagated by a modern and civilized society.

In the near-iconic opening shot of Samira Makhmalbaf’s remarkable first feature, The Apple, a hand is reaching into the frame to water a dried-out plant. The futility of this simple act becomes evident as we see the life-bringing water miss the pot.  The hand performing this unavailing task belongs to Zahra, an 11 year-old girl who plays herself in this true-to-life film. The bars hindering Zahra from reaching the thirsty flower are the same ones that separate her from the outside world. For as long they can remember, she and her twin sister Massoumeh have been imprisoned in the family home by a righteous and protecting father.  In tying the fate of the flower to the condition of the twins, Samira Makhmalbaf manages to create a powerful and poetic metaphor for the condition of girls and women in an anachronistic Iranian society where archaic traditions can cause antagonism and modern-day tragedy.  In a central part of the film, the father is asked to justify his daughters’ captivity to a social worker. Defending his deed, the 65 year-old unemployed patriarch refers to a tattered copy of “Advice to Fathers.”  “My daughters are like flowers,” he says, “expose them to sun, and they will wither away.” Interpreting the “sun” to mean “boys”, the religious father, whose only ally is his blind wife, decides to isolate his beloved daughters in the name of dignity.  After learning about this real-life tragedy from Iranian television, the 17 year-old director Samira Makhmalbaf became interested in the fate and future of the twins. 

It is clear that the making of The Apple was a profound experience for both Zahra and Massoumeh -- a summary initiation into both the real and the reel world. As viewers, we are allowed to share in their joy of freedom and exploration, and in their enthusiastic appreciation of the small things in life. It is a rare gift to see something so authentic in such an artistic context.  I recently read that Samira’s younger sister has shot two short films. She is ten years old and will probably soon join the ranks of her sister and father. If Samira’s filmmaking is an indication of her sister’s talents, then the Iranian Film Revolution -- or is it Evolution? -- is set to continue.

Ikarie XB 1

1963 Director Jindrich Polák

This Czech film from 1963 – based on a book by Lem, and released in America in a dubbed and recut version as Voyage to the End of the Universe – is about a spacecraft, “a small cosmic town of 40 citizens”, setting forth to seek out life on the planets of the Alpha Centauri system 26,000 light years away. Boldly going where no man has been before – Soviet-style.

Which means taking the whole thing very seriously. There's little or no frivolity in Eastern Bloc SF. So instead of some nonsense about alien princesses, you get a thoughtful script that deals in a sophisticated way with the issues that would beset a crew in that situation. The trip will take 15 years, but because of time dilation it's only going to seem like about eighteen months for those on board. That's long enough though, and a large part of the film is given over to the boredom and petty annoyances of space flight. The dialogue is mostly the kind of ultra-civilised chitchat you would expect to hear at a science symposium, and the acting is of a quality that wouldn't be out of place in a classical drama. As for the trials which the crew face, don't expect any little green men in bubble helmets: the dangers come primarily from humanity's own past and from a bizarre new form of radiation which they encounter.

For anyone who has seen Tarkovsky's stately SF epics, all this is, in a way, only to be expected. What will come as a pleasant surprise, though, is how briskly director Jindrich Polak moves everything along. His elliptical approach to characterisation and use of brief, fragmented scenes is reminiscent of early Roman Polanski. The film is shot in immaculate widescreen black-and-white, and Polak takes advantage of spacious, well-finished sets to experiment with wide-angled lenses, handheld cameras and zooms. You can't help but suspect that the resulting look had a big influence on Kubrick, not just on 2001 but on the War Room scenes in Dr Strangelove.

Ikarie XB-1 is let down slightly by an episodic storyline and an abrupt ending, but otherwise it's an absolute treat, offering all the kitsch pleasures of vintage SF while still bearing up remarkably well to modern scrutiny. Anyone brave enough to check it out will be very glad they did.

The Wind will carry us

1999 Director Abbas Kiarostami

With a strange mission, a group of people from the city come to a small village in Iran. They are awaiting the death of a 100+ year old woman, while pretending to be communication engineers.

A subtle, deceptively simple and richly rewarding work of genius from Kiarostami, this film opens on a long shot of a car negotiating a dusty mountain road, with driver and passengers arguing about where they are. Once the car reaches the Kurdistan village of Siaf Dareh, the ambiguities and mysteries proliferate and interweave. Are the men in the village treasure-hunters, as they tell a boy, the telecom engineers as the villagers assume to be, or something more sinister? Why is their apparent leader curious about the boy's dying grandma? And why, when Tehran calls on his mobile and he needs to move to higher ground, does he always drive to the cemetery, where an invisible man sings from a hole in the ground?

This engrossing and beautiful film succeeds on many levels. As witty, almost absurdist comedy, it offers lovely visual and verbal gags. And as an ethnographic/philosophical study of the relationships between ancient and modern, rural and urban, devotion and directionlessness, it's intriguing and illuminating.