Film Atlas (Denmark): The Celebration

Country: Denmark

Title: The Celebration / Festen (1998)

Wealthy patriarch Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen is celebrating his 60^th birthday with his extended family at their sprawling hotel estate. Tension is already high among his grown children which include Michael, a volatile adulterous family man, Helene, a globetrotting career woman whose liberal attitude and black boyfriend bristles the stiff-necked guests, Christian, a troubled loner and Linda, his twin sister, recently dead by her own hand. At the big dinner that evening Christian shocks the gathering during a dramatic toast in which he reveals that Helge sexually abused him and Linda when they were children. His accusations fail to register for some and are treated as tasteless jokes by others. Even his sibling Michael responds with, in order, skepticism, anger and violence. But the façade of family mirth and cohesion is too rotten to survive the long-delayed blow and once it starts crumbling all the secrets, grudges and bigotries shake loose.

The Celebration was the first and, in all likelihood, the best of the Dogme 95 movement, a Danish-led return to naturalism whose manifesto advocated handheld camerawork  and a rejection of special effects, studio sets and lighting, post-production audio and the worn-out crutch of genre conventions. The film launched director Thomas Vinterberg onto the international stage, but he followed it up with a decade of critical failures while his coconspirator Lars von Trier (whose only Dogma 95 film is, ironically, one of his worst films) went on to enjoy a career of challenging, provocative breakthroughs. 15 years later, however, Vinterberg has happily returned to form with The Hunt, a film that revisits the theme of child abuse from a very different angle, this time following a teacher accused of an incident that didn’t happen, proving that he still has plenty to say. And while The Celebration has all the jolting outrage of an angry young filmmaker out to rewrite the rules, The Hunt takes a more mature and thoughtful approach, tapping a wider emotional register with an arguably lighter touch.

The film community later soured on Dogma 95, which set itself up for the inevitable backlash, but the raw talent that went into The Celebration still holds up. With all the brash energy and angry antiauthority of a newborn movement it’s hardly surprising that its proudly low-fi shot-on-digital aesthetic was a major influence on young filmmakers in Europe and the states. Vinterberg cleverly marries the grungy underlit cinematography to suitably dark material and presents the story in a faux-improvised manner that uses documentary intimacy as a way to get around our defenses and under our skin. All the same, the intention here, or at least the outcome, isn’t quite realism. Vinterberg’s moral indignationat the corruption within the sacred institution of the bourgeois family and the hypocrisies of ugly old-world conservatism has a gleeful edge of hysteria that threatens to overwhelm the mannered microcosm he’s concocted. Perhaps its OK that underneath the intense discomfort he stirs up he's either giving us the finger or winking at us impishly (it makes up for all the film’s glowering), or maybe it’s dangerously symptomatic of a today’s post-sincerity filmmaking where stylized individual cynicism is the weapon of choice against society’s impersonal cynicism. I’m not sure. Either way, The Celebration is interesting, vital and emotionally charged; a reliable recipe for heated discussions worth having with your friends and coworkers.

My Favorites:

The Word / Ordet

The Elements of Crime

Dancer in the Dark

Breaking the Waves

The Celebration

Dogville

The Hunt (2012)

Zentropa

Meloncholia

Terribly Happy
Gertrud
Pusher
Hunger (1966)
Brothers (2004)

Major Directors:

Susanne Bier, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Per Fly, Nicolas Winding Refn, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars Von Trier

Film Atlas (Czech Republic): Case for a Rookie Hangman

Country: Czech Republic

Title: Case for a Rookie Hangman (1969)

The opening credits announce that Case for a Rookie Hangman is adapted from Part 3 of Gulliver’s Travels (notably the least popular section) and admits that Jonathan Swift would’ve likely “turned over in his grave” had he seen the results, which bear only a passing resemblance.

Lemuel Gulliver is standing before a roadblock. He takes an unpaved detour and finds himself lost in a tranquil forest while his car drives on without him. With a misleading sense of familiarity, he comes upon a solitary decaying house littered with forgotten emblems of his childhood and catches a glimpse of Marketa, his first love, who drowned twenty years earlier. Reality gives way under Lemuel’s feet, and, after being gunned down by mysterious intruders, he plunges into Balnibarbi through a door in the floor. There a professor holds up a flashcard reading “I’m sorry, but this is not a dream,” and an eerie silence prevails. Lemuel is arrested by the rather ludicrous Academy of Inventors for possession of a watch he purloined from the corpse of a well-dressed rabbit (the first of many Alice in Wonderland references) and the next day he is used as a case study for a college class on interrogation. Later he’s called before the childlike governor and learns that Balnibarbi is beset by the flying kingdom of Laputa, which blots out the sun for long periods. He meets a succession of rather unhelpful characters, joins a dubious band of poet rebels, witnesses a water riot at some sort of refugee camp and has other adventures, but primarily busies himself with chasing the elusive Marketa. Her real identity is in constant flux and it doesn’t help that as whenever he makes any romantic progress he wakes up in a bed, naked, with another woman entirely.

As things come to a head, Lemuel is led to a circus-sponsored execution contraption but is reprieved by a special invitation to Laputa. There he receives a cold welcome until the ministers learn that he once visited Monte Carlo. It soon becomes clear that their king, absent now for 11 years, works there as a hotel porter at the Carlton. The city and its hapless staff have drifted aimlessly since his departure. When Lemuel returns below, he finds that the Balnibarbians are unreceptive to the news that their god-like Laputian masters are actually unaware of them and indifferent to their plight. The governor and the rebels resort to violence. Lemuel flees. He reunites with the village idiot, encountered earlier, and they move on to the lands beyond the roadblock. Lemuel notes that the rabbit’s watch is now running backwards. “Be happy,” the idiot tells him, “that it’s still ticking.”

Case for a Rookie Hangman is an exercise in surrealist dreamlogic that, at first glance, may seem totally impenetrable. The film has an episodic structure potholed with disorienting ellipses and impossible geographic transitions that threaten to shake us loose, but director Pavel Juracek leaves just enough breadcrumbs to keep the viewer on track. Often, though, the film feels more connected by implications, echoes and symbols than by conventional narrative so your mileage, and interpretations, may vary. That said, even at its most confusing it’s still a highly satisfying film. The tone is kept predominantly light and entertaining by the fanciful cinematography, sporadic sex appeal and absurdist humor (scientists eliminate November to reduce flu epidemics, bureaucrats carefully shred a mural so that each fragment can be precisely cataloged, a nut-cracking statesman plays ‘the floor is lava’ on newspaper islands) while the accrual of indirect hints and satirical jabs (targeted at censorship and silence, bureaucracy and mismanagement, coercion and collaboration) allow a more serious political undertone to peek through, enough so that Juracek was banned from Czech cinema for life. 

At the heart of the film’s fertile imagination and haunting imagery is Juracek’s talent for scouting out locations bound up in otherworldly enchantments and dressing baroque sets in dilapidation rife with lost history, but it wouldn’t have worked without cinematographer Jan Kalis’s unique combination of seductive nostalgia and noir menace. Case for a Rookie Hangman is a rare film, even within the context of the underappreciated Czech New Wave, but it has a unique, timeless brilliance.

My Favorites:

The Cremator
The Ear

Marketa Lazarova

Baron Prasil

Who Wants to Kill Jesse?

Case for a Rookie Hangman

Diamonds of the Night

The Fifth Horseman Is Fear

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Carriage to Vienna

Alice (1988)

Valley of the Bees

Daisies

Happy End (1966)

The Devil's Trap

Krakatit

Ikarie XB-1

All My Good Countrymen

Lemonade Joe

Tomorrow I Will Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea

Lunacy

Major Directors:

Jiri Barta, Vera Chytilova, Milos Forman, Jaromil Jires, Pavel Juracek, Oldritch Lipsky, Gustav Machaty, Jiri Menzel, Jan Nemec, Ivan Passer, Jan Svankmajer, Frantisek Vlacil, Vaclav Vorlicek

Film Atlas (Cyprus): Akamas

Country: Cyprus

Title: Akamas (2006)

After rudely insulting a teacher who is droning on about Cyprus’s status as a British colony, Turkish Muslim student Omer drops out of school and is sent to the Akamas peninsula to work as a shepherd for a Greek Christian family. He immediately takes a shine to their daughter, Rhodou. By the late 1950s Omer is stuck firmly in the friend zone, desperately longing for a chance to prove his heroism to Rhodou. An opportunity presents itself when he provides a hideout in the mountains to the EOKA (partisans fighting British rule, but typically opposed by Turkish Cypriots for seeking reunification with Greece). After accompanying the resistance cell on a mission in which they assassinate a traitor, Omer finds he is repelled by their violent methods. A rift forms between him and Rhodou, culminating in his discovery that Rhodou is having an affair with one of the EOKA leaders. Soon after, the rebel group is betrayed and Rhodou’s lover is killed. Although Omer is suspected, he is guiltless. More years pass and Omer and Rhodou put aside the past and their difference. The begin meeting in secret and fall passionately in love. However, their families and communities find out and reject the relationship, separating the couple. They endure, finally finding happiness in Omer’s hometown of Vasilia, but their lives become harder during the 1970s, as the tension between Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians turns to all-out war.

Akamas is an evenhanded history of three decades in Cyprus’s struggle for independence (successful) and unification (unsuccessful), couched in the form of a cross-cultural romance. I say evenhanded because when both sides declare the film as propaganda for their opponents and the government censors the finished product, odds are you’re actually pretty close to the middle ground. Director Chrysanthou shows both Greek and Turkish Cypriots as a mix of good and bad, reserving his condemnation for nationalist extremists of either faction and portraying their escalations as counterproductive at best, violently destructive at worse.

The film’s politics find natural parallels in the love story, including its central themes of forgiveness (Omer getting over Rhodou’s relationship with the EOKA member), compromise (both are willing to enter the other’s religion to allow a wedding) and serenity (Omer gives up his gun after a friend convinces him that violence will only play into the hands of his opponents). This is nontrivial stuff considering that, while most films pay lip service to these values, they predominantly focus on their more cinematic and presumably exciting opposites: revenge, unwavering convictions and violent aggression. This doesn’t make the heroes of Akamas weak (although I like that Chrysanthou is willing to risk that judgment), because they don’t lack for courage, determination or passion (e.g. several steamy scenes shot amid Cyprus’s inordinately photogenic geography including Avakas Gorge and a waterfall where Aphrodite was said to bathe), they just channel their efforts into romantic rather than patriotic pursuits. Not everyone, certainly not all Cypriots, would agree with that philosophy and the films ends on a mixed note as Omer and Rhodou come to accept their loneliness as exiles from both communities. Well, at least they have each other.

My Favorites:

Akamas

The Last Homecoming (2008)

Film Atlas (Cuba): The Death of a Bureaucrat

Country: Cuba

Title: The Death of a Bureaucrat / La muerte de un burócrata (1966)

“Whereas immediately following, you will begin the film…,” reads a typed standardize form containing, in laughably stiff legal jargon, the opening credits of Death of a Bureaucrat.  The film proper opens with a funeral for Paco, a sculptor and ‘proletariat hero’ who invented a machine for churning out busts of Cuban icon Jose Marti. So much was his work ethic admired that his family symbolically buries him with his work card, only to discover directly after that his widow needs it to apply for a pension. Paco’s nephew, our protagonist, must enter a nightmare labyrinth of bureaucracy to clear up the irregularity. Encountering endless technicalities that prevent him from exhuming the coffin, he resorts to an under-the-table arrangement with a trio of gravediggers, but once he recovers the necessary card runs into more paperwork trying to get the body reburied. 

All he needs is to get one more document stamped, but after waiting in line all day, the whistle blows and the worker on duty, his arm suspended in mid-air stamp in hand, grabs his coat and goes. Our hero stealthily stays behind to finish the job, but gets trapped in the office and has to sneak out on a ledge where he’s mistaken for a suicidal man (which isn’t far from the truth by this point). He eventually resorts to political pull, begging help from his powerful boss, Mr. Ramos, who runs a propaganda agency (think bulging biceps, capitalist octopi, etc.) currently designing a campaign touting the defeat of bureaucracy. Finally everything is in order, but the funeral director balks at burying a citizen already buried three days earlier. This is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The film ends with another funeral, this time for the death of a bureaucrat.

Not only a trenchant commentary on faceless bureaucracy and the petty men who hide behind it, Death of a Bureaucrat is also a darn funny film. Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba’s most famous director, attacks bureaucracy on multiple fronts and while his salvos may lack coordination, his shots are rarely off the mark. In the film’s centerpiece scene the nephew bounces around a cavernous gallery of numbered desks trying to obtain the proper paperwork. Each functionary displays his own brand of office-bred obstructionism, but my favorite is a near-silent routine in which a bureaucrat slowly searches for a pen and fastidiously tears a strip of paper along a straight edge. In the background we can hear a man with small feet trying to acquire a dispensation for children’s shoes and an armless man being chastised for failing to sign a form. These details emphasize the film’s class conscious heart, showing how exception cases (the poor, illiterate, handicapped or just different) fall through the cracks while the rich and powerful bypass all trouble by ‘exercising influence’.  We also see, of course, how large institutions are inevitably first in line to denounce waste, inefficiency and red tape without seeing the irony.

Alea is clearly in love with film history and his film abounds with explicit references. A funeral parade traffic accident becomes an escalating exchange of mutual destruction straight out of Laurel and Hardy. Dream sequences parody imagery from Bunuel and Bergman. At one point the nephew finds himself hanging by a clock hand like Harold Lloyd. All the aforementioned are thanked by name in the film’s dedication, but I think Alea’s original material, combining serious, morbid subject matter with slapstick and satire, works best. Death of a Bureaucrat has itself influenced other works, most notably Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’. Alea’s use of low framerate cutout animation (in a notable sequence that serves as Paco’s eulogy) and other manipulations like fast forwarding through a rambling list of procedures became hallmarks of Monty Python.

My Favorites:

I Am Cuba

Death of a Bureaucrat

Lucia

Major Directors:

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Film Atlas (Croatia): H-8

Country: Croatia

Film: H-8... (1958)

At 8:33 pm on April 14, 1957 along a stretch of highway between Zagreb and Belgrade a car driven by an unknown driver caused a wreck between a bus and a truck carrying sheet metal. 8 people were killed. The car shut off its lights so that no one could read its license plate beyond "H8..." and then drove off. Director Nikola Tanhofer takes this true life incident and begins in reportage style, giving us times, statistics, weather conditions and all the other known facts. We are told that the vehicles will crash. We are told how many people will die. We are even told which seats belong to the casualties. The only thing he holds back is who will be sitting in them. What follows is an extrapolation of the final two hours aboard the vehicles as we get to know the passengers, their pasts, personalities and plans. We learn to like some and not others. We find ourselves understanding, rooting for or wondering about them as the tension of knowing what hangs over them builds to an unbearable pitch.

Tanhofer plays a tricky, macabre and potentially tasteless game: he shows you most of his cards, tells you what's going to happen and then asks you to care for a large cast of characters despite knowing that some subset of them will be killed for no fault of their own. There are a lot of characters to develop and relatively little time for us to form opinions and emotional connections concerning them, and at the same time this has to be merely a typical bus ride without excessive drama, unmotivated seat-changing or misguided symbolism. Thankfully, and impressively, the acting, writing and directing all rise to the occasion. This is a fantastic example of efficiency, nuance and variety, with a knack for choosing which little moments to leave in and what long expositions can be cut out. Tanhofer never includes a flashback. Important elements from the past are implied or come up naturally through conversations, observations and interactions are also serving other purposes. The forward continuity also preserves the morbid tension, the sense of a implacable countdown that makes us lean in at every glimpse of a clock or mention of the time.

Crafting this suspense is undeniably exploitive, but Tanhofer actually cares for his characters and has more on his mind than just a genre exercise. The ending, a poetic montage of consequences and what-ifs, drives home the arbitrariness and cruelty of death. Tanhofer dedicates the film to the unknown driver, unharmed and unseen, almost as if he hopes his film will restore a conscience, a sense of responsibility, or at least guilt, to those who can cause death and then move on. H8 works superbly as a suspense film and ensemble piece, but it also strikes me as, on a deeper level, an anti-war movie, a troubling exploration of who dies and why and what does that mean.

My Favorites:

H-8

Don't Look Back My Son

Fine Dead Girls

Rondo

The Birch Tree / Breza

Major Directors:

Branko Bauer, Nikola Tanhofer

Film Atlas (Colombia): A Man of Principle

Country: Colombia

Title: A Man of Principle / Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1984)

A Man of Principle is set between 1946-1958, during the period of political attack and reprisal known as The Violence, during which more than 200,000 were killed. The title refers to Leon Maria Lozano, an unassuming conservative in the liberal-dominated town of Tulua, Colombia. Most of the town openly disdains him, but even-handed local matriarch Gertrude Potes, though a passionate liberal, gets Lozano a job at a cheese shop. After the death of liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan triggers rioting, Lozano steps up to defend the conservative-leaning church from a mob and finds himself an overnight hero. He capitalizes on his popularity to strengthen his connection with party leadership in Bogota and receives support, including money, weapons and protection. He sends his daughter to an expensive reform school to preempt her budding romance with a young liberal and begins to violently assert his control over the city.

Soon Lozano is known as The Condor, the most feared of the Colombian assassins known as Pajaros, or birds, willing to kill all who oppose them. Only Gertrude is spared, and though an old lady, she struggles bravely for peace. Liberals attempt to poison Leon Maria Lozano and as he receives the last rites a spontaneous carnival celebrates outside his window. But Lozano recovers, and the musicians from the festivities are found dead the next day. Eventually even the Condor loses control and the systematic killings give way to unbridled chaos, with torture, rape and wholesale massacres sweeping the countryside. When political power shifts back to the liberals, Lozano accepts a pension and goes into hiding, but he cannot escape his reoccurring nightmare: to die alone in the streets.

A Man of Principle is a curious biopic. It works as a chronicle of a notorious assassin, but without offering much in the way of psychological insight or polemic condemnation. We see, primarily, the way in which a ‘principled’ man, embittered by discrimination and disrespect, leverages the opportunities that come his way to solidify a power base. The fact that murder becomes his stock in trade is almost morally inconsequential to the outwardly plain and unremarkable Lozano; it is simply the most effective tool at his disposal. Unusual for a gangster saga, most of the violence is off-screen (Lozano himself rarely gets his hands dirty) with the focus, instead on the machinations, manipulations and intimidation. Lozano’s inevitable fall is portrayed less as a result of reach exceeding grasp than of letting the genie out of the bottle and not being able to put it back in. The film can be occasionally hard to follow; the abstruse political minutia and the rather too coolly detached directing require the viewer to connect a lot of the dots themselves, but for those interested in the legacy of pre-cartel Colombian crime or fans of history without histrionics, this is essential viewing.

For a less grim Colombian film try The Snail's Strategy, a comedy about tenants who find a creative way to avoid eviction, or a recent guilty-pleasure favorite, The Hidden Face, a sexy thriller whose twists and turns would've been spoiled if I'd written a review. (If you are interested, don't even watch the trailer!) Easily the best Colombian film I've seen is the recent Embrace of the Serpent. In fact, I may replace this review with one for that film.

My Favorites:

Embrace of the Serpent
Birds of Passage
The Hidden Face

Maria Full of Grace

A Man of Principle

The Snail's Strategy

Film Atlas (China): Raise the Red Lantern

Country: China

Title: Raise the Red Lantern / Da Hong Denglong Gaogao Gua (1991)

Raise the Red Lantern takes place during the 1930s, entirely within the compound of the wealthy Master Chen Zuoqian and follows the plight of the newly arrived Songlian (Gong Li), his latest concubine. Songlian was partway through a college education when her father died, leaving her with few options. She marries Chen, thirty years her senior, and moves into her own house within his walled estate. Red lanterns are lit at the house of the wife where Chen plans to sleep on a given night. The wife so favored, usually little more than a well-dressed prisoner, receives a modicum of power and influence, including the right to a special foot massage and the option to the set the menu. Songlian, now referred to as 4^th mistress, immediately clashes with 3^rd mistress, a former opera singer, and her own sullenly jealous servant Yan’er, who nurses an aspiration to be a concubine too. The elderly 1^st mistress, who is content with the old traditions, ignores her, but Songlian meets and develops an imprudent crush on her son, the flute-playing Feipu. Her only consolation comes from the “Buddha-faced” 2^nd mistress.

As the seasons of her first year turn over, Songlian finds it difficult to endure the stifling, empty life of a concubine and the relentless household intrigues. Outmaneuvered at every turn, she falls from favor and vents her anger by cruelly avenging herself on Yan’er. This last petty attempt to assert herself backfires, leaving her guilt-ridden. Chastened and depressed, Songlian celebrates her 20^th birthday by wallowing in wine and self-pity, but a slip of the tongue while drunk sets in motion a final disaster. The film’s ending mirrors the beginning: the household welcomes the arrivals of a 5^th mistress.

Raise the Red Lanterns is a film that works on a lot of levels: as a compelling narrative, an aesthetic spectacle, a historical snapshot, a feminist critique and a political statement. Its richness comes from the streamlined adaptation of author Su Tong’s book and Gong Li’s central performance, a delicate balancing act of suppressed emotions and sudden outbursts that reveal the psychological toll of concubine servitude without reducing her to mere ‘victim’ status. Though the loveless sexual duties are left off-screen, it can be little worse than the mistrust, jealousy and spite, the subtle but pervasive fear and the choking solitude and boredom that dominates the limited sphere of the mistresses’ lives. The risk of censorship means that the film is officially without agenda, but it’s no secret that it lends itself easily to comparisons with the dark side of China's recent history: the suffocating rigid hierarchy, the use of tradition as a form of control, the loss of both privacy and community in an environment where every friend can be an informer, the systemically encouraged competitiveness that directs aggression into in-fighting rather than rebellion.

But for all that the film is also a triumph of the visual arts. Acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s strict architectural compositions and ruler-straight angles, not to mention the absence of any exterior shots beyond the compound, enforce the shackled atmosphere, and yet all the while he's also seducing us. The meticulous art direction, from silks to shingles, plunges the viewer into luxury and elegance that is hard not to admire (though some critics have accused Zhang of pandering to foreign demand for Orientalism). Red, a color already deeply associated with both China and Zhang personally (see his debut film, Red Sorghum) takes on a spectrum of meanings too plentiful to analyze here, but its sheer visual impact in the hands of his cinematographer is reason enough to see the film.

Zhang Yimou is easily China’s best-known director abroad, introducing the world to the so-called Chinese Fifth Generation: the first wave of filmmakers to emerge following the Cultural Revolution (other members include Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang). However, since the turn-of-the-millennium The Sixth Generation, who tend to focus on gritty urban settings and contemporary issues like crime and globalization, have captured the spotlight. I considered Sixth Generation masterpieces like Jiang Wen’s ‘In the Heat of the Sun’ and ‘Devils on the Doorstep’ or any of several great films by the sly slow-cinema maverick Jia Zhangke for my review, but ultimately I came back to ‘Raise the Red Lanterns’. It is long overdue for a blu-ray release and a resurgence in popularity.

My Favorites:

Raise the Red Lantern

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Devil on the Doorstep
Black Coal, Thin Ice

Lust Caution

A Touch of Sin

Hero

The Goddess (1934)

Still Life (2006)

In the Heat of the Sun
Summer Palace

Farewell My Concubine

Red Sorghum

Suzhou River

The Story of Qiu Ju

Blind Shaft
City of Life and Death

The World (2004)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks
Hibiscus Town

Major Directors:

Chen Kaige, Jiang Wen, Jin Xie, Lou Ye, Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, Tian Zhuangzhuang