SLIFF 2014: The Major

Title: The Major

Country: Russia

Rating: 5.5

                Police commander Sergei Sobolev gets the call that his wife is in labor and rushes through the winter streets to the hospital weaving in and out of traffic. He spins out of control, both literally and figuratively, at a remote bus stop, killing a young boy in front of his mother. Horrified more by the legal consequences for himself than about the magnitude of the mother’s loss, he calls in his pals on the force and arranged to cover up the crime. The parents don’t take this sitting down and a fellow officer ends up dead in a tense police station standoff.

                [Spoiler paragraph] Sergei repents of his crime, rather tardily, after realizing that his partner, Pavel (played by the director Yuri Bykov, who gives the film’s standout performance), plans to kill the mother before she can testify against them. He becomes her unlikely rescuer as the two try to lay low until Internal Affairs can arrive. But Pavel won’t leave them alone, and gives Sergei a terrible choice: either the woman dies, or his wife does.

                The Major is a cop movie with a lot more on its mind than most. While a lot of cop movies deal with police corruption, few start with the hero being so unsympathetically corrupt himself. This makes Sergei rather fascinating, but it also makes his later conversion rather implausible, even inexplicable. The more the moral high ground shifted around, the more the story intrigued me, but the character’s psychology escaped me. A found the ending to be powerful, but strangely unconvincing.

                What The Major could probably use is a lot more talking and a lot less shouting. Characters express themselves in brooding silences and sudden outbursts rather than in conversations. Cop movies have taught me that this is just the way cops are, both in the US and apparently in Russia, but I could have used something more humanizing.

                I’m probably unfairly lukewarm about The Major because I saw the far more audacious ex-Soviet corruption expose drama The Tribe a few days earlier (review coming soon!), and by comparison the former is pretty tame and conventional. But still, there is some good material here and a willingness to tweak the established cop movie formulas in a meaningful way.

SLIFF 2014: Listening

Title: Listening (2014)

Country: US

Rating: 6

                What if you could read people’s minds? Would you want to? What if someone could read your mind… or plant thoughts into it? What would it mean for privacy NS free will? Would you trust people more or less?

                David and Ryan are graduate students working on a thought-to-text program. You attach a device to your skull and think clear, simple words and a software program matches the readings from your brain with a dictionary of recognized patterns. They are getting fairly promising results, but are broke, relying on stolen equipment and dealing with a lot of personal problems: Ryan’s dying grandmother, David’s limping marriage. Enter Jordan, a beautiful blonde with a neurochemistry degree, who turns the heads of both men in more ways than one and gives them the breakthrough they need. Realizing that no computer is powerful enough to process all the data going through a brain in realtime, they switch to the only thing that can: another brain. They will send thoughts, one-way only, from one mind to another. Technologically-assisted telepathy.

                But knowing each other’s thoughts has dangers of its own, and plenty of powerful forces are interested in their work for their own ends.

                In the days of Twilight Zone and Astounding magazine, sci-fi was all about good ideas. Thought experiments. Explorations into the unknown. Many of the best works took up an intriguing thread and kept us rapt while the author followed it through to its logical conclusions. Writers and readers alike didn’t worry much about style or character development. Listening kind of reminds me of that. Not that the writing, characters or filmcraft are bad, but an appreciation for low-budget constraints and a healthy suspension of disbelief will definitely help you enjoy the movie.

                First time director Khalil Sullins follows in the footsteps of Aronofsky’s Pi and Carruth’s Primer in terms of showing indie inventions going wrong, and he seems to have an ear for the language and eye for the laboratory life of scientists and engineers. The acting is rough around the edges, the villain pointlessly cliché and the thriller elements don’t do the sci-fi bits justice, but my biggest complaint is also a kind of compliment: the premise is so good I wish it’d been explored in even greater depth, especially the interpersonal friction of a tightknit group uncomfortably aware of each other’s resentments, fantasies, fears and desires.

SLIFF 2014: Human Capital

Title: Human Capital

Country: Italy

Score: 7

                Like other great Italian works I could name, this one starts with two families: The Bernachis and the Ossolas. Giovanni Bernachi is an obscenely wealthy financial funds manager and his wife Carla is a former actress trying to rescue a historically important theater. Dino Ossola runs a small real estate business and is comfortably middle-class, but with upward aspirations. His wife is a school counselor. Their kids, Massimilano and Serena, are dating. Dino and Giovanni start to play tennis regularly. On the strength of their inchoate friendship, perhaps overstated, Dino asks if he can buy into Giovanni’s fund, but the move proves disastrous. Meanwhile Serena and valedictorian near-miss Massimiliano drift apart, and she finds herself more interested in one of her mother’s cases, student-artist and self-described f*ck-up Luca. Somewhere in the middle of all this is a dead cyclist, driven off the road by an SUV owned by the Bernachis. Identifying the driver is the name of the game.

                The best thing about Human Capital is its Rashomon-style structure. We see the same time period through the eyes of first Dino, then Carla and finally Serena. The murder mystery element keeps the stakes high, but it is hardly necessary; the families themselves are such a tangled mess of personalities, psychoses and interactions that they hold our interest in their own right. Seeing their actions first and then learning their earlier motivations or later consequences is quite fun.

                Unfortunately, the large cast of characters and the need to cover the same ground multiple times is a mixed blessing, and too many of the central players don’t have time to be fully developed. Their roles are a little too prescribed (the rich jerk husband, the bored housewife, the gauche social climber, the rebellious teen) to feel completely real.

                Director Paolo Virzi ends his film on a strange note. On one hand he lets all his characters off the hook (which I have problems with) and on the other hand he gives us some white text on black background explaining what human capital means (which is way too heavy handed). I’m not sure the presumed theme, of how callous society has become when human lives and filthy lucre are weighed on the same scale, should have been the film’s marquee. This idea has been worked through in movies many times before and better. It’s especially sad because Human Capital has a much better theme going: the way we, rich or poor, get so caught up in our own problems that we remain blind to the problems of others.

SLIFF 2014: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Title: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Country: Iran

Rating: 8.5

                Have you ever been to the Iranian netherworld of Bad City? No? Well it’s awesome! Black and white, ultra-hip, throbbing with 80’s music and vintage cars. Of course, it is ravaged by plague, haunted by vampires and burdened by drugs, crime and male violence. But nowhere is perfect.

                I could talk to you about plot. There’s a young guy who appropriates a cat. And this cat gives a great performance! And the dude’s trying to pay off his dad’s debts, the legacy of an opium addiction. He meets a rich girl and something starts to spark, but he steals her earrings instead of her heart. The girl he falls for next is a bit more bohemian, and a vampire. They meet after he leaves a party high, dressed as Dracula, and asks her for directions. Every second of the scene is witty. Oh, and they have a prostitute friend in common. But not like that sounds.

                So yeah, the plot isn’t really the point. Director Ana Lily Amirpour is more interested in making individual shots and scenes work then in worrying about the big picture. That’s mostly fine with me. Especially since the shots, immaculately lit, crisply composed and tightly staged, are so incredibly good. That said, A Girl Walks Home isn’t exactly style-over-substance: the subtext here is frightfully loaded with delightfully weird feminist vibes and bristles with little daggers pointed at parental, patriarchal, political and religious authority. And even if I’m not really sure what anyone is thinking or why they do what they do, I like the mystery.

                This is a horror film for people who enjoy their chills moody, modish and a bit hard to pin down. It is destined for culthood.

SLIFF 2014: Elegy to Connie

Title: Elegy to Connie

Country: US

Score: 6.5

                In February of 2008 Charles Lee Thorton walked into Kirkwood City Hall and killed six people, including council member Connie Karr. Elegy to Connie is a grassroots, experimental animated documentary about the neighborhood, the shooter and most importantly, Connie, a hardworking down-to-earth public servant who brought people together and improved the city she loved.

                Elegy to Connie is up front about being an elegy, or even more accurately a tribute, which is both good and bad. It is filled with a genuine sense of love and loss for Connie (who ironically had many of Thorton’s issues at heart), a local crusader of the type that rarely gets the recognition they deserve. It also means that this is not an intimate character study or nuanced profile, but a reverential treatment of a private and public figure whose untimely death was a tragedy to friends, family and community.

                I couldn’t help wanting this film to be more though. It is so formally artistically bold (more on that in a second), and yet structurally and politically shy. The information on Kirkwood’s history is a good start, but feels light. The sections on Thorton and the shooting spree didn’t tell me any more than my memories of the news coverage. At a time when St. Louis is dealing with the Michael Brown shooting and having some hard-hitting debates on race, poverty, crime, zoning, city planning and corruption, it might be time for the kid gloves to come off. And yet, this film is likely in keeping with Connie Karr’s own style: a light touch backed by sincerity and conviction; an understanding instead of inflammatory approach.

                And now to the animation! This is where the film blew my mind. Director Sarah Paulsen, working with a very small team of assistants, has managed to present a sort of crash course of animation styles that writhes with creative energy and visual originality. Paper cutouts, photos, puzzle pieces, mosaics, stop-motion, traditional hand-drawn, wet paint on glass, etc., etc. This film literally brimming over with techniques, and fresh ways of seeing and yet they are blended together and united in tone such that the film never feels incoherent or disjointed. This is animation that is honestly more interesting than 90% of the multimillion dollar productions that come of big name studios and I hope Paulsen goes on to create much more of it!

SLIFF 2014: Diplomacy

Title: Diplomacy

Country: France/Germany

Score: 5.5

                August 24, 1944. Paris. Germany is losing the war. General Choltitz is planning to withdraw from the capitol. He has orders from Hitler to blow up the city’s great landmarks and grand bridges behind him, killing potentially a million or more in the resulting floods and leaving Paris’s cultural heritage in ruins. Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul, overhears the plans and sneaks into Choltitz’s hotel room to talk him out of it. What results is a verbal game of cat and mouse that will run through the night and into the next day.

                It a good setup, and the acting and much of the screenwriting work hard to do it justice. The art direction is strong, and the room where most of the film takes place is impeccably – one might even say too-impeccably – littered with historical artifacts. The problem is that the usually reliable director Volker Schlondorff falls into many of the pitfalls that so often plague both adaptations of history and of plays: he doesn’t have enough faith in the source material.

                The verbal sparring is the heart of the film and the focal point of everything Diplomacy does right: high-stakes tension pitched softly low-key, thoughtful debate ranging from the value of posterity to the balance of duty and morality, and a character study of world-weary but far from soulless men. And yet, presumably wanting to ‘open things up’ from its one room setting, these scenes are interrupted by a B-plot in which a message must be delivered to the demolition team. They, of course, regardless of the final order, behave senselessly so that there can be a little action and violence for the denouement that is both thematically and structurally out of place.

                Then too, the writing works much better as a showcase for the two central performances than as a truly deep think piece. In the first half of the film Choltitz’s appear to have only spurious unsatisfying motivations, hardly worth the defense he puts up. When he reveals in the second half that his family is being held hostage to enforce the order, it invalidates most of the previous argument (and one rather wonders why he didn’t bring it up first thing) and leads to a tedious debate about whether it is better to save your loved ones or faceless thousands. It’s a debate screenwriters love, but I do not.

SLIFF 2014: The Dark Valley

Title: The Dark Valley

Country: Austria

Score: 8

                Black-clad figures on horseback silhouetted against alpine snow. A taciturn stranger, calling himself Greider, arrives in a remote Austrian village that squirms restlessly under the thumbs of the six brutish Brenner boys. Greider is here, so it seems, to take some photographs. His camera, like a Winchester repeater that he stows in secret, is a novelty on this frozen fringe. But Greider’s real purpose, sealed away inside but almost oozing from his eyes, is revenge. Some men are going to die.

                The Dark Valley is a western that would drip with atmosphere if it wasn’t too cold for dripping. It has an immediate lived-in look and feel, albeit a time and place we wouldn’t want to live in, look at or touch. None of the timber is machine sawn. The dark, heavy and dirty clothes are hand-made and utilitarian. The snow isn’t fake; the actors (led by a mesmerizing Sam Riley) are clearly freezing their asses off.

This is a film of raw elements: water, wood, stone. Man, horse, gun. Even the characters are stripped to their essence, sans psychological complexity or explicit dialog. There are some florid touches in the edgy soundtrack and the arguably injudicious use of slow-motion, but mostly the film succeeds on its lean ferocity.

The first half of Dark Valley is a patient exercise in mounting tension. Then the tension is released, in an inevitably violent bloodbath. There is a scene where the villagers are sending fresh lumber down the mountain, after the first snow has caked the flumes with ice that has a palpable sense of cold and danger and death. The shotgun blasts and swinging fists of the climax, well-choreographed as they are, just don’t have the same subtlety. But another might just as easily feel the other way around. This is a film with a lot to like in it and a must-see for fans of revisionist westerns.