NZIFF 2021: Quo vadis, Aida? (2020)

The centrepiece film of my Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival last month — both halfway through the festival and halfway through the total number of films I saw — was this festival favourite of last year, finally making its way to NZ’s shores. It’s a tough watch certainly, but brilliantly made (seemingly a co-production between half of Europe from all the countries and production companies attached).

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It’s fair to say this isn’t a cheerful watch and if I’d paid much attention to the write-up I’d probably have known that going in. I have seen Grbavica, an earlier film by the same director, so I get the sense she makes films that engage with the modern history of her country — or at least that’s what gets international attention (since I see she also has a film called Love Island which I now want to watch, but that’s an aside) — but this one tackles the Srbrenica massacre head-on. That said, you don’t really need any historical context to become aware of just where this drama is heading, because much of it is carried in the intense, cold, hard stare of its title character, a Bosnian translator working for the UN (and played brilliantly by Jasna Đuričić). When the Serbs under Ratko Mladić (Boris Isaković) march into Srebrenica, displacing the Bosniak Muslim population, the UN take shelter of them and promise airstrikes in retaliation, but as seen here through the eyes of Aida, there is an increasing sense of desperation and futility amongst the (Dutch) UN officers in charge on the ground.

The film tracks all this without resorting to any sentimental metaphors or grandstanding, because it’s carried through the demeanour of Đuričić, as she scurries back and forth around the UN compound trying to secure the safety of her family and being pulled into making increasingly hollow and craven announcements on behalf of her bosses. Nobody ever really states what’s happening, but everyone knows it, and that’s really where the film is operating, on a sense of shared desperation and complicity in genocide, because there’s no political will to do anything else. Yet when the inevitable happens — and thankfully it’s never seen explicitly — it’s still a kick in the guts, whether or not it was ever really preventable. The film leaves us back in Bosnia years later, where everyone still knows everyone else, knows what they did, what side they were on. The film has a repeated motif of just looking into people’s eyes, and in every set we see here reflected back at us, the inevitability is etched.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Jasmila Žbanić; Cinematographer Christine A. Maier; Starring Jasna Đuričić Јасна Ђуричић, Izudin Bajrović, Boris Isaković Борис Исаковић, Johan Heldenbergh; Length 102 minutes.
Seen at Embassy, Wellington, Saturday 13 November 2021.

Colectiv (Collective, 2019)

Last week I started a themed week around new(ish) releases I saw in the cinema, but then halfway through the week I got distracted by a new job, and you know, where does all the time go? So I forgot to post for the last few days, meaning I’m going to pick up again this week, starting with a recent Oscar-nominated best documentary film from Romania.

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There are a few stories swirling around in this Romanian documentary, like the one it takes its name from, and where it effectively starts: the tragedy that saw the Colectiv nightclub burn down in Bucharest to great loss of life. However, this is probably of least interest to the film (we don’t learn why it happened, nor who was responsible, largely because I imagine the details are fairly banal, and there have been a number of cases of this kind of fire even in recent decades). That the fire led to the fall of the government is also covered in the opening text scrawl. No, this documentary swiftly becomes about why so many died in the aftermath of the fire, even with relatively minor burns compared to some who survived. It’s a story of government corruption around the building, management and supply of hospitals, and while a few individuals lose their jobs, it’s also fairly clear by the end that wider accountability is still to be delivered. After all, the party which was in power during the time of the fire, and whose corruption is at the heart of the allegations, was voted back into power within a year.

Where the early part of the film focuses on the journalistic investigations (by a sports daily, no less, such is the state of the country’s journalism), it later moves to focusing on the youthful new Minister of Health, whose behind-the-scenes efforts to deal with widespread corruption are quickly spun by the state media, and who you feel surprised is even trying to do good by the end, such are the forces arrayed against him. This is all captured by the filmmaker, who focuses on little details to draw out some of the ironies of the situations, contrasting it with a background story about one of the survivors of the fire trying to rebuild her life. It’s hard to respond to the film without a sigh of cynicism about politicians and corruption (it’s hardly the only country to have failed to levy accountability after a disastrous fire caused by lax health or building standards), but it’s heartening (a little bit) to see a few people who do still care about trying to change things, and that’s what I am trying to carry away from this film.

CREDITS
Director/Cinematographer Alexander Nanau; Writers Nanau and Antoaneta Opriș; Length 109 minutes.
Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 28 March 2021.

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

I took a break last week because I was on holiday (although didn’t end up leaving home), but this week I’ll be building up to my Global Cinema entry on Belgium (on Saturday). As a loose theme, then, I’m covering films with a Belgian production credit, though it turns out a lot of films with some Belgian financing aren’t particularly ‘Belgian’, whatever that might amount to. This one, for example, is an American film by a French director, also co-produced by partners from Belgium, Romania and Spain, so it spans plenty of countries, without really representing any of them exactly — except of course America, where it’s set. Still, it’s a way of looping in a lot of not very Belgian films into consideration this week.

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This Western crime comedy drama is directed by a French man with an enormous number of production deals (the first title card of the film, as it builds up all its production and co-production credits, is itself somewhat hilarious) and surely has a lot of money on-screen in what I assume is a faithful rendering of Oregon and California in the mid-19th century. However, it does strike rather an odd tone, a sort of laidback melancholia with bursts of violence and goriness that leads up to a dream-like ending, a story of two brothers (Reilly and Phoenix) who have a quest, even if that quest largely loops back to a consideration of their own family and the way they have been brought up. The acting is, as you might expect, very solid, with no notable let-downs, and Phoenix is a particular good fit to his character. Some of the digital photography seemed just a little on the ‘uncanny’ side, but maybe that was just me or the screening I was at. In any case, there’s plenty to like here, but it is at the very least meandering.

CREDITS
Director Jacques Audiard; Writers Audiard and Thomas Bidegain (based on the novel by Patrick deWitt); Cinematographer Benoît Debie; Starring John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed; Length 121 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Saturday 20 April 2019.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

It’s been quite the festival darling, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe one’s reaction to it really does depend on being in the right room filled with the right group of people reacting favourably. I mean, I hardly disliked Toni Erdmann (and even laughed at a number of sequences), but it doesn’t quite elicit from me the same rave reviews others have been giving it. Calling it a “comedy”, for a start, is a bit misleading, as like the other films by director Maren Ade I’ve seen (2009’s Everyone Else and 2003’s The Forest for the Trees) it’s essentially about a person profoundly failing to connect with other human beings, so there’s a pretty deep sense of pathos to it — but then, that wouldn’t be unusual for the comedy genre.

The title character is an alter ego of Winfried (Peter Simonischek), the father of corporate consultant Ines (Sandra Hüller), and the film’s centre of attention shifts between them, following him for the first section, then her, then him again. She has a client in Bucharest, and so, feeling like she needs some further direction in life, he arrives unannounced to visit her. He’s a practical joker, she’s a business woman, and that’s where the comedy really comes from: that sense of hyper-awareness about how his actions are being seen by her, and some of the biggest laughs come from the abject fear you can sense behind her eyes, though she remains outwardly composed for those around her. Yet for a film that sort of bases itself in the comedy of humiliation, and as someone for whom that humour (mostly found in the sitcom format) is among my least favourite things, it never feels quite as squirm-inducing as I worried it would become, and perhaps the length at which it allows its scenes to unfold help with that (it’s not a short film).

It touches on a lot of issues pertinent to the modern world, and sure, locating a malaise at the heart of corporate culture isn’t exactly startlingly new, but it does it very nicely all the same. The generational disconnect is explored winningly too. And even if it never quite struck me as a masterpiece (cf. also La La Land), I certainly enjoyed it and for all that the characters may have been bored at times (or rather, perhaps, filled with ennui), I never found it boring to watch.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Maren Ade; Cinematographer Patrick Orth; Starring Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek; Length 162 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Aldgate, London, Sunday 22 January 2017.

The Zero Theorem (2013)

Apologies for the intermission. I was away on holiday for the last week, and though I’d intended to put a few posts up, in the end I didn’t get around to it. Have sort of found myself spending rather more time proscratinating than writing, so I’m a bit behind. Just need to get back into the writing habit…

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There was a point, back when I started going to the movies, when a new film by Terry Gilliam was something that got people properly excited, and more to the point, got me quite excited. But that was the mid-1990s and a lot of time and projects (filmed and unfilmed) have passed through his career since then. Now, maybe it’s just because I’m not at university anymore that I’ve missed the frenetic and excited discussion about this new film, or maybe it’s that Gilliam’s peculiar vision is no longer aligned with the zeitgeist, but when a friend suggested going to see The Zero Theorem, I had to look up just what it was. So just to recap: it’s the new Terry Gilliam film.

Once it begins, though, there’s certainly no doubting the singular auterist vision at work here. The frenzied, stylised set design, bright colours, and repurposed junk aesthetic are all quintessential Gilliam. In many ways, this film visually recalls 12 Monkeys (1995) most of all, with its bald-headed holy fool protagonist (here Christoph Waltz where once it was Bruce Willis). His sleeping mask recalls that worn to travel through time in the earlier film, although the impenetrable bureaucracy brings to mind Brazil (1985) too, so it’s no surprise to see these films quoted in reviews. Even if this new film isn’t explicitly a sequel, it is intended to be grouped with them, from what I understand, and that makes sense.

Waltz’s Qohen Leth is a programmer of sorts, working a Kafkaesque desk job within a confounding hierarchy to achieve nothing particularly tangible. He is pestered by his boss Joby (David Thewlis) and catches glimpses of the chief, known as “Management” (Matt Damon). They want him to work on the titular theorem, a task which has been helpfully gamified with chunks of flying equations in a virtual reality world, and Management’s son Bob (Lucas Hedges) is drafted in to help. Leth is obsessed with taking a phonecall which seems to promise some hope to him of explaining that his life has some purpose, while the implication for solving the theorem is that it will prove the ultimate futility of life — though I concede too that I am easily confused.

There’s a whirl of colourful incident, at Leth’s work, at his home (a converted church), at parties and on the street, which chiefly serve to further Gilliam’s carnivalesque vision of life in the city (presumably London, though the film was made in Romania). The actors bounce around gamely, particularly Thewlis, an on-screen psychiatrist played by a daffy Tilda Swinton, and Mélanie Thierry as Bainsley, a sort-of-love-interest for Leth. There’s a slightly troubling undercurrent of objectification in Bainsley’s characterisation as essentially the prostitute with a heart of gold archetype, though of course the company Leth works for is called Mancom, and this is a deeply patriarchal world.

It’s undoubtedly all very exhausting to watch, though that’s very much in keeping with Gilliam’s filmography. There are some nice ideas somewhere in here, and the set design is as fabulously detailed and packed with all kinds of witty puns as ever, but it has the feeling of something a bit hurried and unstructured. In some ways the title hints at that: this is like an idea of a film more than something neatly finished off, but it’s at least good to see a film that has plenty of ideas, even if they don’t always seem to bear fruit.

CREDITS
Director Terry Gilliam; Writer Pat Rushin; Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini; Starring Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Thierry, David Thewlis, Lucas Hedges; Length 107 minutes.
Seen at Genesis, London, Monday 17 March 2014.