"Ida" award for the best 2014 european film at the EFA in Riga...bof....

Yes, I know” IDA” is receiving sparkling reviews and awards.

But director Pawel Pawlikowski’s ode to his homeland is not only puerile, it’s also insensitive to Jews and Catholics.

But, boy, does his film look terrific!

It is shot in gorgeous black and white, and formatted in a 4:3 ratio that makes it look like it was filmed way back in 1962,

the year in which the story is set.

It also displays two amazing performances by Agata Kulesza and newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska. The latest - a fresh-faced teen who was discovered – shades of old Hollywood – in a Warsaw coffee shop.

Not only is she of a gaminesque beauty, she’s also an outstanding actress, which makes it all the more frustrating that the script by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz is shot full of holes.

In it, Trzebuchowska plays an 18-year-old novice nun one week before her final vows. Before that lifetime commitment, Mother Superior insists that the orphaned travels to Lodz to meet the communist aunt (Kulesza) she never knew she had.

 

There rests the first of the script’s many holes. Why would the monastery wait so long to tell Anna about her long-lost relative?

Yet, that might have been forgivable if the tale didn’t turn so ridiculous… beginning with Anna learning for the first time that she’s indeed Jewish and her real name is Ida Lebenstein.

Again, why would they keep that from her?

Neither does the road trip Anna/Ida takes with her Aunt Wanda to the family village, now occupied by the trashy clan that killed Anna/Ida’s parents during the Nazi occupation.

"What are you thinking about?”  nun Anna is asked toward the end of “Ida.”

“I’m not thinking,” she replies.

As far as the viewer is concerned, her mind may very well be empty. Because such is the dead interior life she’s given over the film’s 80 minutes. Asked to do little more than gaze with wide eyes at the world around her, Agata Trzebuchowska’s character is blank for most of the film. Only in the final scenes does she transform into something more than a passive observer.

But by then, it’s too little too late…

 

Along the way, the women pick up a handsome sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik), who turns out to be a dreamboat. And the way he plays Coltrane is just enough to persuade the virginal Anna/Ida to exchange her habits, for a passionate roll in the sheets.

Assuming Aunt Wanda, a Soviet judge by day, and a self-confessed “slut” by night, doesn’t get the guy first…

It only gets worse when the film enters an almost darkly comic third act.

There a person leaps out a window and Anna/Ida indulges in a night of sexual and substance-abusing debauchery, before strolling back to the convent.

Not only is it all silly, it doesn’t make a lick of sense in the context of the story.

 It’s as if Pawlikowski (director of the vastly superior “My Summer of Love”) decided to make stuff up as he went along.

When composing his shots, Pawlikowski has, though, the eye of a painter. He is constantly moving his characters, and the viewer’s eyes, around the edges of the frame.

He’s a top visual stylist who understands the virtues of letting scenes breathe. His long takes and distant framings offer the film a quiet, observational grace.

But cinema is (for most of us) a narrative medium.

We want stories, not visual art exhibits, with characters who think and feel and, in turn, make us think and feel.

The point he’s attempting to make via the two women is that one is oppressed by the Soviet regime, and the other by a religion that’s not even her birthright.

But it all feels uninvolving, stirring unintended giggles, instead of the tears he desperately seeks.

It’s such a waste,  because the look, the mood and the subject matter are worthy of so much more than “Ida” offers.

Which is sadly as dull and austere as life in the Soviet countries...

By giulia dobre

 

Eurasia, my party girl...

...

I am in Kazakstan.
In Almaty, not really the capital city.

As escaped from a shipwreck, a bunch of us, hanging on the rules, on the program.

Long day hours to write, interrupted by the cleaning lady's hoover and by a neighbouring master expecting soluble coffee, 5 times a day...

Sleepless nights for whatever reasons...

Lavish organized visits and traditional horse meat (and sausages), lunches, dinners, en cas...

Harsh bitter-sweet shared stories, looking straight in the eye of people I barely know,
who were with me as in a lifetime...

Sounds and sites that are so different...and that aren't...

oddly enough, I feel very much at home...

...among the 10 films in competition (or 12) at EURASIA,
of which I have already seen 9, there is my fellows' from the FEMIS' piece of work
that tantalizes my mind...

"Party Girl" ( France 2014, by Mari Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis)
speaks to a side of me
that I could,yes,  
I might be,
I was
in a previous life...
So I ultimately enter
in the Almaty cinema
and watch it again...

...and I saw a woman…
Filled with jewelry that shines and a wild hair bun…
...her name is Angélique,
she’s been a cabaret dancer for 30 years in Alsace and Lorraine.

She used to dance over her legs and ass.
One day, she has to stop.

She puts her clothes back on,
and does all bars,
drifts out in the night until daylight…
She has 4 kids with 4 different men…
One of them, gorgeous man and actor, leaves Paris for saving her.
She goes into rehab.
He writes a movie:
his mother will be its heroine.

Everything is false and everything is true in “Party Girl”.
There is the real family,
and the fiction of a documentary.

 
All the rest is written, acted, segmented
in a funny sort of deviancy
à la Cassavetes
and with a filthy twist
as in the films of Fassbinder…



Precisely as my devouring Almaty vibes...

giulia dobre

A new blasty greek film at the 20th SFF (Sarajevo): "A Blast"

A Blast – Sarajevo Film Festival

 

This is how life goes.

Syllas Tzoumerkas « A Blast »,

with its burning actuality,

should occupy the first pages in all news papers.

It is a film that pushes down the knife

in the open wound of the Greek “question”.

Syllas Tzoumerkas

belongs to those directors

whose work has been highly affected

by the current greek situation.

Four years after

his debut feature film Homeland
(Hora Proelefsis / ΧώραΠροέλευσης, 2010),

Tzoumerkas delivers this sophomore work,

that had its regional premiere

during the 20^th Sarajevo Film Festival

and participated in the Official Competition.

It tells the story of a family crisis

where public and personal affairs melt

in an existential mal de vivre

that becomes a tragedy.

 

Maria (Angeliki Papoulia) lives in Athens;

she is mother of three
and married to Yiannis (Vassilis Doganis)

who works abroad as a captain.

Dissatisfied, anxious,

desperate by the bankruptcy
of an entire country,
prostrated by the distance with her husband,

she will explode out of anger.

Tzoumerkas is using Maria’s character

in a highly symbolical role.

 She could incarnate

all those dreadful fragments

of everybody’s life

in the contemporary Greek reality.

As it is a common feeling

that literally
there is no safe place
around us anymore...

Family, who has always been considered

as the crest of stability and serenity,

is now dangerous

and the core of all true problems.

Nowadays the enemy who could destroy us
isn’t some foreign or exterior threat,

but someone close.

The economic crisis has only been

the spark

that inflamed those fragile relationships.

 And since no one can really

be close to anybody,

they could easily be burned.

Assisting the emotional derailing
of the protagonist,

the narrative structure proceeds

in a syncopated manner,

with time inversions

between the past and the present.

They are meant to destabilize the public,

In analogy with the films

of his preceding colleagues (Lanthimos, Avranas),

even “A Blast" uses the body

as a terminal

for frustration.

Their acts become a rebellion
beyond any convention.

 

Hence a film that plays

with Eros and Thanatos

in an unstoppable
and uninhibited
pan sexuality.

The scene where Maria watches porn

in an internet cafe,

surrounded by mail users,
is the sign of that
powerful individual approach
of life. 

And, as the director explained
at his Q and A in Sarajevo,

it remains the only form of defense

in front of the horror of the present.

This is not a film about the crisis,
but a film in crisis.

Courageously driven
to the scattering point.

Where all nerves are tense,

temperatures are elevated,

pressure is at its maximum.

Where there is no other way

than escaping it all.

And Maria announces it, finally serene,

in a monologue that will remain

among the unforgettable scenes
of this rather modest 20^th Sarajevo SFF.

There is to say also

that Tzmoumerkas films in a divine manner.

His solutions open up his images

to an endless meaning

that is never exhausted by what we see.

But they stay and dwell for a long time

in our souls…

“A Blast" is definitely

a punch in the stomach

that could help at

waking up the minds…

 

By giulia dobre