belleville baby (and defenceless me...)...

 

Presented in Panorama, chapter Dokumente, of the Berlinale 2013, Belleville Baby is a project of an outstanding originality. And disputable making.

 

It all starts with a phone call between the Swedish Director Mia Engberg and her ex french lover Vincent, grand amour of her youth. Vincent reappears after years of oblivion, having been jailed.

 

This is a stringent, fascinating reflexion on the fluidity and the fading of memory, that uncatchable, unseasable "thing", that not even the two lovers were sharing in an equal measure....The starting point of a long chain of memories for both of them. Memories that appear to have a different weight according to each subjectivity...

They are meant to rebuild an unforgettable and tormenting liaison, lived in the parisian quartier of Belleville, between a normal girl, aspiring to become a videomaker, and a young criminal, inloved but irremediable...

The only images that Mia kept are those of her lover shaving, as shot by her. We are not seeing much more of the footage because their conversations are on the telephone, with the voice of an actor and literrary quotations, and also very political statements. 

Those words are a leit-motiv for a fascinating visual and a very moving experiment halfway between video-installation and personal confession. Visuals blend footage shot on Super 8, Super 16 and cell-phone video in Paris and Stockholm, or simple photographs. 

They range from the center to the extreme banlieue of Paris, from frozen swedish lakes near Stockholm to the bright sea at Marseille, and the pic of an old parrent of the director saying of a lost love story from forgotten times...

 

 

Framed by Engberg's recounting of the myth of Orpheus, the dialogue track alternates between her diary-like voiceover and what seem to be telephone conversations...

It is rather acceptable, morally,  that an author tells such an intimate story (including names of the familly and so on), but by the end of the film this very autor elluded a total opening to the public when presenting the movie in person at the Berlinale...

 In reality, the true passion, or even the deep obsession of the director (and painfully of a few sensitive spectators) could be the concept of memory. In as such as her romanticized recollections attempt the possibility of rendering eternal, memories otherwise destined to diminish with the passing of time.... 

Dreamlike editing and Michel Wenzer's evocative score support the ambience.

This is a very personal and troubling film, built on constant subjectivity, telling of how one's self at each moment is affected by hidden memories and elusive inner layers... with echoes from Marguerite Duras and with wide reverberations into our own "vecu"...
 

Ames sensibles s'abstenir...

gd

 

 

 

 

A long distance call from a long lost lover makes her reminisce about their common past.
She remembers the spring when they met in Paris, the riots, the vespa and the cat named Baby.
A film about love, time and things that got lost along the way.

Directed and written by Mia Engberg
Produced by Tobias Janson
Music and dramaturgy: Michel Wenzer
Supervisor: Kalle Boman
Voice of Vincent: Olivier Desautel
First Assistant Director: Åsa Sandzén
Stills: Christian Demare
Sound design: Jan Alvermark
Sound mix: Jan Alvermark and Owe Svensson
Camera and editing: Mia Engberg
Additional Camera: Albin Biblom and Ewa Cederstam
Graphic Art: Jacob Frössén
Casting: Elsa Pharaon, Anne Agbadou-Masson, Catarina Ramstedt
Production Assistants: Jeroen Pool, Sophie Vukovic, Tim Dahlberg
Grading: Martin Steinberg
Online: Rickard Petersen
Conform and Mastering: Mattias Olsson
Super8 scanner: Nordisk Film Post Production
Made with support from: Swedish Film Institute, Tove Torbiörnsson, Suzanne Glansborg, MEDIA Plus Slate Funding, Konstnärsnämnden, Centre Culturel Suédois
In Co-production with: Sveriges Television, Ingemar Persson

James Franco does it again

 “Maladies” tries the spectator’s patience after just five minutes, and is best summed up in one word: wasteful.

It is wasteful of the talents of a fabulous cast, wasteful of an off-beat visual approach, and wasteful of our time.

It is even wasteful of a director whose instincts seem to lie more in the direction of classical, straightforward story he is at pains here to not give us.

Nope, this is a film that Comments On The Creative Process, and Refers To Itself As A Film and Makes Statements About Sexuality And Gender and Has Its Characters FIght With Their Real-Life Personas...So nope, this is nothing so old hat as a classically told story...

Which is not to say I am against the idea of filmmakers playing with the form or challenging norms...But only if the result is playful and/or challenging.

This is neither.

Ultimately it’s alienating and dull, in love with the idea of saying something deep and meaningful, but simply not having the necessary wisdom.

It’s a film born of director Carter’s  association with James Franco. So it’s easy to see how it appealed to the star, who never seems happier these days than when repackaging or reformatting his life and persona in the name of art.

Here he plays an ex-soap actor named James, and clips from Franco’s “General Hospital” are used for the soap-within-the-film.

Of course that appearance was itself approached as something of a "conceptual art project"…

So we reach the horizon of metatextuality and the universe deletes itself in a fizz of singularities and Higgs bosons…

 In fairness to Franco, however, he turns in a performance that is, by his standards, really quite committed.
It’s the difference between acting and representing...and since I am not sure I am so very interested anymore in what Franco stands for, I just wish he’d do more of the acting thing that he looks to be pretty good at.

But any small momentum is lost by the obsession of dividing the film into titled sections, each with a wise, opaque and enigmatic, would-be "deep" dialogue.

A chapter heading of “Everything needs to be made and everything needs to be made by someone” was bad enough, but by the time I was down to the off-repeated "At point A you are one person. At point B, you are another person. At point C, you are again transformed into yet another facet, angle, shard, area, zone," I basically wanted to punch the film in the face.

So while I may have been tempted to grade this up, due to some strong performances, that instinct is instantly cancelled by how annoyed I am that I wasn’t served better, and just how bored I was...

gd

THE ACT OF KILLING (noon chronicle aus berlinale)

Joshua Oppenheimer’s shattering documentary “The Act of Killing,” which screened here in Berlin, is truly one of the most intensely frightening, riveting films I've seen, maybe ever...

In Indonesia in 1965 a military coup occurred, after which a wide purge of “Communists” (real or imagined) was put into action.

The men who carried out the slaughter, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes by burning entire villages, have never been brought to justice for their crimes.

They number today among the more powerful elite, closely allied with Indonesia’s Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary organization with 3 million members, that controls everything from racketeering to smuggling to gambling .

They are also hired as security guards in supermarkets: these guys are everywhere...

Oppenheimer’s film focuses on a group of older men, death squad leaders during the exterminations of 1965-1966.  Soon one of them, Anwar Congo, emerges as the film’s main character.

Anwar, you see, estimated at one point by an observer to have killed maybe 1,000 people, wants to make a movie.

This movie will tell the "truth" of the communist purge, but will also have fancy elements of humor and romance, because otherwise, they all know, people won’t see it.

And they want people to see it.

Not because of the job it will do in excusing them of their crimes, or justifying their actions.

No, they want people to see just how sadistic they were; that their cruelty was far, far greater than that of the "Communists" they summarily executed.

 

They are proud of what they did, proud of their corruption.

 

It was at this early point in the film that my jaw dropped, and it remained on the floor throughout the entire rest of the 2-hours runtime.

At times the mythologizing and reminding becomes practically psychologically unwatchable!

 Paramilitaries sit around recounting tales of raping “delicious” 14 year olds, to the laughter and nostalgic of their peers.

The pretty interviewer on a Indonesian talk show, practiced and telegenic, interviews Anwar and co., and concludes to the camera with a bright smile “Yes, God really does hate Communists,” to daytime-TV applause.

What we get here is banal, of course, but it’s the joviality of evil that really kicks you in the face.

So we can call Oppenheimer a genius.

He inserts himself rarely into the film, maybe speaking only three or four times, though his subjects often talk to him directly, Joshua-this, Joshua-that.

But when Oppenheimer does talk, it’s with great effect (and in Indonesian).

The film ends with Anwar back on the concrete rooftop/execution site where earlier he cha-cha-chaed.

Now that it’s a little later, my heart rate has returned to normal. But the profound impression this film has made remains.

If only the word “mindblowing” wasn’t so regularly used, I’d use it here... my mind was blown, into a thousand tiny pieces.

"The Act Of Killing" presents a hidden holocaust and a moral apocalypse where the basic humanities have become twisted beyond recognition.

 “The Act of Killing” is a without a doubt a huge achievement in filmmaking, documentary, or anything else...

 

Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing" won an Ecumenical Award and an Audience Award at the Berlin film festival.

 

gd

Cast: Anwar Congo, Adi Zulkadry, Herman Koto, Jusuf Kalla

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

 
Production company: Final Cut for Real, Denmark
Producers: Joram ten Brink, Anne Köhncke, Michael Uwemedimo, Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, Anonymous
Executive producers: Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, André Singer, Torstein Grude, Bjarte Mørner Tveit, Joram ten Brink
Cast: Anwar Congo, Adi Zulkadry, Herman Koto, Jusuf Kalla
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Co-directors: Christine Cynn, Anonymous
Cinematographers: Carlos Arango de Montis, Lars Skree
Editors: Niels Pagh Andersen, Janus Billeskov Jansen, Mariko Montpetit, Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Ariadna Fatjó-Vilas Mestre
Music: Elin Øyen Vister, Karsten Fundal
Sales company: Cinephil, Tel Aviv
Rating TBC, 120 minutes

jeremy irons jumps on the night train to... tombouctou

 

 

Night Train to Lisbon

by Bille August

Raimund Gregorius (Jeremy Irons) is a man who doesn’t sleep. A man who lost the sparkle of life too. He is a teacher in Berne and totally devoted to his work. One day he saves a woman from jumping in the cold waters of the river. The woman vanishes but leaves behind a red coat, an old book by a Portuguese doctor, and a train ticket to Lisbon.  

The mystery of this book and a sparkle of irrational push Gregorius to travel to the Lisbon home of Adriana (Charlotte Rampling), who's Ken-doll-handsome brother, doctor Amadeu (Jack Huston, in flashbacks), was involved in undermining Salazar's regime with his best friend (August Diehl), until a smart beauty (Melanie Laurent) came between them.

Story of a book within a book, Night Train to Lisbon is German-Swiss-produced, spoken in English, an adaptation of Helvetian philosopher-author Pascal Mercier. The result, however, is an un-emotional movie that feels like a tedious filmed conference call.

But Jeremy Irons seemd to be quite optimistic about the fate of this film, which success, he assumed in our interview, will take the film crew on a "Train to Tombouctou" follow up...

 

Raimund Gregorius' loneliness and intellectualism are established by an early scene of him playing chess against himself... And this sets the tone of the entire film!

Irons is a watchable actor, but here he evoluates between a repressed guy in uggly glasses to ever so slightly less repressed guy in cooler glasses...

 

 

The project fails as the film evolves by insisting on the boring love triangle, rather than on the writer, or by insisiting on the phrases of the book as read by Irons...A book full of aphorisms that are maybe about the level of a 4 years old' "Book of Philosophy" that we might leave in the bathroom for our kid's next solitary confinements...

And as we cannot really grasp the mysterious force that pushed Gergorius to board that train, we, specators, feel as passengers of the wrong train.

It is a dellusion of which we cannot distance throughout the film...

Perhaps the writings themselves should have been left a mystery to the audience?...

Perhaps the Gregorius story could have been left out altogether?...

Perhaps Irons could have been given an insolent twist?...

One could only imagine how many ways there could have been to make this film a little more colorful, a little more lively and surprising.

 

Passeistic and entirely devoid of tension, the picture makes the Portuguese Resistance look about as dangerous as eating a pastel de nata.

 

Night Train to Lisbon tries to appropriate the Pascalian ideea that it is not the hunted deer that counts  but the hunt itself…

But Bille August’s attempt fails according to this same ideea, stuck in its banal rethorics as profound as a fairwell at the train station…

 

 

GD

"The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas" .

As part of my favorite unformal FORUM section of the 2013 Berlinale, the Greek Weird Wave entry was "The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas" .

It follows an aging morning talkshow host who stages his own kidnapping in order to pay off his debts and orchestrate an elaborate comeback.

Clearly a take on a country in crisis, as well as the way celebrity culture has replaced more traditional hero worship.

Without dialogue, the first10 minutes show Antonis (Christos Stergioglou), who's been a TV host since  1980s, being taken in a car trunk  to a remote luxury hotel that's closed during the winter season.

 Upon arrival, the driver and his charge unload tons of spaghetti -- a recurring visual motif -- in the kitchen before Antonis is left alone to settle in.

In a few droll, dry humorous scenes, the sad protag passes the time exploring the hotel. He is edicting his own version of a cooking program, where he tries to make molecular spaghetti; and doing karaoke by himself in the hotel disco on "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, who herself once stayed at the establishment.

But that song's credo isn't such a sure thing anymore, as the days start to drag on and Antonis has only himself for company as he bides his time.

There is a severe touch of madness at work here as he not only obsessively scans the celebrity magazines and evening news for articles about his "kidnapping" -- which, it turns out, he set up with his TV station's boss.

The irony is that a financially ruined and holed-up former star forces himself to relive a moment of past glory that already contained the seeds of his (and Greece's) doom.

If even a nation's heroes fall, what is there left for a country except for desperate acts such as Antonis'?

The final reels, which kick off with a delirious and technically impressive tracking shot a la "Goodfellas" through the hotel's now-full party hall and kitchen, suggest how far Antonis has gone off the rails.

Besides that Steadicam shot, the film is less aesthetically rigid than other recent Greek art films such as "Dogtooth," "Alps" and "Attenberg," though the 16mm lensing looks good, and the rest of the tech package is also solid.

Julio Iglesias' "Me olvide de vivir," which literally translates as "I Forgot to Live," is strategically used in a deliciously staged, entirely absurd number, suggesting the show must go on no matter what.

Camera (color, 16mm), Dionysis Efthimiopoulos; editor, Nikos Vavouris; music, Felizol; production designer, Pinelopi Valti; costume designer, Marli Aliferi; sound, Dimitris Kanellopoulos, Kostas Kouteelidakis; sound designer, Persefoni Miliou; assistant director, Katerina Barbatsalou. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Forum), Feb. 9, 2013. Running time: 93 MIN.