Introverted Sally Hurst has just moved in with her father Alex and his girlfriend Kim when she realizes that their sprawling estate holds its fair share of secrets. Ascending to the depths of the house, Sally gains access to a secret lower level that has lain undisturbed for nearly a century, when the original builder vanished without a trace.
Oct 212011
Oct 212011
Young lawyer Arthur Kipps travels to a remote village to organize a recently deceased client’s papers, where he encounters the ghost of a scorned woman set on vengeance.
Oct 212011
The day is May 6, 2007, France’s run-up to the presidential elections. As the French people are getting ready to go to the polls to elect their new president, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has shut himself away in his home. Though Sarkozy soon learns he has won the election, he is alone, gloomy and despondent.
Oct 202011
The image that springs to mind is of the young Mozart touring the royal courts of Europe and being feted by crowned heads. He was a prodigy, a celebrity, a star. The reality was not so splendid, and even less so for his sister, Nannerl, who was older by 4½ years and also highly gifted.
The family Mozart, headed by the ambitious impresario Leopold and cared for by his wife, traveled the frozen roads of the continent in carriages that jounced and rattled through long nights of broken sleep. Some royalty were happy to keep the Mozarts waiting impatiently for small payments. There was competition from other traveling prodigies — none remotely as gifted as Mozart, but how much did some audiences know about music? Toilet facilities were found in the shrubbery along the roads.
Still, theirs was largely a happy life, as shown in Rene Feret’s “Mozart’s Sister,” a lavishly photographed period biopic that contrasts the family’s struggle with the luxuries of its patrons. Papa Mozart (Marc Barbe) was a taskmaster but a doting father. Frau Mozart (Delphine Chuillot) was warm and stable. And this is crucial: Nannerl (Marie Feret) and Wolfgang (David Moreau) loved music. They lived and breathed it. They performed with delight. The great mystery of Mozart’s life (and now we must add his sister) is how such great music apparently came so easily. For them, music was not labor but play.
One understandably hesitates to say Nannerl was as gifted as her brother. We will never know. She played the violin beautifully, but was discouraged by her father because it was not “a woman’s instrument.” She composed, but was discouraged because that was not “woman’s work.” She found her family role at the harpsichord, as Wolfgang’s accompanist. The feminist point is clear to see, but Leopold was not punishing his daughter so much as adapting his family business to the solidly entrenched gender ideas of the time.
There’s a trenchant conversation late in the film between Nannerl and Princess Louise de France (Lisa Feret), the youngest child of Louis XV. From such different walks of life, they formed almost at first meeting a close, lifelong friendship, and shared a keen awareness of the way their choices were limited by being female.
A royal princess who was not close in line to the throne (she was the 10th child), Louise had two career choices: She could marry into royalty or give herself to the church. She entered a cloistered order, and it was her good fortune to accept its restrictions joyfully. “But think if we had been males!” she says to Nannerl. Each could have ruled in their different spheres of life.
Nannerl also has a close relationship with Louise’s brother, the Dauphin prince (Clovis Fouin), a young widower. It seems to have been chaste but caring. Nannerl was always required in the wings of her brother’s career, and after his death at only 35, she became the guardian of the music and the keeper of the flame. She found contentment in this role, but never self-realization.
The movie is an uncommonly knowledgeable portrait of the way musical gifts could lift people of ordinary backgrounds into high circles. We hear Papa in a letter complaining about the humiliations his family experienced by tight-fisted royals (they were kept waiting two weeks as one prince went out hunting). Leopold was a publicist, a promoter, a coach, a producer. It is possible that without him, Mozart’s genius might never have become known.
The film focuses most closely on Nannerl, a grave-eyed beauty, whose face speaks volumes. She aspires, she dreams, she hopes, but for the most part, she is obedient to the role society has assigned her. Marie Feret, the director’s daughter, is luminous in the role. Another daughter, Lisa, plays the princess, and Rene Feret himself turns up as a music master; does his family have a Mozartian dynamic?
David Moreau supplies a different Wolfgang than the one we remember so clearly by Tom Hulce in “Amadeus” (1984). He is younger, rounder-faced, more angelic, more childish. As he and his sister have a pillow fight, all of the mystique evaporates from the notion of being a “great composer.” Through some happy chance, the child and man who created such bountiful music in so many styles and fashions was motivated by sheer enjoyment of the gift he had been given. It is one of those lives that makes you wonder at the glory of men. Not so much at the opportunities of women.
Oct 202011
“The Hedgehog” is a feel-good movie that masquerades at first as a feel-bad. It’s narrated by Paloma, a precocious and almost infuriatingly self-assured 11-year-old, who plans to kill herself on her 12th birthday. This seems like a permanent solution to a trivial set of problems. Her complaints are common enough: Her mother talks to plants, her father is distracted by work, her sister is a snooty little snotnose, and her sister’s goldfish serves for Paloma as a metaphor for her own life lived in a bowl.
Paloma is the heroine ofThe Elegance of the Hedgehog, a French best-seller by Muriel Barbery. The hedgehog, as we know, is a creature that’s all bristles on the outside, and all cuddly on the inside. It is not Paloma who is the hedgehog in the film, but Madame Renee Michel (Josiane Balasko), the 54-year-old concierge of the Parisian apartment building where Paloma lives with her family. Madame Michel refers to herself as old and ugly, dresses in an almost aggressively dowdy fashion, and “doesn’t do anything with herself.”
At first, we fear the film will focus entirely on Paloma’s tiresome narcissism. Then a deus ex machina arrives in the form of Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa), who moves into an empty apartment. Mr. Ozu is an elegant Japanese man of around 60, and it should catch our attention that he happens to have the same surname as Yasujiro Ozu, that most civilized of Japanese directors.
We never learn very much about Mr. Ozu’s history. He arrives fully formed in the building, well dressed, quiet, his gray hair cut youthfully short. He overhears Madame Michel saying impatiently, “Happy families are all alike.” These are perhaps the most famous opening words of any novel, and Ozu supplies Tolstoy’s next line: “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Mr. Ozu is apparently the first person in some years to regard Madame Michel’s bristly exterior and realize she is warm and good beneath the surface; feeling rejected by society, she has retreated to a small room in her apartment with her cat and her beloved books, and lives a life of the imagination.
There’s little that happens in the building that Paloma doesn’t observe, and often she records it on a video camera. This will presumably produce a document to explain her complaints about her family, and in particular, her feelings about the goldfish and why she has departed this life. But now a strange thing happens. She begins to see Madame Michel transformed by the quiet courtesy of Mr. Ozu, and she learns, by inference, that she must have more respect for her own warm insides and not be so fond of her prickly exterior.
“The Hedgehog” isn’t one of those movies where the heroine is transformed by a beauty makeover. The actress Josiane Balasko is not a beautiful woman, although of course she would be attractive if she permitted her face to advertise a sunny personality. We get a hint of this in a single smile, so small, so astonishing. I won’t go into the details of the polite relationship between the concierge and her new gentleman, nor will I mention a crucial event later in the film. All of that has to be experienced in context.
“The Hedgehog” is just a little too neat for me. Paloma is affected, Mr. Ozu is perfect to an unlikely degree, Paloma’s family exists as comic types, and Madame Michel comes closest in the film to simple plausibility. Still, this a movie with such a light, stylish touch, it makes no claims to profundity and is a sweetly hopeful experience.
Oct 202011
“Circumstance” begins as the story of two teenage Iranian girls in love, and if it had continued to focus on the impossibility of their relationship in everyday modern Tehran, I think it would have been more successful. Unfortunately, it strays into unlikely melodrama and distracting eroticism. Still, it is a bold statement about the treatment of women in the modern Islamic state.
We meet Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), two high school girls who share a big crush. This they keep secret from their families: Atafeh’s, whose professional parents are conformist but not unkind, and Shireen’s, who is being raised by her uncle after her dissident parents ran afoul of the clerical authorities. They frequent clandestine stores with Western videos, attend secret parties, smoke, dance and steal away to their bedrooms to share fantasies of the freedom they could experience in nearby Dubai.
Unfortunately, these fantasies are visualized all too sensuously by writer-director Maryam Keshavarz, who uses light, color and music to suggest escapes that would have been more at home in an American lesbian romance. If the two teens had been more realistic, innocent and naive, I would have believed in them more.
Then, at about the halfway point, a miscalculation arrives in the form of Atafeh’s brother, Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai). Just returned from drug rehab, he is subjected to urine tests by their father, Firouz (Soheil Parsa), despite his protests that he is cured. So he seems to be, although his cure takes the form of an Islamist dogma that has turned him into much more of an extremist than anyone else in his family.
That this happened so quickly is a little unlikely. We sense something unwholesome about Mehran, who incredibly hides spy cameras in the family home to keep track of Atafeh and Shireen; his interest is more voyeuristic than liturgical. One senses here a half-realized ambition by the first-time filmmaker to emulate Hitchcockian motifs, but the film never organizes Mehran’s peculiarities to a particular purpose.
Firouz and wife Azar (Nasrin Pakkho) come across as reasonable parents, given their society, who want only a quick and safe marriage for their daughter. One day, Firouz takes the family to the beach, where he and Mehran go swimming, and he says to the women, “one day we can all go swimming.” The implication is that he regrets the prohibition of women in bathing suits, but observes it.
The strongest message for most Western audiences will be the way the subjugation of women saturates every aspect of this society, and clearly informs even Mehran’s kinkiness. Yes, but I wish Keshavarz had chosen a more low-key, everyday approach to two ordinary teenagers, and gone slowly on the lush eroticism and cinematic voyeurism.
Oct 202011
Vera Farmiga’s “Higher Ground” is the life story of a woman who grows into, and out of, Christianity. It values her at every stage of that process. It never says she is making the right or wrong decision, only that what she does seems necessary at the time she does it. In a world where believers and agnostics are polarized and hold simplified ideas about each other, it takes a step back and sees faith as a series of choices that should be freely made.
The woman’s name is Corinne. We see her as a child, a teenager around 20 and an adult around 40. As a child, she invites Jesus into her life in a conventional mainstream Protestant sort of way. Later, she is born again, with full immersion and all the rest of it, after she and her husband credit God for saving them and their child from tragedy. Later still, she finds her evangelical congregation enforcing uncomfortable conformity upon her.
I would like to say “Higher Ground,” which marks Farmiga’s directorial debut, never steps wrong in following this process, but it does. Sometimes it slips too easily into satire, but at least it’s nuanced satire based on true believers who are basically nice and good people. There are no heavy-handed portraits of holy rollers here, just people whose view of the world is narrow. There are also no outsize sinners, just some gentle singer-songwriters who are too fond of pot and whose lyrics are parades of cliches.
Corinne is played as a girl by McKenzie Turner, as an adult by Vera Farmiga and as a teenager by Farmiga’s sister, Taissa. At all of these stages in life, the character’s face reflects awareness and intelligence, along with an inbred independence that makes her a little reluctant to go along with the crowd. At the discussions held by her prayer group, we can see her drawing a line between those who are thoughtful and those who are passive conformists. Corinne reads widely. She thinks about the Scriptures. She has opinions. She doesn’t respond well when an older woman advises her that when she speaks out, it sounds too much like preaching. God forbid a woman should have an opinion.
Yet the preachers she comes into contact with are not bad men. The film carefully avoids stereotyping them. It’s just that as she grows older, her congregation becomes a group where the others feel more included than she can. They accept. Even the men consider male dominance a duty, not a pleasure.
Corinne has a best friend, Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk), she confides in. They share thoughts about sex and other things. (Farmiga might have been wise, however, to avoid the easy laugh when each woman draws her husband’s penis. There is a statement to be made, but there must be a more subtle way to make it.)
Unhappiness strikes the group. I will not supply details. I observe, however, that a person who suffers great misfortune is unlikely to be comforted by the assurance that God’s will has been done. (In the case of my own misfortune, I prefer to think that God’s will had nothing to do with it. People who tell me it did are singularly tactless.)
Ask yourself during the film where you think it takes place — which American state? I looked up the locations on IMDb and was surprised. Its location doesn’t fit regional stereotypes. Nor do its characters. These are decent people, trying to do the right thing, and Corinne is a decent person who believes she must decide on the right thing for herself. When others inform her what that is, why are they rarely eager to have her input?
Vera Farmiga is such a warm actress. I don’t know if she could play cruel. John Hawkes, who plays her alcoholic father, can play cruel — but not in a physically violent way. His is the kind of cruelty that shows a child her father is weak and pitiful, and doesn’t deserve her respect. Perhaps that’s how she began to doubt at an early age the paternalism of her social group.
We see the seeds of imagination growing through her reading. People in books sometimes do things we can understand because we have come to know those people. Non-readers are likely to think they know what people should do because — well, they just should, that’s all. You can read this in a book: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Oct 202011
Oliver Schmitz’s “Life, Above All” earns the tears it inspires. The film is about deep human emotions, evoked with sympathy and love. It takes place entirely within a South African township near Johannesburg, one with modest prosperity and well-tended homes. It centers on the 12-year-old Chanda, who takes on the responsibility of holding her family together after her baby sister dies.
As the film opens, Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka) visits an undertaker to examine the inexpensive coffins on display. This is a task no 12-year-old should ever have to endure. But her mother, Lillian (Lerato Mvelase), is immobilized by grief and illness and her father by drink. The next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tafa (Harriet Manamela), helps her care for two younger siblings.
Suspicion spreads in the neighborhood that the real cause of the family’s problems is AIDS, although the word itself isn’t said aloud until well into the film. Its absence forms a fearful echo chamber — reflecting South Africans’ own insistence, until recent years, of denying the reality of AIDS. A family linked to the disease by rumor or gossip is ostracized, which is why Mrs. Tafa facilitates Lillian’s “visit” to distant relatives.
Chanda does what she can to care for her siblings, attend school and keep up appearances. Her own good heart is demonstrated by her friendship with a schoolmate named Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), who is forced into prostitution to earn the funds for survival. It goes unspoken between them that this could lead to AIDS for Esther herself. The South African tragedy was that former president Thabo Mbeki persisted in puzzling denial about the causes and treatment of AIDS, so many who suffered and died of AIDS need not have. This contributed to a climate of ignorance and mystery surrounding the disease, which only increased its spread.
By directly dealing with the poisonous climate of rumor and gossip, the film takes a stand. But in nations where AIDS has been demystified, “Life, Above All” will play strongly as pure human drama, and of two women, one promptly and one belatedly, rising courageously to a challenge.
The performances by the two young girls are remarkable here. They have seen and internalized unspeakable experiences. Their faces are young, but their eyes are wise. Whenever I see such early performances by inexperienced actors, I wonder where they come from. No doubt director Oliver Schmitz had much to do with these portrayals. The casting process must have been crucial. But Manyaka and Makanyane have grave self-possession; they never even slightly overact. I met Khomotso Manyaka at Ebertfest 2011 and found her a cheerful, friendly teenager. Where did she find these resources? Where does any actor?
As for Harriet Manamela as Mrs. Tafa, she has a central role. This township is far from the poorest in South Africa. In the terms of that neighborhood, many households are middle class; Mrs. Tafa embodies authority. She is fiercely proud of her son, a star athlete. She shares the general taboos about AIDS, but she is a good person, kind, with sympathy that she sometimes keeps concealed.
There is a scene where fearful neighbors gather outside Chanda’s house, inflamed by their suspicions about her mother. Mrs. Tafa confronts them, surprising even herself, perhaps, by how she rises to the occasion. Schmitz’s camera placements here are confident and underline the drama.
The film’s ending is improbably upbeat: Magic realism, in a sense. It works as a deliverance. Dennis Foon’s screenplay is based on the novel Chanda’s Secrets by Canadian writer Allan Stratton. It is a parable with Biblical undertones, recalling Cry, the Beloved Country.
Oct 202011
Not often have I been more certain of the direction a movie is heading, or more wrong. “littlerock,” a sensitive indie feature by Mike Ott, plays fair. I was misled only by my own cynicism. I arrived at quick assumptions about the characters, and didn’t credit them for being young and aimless but not evil or violent. Within the terms of their relationships, they all come out fairly well — not happy, but not tragic, and they had some good times.
“Littlerock” is a town in the remote drylands of Los Angeles County. From the looks of its Fourth of July parade, it may be a nice place to live, but the characters we meet are all unemployed, living in poverty, spending their days drinking and smoking pot. When they offer to take a visitor biking around town, it’s not on motorbikes but child-sized bicycles that look like they’d had them since they were 8 or 9.
The two visitors are Atsuko and Rintaro, a sister and brother from Japan. Their rental car broke down as they were driving toward San Francisco. The brother (Rintaro Sawamoto) speaks a little English, the sister (Atsuko Okatsuka) none. They check into a motel and fall into the orbit of some kids about their age when they go to complain about the noise in the next room. They’re are friendly enough, offer them beers, share smokes and let them hang out.
One of the local boys is Cory (Cory Zacharia), who is pleasant to the attractive girl, but sort of slow, as if he’s smoked too much pot. Her brother looks on coolly. Where is this going? Atsuko is headed for trouble, right? Not at all. She doesn’t drink too much, she isn’t assaulted, and these layabouts don’t belong to a local chain saw gang.
Atsuko regards them with curiosity and, in the case of the attractive musician, Jordan (Brett L. Tinnes), guarded lust. She likes it here. Her brother, who seems older and certainly wiser, thinks they should stick to their original plans once the car is repaired. She wants to stay for a while. Rintaro argues there is nothing here for her: “They just sit around all day drinking.” He is correct. The actress Atsuko Okatsuka, who also co-wrote, has a cautious face where curiosity and emotions are at play.
He brother leaves her there for a few days. She has no idea what anybody is saying, which Jordan understands, but Cory persists in protesting: “You don’t know a word I’m saying!” What happens with her and these two boys you will discover. You also will get a vivid portrait of the clueless Cory, his dreams of artistic success, his difficulties with reading body language.
Much is still to happen, which I will not disclose. Let me say that we learn a great deal more about all of the characters, and we understand as Atsuko learns that only a chance of history has prevented her from growing up in America very much like these two. We also note that the locals are not racist toward the Japanese, although the pot dealer is vicious toward a Mexican. Later we can consider that there are shifting fashions in racism.
“Littlerock” tells a confident story that knows precisely where it’s going. Its characters all learn a little and grow a little and one of them cries a little. And this is how Atsuko and Rintaro spend their summer vacation.
Oct 202011
Here is a millionaire industrialist who has inherited control of the family company. Stanislas Graff is well-married and well-respected. He maintains a secret life with a love nest populated with mistresses who are no doubt well-paid. We meet him in mid-stride at the dawn of another day of playing a master of the universe.
Then Stanislas Graff is kidnapped. That wasn’t in the plan. It’s an efficient operation. Graff (Yvan Attal) is pulled from his car, blindfolded and held chained and captive in a cold, dark room of an abandoned factory, where he will never be found by accident. Enormous ransom demands are made.
Our sympathies are with him. Then the police start sniffing around rumors that he was a big loser in private poker games. The press finds out about the mistresses. Weeks pass. His wife (Anne Consigny) and daughters are humiliated by news of his infidelities. There isn’t nearly as much money in his bank account as they would have expected. The kidnappers grow impatient.
“Rapt,” written and directed by Lucas Belvaux, is based on a real-life case, but the industrialist could probably have been inspired by many men. I thought first of all of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. To be sure, all charges have been dropped against him, but his alleged behavior seemed consistent with his reputation, and aren’t many of us rather persuaded that something wrong happened in the hotel room? Berlusconi is another exhibit.
What lends “Rapt” its fascination is that it represents such a dramatic fall from grace for its hero. The kidnappers take his freedom, one of his fingers, the respect of his family, and his public facade, which he required as the leader of a big corporation. He finds in the end that he doesn’t require 10 fingers, or even nine, to count his real friends. Indeed, the kidnapper named “Le Marseillais” (Gerard Meylan) seems to see him more clearly as a human being than anyone else. A master of the corporate universe requires the acquiescence of the universe, or his power is built on sand.
What a harrowing performance this must have been for Yvan Attal. He begins the film as a powerful, sleek animal, becomes a haggard victim and ends as a pitiful case study. His success and prosperity was not necessary for a single person. His experience has demonstrated that his status was an illusion of smoke and mirrors. In a sense, he made himself an attractive target for kidnapping by pretending to be much more than he was.
We now know that DSK will not be the Socialist candidate for the French presidency. He may have still to discover other things he will never be.