Shouldn't this have its own thread?
I probably don't need to remind anyone that I've despised Von's films ever since "Breaking the Waves" (with the exception of "Dogville", which I quite liked much to my surprise), but even I must defend him. Variety sic'd big., bad Todd McCarthy on him, and that would be equivalent to asking ME to review one of his films. McCarthy's held a vendetta since his notorious "Dancer in the Dark" pan. It's really wasn't fair to assign him "Antichrist"... not fair to Von, and not fair to McCarthy. But, for shits and giggles, here's the review.
Antichrist
(Denmark-Germany-France-Sweden-Italy-Poland)
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist." As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images that might have impressed even Hieronymus Bosch, as the director pursues personal demons of sexual, religious and esoteric bodily harm, as well as feelings about women that must be a comfort to those closest to him. Traveling deep into NC-17 territory, this may prove a great date movie for pain-is-pleasure couples. Otherwise, most of the director's usual fans will find this outing risible, off-putting or both -- derisive hoots were much in evidence during and after the Cannes press screening -- while the artiness quotient is far too high for mainstream-gore groupies.
Admittedly made in the wake of a severe depression two years ago that left the director wondering if he'd ever be able to shoot another film, "Antichrist" starts with a stunning rendition of a tragic domestic occurrence. To the accompaniment of a Handel vocal piece on the soundtrack, gorgeous slow-motion black-and-white widescreen images record how a toddler falls to his death from a high apartment window on a snowy day while his oblivious parents make love nearby. Mindful to warn viewers that they can never know what they're going to see in a von Trier film, the helmer obliges by sticking one hardcore insert shot in this sequence.
Dividing the narrative into four chapters bracketed by the prologue and an epilogue, the helmer switches to color as the mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg)leaves more than a month's hospitalization and enters into the care of her husband (Willem Dafoe), a professional therapist. In one of her quieter moments in this chapter, entitled "Grief," the woman triggers a calm argument, accusing her mate of indifference over their son's death, even as she assumes responsibility for it. So capably does the man seem to guide his wife through her trauma that the line becomes blurred as to whether he's functioning more as husband or therapist, as he semi-jokes, "Never screw your therapist," when she gets frisky.
After the woman is pushed to confess that she's most afraid of their property deep in the forest -- where the she spent part of the previous summer alone with her son -- that's where hubby take her. This chapter on "Pain" actually charts the woman's self-proclaimed recovery, but ends unpromisingly with a disemboweled fox rising out of the ferns to announce, "Chaos Reigns."
The ante is upped, and a climax of sorts is achieved, in "Despair," reassuringly subtitled "Gynocide," and if one is uncertain as to what the latter means, rest certain von Trier will graphically illustrate it. Suffice to say the woman's mental health takes a turn for the worse, she vividly pleasures her man in a conspicuously unwelcome manner and then, apparently inspired by images of medieval torture inflicted upon women, finds a way to impale him that Hollywood's leading torture-porn experts will kick themselves over not having dreamed up first.
But the woman generously saves the most gruesome, preferably unwatched act for herself in the final chapter, the title of which, "The Three Beggars," provides no revelations worth waiting for.
Offering the opposite of hope for anyone aspiring to recover from grief through therapy, analytical or experiential, and perhaps distantly inspired by the marital battles in Strindberg, "Antichrist" does not even raise the possibility of healing through religion, leaving the title to seem rather arbitrary and more than a little pretentious. Moreover, the blood-smeared sensationalism smothers what serious thoughts the script serves up in passing, just as the sexual interludes detract from the film by playing peek-a-boo and making you try to figure out what's real and/or how it was faked.
Looking very good, Dafoe maintains his dignity most of the way with a performance of seriousness and tact, while Gainsbourg veers between sullenness and extreme histrionics. Only people to appear in the film aside from the lead actors are the little boy and some extras near the beginning and at the end.
Pic's strong physical values include ace lensing by Anthony Dod Mantle in two styles, the shimmering monochrome of the bookends and the more rugged, often hand-held work in the cabin and on the densely green mountain locations; although the film was shot in Germany, the nominal Seattle-area setting is suggested by internal evidence.
End credits dedication to the late Andrei Tarkovsky was greeted by laughs and catcalls in Cannes.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242614588
Cannes 2009
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MORE FROM WELLS
Reuters' Mike Collett-White reports that Danish director Lars von Trier "elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama Antichrist at the Cannes Film Festival.
"The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival, which ends on 5.24.
"Cannes' notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening's viewing was unusually demonstrative. Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.
"Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to Von Trier's decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end."
...AND MORIBUND ROGER EBERT
For even now already is it in the world
By Roger Ebert
There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, could be heard singing "That's Entertainment!"
Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen.
If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now.
(YEAH, HE'S NOT JOKING. NOT SO MUCH SPOILERS AS A PLOT DESCRIPTION FOR SOMETHING THAT WILL PROBABLY NOT BE SEEN IN THIS COUNTRY BUT IS SHOCKING ENOUGH TO FEEL LIKE SPOILERS)
The film involves a couple, He and She, whose infant child falls out a window and smashes to the pavement while they are making explicit love. They feel devastating grief. He, a psychologist, takes She off psychotropic medications, and they go to live in their secluded hideaway in the forest, a cottage named Eden.
He subjects her to probing questions and the discussion of the Meaning of it All, which must affect her like a needle to an inflamed tooth. Oh, He is quite intelligent and insightful, and brings passive aggression to a brutally intimate level. Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she used a large woodscrew to drill a hole through his keg and bolt a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive.
What does this metaphor (with a Prologue, an Epilogue and Four Chapters) mean? The dinner conversations all over town must not have been appetizing. Some read it this way: Perhaps the world began with man evil instead of good, guilty instead of innocent. That the Garden of Eden was visited by the Antichrist, not the Lord. That man's Original Sin was not eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but not vomiting forth knowledge and purging himself.
All for this will be discussed at great length. What can be said is that von Trier, after what many found the agonizing boredom of his previous Cannes films "Dogville" and "Manderlay," has made a film that is not boring. Unendurable, perhaps, but not boring. For relief I am looking forward to the overnight reviews of those who think they can explain exactly what it means. In this case, perhaps, a film should not mean, but be.
You see strangely assorted films all in a row here. The first eight Cannes films I've seen have been: (a) a Pixar animated comedy about a man who ties balloons to his house and floats into the rain forest; (b) a film about the young love of the doomed John Keats; © a devastating African-American drama about an abused fat girl; (d) a Korean film about a mother defending her dim-witted son against a murder charge; (e) a Filipino film with 45 minutes of an impossible-to-see, too-loud-to-listen to kidnapping; (f) a Hong Kong film about a French chef's violent revenge; (g) a French bourgeois family drama about a bankrupt movie producer, and (h) "Antichrist." First thing tomorrow, the new Almodovar film, about a film director who loses his eyesight and the love of his life. At least there will be Penelope Cruz to look at, if only he could see her.
Cannes has always cast a wide net. It was here I first began to learn more about violent Asian films that were not "chop-socky" trash but in fact polished genre exercises with their own auteurs. After seeing my first Takeshi Kitano film in the awesome Lumiere, I began to suspect he might become one of my favorite directors. The legions of Western fans for Hong Kong films, in particular, may have Cannes to thank.
Speaking of Western fans, this morning I saw a classic Western named "Vengeance." There were certain parallels with Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven;" it had gun-slingers striding down streets deserted by the townspeople, and a score (guitars and lonely flutes) that Sergio Leone might have envied. Was this film set in Durango or Tombstone? No, it was set in modern-day Macao, the Los Vegas of China. Was the hero played by Eastwood? No, he was played by the 65-year-old Johnny Hallyday, known as "the French Elvis." Who was the hero of this Western? Was he named Slade or Cain or Shane? No, he had a good French name, Costello. Who was the film directed by? Johnnie To, who has also made "The Heroic Trio," "My Left Eye Sees Ghosts," "Running on Karma," and 46 other films since 1986.
This was really a good film. The plot is off the shelf: Costello's family is murdered, and he vows revenge. But the twists, now, that's where the pleasure comes. And the acting, dead serious and low key, but with some jovial fat men allowed. And a stunning visual sense. And pacing that made it compulsively watchable--just the curative for me after the previous evening's excruciating "Kinatay."
This is not the place for my review. Let me just mention two details. If you know Johnny Hallyday, picture him standing over a dying crime boss in the street. He has plugged him with about a dozen rounds. And before firing a final fatal round, he thoughtfully and quite seriously observes, "that's your coat."
And then imagine a gunfight in a vast open field, seen from a high angle. Three men surrounded by enemies. The field containing for some reasons tightly-compacted bales of waste newsprint, almost as high as a man. The three in the center using three bales as cover. The dozens around advancing in a wall of forward-tumbling bales, and firing from behind them. Words do not convey the macabre visual effect of this scene.
The film involves professional killers quite prepared to sacrifice their lives for their values. No, not for their criminal code. For their deep human values. They are craftsmen who respect their work. They will perform it well and faithfully even if the man who hired them knows nothing of it, and is away playing with some little children on the beach. These are values that could come from...a Western. And recall that the Western began with Greek drama.
Reuters' Mike Collett-White reports that Danish director Lars von Trier "elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama Antichrist at the Cannes Film Festival.
"The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival, which ends on 5.24.
"Cannes' notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening's viewing was unusually demonstrative. Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.
"Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to Von Trier's decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end."
...AND MORIBUND ROGER EBERT
For even now already is it in the world
By Roger Ebert
There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, could be heard singing "That's Entertainment!"
Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen.
If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now.
(YEAH, HE'S NOT JOKING. NOT SO MUCH SPOILERS AS A PLOT DESCRIPTION FOR SOMETHING THAT WILL PROBABLY NOT BE SEEN IN THIS COUNTRY BUT IS SHOCKING ENOUGH TO FEEL LIKE SPOILERS)
The film involves a couple, He and She, whose infant child falls out a window and smashes to the pavement while they are making explicit love. They feel devastating grief. He, a psychologist, takes She off psychotropic medications, and they go to live in their secluded hideaway in the forest, a cottage named Eden.
He subjects her to probing questions and the discussion of the Meaning of it All, which must affect her like a needle to an inflamed tooth. Oh, He is quite intelligent and insightful, and brings passive aggression to a brutally intimate level. Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she used a large woodscrew to drill a hole through his keg and bolt a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive.
What does this metaphor (with a Prologue, an Epilogue and Four Chapters) mean? The dinner conversations all over town must not have been appetizing. Some read it this way: Perhaps the world began with man evil instead of good, guilty instead of innocent. That the Garden of Eden was visited by the Antichrist, not the Lord. That man's Original Sin was not eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but not vomiting forth knowledge and purging himself.
All for this will be discussed at great length. What can be said is that von Trier, after what many found the agonizing boredom of his previous Cannes films "Dogville" and "Manderlay," has made a film that is not boring. Unendurable, perhaps, but not boring. For relief I am looking forward to the overnight reviews of those who think they can explain exactly what it means. In this case, perhaps, a film should not mean, but be.
You see strangely assorted films all in a row here. The first eight Cannes films I've seen have been: (a) a Pixar animated comedy about a man who ties balloons to his house and floats into the rain forest; (b) a film about the young love of the doomed John Keats; © a devastating African-American drama about an abused fat girl; (d) a Korean film about a mother defending her dim-witted son against a murder charge; (e) a Filipino film with 45 minutes of an impossible-to-see, too-loud-to-listen to kidnapping; (f) a Hong Kong film about a French chef's violent revenge; (g) a French bourgeois family drama about a bankrupt movie producer, and (h) "Antichrist." First thing tomorrow, the new Almodovar film, about a film director who loses his eyesight and the love of his life. At least there will be Penelope Cruz to look at, if only he could see her.
Cannes has always cast a wide net. It was here I first began to learn more about violent Asian films that were not "chop-socky" trash but in fact polished genre exercises with their own auteurs. After seeing my first Takeshi Kitano film in the awesome Lumiere, I began to suspect he might become one of my favorite directors. The legions of Western fans for Hong Kong films, in particular, may have Cannes to thank.
Speaking of Western fans, this morning I saw a classic Western named "Vengeance." There were certain parallels with Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven;" it had gun-slingers striding down streets deserted by the townspeople, and a score (guitars and lonely flutes) that Sergio Leone might have envied. Was this film set in Durango or Tombstone? No, it was set in modern-day Macao, the Los Vegas of China. Was the hero played by Eastwood? No, he was played by the 65-year-old Johnny Hallyday, known as "the French Elvis." Who was the hero of this Western? Was he named Slade or Cain or Shane? No, he had a good French name, Costello. Who was the film directed by? Johnnie To, who has also made "The Heroic Trio," "My Left Eye Sees Ghosts," "Running on Karma," and 46 other films since 1986.
This was really a good film. The plot is off the shelf: Costello's family is murdered, and he vows revenge. But the twists, now, that's where the pleasure comes. And the acting, dead serious and low key, but with some jovial fat men allowed. And a stunning visual sense. And pacing that made it compulsively watchable--just the curative for me after the previous evening's excruciating "Kinatay."
This is not the place for my review. Let me just mention two details. If you know Johnny Hallyday, picture him standing over a dying crime boss in the street. He has plugged him with about a dozen rounds. And before firing a final fatal round, he thoughtfully and quite seriously observes, "that's your coat."
And then imagine a gunfight in a vast open field, seen from a high angle. Three men surrounded by enemies. The field containing for some reasons tightly-compacted bales of waste newsprint, almost as high as a man. The three in the center using three bales as cover. The dozens around advancing in a wall of forward-tumbling bales, and firing from behind them. Words do not convey the macabre visual effect of this scene.
The film involves professional killers quite prepared to sacrifice their lives for their values. No, not for their criminal code. For their deep human values. They are craftsmen who respect their work. They will perform it well and faithfully even if the man who hired them knows nothing of it, and is away playing with some little children on the beach. These are values that could come from...a Western. And recall that the Western began with Greek drama.
"How's the despair?"
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Big Magilla
- Site Admin
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- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
- Location: Jersey Shore
More from MD'A
Okay, trying again. Antichrist ('09 Von Trier): 19 (if serious)/91 (if someone can persuade me it's the greatest prank in cinema history).
But you know what? Either way, I love Lars for just making something that had the entire theater fucking slackjawed.
The Eloquent Jeffrey Wells
ANTICHRIST = FARTBOMB
I ran right up to the Orange wifi cafe after escaping from Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which had begun at 7:30 pm in the Salle Debussy. I sat down and wrote for a solid hour, so charged by what I'd just seen and what had just happened -- easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes Film Festival history and the complete meltdown of a major film artist in a way that invites comparison to the sinking of the Titanic -- that I didn't pay attention to the fact that my plug adapter wasn't giving power.
The computer went down and I lost everything. Seven or eight really
good paragraphs.
It's now 10:42 pm and the Orange cafe is about to close. It's over and finished and I'm sick of this day. It's been one thing after another today (heat, sweat, lost power cord) and I know when I'm beaten and drained. I'll sit down and write more again tomorrow. But my God, what a screening! What a reaction! Critics howling, hooting, shrieking.
There's no way Antichrist isn't a major career embarassment for costars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourgh, and a possible career stopper for Von Trier.
It's an out-and-out disaster -- one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic over-the-top calamities I've ever seen in my life. On top of which it's dedicated to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose rotted and decomposed body is now quite possibly clawing its way out of the grave to stalk the earth, find an axe and slay Von Trier in his bed.
Here's a portion of Von Trier's "director's confession" from the press book:
"Two years ago I suffered from depression. Everything, no matter what, seems unimportant, trivial. I couldn't work. Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if would ever make another film.
"The script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking. They often came from dreams I was having at the time, or dreams I'd had earlier in my life.
"In any case I offer no excuses for Antichrist. Other than my absolute belief in the film -- the most important film of my entier career!"
A man whom I've admired and respected for a many years has lost his mind for the time being, or at last lost it while he was writing and shooting the film. I can't fathom how the director of Breaking The Waves and Dancer in the Dark and Dogville could have made something so amateurishly awful. The decent and compassionate thing would be to forget Antichrist and to forgive Von Trier. To put it aside and move on on all fronts.
I know that if I had been in Dafoe or Gainsbourgh's shoes I would have walked off the film. I would have said "go ahead, sue me -- I welcome a lawsuit!" and walked off and walked home proudlyand at peace.
Edited By Sabin on 1242597932
Okay, trying again. Antichrist ('09 Von Trier): 19 (if serious)/91 (if someone can persuade me it's the greatest prank in cinema history).
But you know what? Either way, I love Lars for just making something that had the entire theater fucking slackjawed.
The Eloquent Jeffrey Wells
ANTICHRIST = FARTBOMB
I ran right up to the Orange wifi cafe after escaping from Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which had begun at 7:30 pm in the Salle Debussy. I sat down and wrote for a solid hour, so charged by what I'd just seen and what had just happened -- easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes Film Festival history and the complete meltdown of a major film artist in a way that invites comparison to the sinking of the Titanic -- that I didn't pay attention to the fact that my plug adapter wasn't giving power.
The computer went down and I lost everything. Seven or eight really
good paragraphs.
It's now 10:42 pm and the Orange cafe is about to close. It's over and finished and I'm sick of this day. It's been one thing after another today (heat, sweat, lost power cord) and I know when I'm beaten and drained. I'll sit down and write more again tomorrow. But my God, what a screening! What a reaction! Critics howling, hooting, shrieking.
There's no way Antichrist isn't a major career embarassment for costars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourgh, and a possible career stopper for Von Trier.
It's an out-and-out disaster -- one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic over-the-top calamities I've ever seen in my life. On top of which it's dedicated to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose rotted and decomposed body is now quite possibly clawing its way out of the grave to stalk the earth, find an axe and slay Von Trier in his bed.
Here's a portion of Von Trier's "director's confession" from the press book:
"Two years ago I suffered from depression. Everything, no matter what, seems unimportant, trivial. I couldn't work. Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if would ever make another film.
"The script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking. They often came from dreams I was having at the time, or dreams I'd had earlier in my life.
"In any case I offer no excuses for Antichrist. Other than my absolute belief in the film -- the most important film of my entier career!"
A man whom I've admired and respected for a many years has lost his mind for the time being, or at last lost it while he was writing and shooting the film. I can't fathom how the director of Breaking The Waves and Dancer in the Dark and Dogville could have made something so amateurishly awful. The decent and compassionate thing would be to forget Antichrist and to forgive Von Trier. To put it aside and move on on all fronts.
I know that if I had been in Dafoe or Gainsbourgh's shoes I would have walked off the film. I would have said "go ahead, sue me -- I welcome a lawsuit!" and walked off and walked home proudlyand at peace.
Edited By Sabin on 1242597932
"How's the despair?"
I think I owe Lee Daniels an apology. He did Shadowboxer which is a MISERABLE film, and produced Monster's Ball and The Woodsman (which is all right). I just don't really like what he does. So when I saw Precious, I forgot the fact that it is actually Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, a movie that got glowing reviews at Sundance. I just immediately thought to myself, "Another Lee Daniels film." This one is supposed to be very good. I recant.
Second:
MD'A
Anti-Christ (Dir. Lars Von Trier): Uh...............yeah.
Second:
MD'A
Anti-Christ (Dir. Lars Von Trier): Uh...............yeah.
"How's the despair?"
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Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
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- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
Another film that has been getting very interesting reviews, but shown in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, is the Romanian "Police, Adjective" directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. It appears to be getting a stronger reception than most of the films in competition.
http://www.screendaily.com/police-adjective/5000820.article
http://www.variety.com/index.a....09&cs=1
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr....191d684
http://www.screendaily.com/police-adjective/5000820.article
http://www.variety.com/index.a....09&cs=1
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr....191d684
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Cannes #4: What were they thinking of?
by Roger Ebert
There are few prospects more alarming than a director seized by an Idea. I don't mean an idea for a film, a story, a theme, a tone, any of those ideas. I'm thinking of a director whose Idea takes control of his film and pounds it into the ground and leaves the audience alienated and resentful. Such a director is Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, and the victim of his Idea is his Official Selection at Cannes 2009, "Kinatay." Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling "The Brown Bunny" the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.
After extensive recutting, the Gallo film was redeemed. I don't think editing is going to do the trick for "Kinatay." If Mendoza wants to please any viewer except for the most tortured theorist (one of those careerists who thinks movies are about arcane academic debates and not people) he's going to have to remake his entire second half.
The sad thing is, the opening scenes in his film give promise of being absorbing and even entertaining. The film opens as the story of Peping, a young man seen taking his girl and their baby to be married in Manila in a jolly group wedding. Mendoza establishes Peping's world as a crowded jumble of street markets, open-air food stands and people who seem to know each other. He picks up cash sometimes by doing odd jobs for local criminals. He will need more funds as a young married man, and is offered a higher-paying job.
It is unlikely you will ever see this film, but if there's a possibility, know that spoilers follow.
Peping joins a group of other professional criminals assigned to teach a lesson to a 30ish women who owes money because of drugs. She is bound, gagged, and thrown into the back of a van. Now commences the Idea. It is Mendoza's conceit that it his Idea will make a statement, or evoke a sensation, or demonstrate something--if only he makes the rest of the film as unpleasant to the eyes, the ears, the mind and the story itself as possible. This he succeeds in doing beyond his wildest dreams.
For at least 45 minutes, maybe an hour, maybe an eternity, Mendoza gives us Queasy-Cam shots, filmed at night in very low light, of the interior and exterior of the van as they drive a long distance outside Manila to a remote house. The woman is thrown on a bed, she pleads for her life, she is eventually murdered, her body is hacked into pieces, the pieces are wrapped in plastic, and the body parts are thrown out of the van at intervals during the return journey. No drama is developed. No story purpose is revealed. The woman cannot pay at a later date. She has learned her lesson, but to what avail? There is little dialogue. Peping did not know the woman would be murdered.
On the sound track, there are traffic noises, loud bangings, clashings, hammerings and squealings of tires. They continue on and on and on. They are cranked so high we recall the guitar setting of "11" in "This is Spinal Tap." They are actively hostile. They are illustrated by murk. You can't see the movie and you can't bear to listen to it. Much later, Peping is deposited back in Manila by the van, and hails a taxi. We get incessant sights and sounds of the taxi driving, as the night gives away to pale shades of dawn. The taxi blows a tire. The driver gets out to change it. Peping stands on the curb, trying to find another taxi. Loud, real loud, traffic noises. The tire is changed. The taxi driver asks him to get back in the cab. Peping doesn't want to. Finally he does. Some shots of meat being chopped for food, and of his wife and baby. The movie is over.
This is an Idea. An idée fixe, as the French so usefully put it. As Pierre Henri Castel observes, Au sens banal, idée fixe est l'équivalent d'obsession. Poor Mendoza knows that his strategy is alienating, his scenes unpleasant and painful, his audience recoiling. That is the Idea. You tell me why. Oh, someone will. You mark my words. There will be critics who fancy themselves theoreticians, who will defend this unbearable experience, and lecture those plebians like me who missed the whole Idea. I will remain serene while my ignorance is excoriated. I am a human being with relatively reasonable tastes. And in that role, not in the role of film critic, I declare that there may not be ten people in the world who will buy a ticket to this movie and feel the money was well spent.
But there is no reasoning with a man with a an idée fixe. He knows with a deep certainty that he is right. He will demonstrate that to us. He is an auteur. Surely we will recognize his inspiration, and applaud his bravery. He has filled his own bucket with wet cement, and stepped into it. For a time he could wriggle his toes. But now the cement has set, and he is frozen in place with the results of his decision. He will sink or swim.
I've seen several other films here already, but "Kinatay" seized my attention. I was talking the other day with Thierry Fremaux, the director of the festival, and I mentioned that he has many big names among the directors of this year's Official Selections. "Yes," he said, "but not every great director makes only great films. And we cannot show only great films, although every film is one we believe deserves to be seen." Fremaux knows his films, his festival, his audience. His taste is exceptional. He was not, of course, referring to any particular films or directors. I quote him because some of my film critic colleagues, staggering out into the light after "Kinatay," were banging their palms against their foreheads and crying out, "what got into them when they programed this film?" To them I say, Now, now. They can't only show great films.
One of the best films I've seen here is Lee Daniels' "Precious," (ugh) the story of a physically and mentally abused poor black girl from the ghetto, who summons the inner strength to fight back for her future. It contains two great performances, by Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe, in the title role, and Mo'Nique as her pathetic mother. Sidibe is the life force personified. Mo'Nique has a closing monologue that reduced some of us to tears. I would write more, but Barbara Scharres, programmer for the Siskel Film Center, has just featured it in the blog she's writing for this site.
by Roger Ebert
There are few prospects more alarming than a director seized by an Idea. I don't mean an idea for a film, a story, a theme, a tone, any of those ideas. I'm thinking of a director whose Idea takes control of his film and pounds it into the ground and leaves the audience alienated and resentful. Such a director is Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, and the victim of his Idea is his Official Selection at Cannes 2009, "Kinatay." Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling "The Brown Bunny" the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.
After extensive recutting, the Gallo film was redeemed. I don't think editing is going to do the trick for "Kinatay." If Mendoza wants to please any viewer except for the most tortured theorist (one of those careerists who thinks movies are about arcane academic debates and not people) he's going to have to remake his entire second half.
The sad thing is, the opening scenes in his film give promise of being absorbing and even entertaining. The film opens as the story of Peping, a young man seen taking his girl and their baby to be married in Manila in a jolly group wedding. Mendoza establishes Peping's world as a crowded jumble of street markets, open-air food stands and people who seem to know each other. He picks up cash sometimes by doing odd jobs for local criminals. He will need more funds as a young married man, and is offered a higher-paying job.
It is unlikely you will ever see this film, but if there's a possibility, know that spoilers follow.
Peping joins a group of other professional criminals assigned to teach a lesson to a 30ish women who owes money because of drugs. She is bound, gagged, and thrown into the back of a van. Now commences the Idea. It is Mendoza's conceit that it his Idea will make a statement, or evoke a sensation, or demonstrate something--if only he makes the rest of the film as unpleasant to the eyes, the ears, the mind and the story itself as possible. This he succeeds in doing beyond his wildest dreams.
For at least 45 minutes, maybe an hour, maybe an eternity, Mendoza gives us Queasy-Cam shots, filmed at night in very low light, of the interior and exterior of the van as they drive a long distance outside Manila to a remote house. The woman is thrown on a bed, she pleads for her life, she is eventually murdered, her body is hacked into pieces, the pieces are wrapped in plastic, and the body parts are thrown out of the van at intervals during the return journey. No drama is developed. No story purpose is revealed. The woman cannot pay at a later date. She has learned her lesson, but to what avail? There is little dialogue. Peping did not know the woman would be murdered.
On the sound track, there are traffic noises, loud bangings, clashings, hammerings and squealings of tires. They continue on and on and on. They are cranked so high we recall the guitar setting of "11" in "This is Spinal Tap." They are actively hostile. They are illustrated by murk. You can't see the movie and you can't bear to listen to it. Much later, Peping is deposited back in Manila by the van, and hails a taxi. We get incessant sights and sounds of the taxi driving, as the night gives away to pale shades of dawn. The taxi blows a tire. The driver gets out to change it. Peping stands on the curb, trying to find another taxi. Loud, real loud, traffic noises. The tire is changed. The taxi driver asks him to get back in the cab. Peping doesn't want to. Finally he does. Some shots of meat being chopped for food, and of his wife and baby. The movie is over.
This is an Idea. An idée fixe, as the French so usefully put it. As Pierre Henri Castel observes, Au sens banal, idée fixe est l'équivalent d'obsession. Poor Mendoza knows that his strategy is alienating, his scenes unpleasant and painful, his audience recoiling. That is the Idea. You tell me why. Oh, someone will. You mark my words. There will be critics who fancy themselves theoreticians, who will defend this unbearable experience, and lecture those plebians like me who missed the whole Idea. I will remain serene while my ignorance is excoriated. I am a human being with relatively reasonable tastes. And in that role, not in the role of film critic, I declare that there may not be ten people in the world who will buy a ticket to this movie and feel the money was well spent.
But there is no reasoning with a man with a an idée fixe. He knows with a deep certainty that he is right. He will demonstrate that to us. He is an auteur. Surely we will recognize his inspiration, and applaud his bravery. He has filled his own bucket with wet cement, and stepped into it. For a time he could wriggle his toes. But now the cement has set, and he is frozen in place with the results of his decision. He will sink or swim.
I've seen several other films here already, but "Kinatay" seized my attention. I was talking the other day with Thierry Fremaux, the director of the festival, and I mentioned that he has many big names among the directors of this year's Official Selections. "Yes," he said, "but not every great director makes only great films. And we cannot show only great films, although every film is one we believe deserves to be seen." Fremaux knows his films, his festival, his audience. His taste is exceptional. He was not, of course, referring to any particular films or directors. I quote him because some of my film critic colleagues, staggering out into the light after "Kinatay," were banging their palms against their foreheads and crying out, "what got into them when they programed this film?" To them I say, Now, now. They can't only show great films.
One of the best films I've seen here is Lee Daniels' "Precious," (ugh) the story of a physically and mentally abused poor black girl from the ghetto, who summons the inner strength to fight back for her future. It contains two great performances, by Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe, in the title role, and Mo'Nique as her pathetic mother. Sidibe is the life force personified. Mo'Nique has a closing monologue that reduced some of us to tears. I would write more, but Barbara Scharres, programmer for the Siskel Film Center, has just featured it in the blog she's writing for this site.
"How's the despair?"
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
Alejandro Amanabar's historical epic "Agora"starring Rachel Weisz receives mixed reviews.
http://www.indiewire.com/article....and_awe
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr....7.story
http://www.variety.com/index.a....82&cs=1
http://www.indiewire.com/article....and_awe
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr....7.story
http://www.variety.com/index.a....82&cs=1
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
The obligatory "provocative" selection... and we haven't even gotten to Noe, Haneke and Von Trier yet.
Kinatay
17 May, 2009 | By Mike Goodridge
Screendaily
Dir: Brillante Mendoza. 2009. France/Philippines. 110 minutes
Showing the kidnap, beating, humiliation, rape, murder and dismemberment of a young prostitute, Brillante Mendoza’s new film Kinatay (which means “butchered” in Tagalog) is a nerve-shredding exploration of crime which is both repellent and grimly compelling. Offering audiences no relief or redemption, it is perhaps most notable for its daring in attempting to capture the moment a young man crosses the line into irrevocable evil.
Well-made by Mendoza and more coherent than last year’s Serbis, it will nevertheless be hard for even the most adventurous arthouse audiences to stomach. Somewhere in the indie shocker niche occupied by Irreversible or Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, Kinatay should win a small following on the festival circuit and sales to edgy distributors who specialize in handling tough movies. Distribution opportunities in some territories will be hampered by the extreme nature of the material.
As in Serbis, Mendoza devotes much of his energy to setting the scene in the teeming, frenetic city of Manila. Establishing sequences show the squalor in which the 20 year-old protagonist Peping (Martin) lives with his young fiancée Cecille (Cabral) and their seven month-old baby. The film opens as the two get the bus to their wedding in front of a judge and celebrate with their family.
Peping is a student in the police academy but in order to make some money on the side for his family, he helps collect payments for a local drug ring. One night, while Cecille and child are at home, he is summoned by his liaison in the gang Abyong (Hilario) to come join them on an “operation.”
He gets on board a van with the boss of the gang, Abyong and other thugs including the brutish Sarge (Regala) and Vic (Diaz) unaware of what they are about to do. The van stops outside a hostess club and they pick up a beautiful prostitute called Madonna (Lopez) but the moment she gets into the car, Sarge and Vic beat her, gag her and force her to the floor.
Stunned in the back of the van, Peping watches in horror as they travel outside the city to a small secluded house where Madonna, who is in irredeemable debt for drug money to the chief, is taken to a cellar and the process of her hideous death begins at the hands of the psychotic troupe.
Mendoza’s deliberate pace which feels leisurely in the first 20 minutes of normality becomes tortuously effective as Peping makes the descent into horror and is faced with the terrifying dilemma of what to do. The audience, should it be willing to do so, makes the same descent and Mendoza asks his viewers to consider what they themselves would do in the same situation.The fact that the gang contains several senior police officers makes the circumstances even more excruciating and serves as a horrifying indictment of the corrupted life for millions of people in Manila.
Mendoza doesn’t shy away from showing the woman’s suffering nor how the men hack her body to pieces. Much of the night is in real time and he is determined to make his audience squirm in the same way as Peping. To that end, the cutting is appropriately jarring, the score by Teresa Barrozo unsettling.
Using handheld camera and close-up to discomfiting effect, the film is equally disturbing in its depiction of the complacency and mundane conversations of the seasoned killers while they commit the atrocities. Less subtle are the scenes of Peping’s rosy home life especially the film’s final scene which feels superfluous and obvious.
-----------------------------------------------------
Kinatay
(France-Philippines)
By JAY WEISSBERG
Variety
Acolytes convinced Brillante Mendoza is ready for his second Cannes competish slot will dwindle following "Kinatay," an unpleasant journey into a brutal heart of darkness. Mendoza strengthens his gift for describing space with inquisitive cameras, but as the helmer's star rises, his subtlety wanes, resulting in obvious statements made banal by heavy-handed ironies. This noirish tale of an innocent guy drawn into a dark world of torture and dismemberment understands that an unwilling accomplice is still tarred by fate, but the pic's graphic nature does realism no favors. Fest life may linger, but theatrical won't survive long.
Exec producer Didier Costet is well aware of the risks; his distrib company Equation has already released three Mendoza titles in France, including last year's controversial Cannes entry "Serbis," which he co-produced under Swift Prods. "Kinatay" is Tagalog for "slaughter," which could be a prescient title given the likely drubbing the pic will receive from mainstream critics.
The first 15 minutes or so showcase what Mendoza does best: capturing the chaos of life in the teeming slums and streets of Manila. Accompanied by a cacophony of noises and voices, police cadet Pepoy (Mendoza's muse Coco Martin, also credited as producer under his real name, Rodel Nacianceno) and his g.f. Cecille (Mercedes Cabral) drop their baby off with an "auntie" and head to city hall to get married. Money is scarce, but their happiness is palpable, and everyone in the wedding party optimistically dreams of purchasing big-ticket items.
The next day, Pepoy hooks up with friend Abyong (Jhong Hilario), who promises him a nice chunk of change if he joins some shady cohorts for an unspecified job. Accepting the offer, Pepoy watches as Sarge (John Regala) lures deadbeat drug addict/prostitute Gina, aka Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez), into a van, where the thugs pummel the helpless woman on the orders of Vic (Julio Diaz).
A long nighttime ride follows, as the van departs Manila, with a terrified Gina watched in the back by a silent, frightened Pepoy. Mendoza shoots much of the ride inside the darkened van, its indistinct, menacing forms accompanied by strange soundscapes meant to invoke viewer anxiety.
On reaching their destination, Gina is brought to a room where she's beaten, raped and finally dismembered. Unfortunately, the graphic nature of the presentation is so coldly matter-of-fact and overtly in-your-face that auds are unlikely to feel anything other than anger at being subjected to such unnecessary scenes. It's not that the helmer takes any glee in the sadism, but the nightmarish quality he captures is merely vile, without a deeper sense of the scene's horror.
Thus, Mendoza's stated aim, to show how one misstep can turn a basically decent guy into a scarred and culpable soul, becomes a pseudo-noir treatment in which the brutality, alternately coy and explicit, overshadows the soul-searching. Worse, the helmer insists, as he did in "Serbis," on hitting auds over the head with unsubtle ironies, such as a poster of Jesus hanging near Gina's torture room.
On a purely technical level "Kinatay" impresses, especially in the first quarter. D.p. Odyssey Flores shoots each scene from a variety of angles, as if the camera itself had an urgent need to understand where characters are in space and in relation to their surroundings. Early scenes were shot on film and have a bright, colorful glow -- Mendoza gets the joyful anticipation of the wedding day absolutely right -- while the endless night sequences, deliberately murky and ashen, were lensed digitally with the versatile Arriflex D-21.
----------------------------------------
Film Review: Kinatay
By Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- Festival darling Brillante Mendoza's "Kinatay" is a long night's journey into the Philippine underworld of casual corruption and nauseating cruelty, seen through the eyes of a greenhorn police cadet. Featuring shooting violence, rape and mutilation extensively in real time, from camera angles that make the audience feel like they are watching a snuff film, this full-on experience of forced voyeurism is certain to incite strong (most probably offended) responses.
The deliberately rough-hewn art direction adds to the blunt force of Mendoza's moral outrage, but it won't help "Kinatay" (which means 'slaughter' in Tagalog) make a killing in theatrical business. Unlike such other Mendoza works as "Foster Child" or "Serbis," which capture with warmth or exotic social phenomena distinctive to the Philippines, "Kinatay's" sketchy slice of crime world nastiness can be found anywhere. This makes it a hard sell even to art houses, as their target audience often looks for stronger cultural flavor.
Newly married Peping, who attends the police academy, receives an offer via text message to make a fast buck with a shady friend. By nightfall, he is in a van with a group of vicious gangsters who have kidnapped a bar hostess to demand a loan repayment under orders from an elusive general. From then on, Mendoza switches from the 35mm used for daytime scenes to HD, wrapping all the action in a deliberately ugly, sooty hood of near darkness.
The real time pacing, feels like being stuck in a traffic jam, but the dramatic thrust is relentless as one hears through the muffled darkness, the woman being gagged and beaten mercilessly. The horror escalates to rape, murder and dismemberment. None of this is left to the imagination, with the men's verbal sexism being equally distasteful.
With the artistic choices he has made, Mendoza achieves a singularity of purpose in hammering home his message, and the experience compels one to watch even as one wishes to turn away. He deplores this human treachery with almost Old School, religious morality. He preaches it unequivocally -- at the climax of the slaughter, the subtitles "If you lose your integrity once, you lose it forever" appear. Laying on the Christian symbolism, the woman is called Madonna, while the camera occasionally cuts away to a picture of Jesus on the wall. She keeps screaming she has a child, which new father Peping is supposed to sympathize with.
The irony that Peping has a vocation in law-enforcement cannot be missed.
The camera regularly pauses on some sideway or other odd-angled closeup of his anguished, conscience-stricken face, accompanied by a twangy score that sounds common to horror flicks, implying that these are turning points where he could have stood up to them, or at least walked away. Images of him standing in an empty carpark, brooding inside a public toilet or stranded in screeching traffic symbolize he is at a moral crossroads or labyrinth.
Kinatay
17 May, 2009 | By Mike Goodridge
Screendaily
Dir: Brillante Mendoza. 2009. France/Philippines. 110 minutes
Showing the kidnap, beating, humiliation, rape, murder and dismemberment of a young prostitute, Brillante Mendoza’s new film Kinatay (which means “butchered” in Tagalog) is a nerve-shredding exploration of crime which is both repellent and grimly compelling. Offering audiences no relief or redemption, it is perhaps most notable for its daring in attempting to capture the moment a young man crosses the line into irrevocable evil.
Well-made by Mendoza and more coherent than last year’s Serbis, it will nevertheless be hard for even the most adventurous arthouse audiences to stomach. Somewhere in the indie shocker niche occupied by Irreversible or Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, Kinatay should win a small following on the festival circuit and sales to edgy distributors who specialize in handling tough movies. Distribution opportunities in some territories will be hampered by the extreme nature of the material.
As in Serbis, Mendoza devotes much of his energy to setting the scene in the teeming, frenetic city of Manila. Establishing sequences show the squalor in which the 20 year-old protagonist Peping (Martin) lives with his young fiancée Cecille (Cabral) and their seven month-old baby. The film opens as the two get the bus to their wedding in front of a judge and celebrate with their family.
Peping is a student in the police academy but in order to make some money on the side for his family, he helps collect payments for a local drug ring. One night, while Cecille and child are at home, he is summoned by his liaison in the gang Abyong (Hilario) to come join them on an “operation.”
He gets on board a van with the boss of the gang, Abyong and other thugs including the brutish Sarge (Regala) and Vic (Diaz) unaware of what they are about to do. The van stops outside a hostess club and they pick up a beautiful prostitute called Madonna (Lopez) but the moment she gets into the car, Sarge and Vic beat her, gag her and force her to the floor.
Stunned in the back of the van, Peping watches in horror as they travel outside the city to a small secluded house where Madonna, who is in irredeemable debt for drug money to the chief, is taken to a cellar and the process of her hideous death begins at the hands of the psychotic troupe.
Mendoza’s deliberate pace which feels leisurely in the first 20 minutes of normality becomes tortuously effective as Peping makes the descent into horror and is faced with the terrifying dilemma of what to do. The audience, should it be willing to do so, makes the same descent and Mendoza asks his viewers to consider what they themselves would do in the same situation.The fact that the gang contains several senior police officers makes the circumstances even more excruciating and serves as a horrifying indictment of the corrupted life for millions of people in Manila.
Mendoza doesn’t shy away from showing the woman’s suffering nor how the men hack her body to pieces. Much of the night is in real time and he is determined to make his audience squirm in the same way as Peping. To that end, the cutting is appropriately jarring, the score by Teresa Barrozo unsettling.
Using handheld camera and close-up to discomfiting effect, the film is equally disturbing in its depiction of the complacency and mundane conversations of the seasoned killers while they commit the atrocities. Less subtle are the scenes of Peping’s rosy home life especially the film’s final scene which feels superfluous and obvious.
-----------------------------------------------------
Kinatay
(France-Philippines)
By JAY WEISSBERG
Variety
Acolytes convinced Brillante Mendoza is ready for his second Cannes competish slot will dwindle following "Kinatay," an unpleasant journey into a brutal heart of darkness. Mendoza strengthens his gift for describing space with inquisitive cameras, but as the helmer's star rises, his subtlety wanes, resulting in obvious statements made banal by heavy-handed ironies. This noirish tale of an innocent guy drawn into a dark world of torture and dismemberment understands that an unwilling accomplice is still tarred by fate, but the pic's graphic nature does realism no favors. Fest life may linger, but theatrical won't survive long.
Exec producer Didier Costet is well aware of the risks; his distrib company Equation has already released three Mendoza titles in France, including last year's controversial Cannes entry "Serbis," which he co-produced under Swift Prods. "Kinatay" is Tagalog for "slaughter," which could be a prescient title given the likely drubbing the pic will receive from mainstream critics.
The first 15 minutes or so showcase what Mendoza does best: capturing the chaos of life in the teeming slums and streets of Manila. Accompanied by a cacophony of noises and voices, police cadet Pepoy (Mendoza's muse Coco Martin, also credited as producer under his real name, Rodel Nacianceno) and his g.f. Cecille (Mercedes Cabral) drop their baby off with an "auntie" and head to city hall to get married. Money is scarce, but their happiness is palpable, and everyone in the wedding party optimistically dreams of purchasing big-ticket items.
The next day, Pepoy hooks up with friend Abyong (Jhong Hilario), who promises him a nice chunk of change if he joins some shady cohorts for an unspecified job. Accepting the offer, Pepoy watches as Sarge (John Regala) lures deadbeat drug addict/prostitute Gina, aka Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez), into a van, where the thugs pummel the helpless woman on the orders of Vic (Julio Diaz).
A long nighttime ride follows, as the van departs Manila, with a terrified Gina watched in the back by a silent, frightened Pepoy. Mendoza shoots much of the ride inside the darkened van, its indistinct, menacing forms accompanied by strange soundscapes meant to invoke viewer anxiety.
On reaching their destination, Gina is brought to a room where she's beaten, raped and finally dismembered. Unfortunately, the graphic nature of the presentation is so coldly matter-of-fact and overtly in-your-face that auds are unlikely to feel anything other than anger at being subjected to such unnecessary scenes. It's not that the helmer takes any glee in the sadism, but the nightmarish quality he captures is merely vile, without a deeper sense of the scene's horror.
Thus, Mendoza's stated aim, to show how one misstep can turn a basically decent guy into a scarred and culpable soul, becomes a pseudo-noir treatment in which the brutality, alternately coy and explicit, overshadows the soul-searching. Worse, the helmer insists, as he did in "Serbis," on hitting auds over the head with unsubtle ironies, such as a poster of Jesus hanging near Gina's torture room.
On a purely technical level "Kinatay" impresses, especially in the first quarter. D.p. Odyssey Flores shoots each scene from a variety of angles, as if the camera itself had an urgent need to understand where characters are in space and in relation to their surroundings. Early scenes were shot on film and have a bright, colorful glow -- Mendoza gets the joyful anticipation of the wedding day absolutely right -- while the endless night sequences, deliberately murky and ashen, were lensed digitally with the versatile Arriflex D-21.
----------------------------------------
Film Review: Kinatay
By Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- Festival darling Brillante Mendoza's "Kinatay" is a long night's journey into the Philippine underworld of casual corruption and nauseating cruelty, seen through the eyes of a greenhorn police cadet. Featuring shooting violence, rape and mutilation extensively in real time, from camera angles that make the audience feel like they are watching a snuff film, this full-on experience of forced voyeurism is certain to incite strong (most probably offended) responses.
The deliberately rough-hewn art direction adds to the blunt force of Mendoza's moral outrage, but it won't help "Kinatay" (which means 'slaughter' in Tagalog) make a killing in theatrical business. Unlike such other Mendoza works as "Foster Child" or "Serbis," which capture with warmth or exotic social phenomena distinctive to the Philippines, "Kinatay's" sketchy slice of crime world nastiness can be found anywhere. This makes it a hard sell even to art houses, as their target audience often looks for stronger cultural flavor.
Newly married Peping, who attends the police academy, receives an offer via text message to make a fast buck with a shady friend. By nightfall, he is in a van with a group of vicious gangsters who have kidnapped a bar hostess to demand a loan repayment under orders from an elusive general. From then on, Mendoza switches from the 35mm used for daytime scenes to HD, wrapping all the action in a deliberately ugly, sooty hood of near darkness.
The real time pacing, feels like being stuck in a traffic jam, but the dramatic thrust is relentless as one hears through the muffled darkness, the woman being gagged and beaten mercilessly. The horror escalates to rape, murder and dismemberment. None of this is left to the imagination, with the men's verbal sexism being equally distasteful.
With the artistic choices he has made, Mendoza achieves a singularity of purpose in hammering home his message, and the experience compels one to watch even as one wishes to turn away. He deplores this human treachery with almost Old School, religious morality. He preaches it unequivocally -- at the climax of the slaughter, the subtitles "If you lose your integrity once, you lose it forever" appear. Laying on the Christian symbolism, the woman is called Madonna, while the camera occasionally cuts away to a picture of Jesus on the wall. She keeps screaming she has a child, which new father Peping is supposed to sympathize with.
The irony that Peping has a vocation in law-enforcement cannot be missed.
The camera regularly pauses on some sideway or other odd-angled closeup of his anguished, conscience-stricken face, accompanied by a twangy score that sounds common to horror flicks, implying that these are turning points where he could have stood up to them, or at least walked away. Images of him standing in an empty carpark, brooding inside a public toilet or stranded in screeching traffic symbolize he is at a moral crossroads or labyrinth.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
Mixed reviews from the trades for Johnnie To's "Vengeance":
Film Review: Vengeance
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- This is a tale of two Johnnies. Renowned Hong Kong action director Johnnie To teams up with iconic French singer-actor Johnny Hallyday for a stylish, whiz-bang revenge melodrama in "Vengeance."
With atmospheric locations in Hong Kong and Macau and To's signature set pieces of choreographed gunplay all accomplished with a bemused wink to his audience, "Vengeance" can penetrate just about any market in the world. Popcorn and art certainly can co-exist as this movie amply demonstrates.
Interestingly, To knew nothing of Hallyday's long career in music and cinema before Alain Delon dropped out of the project. But thank goodness the two Johnnies met. With his long, deeply etched face, lanky figure in dark suit and tie, sometimes accessorized with an overcoat and black hat, and slow, steady gate, Hallyday perfectly fits the story's concept: A soft-spoken, deadly stranger in a foreign land who seeks the help of local assassins to take his revenge.
Hallyday plays a Parisian restaurateur who journeys to Macau when his daughter is critically injured and her husband and two small children brutally murdered by Triad hit men. There is in the Frenchman's manner the strong suggestion that whatever his culinary talents, he knows his way around guns and men of violence even better.
Hong Kong action films display impatience with logic and procedure in their anxiety to get to the point. So Hallyday doesn't need to go looking for help to penetrate the Chinese crime world -- it comes right to him.
Down the corridor from his hotel room, moments after he checks in, three hit men (played winningly by Anthony Wong, Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet) are taking care of their boss' unfaithful mistress. So Hallyday hires them to help him find and execute his family's killers. No one seems to anticipate what an audience immediately will: Won't these Triad hit men know the Triad hit men who wiped out Hallyday's family? And isn't it likely that their boss may know or actually be the other assassins' boss?
Yes and yes to all that but, again, only the characters seems oblivious to the obvious. Best to forget these kind of questions so you can get to two extremely witty shootouts and one chase up and down a narrow building.
One shootout takes place at a picnic area in the woods, where the two sets of killers calmly wait for a barbeque to finish, night to fall and the hit men's families to depart before jerking out their weapons. The other, by contrast, is in broad daylight at a dumpsite, where everyone takes cover behind huge bales of compacted trash as they blast away with eager abandon.
A kicker here -- which To and writer Wai Ka Fai make clear much too late in the story, to be honest -- is that an old bullet lodged near the Frenchman's brain is causing rapid memory loss. So rapidly, again illogically, that his sense of purpose when he sets foot in Macau and later Hong Kong abruptly vanishes at the mid-point. He must, as did the hero of "Memento," take photos of people and label them so he knows friends from enemies and can recall his daughter's tragedy.
So the philosophical question the film raises is what does vengeance really mean when you've lost all memory? Whatever the answer to that, everyone is programmed to continue. Which means that even the white man's hired Triad assassins are willing to go up against their own boss and fellow assassins for the sake of this foreigner.
OK, so rational behavior takes a backseat to genre requirements, though few if any will care when the killers stalk each other with such a tongue-in-cheek sense of destiny and deliver deadpan dialogue that makes fun of their own absurdity. Call it cornball existentialism.
Sylvie Testud turns up with hardly any introduction as a woman who plays a key role in assisting Hallyday in exacting revenge while Simon Yam seems to enjoy himself as the smug villain.
Cheng Siu Keung's moody cinematography gives "Vengeance" a noir-ish sensibility while David Richardson's smooth editing pulls the action sequences together in a most satisfying way.
------------------------------------------------------
Vengeance
(France-Hong Kong)
By JUSTIN CHANG
Variety
Johnnie To and Johnny Hallyday have a bloody good time in "Vengeance," a smoothly executed revenge thriller that finds one of Hong Kong's genre masters in assured action-movie form. Apart from the novelty of casting a Gallic rock 'n' roll icon as an aging ex-hitman exacting payback with the help of some Macau mobsters, this tightly tuned, heavily armed vehicle is vintage To, though it may strike both partisans and detractors as more of the stylish same. Western elements and abundant bloodshed make this To's most marketable item since 2006's "Exiled," with appeal for Asian buffs and French hipsters alike.
Wai Ka-fai's script gets down to its bloody business in the opening minutes, as a Chinese man and his French wife (Sylvie Testud) are gunned down in their Macau home. The violence -- accompanied by the smoky, stylized bloodspray that's become a To trademark -- dispels the mood of domestic bliss with shocking suddenness. From there, "Vengeance" descends into a darkly beautiful Triad gang underworld, where every confrontation must be preceded by much slo-mo brooding and sizing up of one's competition, often through sunglasses.
In a poignant but amusingly tongue-in-cheek scene, the wife, who has miraculously survived the attack, is visited by her father Costello (Hallyday), who promises to avenge her. Cutting a dangerously debonair figure in black hat and overcoat, Hallyday immediately draws all eyes, his magnificently grave, weathered features suggesting a lifetime of hardened criminality and brutal life experience. But there's also something about him -- perhaps the charming fact that his character, who hasn't used a gun in 20 years, now works as a chef in Paris -- that has a way of putting the viewer at ease. As coolly taciturn killers go, Hallyday's Costello is a pleasure to spend an hour and 45 minutes with.
The first of the film's suave setpieces brings Costello into contact with three assassins (played by To regulars Anthony Wong, Lam Suet and Lam Ka-tung) in the employ of a vulgar, decadent crime boss, Fung (another To standby, Simon Yam). Once Costello enlists the trio to help him hunt down his quarry, "Vengeance" settles into a wry, almost comfortably familiar buddy-picture rhythm, as the four men meticulously reconstruct the initial crime (precisely edited by Cheng Siu-keung), compare weaponry over a hot meal, and quietly consider the possibility of honor among hitmen.
As the action shifts from Macau to Hong Kong, Wai's script borrows a few twists from "Memento" and "The Memory of a Killer": It becomes apparent that Costello is experiencing the rapid onset of amnesia, imbuing his mission with fresh urgency. The final scenes, which include a lovely beachside interlude and a nighttime showdown in the streets of Hong Kong, are at once sad, elegiac and strangely joyous.
"Vengeance" isn't exactly subversive, and it more than keeps the promise bluntly extended by its title. But it would be a mistake to overlook the ideas that occasionally penetrate its sleek surface. To acknowledges that the seven professional murderers onscreen (four good, three bad, for those who care to delineate) are in many ways interchangeable. He also foregrounds the desire to protect one's children as the overriding motivation that governs the film's universe, not only setting the plot in motion but unexpectedly complicating it along the way.
Hallyday's craggy charisma stands out yet never overpowers his Chinese co-stars, with whom he blends effortlessly. To's widescreen mise-en-scene also merits top billing, as the helmer manipulates light, image and sound -- at one point even orchestrating a gory shootout by selective moonlight -- to bravura effect.
---------------------------------------
Vengeance
17 May, 2009 | By Lee Marshall
Screendaily
Dir: Johnnie To. Hong Kong-France. 2009. 108mins.
A revenge shoot-em-up which fires mostly blanks, Johnnie To’s eagerly anticipated pairing with French actor and rocker Johnny Hallyday is unlikely to make it into the To Top Tens obsessively compiled by the Hong Kong director’s loyal fanbase. As always, the sensuality of To’s visual style and soundscapes and the choreography of the film’s bullet ballet provide reasons to watch, but the contrived plot, some wooden English dialogue and Hallyday’s stilted perfomance derail proceedings well before the final showdown.
What’s really lacking in Vengeance is the narrative inventiveness which lifted films like Breaking News or PTU out of the Hong Kong crime genre box and turned them into arthouse crossover items.
Producer/distributor ARP releases the film in France on May 20 – but the audience driven by the pulling power of ageing rocker Hallyday, who is a national institution, is likely to be short-lived, and may not translate to other territories. Though he has become a festival favourite over the last five or six years, To is still invisible to most ordinary filmgoers, and Vengeance is unlikely to change this. Most of its ultimate audience will probably come from DVD.
There’s something very physical and compelling about To’s innate feel for cinematic sheen and syntax, and it’s fully on display in the 90-second pre-title sequence, which shows the brutal slaying of a happy Macau family – French mother Irene (Testud), her Chinese husband and their two young sons – by a trio of hitmen. Left for dead, Irene survives – and when chisel-faced father Costello (Hallyday) arrives at the hospital, he swears to avenge the murder.
Costello engages three local hitmen (To regulars Wong, Tung and Suet) to find the killers. To has a way with character actors, but the wry chemistry between the three assassins and the rugged Frenchman – who offers them his restaurant on the Champs-Elysees as collateral for the deal – doesn’t quite work. Maybe it’s because Suet and Tung learned their lines phonetically, maybe it’s because, behind his unflinching Easter Island facemask, Hallyday looks as if he’s not sure what he’s doing here. But around 30 minutes in, the humour-tinged noirish atmosphere that To is usually so good at evoking begins to tip over into absurdity.
Essentially it’s a script problem. Worst of all is the moment around 45 minutes in when a wounded Costello – who by now has revealed that before working as a chef, he too was a hitman – tells his hired guns that he has a bullet lodged in his brain, and is in imminent danger of losing his memory.
It looks like a plot turn that might have been invented on the hoof, but this is the first script that To and Wai Ka-fai actually committed to paper. This new fact allows for some Memento-style visual business as Costello rapidly drifts into amnesia and is forced to write down the names of friends and enemies on photos, and on his gun. It also gives an amusing edge to the final last-man-standing shoot out, but the slapdash way it’s introduced loses the sympathy of an audience that was already wavering between indulgence and impatience.
As ever, there are compensations. To is a master of location shooting, and Macau’s neon casino signs and ancient lanes provide an atmospheric backdrop for the film’s early scenes – an atmosphere that is underlined by Lo Tayu’s great urban score, which alternates blaxploitation-style funk with jangling Wild West guitar melodies. A scrapyard on a piece of wasteland backed by distant high-rise office blocks supplies another atmospheric setting, and becomes the location for the film’s most choreographed gunfight involving huge bales of scrap paper – a sequence whose self-conscious theatricality is underlined by the improvised grandstand from which Fung surveys the action.
Film Review: Vengeance
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- This is a tale of two Johnnies. Renowned Hong Kong action director Johnnie To teams up with iconic French singer-actor Johnny Hallyday for a stylish, whiz-bang revenge melodrama in "Vengeance."
With atmospheric locations in Hong Kong and Macau and To's signature set pieces of choreographed gunplay all accomplished with a bemused wink to his audience, "Vengeance" can penetrate just about any market in the world. Popcorn and art certainly can co-exist as this movie amply demonstrates.
Interestingly, To knew nothing of Hallyday's long career in music and cinema before Alain Delon dropped out of the project. But thank goodness the two Johnnies met. With his long, deeply etched face, lanky figure in dark suit and tie, sometimes accessorized with an overcoat and black hat, and slow, steady gate, Hallyday perfectly fits the story's concept: A soft-spoken, deadly stranger in a foreign land who seeks the help of local assassins to take his revenge.
Hallyday plays a Parisian restaurateur who journeys to Macau when his daughter is critically injured and her husband and two small children brutally murdered by Triad hit men. There is in the Frenchman's manner the strong suggestion that whatever his culinary talents, he knows his way around guns and men of violence even better.
Hong Kong action films display impatience with logic and procedure in their anxiety to get to the point. So Hallyday doesn't need to go looking for help to penetrate the Chinese crime world -- it comes right to him.
Down the corridor from his hotel room, moments after he checks in, three hit men (played winningly by Anthony Wong, Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet) are taking care of their boss' unfaithful mistress. So Hallyday hires them to help him find and execute his family's killers. No one seems to anticipate what an audience immediately will: Won't these Triad hit men know the Triad hit men who wiped out Hallyday's family? And isn't it likely that their boss may know or actually be the other assassins' boss?
Yes and yes to all that but, again, only the characters seems oblivious to the obvious. Best to forget these kind of questions so you can get to two extremely witty shootouts and one chase up and down a narrow building.
One shootout takes place at a picnic area in the woods, where the two sets of killers calmly wait for a barbeque to finish, night to fall and the hit men's families to depart before jerking out their weapons. The other, by contrast, is in broad daylight at a dumpsite, where everyone takes cover behind huge bales of compacted trash as they blast away with eager abandon.
A kicker here -- which To and writer Wai Ka Fai make clear much too late in the story, to be honest -- is that an old bullet lodged near the Frenchman's brain is causing rapid memory loss. So rapidly, again illogically, that his sense of purpose when he sets foot in Macau and later Hong Kong abruptly vanishes at the mid-point. He must, as did the hero of "Memento," take photos of people and label them so he knows friends from enemies and can recall his daughter's tragedy.
So the philosophical question the film raises is what does vengeance really mean when you've lost all memory? Whatever the answer to that, everyone is programmed to continue. Which means that even the white man's hired Triad assassins are willing to go up against their own boss and fellow assassins for the sake of this foreigner.
OK, so rational behavior takes a backseat to genre requirements, though few if any will care when the killers stalk each other with such a tongue-in-cheek sense of destiny and deliver deadpan dialogue that makes fun of their own absurdity. Call it cornball existentialism.
Sylvie Testud turns up with hardly any introduction as a woman who plays a key role in assisting Hallyday in exacting revenge while Simon Yam seems to enjoy himself as the smug villain.
Cheng Siu Keung's moody cinematography gives "Vengeance" a noir-ish sensibility while David Richardson's smooth editing pulls the action sequences together in a most satisfying way.
------------------------------------------------------
Vengeance
(France-Hong Kong)
By JUSTIN CHANG
Variety
Johnnie To and Johnny Hallyday have a bloody good time in "Vengeance," a smoothly executed revenge thriller that finds one of Hong Kong's genre masters in assured action-movie form. Apart from the novelty of casting a Gallic rock 'n' roll icon as an aging ex-hitman exacting payback with the help of some Macau mobsters, this tightly tuned, heavily armed vehicle is vintage To, though it may strike both partisans and detractors as more of the stylish same. Western elements and abundant bloodshed make this To's most marketable item since 2006's "Exiled," with appeal for Asian buffs and French hipsters alike.
Wai Ka-fai's script gets down to its bloody business in the opening minutes, as a Chinese man and his French wife (Sylvie Testud) are gunned down in their Macau home. The violence -- accompanied by the smoky, stylized bloodspray that's become a To trademark -- dispels the mood of domestic bliss with shocking suddenness. From there, "Vengeance" descends into a darkly beautiful Triad gang underworld, where every confrontation must be preceded by much slo-mo brooding and sizing up of one's competition, often through sunglasses.
In a poignant but amusingly tongue-in-cheek scene, the wife, who has miraculously survived the attack, is visited by her father Costello (Hallyday), who promises to avenge her. Cutting a dangerously debonair figure in black hat and overcoat, Hallyday immediately draws all eyes, his magnificently grave, weathered features suggesting a lifetime of hardened criminality and brutal life experience. But there's also something about him -- perhaps the charming fact that his character, who hasn't used a gun in 20 years, now works as a chef in Paris -- that has a way of putting the viewer at ease. As coolly taciturn killers go, Hallyday's Costello is a pleasure to spend an hour and 45 minutes with.
The first of the film's suave setpieces brings Costello into contact with three assassins (played by To regulars Anthony Wong, Lam Suet and Lam Ka-tung) in the employ of a vulgar, decadent crime boss, Fung (another To standby, Simon Yam). Once Costello enlists the trio to help him hunt down his quarry, "Vengeance" settles into a wry, almost comfortably familiar buddy-picture rhythm, as the four men meticulously reconstruct the initial crime (precisely edited by Cheng Siu-keung), compare weaponry over a hot meal, and quietly consider the possibility of honor among hitmen.
As the action shifts from Macau to Hong Kong, Wai's script borrows a few twists from "Memento" and "The Memory of a Killer": It becomes apparent that Costello is experiencing the rapid onset of amnesia, imbuing his mission with fresh urgency. The final scenes, which include a lovely beachside interlude and a nighttime showdown in the streets of Hong Kong, are at once sad, elegiac and strangely joyous.
"Vengeance" isn't exactly subversive, and it more than keeps the promise bluntly extended by its title. But it would be a mistake to overlook the ideas that occasionally penetrate its sleek surface. To acknowledges that the seven professional murderers onscreen (four good, three bad, for those who care to delineate) are in many ways interchangeable. He also foregrounds the desire to protect one's children as the overriding motivation that governs the film's universe, not only setting the plot in motion but unexpectedly complicating it along the way.
Hallyday's craggy charisma stands out yet never overpowers his Chinese co-stars, with whom he blends effortlessly. To's widescreen mise-en-scene also merits top billing, as the helmer manipulates light, image and sound -- at one point even orchestrating a gory shootout by selective moonlight -- to bravura effect.
---------------------------------------
Vengeance
17 May, 2009 | By Lee Marshall
Screendaily
Dir: Johnnie To. Hong Kong-France. 2009. 108mins.
A revenge shoot-em-up which fires mostly blanks, Johnnie To’s eagerly anticipated pairing with French actor and rocker Johnny Hallyday is unlikely to make it into the To Top Tens obsessively compiled by the Hong Kong director’s loyal fanbase. As always, the sensuality of To’s visual style and soundscapes and the choreography of the film’s bullet ballet provide reasons to watch, but the contrived plot, some wooden English dialogue and Hallyday’s stilted perfomance derail proceedings well before the final showdown.
What’s really lacking in Vengeance is the narrative inventiveness which lifted films like Breaking News or PTU out of the Hong Kong crime genre box and turned them into arthouse crossover items.
Producer/distributor ARP releases the film in France on May 20 – but the audience driven by the pulling power of ageing rocker Hallyday, who is a national institution, is likely to be short-lived, and may not translate to other territories. Though he has become a festival favourite over the last five or six years, To is still invisible to most ordinary filmgoers, and Vengeance is unlikely to change this. Most of its ultimate audience will probably come from DVD.
There’s something very physical and compelling about To’s innate feel for cinematic sheen and syntax, and it’s fully on display in the 90-second pre-title sequence, which shows the brutal slaying of a happy Macau family – French mother Irene (Testud), her Chinese husband and their two young sons – by a trio of hitmen. Left for dead, Irene survives – and when chisel-faced father Costello (Hallyday) arrives at the hospital, he swears to avenge the murder.
Costello engages three local hitmen (To regulars Wong, Tung and Suet) to find the killers. To has a way with character actors, but the wry chemistry between the three assassins and the rugged Frenchman – who offers them his restaurant on the Champs-Elysees as collateral for the deal – doesn’t quite work. Maybe it’s because Suet and Tung learned their lines phonetically, maybe it’s because, behind his unflinching Easter Island facemask, Hallyday looks as if he’s not sure what he’s doing here. But around 30 minutes in, the humour-tinged noirish atmosphere that To is usually so good at evoking begins to tip over into absurdity.
Essentially it’s a script problem. Worst of all is the moment around 45 minutes in when a wounded Costello – who by now has revealed that before working as a chef, he too was a hitman – tells his hired guns that he has a bullet lodged in his brain, and is in imminent danger of losing his memory.
It looks like a plot turn that might have been invented on the hoof, but this is the first script that To and Wai Ka-fai actually committed to paper. This new fact allows for some Memento-style visual business as Costello rapidly drifts into amnesia and is forced to write down the names of friends and enemies on photos, and on his gun. It also gives an amusing edge to the final last-man-standing shoot out, but the slapdash way it’s introduced loses the sympathy of an audience that was already wavering between indulgence and impatience.
As ever, there are compensations. To is a master of location shooting, and Macau’s neon casino signs and ancient lanes provide an atmospheric backdrop for the film’s early scenes – an atmosphere that is underlined by Lo Tayu’s great urban score, which alternates blaxploitation-style funk with jangling Wild West guitar melodies. A scrapyard on a piece of wasteland backed by distant high-rise office blocks supplies another atmospheric setting, and becomes the location for the film’s most choreographed gunfight involving huge bales of scrap paper – a sequence whose self-conscious theatricality is underlined by the improvised grandstand from which Fung surveys the action.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
“Prophet” Portends Pleasure in Audiard’s Arty, Coming of Age Mob Film
by Anthony Kaufman
indieWire.com
A scene from Jacques Audiard's "The Prophet." Image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.If James Toback’s petty-criminal tale “Fingers” inspired Jacques Audiard’s previous “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” it’s Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” that looms over his latest “A Prophet.” Successfully balancing art-film portraiture with a gangster picture’s plot, the film may be one of the more conventional movies in this year’s Cannes competition, but judging from the sustained applause after its Cannes premiere on Saturday morning, it’s also been one of the more satisfying.
“A Prophet” chronicles the criminal education and identity formation of an 18-year-old Arab kid sent to prison for a 6-year-sentence. When we first meet Malik El Djebena (excellent newcomer Tahar Rahim), he’s a scared and ignorant kid, with an 11-year-old’s education, unsure of how to navigate the overwhelming new realities of prison life. Audiard skillfully captures Malik’s confusion with a wandering handheld camera and his limited worldview with a masked lens that only reveals a small circular portion of the frame - a closed-off perspective that will inevitably widen by the films’ conclusion.
Utterly isolated, with no family or friends in or outside the prison, Malik struggles to stick to himself and keep a low profile, a strategy that only works for so long. Soon Malik finds himself in the protection of the Corsican mafia—headed by the white-haired patriarch Cesar (played by veteran Niels Arestrup, reprising his complicated father-figure from “Beat That My Heart Skipped”). Malik’s safety comes with servitude: His first task for the Corsicans is the murder of new Arab inmate Reyeb, a harrowing assignment involving the delivery of a razor blade hidden in his mouth to the target’s jugular. With this first major set piece, Audiard sets the stage for the film to come: a mixture of bloody violence - a la Scorsese - with the interior struggles and ambitions of his protagonist.
Audiard charts Malik’s rise through an array of characters: some important, a Muslim friend Ryad, who helps Malik learn to read and eventually offers him his only sense of real family; others somewhat extraneous, Jordi the Gypsy, a drug dealer who fuels Malik’s underworld career. Title headings and character names printed on the screen provide a guide for those who will play a role in Malik’s development, but don’t really add much to the proceedings. Other stylistic flourishes work to lesser and greater degrees: a pair of slow-motion dream sequences may distract from the more urgent verite visuals; while surrealist sequences involving Reyeb’s return to Malik’s guilty conscience offer depth to Malik’s state-of-mind and internal battles with his Arab identity.
At two and half hours in length, “A Prophet” doesn’t feel slow, showing Malik’s growth in step-by-step stages that naturally evolve—while never losing sight of the fact that he remains an innocent. A scene involving Malik’s first plane trip provides a welcomed and lighthearted reminder that the character, now a major player navigating both Corsican and Arab gangs, is still a kid at heart. Newcomer Tahar Rahim gives Malik the right combination of tough bravado and naivety; watching him evolve is one of the film’s chief pleasures; and while the actor may not have the eyes of Emanuelle Devos (Audiard’s “Read My Lips”) or the energy of Romain Duris (“Heart Skipped”), he’s got plenty of boyish charm.
In fact, “A Prophet” is best seen as a portrait of a young Arab man in search of his identity. Whatever not-so-subtle Oedipal conflict emerges between Malik and Cesar, the bond doesn’t have the emotional weight or dramatic satisfaction to sustain the film. What audiences will most remember about “A Prophet” is not Malik’s troubled relationship with this father figure so much as the sight of a man come of age, finally standing tall with his fellow Arab brothers.
by Anthony Kaufman
indieWire.com
A scene from Jacques Audiard's "The Prophet." Image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.If James Toback’s petty-criminal tale “Fingers” inspired Jacques Audiard’s previous “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” it’s Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” that looms over his latest “A Prophet.” Successfully balancing art-film portraiture with a gangster picture’s plot, the film may be one of the more conventional movies in this year’s Cannes competition, but judging from the sustained applause after its Cannes premiere on Saturday morning, it’s also been one of the more satisfying.
“A Prophet” chronicles the criminal education and identity formation of an 18-year-old Arab kid sent to prison for a 6-year-sentence. When we first meet Malik El Djebena (excellent newcomer Tahar Rahim), he’s a scared and ignorant kid, with an 11-year-old’s education, unsure of how to navigate the overwhelming new realities of prison life. Audiard skillfully captures Malik’s confusion with a wandering handheld camera and his limited worldview with a masked lens that only reveals a small circular portion of the frame - a closed-off perspective that will inevitably widen by the films’ conclusion.
Utterly isolated, with no family or friends in or outside the prison, Malik struggles to stick to himself and keep a low profile, a strategy that only works for so long. Soon Malik finds himself in the protection of the Corsican mafia—headed by the white-haired patriarch Cesar (played by veteran Niels Arestrup, reprising his complicated father-figure from “Beat That My Heart Skipped”). Malik’s safety comes with servitude: His first task for the Corsicans is the murder of new Arab inmate Reyeb, a harrowing assignment involving the delivery of a razor blade hidden in his mouth to the target’s jugular. With this first major set piece, Audiard sets the stage for the film to come: a mixture of bloody violence - a la Scorsese - with the interior struggles and ambitions of his protagonist.
Audiard charts Malik’s rise through an array of characters: some important, a Muslim friend Ryad, who helps Malik learn to read and eventually offers him his only sense of real family; others somewhat extraneous, Jordi the Gypsy, a drug dealer who fuels Malik’s underworld career. Title headings and character names printed on the screen provide a guide for those who will play a role in Malik’s development, but don’t really add much to the proceedings. Other stylistic flourishes work to lesser and greater degrees: a pair of slow-motion dream sequences may distract from the more urgent verite visuals; while surrealist sequences involving Reyeb’s return to Malik’s guilty conscience offer depth to Malik’s state-of-mind and internal battles with his Arab identity.
At two and half hours in length, “A Prophet” doesn’t feel slow, showing Malik’s growth in step-by-step stages that naturally evolve—while never losing sight of the fact that he remains an innocent. A scene involving Malik’s first plane trip provides a welcomed and lighthearted reminder that the character, now a major player navigating both Corsican and Arab gangs, is still a kid at heart. Newcomer Tahar Rahim gives Malik the right combination of tough bravado and naivety; watching him evolve is one of the film’s chief pleasures; and while the actor may not have the eyes of Emanuelle Devos (Audiard’s “Read My Lips”) or the energy of Romain Duris (“Heart Skipped”), he’s got plenty of boyish charm.
In fact, “A Prophet” is best seen as a portrait of a young Arab man in search of his identity. Whatever not-so-subtle Oedipal conflict emerges between Malik and Cesar, the bond doesn’t have the emotional weight or dramatic satisfaction to sustain the film. What audiences will most remember about “A Prophet” is not Malik’s troubled relationship with this father figure so much as the sight of a man come of age, finally standing tall with his fellow Arab brothers.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Screendaily:
Prophet
Un prophete
(France-Italy)
By JUSTIN CHANG
Variety
Genre specialist Jacques Audiard continues his fascination with the secret inner lives of Gaul's criminal underworld in "A Prophet," a tough, absorbingly intricate account of a young French-Arab thug's improbable education behind bars. Applying his jangly aesthetic to a broader canvas than usual, Audiard navigates his protagonist through a grotty, at times overcrowded labyrinth of racially divided gang factions and roughly sketched-in crooks and cons. Though less pleasurably offbeat than the helmer's well-received "Read My Lips" and "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," this is solid, sinewy pulp fiction with strong arthouse prospects abroad and on local release Aug. 26.
Clocking in at an imposing 2½ hours, "A Prophet" is Audiard's fifth and longest feature to date. This has less to do with the intrinsic interest of the central character -- 19-year-old petty criminal Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), who's been sentenced to six years in prison -- than with the thick network of warring tribes he finds himself mired in and ultimately forced to master. It's one of the understated ironies of Audiard's script (co-written with Thomas Bidegain) that for Malik, crime doesn't begin to pay until after he lands in the clink.
Pic breezes its way through the usual prison-movie conventions as Malik is strip-searched, roughed up and quickly enlightened about his place on the jailhouse food chain. In short order, he's targeted by the leader of the prison's Corsican gang, Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped"), who threatens Malik with death unless he murders a fellow Arab inmate, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi).
Audiard sustains tension best in these early scenes by emphasizing Malik's physical nakedness and vulnerability. Though prone to his own flashes of temper, he's mostly shy, inarticulate and on the defensive, his eyes shifting anxiously as he takes in his grim surroundings (a visual strategy approximated by the darting handheld camerawork of d.p. Stephane Fontaine and sharp, kinetic rhythms of Juliette Welfling's editing).
Even after Malik completes his mission -- in a sequence of queasy, unnerving brutality -- and confirms himself as a jailbird to be reckoned with, he remains a loner and an outsider, accepted by neither his Corsican superiors (who call him a "dirty Arab") nor the Muslim hoods who form the prison's other dominant bloc. But even though he can barely read or write, Malik turns out to be a quick study in all the ways that count.
The lengthy remainder of the film spans several years and is devoted to Malik's thriving career in and out of prison. Under Luciani's orders, he manages to secure a few days' leave at a time for good behavior, which he uses to deepen his criminal connections and bump off rivals, often working with his only real friend, ex-con Riad (Adel Bencherif).
A certain mechanical quality inevitably seeps in as the web of conflicting allegiances takes on a dizzying complexity; Malik comes to seem almost invincible, his upward trajectory circumscribed by the screenplay and the pic's not especially subtle title (it could just as easily taken the name of Audiard's 1996 feature, "A Self-Made Hero"). Offsetting these qualities are the tale's headlong momentum, Audiard's flair for pulse-pounding setpieces and the intensely physical lead performance of Rahim, who holds the screen in a role that tends more toward recessive, inward-looking moments than showy ones.
Other perfs are effective enough in mostly one-dimensional parts, with the singular exception of Arestrup's chilling turn as a crime boss who will accept nothing less than Malik's complete submission. While Audiard deploys a few modernist touches such as intertitles, slo-mo and iris shots, as well as a full-bodied score by Alexandre Desplat, an atmosphere of gritty realism predominates, borne out by Michel Barthelemy's stark production design and the film's matter-of-fact approach to the corruption of the prison authorities.
--------------------------------------------
Film Review: A Prophet
By Peter Brunette
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- French master Jacques Audiard has challenged the thus-far mostly middling Cannes competition with a powerful prison drama that's an old-fashioned Bildungsroman in in-your-face, intensely realistic disguise. The militantly unprolific director of such exquisite small films as "Read My Lips" and "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," which have appeared at roughly five-year intervals, has now moved to an infinitely broader canvas with outstanding results.
The film is perhaps a little long at 2 1/2 hours, though many partisans would probably argue that the full development of the subtle particulars of its ideas (not all of which are completely successful, it should be added) requires this leisurely pace. In any case, the film will be picked up for theatrical distribution in all major markets and also should do well on DVD.
First-time actor Tahar Rahim brilliantly embodies Malik El Djebena, a wayward Arab youth who lands in prison at the tender age of 19, unable to read or write. Upon arrival, he is cognizant of none of this forbidding place's dangers and at the mercy of all. The first half-hour of the film depicts the ever-present violence, assorted humiliations and constant struggle for survival that pervade prison life in startlingly authentic ways that must have sprung from real-life experiences. Forced under threat of death by the Corsican gang that effectively runs the prison to befriend and kill a fellow Arab, Malik is thenceforward aligned with the Corsicans, whom he serves as a kind of slave in exchange for their protection. As the years pass, however, Malik educates himself in so many different ways, both legitimate and illegitimate, that he ultimately manages to challenge the prison's power structure and, by playing different groups off each other in the outside world, begins to construct a little empire of his own.
What's most immediately remarkable about the film is the raw intensity of its hyper-realistic encounters, hugely enhanced by the superb acting of newcomer Rahim. This naturalism is nicely counterpointed with a few unabashedly stylized, very lyrical sequences in which Audiard demonstrates his signature mastery of offbeat visual and sound effects. One motif that doesn't quite work, however, is the regular, presumably ghostly return of the man Malik has killed. The comic vein in which these appearances are presented was presumably intended to provide some relief from the relentless and depressing reality of Malik's prison life, but they clash with the film's overall tone. (Similarly, the implications of the film's title are addressed in only one short scene and never properly developed.)
But what finally cuts much deeper than the surface realism (a quality not exactly lacking in recent prison films like "Hunger") is Audiard's minute deconstruction of the various ways power is manifested in prison and, by extension, in human life at its most basic. The Corsicans (an ethnic group rarely represented in the cinema) detest and fear the "bearded ones," the Muslims, as they brutally struggle to maintain control, and the director explores this basic tribal confrontation like a seasoned anthropologist. Audiard is also attentive to the tiniest revelatory gestures, as when he shows Malik, even at his nastiest, as little more than a gentle naif at heart. When this reluctant killer can't suppress his childish delight at his first ride in an airplane, we are delighted as well.
-------------------------------------------------------
A Prophet (Un Prophète)
16 May, 2009 | By Jonathan Romney
Screendaily
Dir. Jacques Audiard. France/Italy. 2009. 150 mins.
When it comes to hard-bitten crime cinema, Jacques Audiard has few equals in Europe, and his violent, gripping prison drama A Prophet shows him extending his range with unimpeachable command. The story of a gauche young inmate who rises through the criminal ranks to become a formidable player, A Prophet works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment.
The only thing that might hamper commercial prospects is a labyrinthine, sometimes perplexing narrative, but otherwise the film – to be released in France in August - should have the same international appeal as last year’s Cannes crime hit Gomorrah. Its unapologetically testosterone-laden tenor will give the film a resonance way beyond the international art-house constituency that embraced Audiard’s last film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Expect this stimulating film also to be much discussed in the French media in terms of its topical backgrounds, the national prison system and France’s Islamic population.
Set largely within prison walls and featuring an almost exclusively male and non-professional cast, the film details the prison career of Malik el Djebena (newcomer Rahim), a 19-year-old man of North African origin but estranged from the Muslim community. Sentenced to six years on an unspecified charge, Malik is chosen by Cesar Luciani (Arestrup), feared kingpin of the prison’s reigning Corsican gang, to kill a prisoner named Reyeb (Yacoubi) who initially offers Malik drugs in exchange for sex. Malik commits the bloody murder, and – thanks to Luciani’s near-total control of the prison’s internal workings - gets off scot-free. This makes him a lieutenant in the prison’s Corsican gang, initially entrusted only with menial duties and disparaged as an Arab outsider.
Haunted by visions of a ghostly Reyeb, and determined to get on, the illiterate Malik not only learns to read, but teaches himself Corsican, surreptitiously learning the ins and outs of Luciani’s business. Another inmate, Ryad (Bencherif), becomes Malik’s friend, later his ally on the outside. When Luciani arranges periods of leave for Malik, entrusting him with various criminal missions, Malik takes the opportunity to do some business of his own, setting up a drugs trade with Ryad’s aid. Life gets increasingly dangerous for Malik, both inside and outside prison walls, but he seems – partly through Reyeb’s benign, unearthly influence - to lead a charmed life. Powers of prophecy are attributed to him after surviving a bizarre car crash – an incident presaged in an enigmatic fantasy sequence.
Immensely detailed both in its accounts of prison life and of the politics of organized crime, A Prophet comes across as both a realistic film and a deeply cynical one: it is extremely matter-of-fact in depicting a dog-eat-dog world.
Audiard fans may miss the subtler psychological shadings of his earlier films, as well as some of his more fabulist story-telling tendencies and stylistic flourishes. Shot by Stéphane Fontaine with a brutally restricted iron-and-cement palette, this is a business-like film, with a cinematic language as punchy and stripped-down as they come: only a few stylistic frills (the aforementioned fantasy sequence, a blurry iris-style effect evocative of Malik’s claustrophobic existence) break the general tenor, and even the occasional visitations of the dead Reyeb are assimilated perfectly, barely compromising the overall realism. Chapter titles and captions identifying key characters help us keep a tab on the film’s complexities.
Newcomer Tahar Rahim carries an extraordinary weight, on screen practically in every shot, and proves a mesmerising centre to the film, limning Malik as an unformed, seemingly weightless figure at the start, who gradually acquires considerable depth, forging his personality and mind through hard conscious struggle. Rahim’s quiet, seemingly artless charisma makes Malik immensely sympathetic, even though this ruthlessly lucid film makes no bones about the amoral lengths he goes to in the name of survival. A largely unfamiliar cast – very few of them the central-casting plug-uglies usually seem in prison dramas – give the film a flesh-and-blood plausibility, while the weather-beaten Niels Arestrup (who also appeared in Audiard’s The Beat…) is formidable and menacing, eventually even vulnerable as the old-guard don.
Prophet
Un prophete
(France-Italy)
By JUSTIN CHANG
Variety
Genre specialist Jacques Audiard continues his fascination with the secret inner lives of Gaul's criminal underworld in "A Prophet," a tough, absorbingly intricate account of a young French-Arab thug's improbable education behind bars. Applying his jangly aesthetic to a broader canvas than usual, Audiard navigates his protagonist through a grotty, at times overcrowded labyrinth of racially divided gang factions and roughly sketched-in crooks and cons. Though less pleasurably offbeat than the helmer's well-received "Read My Lips" and "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," this is solid, sinewy pulp fiction with strong arthouse prospects abroad and on local release Aug. 26.
Clocking in at an imposing 2½ hours, "A Prophet" is Audiard's fifth and longest feature to date. This has less to do with the intrinsic interest of the central character -- 19-year-old petty criminal Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), who's been sentenced to six years in prison -- than with the thick network of warring tribes he finds himself mired in and ultimately forced to master. It's one of the understated ironies of Audiard's script (co-written with Thomas Bidegain) that for Malik, crime doesn't begin to pay until after he lands in the clink.
Pic breezes its way through the usual prison-movie conventions as Malik is strip-searched, roughed up and quickly enlightened about his place on the jailhouse food chain. In short order, he's targeted by the leader of the prison's Corsican gang, Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped"), who threatens Malik with death unless he murders a fellow Arab inmate, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi).
Audiard sustains tension best in these early scenes by emphasizing Malik's physical nakedness and vulnerability. Though prone to his own flashes of temper, he's mostly shy, inarticulate and on the defensive, his eyes shifting anxiously as he takes in his grim surroundings (a visual strategy approximated by the darting handheld camerawork of d.p. Stephane Fontaine and sharp, kinetic rhythms of Juliette Welfling's editing).
Even after Malik completes his mission -- in a sequence of queasy, unnerving brutality -- and confirms himself as a jailbird to be reckoned with, he remains a loner and an outsider, accepted by neither his Corsican superiors (who call him a "dirty Arab") nor the Muslim hoods who form the prison's other dominant bloc. But even though he can barely read or write, Malik turns out to be a quick study in all the ways that count.
The lengthy remainder of the film spans several years and is devoted to Malik's thriving career in and out of prison. Under Luciani's orders, he manages to secure a few days' leave at a time for good behavior, which he uses to deepen his criminal connections and bump off rivals, often working with his only real friend, ex-con Riad (Adel Bencherif).
A certain mechanical quality inevitably seeps in as the web of conflicting allegiances takes on a dizzying complexity; Malik comes to seem almost invincible, his upward trajectory circumscribed by the screenplay and the pic's not especially subtle title (it could just as easily taken the name of Audiard's 1996 feature, "A Self-Made Hero"). Offsetting these qualities are the tale's headlong momentum, Audiard's flair for pulse-pounding setpieces and the intensely physical lead performance of Rahim, who holds the screen in a role that tends more toward recessive, inward-looking moments than showy ones.
Other perfs are effective enough in mostly one-dimensional parts, with the singular exception of Arestrup's chilling turn as a crime boss who will accept nothing less than Malik's complete submission. While Audiard deploys a few modernist touches such as intertitles, slo-mo and iris shots, as well as a full-bodied score by Alexandre Desplat, an atmosphere of gritty realism predominates, borne out by Michel Barthelemy's stark production design and the film's matter-of-fact approach to the corruption of the prison authorities.
--------------------------------------------
Film Review: A Prophet
By Peter Brunette
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- French master Jacques Audiard has challenged the thus-far mostly middling Cannes competition with a powerful prison drama that's an old-fashioned Bildungsroman in in-your-face, intensely realistic disguise. The militantly unprolific director of such exquisite small films as "Read My Lips" and "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," which have appeared at roughly five-year intervals, has now moved to an infinitely broader canvas with outstanding results.
The film is perhaps a little long at 2 1/2 hours, though many partisans would probably argue that the full development of the subtle particulars of its ideas (not all of which are completely successful, it should be added) requires this leisurely pace. In any case, the film will be picked up for theatrical distribution in all major markets and also should do well on DVD.
First-time actor Tahar Rahim brilliantly embodies Malik El Djebena, a wayward Arab youth who lands in prison at the tender age of 19, unable to read or write. Upon arrival, he is cognizant of none of this forbidding place's dangers and at the mercy of all. The first half-hour of the film depicts the ever-present violence, assorted humiliations and constant struggle for survival that pervade prison life in startlingly authentic ways that must have sprung from real-life experiences. Forced under threat of death by the Corsican gang that effectively runs the prison to befriend and kill a fellow Arab, Malik is thenceforward aligned with the Corsicans, whom he serves as a kind of slave in exchange for their protection. As the years pass, however, Malik educates himself in so many different ways, both legitimate and illegitimate, that he ultimately manages to challenge the prison's power structure and, by playing different groups off each other in the outside world, begins to construct a little empire of his own.
What's most immediately remarkable about the film is the raw intensity of its hyper-realistic encounters, hugely enhanced by the superb acting of newcomer Rahim. This naturalism is nicely counterpointed with a few unabashedly stylized, very lyrical sequences in which Audiard demonstrates his signature mastery of offbeat visual and sound effects. One motif that doesn't quite work, however, is the regular, presumably ghostly return of the man Malik has killed. The comic vein in which these appearances are presented was presumably intended to provide some relief from the relentless and depressing reality of Malik's prison life, but they clash with the film's overall tone. (Similarly, the implications of the film's title are addressed in only one short scene and never properly developed.)
But what finally cuts much deeper than the surface realism (a quality not exactly lacking in recent prison films like "Hunger") is Audiard's minute deconstruction of the various ways power is manifested in prison and, by extension, in human life at its most basic. The Corsicans (an ethnic group rarely represented in the cinema) detest and fear the "bearded ones," the Muslims, as they brutally struggle to maintain control, and the director explores this basic tribal confrontation like a seasoned anthropologist. Audiard is also attentive to the tiniest revelatory gestures, as when he shows Malik, even at his nastiest, as little more than a gentle naif at heart. When this reluctant killer can't suppress his childish delight at his first ride in an airplane, we are delighted as well.
-------------------------------------------------------
A Prophet (Un Prophète)
16 May, 2009 | By Jonathan Romney
Screendaily
Dir. Jacques Audiard. France/Italy. 2009. 150 mins.
When it comes to hard-bitten crime cinema, Jacques Audiard has few equals in Europe, and his violent, gripping prison drama A Prophet shows him extending his range with unimpeachable command. The story of a gauche young inmate who rises through the criminal ranks to become a formidable player, A Prophet works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment.
The only thing that might hamper commercial prospects is a labyrinthine, sometimes perplexing narrative, but otherwise the film – to be released in France in August - should have the same international appeal as last year’s Cannes crime hit Gomorrah. Its unapologetically testosterone-laden tenor will give the film a resonance way beyond the international art-house constituency that embraced Audiard’s last film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Expect this stimulating film also to be much discussed in the French media in terms of its topical backgrounds, the national prison system and France’s Islamic population.
Set largely within prison walls and featuring an almost exclusively male and non-professional cast, the film details the prison career of Malik el Djebena (newcomer Rahim), a 19-year-old man of North African origin but estranged from the Muslim community. Sentenced to six years on an unspecified charge, Malik is chosen by Cesar Luciani (Arestrup), feared kingpin of the prison’s reigning Corsican gang, to kill a prisoner named Reyeb (Yacoubi) who initially offers Malik drugs in exchange for sex. Malik commits the bloody murder, and – thanks to Luciani’s near-total control of the prison’s internal workings - gets off scot-free. This makes him a lieutenant in the prison’s Corsican gang, initially entrusted only with menial duties and disparaged as an Arab outsider.
Haunted by visions of a ghostly Reyeb, and determined to get on, the illiterate Malik not only learns to read, but teaches himself Corsican, surreptitiously learning the ins and outs of Luciani’s business. Another inmate, Ryad (Bencherif), becomes Malik’s friend, later his ally on the outside. When Luciani arranges periods of leave for Malik, entrusting him with various criminal missions, Malik takes the opportunity to do some business of his own, setting up a drugs trade with Ryad’s aid. Life gets increasingly dangerous for Malik, both inside and outside prison walls, but he seems – partly through Reyeb’s benign, unearthly influence - to lead a charmed life. Powers of prophecy are attributed to him after surviving a bizarre car crash – an incident presaged in an enigmatic fantasy sequence.
Immensely detailed both in its accounts of prison life and of the politics of organized crime, A Prophet comes across as both a realistic film and a deeply cynical one: it is extremely matter-of-fact in depicting a dog-eat-dog world.
Audiard fans may miss the subtler psychological shadings of his earlier films, as well as some of his more fabulist story-telling tendencies and stylistic flourishes. Shot by Stéphane Fontaine with a brutally restricted iron-and-cement palette, this is a business-like film, with a cinematic language as punchy and stripped-down as they come: only a few stylistic frills (the aforementioned fantasy sequence, a blurry iris-style effect evocative of Malik’s claustrophobic existence) break the general tenor, and even the occasional visitations of the dead Reyeb are assimilated perfectly, barely compromising the overall realism. Chapter titles and captions identifying key characters help us keep a tab on the film’s complexities.
Newcomer Tahar Rahim carries an extraordinary weight, on screen practically in every shot, and proves a mesmerising centre to the film, limning Malik as an unformed, seemingly weightless figure at the start, who gradually acquires considerable depth, forging his personality and mind through hard conscious struggle. Rahim’s quiet, seemingly artless charisma makes Malik immensely sympathetic, even though this ruthlessly lucid film makes no bones about the amoral lengths he goes to in the name of survival. A largely unfamiliar cast – very few of them the central-casting plug-uglies usually seem in prison dramas – give the film a flesh-and-blood plausibility, while the weather-beaten Niels Arestrup (who also appeared in Audiard’s The Beat…) is formidable and menacing, eventually even vulnerable as the old-guard don.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
Here's more D'Angelo posted about Taking Woodstock:
None of the characters in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, adapted from the memoir by key organizer Elliot Tiber, is especially famous, but the story of the concert itself passed into legend long ago, which means that you’re just sitting there waiting for Max Yasgur to show up (hey, it’s Eugene Levy!), for the roads into Bethel to be jammed by barefoot hippies, for heavy rains to turn Yasgur’s field into a giant mud pit, and, inevitably, for Lee to employ the same split-screen effect that Scorsese and Schoonmaker used when editing Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock. Check, check, check, check, and check please. Daily Show correspondent Demetri Martin makes little impression as Tiber, and the rest of the cast tends to indulge stale ‘60s stereotypes, although British thesp Imelda Staunton has some testy fun as Tiber’s Russian-immigrant mom. It’s the kind of movie in which you know the acid just kicked in because the background suddenly goes all smeary-psychedelic (really? again?), and in which we’re prompted to chortle with retroactive knowingness at e.g. one promoter’s assurance that an upcoming free Rolling Stones concert will surely be a nonstop groovy lovefest. (I guess it counts as subtlety that he doesn’t actually say the word “Altamont.”) Harmless enough, but I expect a lot more from Lee and Schamus, even after Hulk.
None of the characters in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, adapted from the memoir by key organizer Elliot Tiber, is especially famous, but the story of the concert itself passed into legend long ago, which means that you’re just sitting there waiting for Max Yasgur to show up (hey, it’s Eugene Levy!), for the roads into Bethel to be jammed by barefoot hippies, for heavy rains to turn Yasgur’s field into a giant mud pit, and, inevitably, for Lee to employ the same split-screen effect that Scorsese and Schoonmaker used when editing Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock. Check, check, check, check, and check please. Daily Show correspondent Demetri Martin makes little impression as Tiber, and the rest of the cast tends to indulge stale ‘60s stereotypes, although British thesp Imelda Staunton has some testy fun as Tiber’s Russian-immigrant mom. It’s the kind of movie in which you know the acid just kicked in because the background suddenly goes all smeary-psychedelic (really? again?), and in which we’re prompted to chortle with retroactive knowingness at e.g. one promoter’s assurance that an upcoming free Rolling Stones concert will surely be a nonstop groovy lovefest. (I guess it counts as subtlety that he doesn’t actually say the word “Altamont.”) Harmless enough, but I expect a lot more from Lee and Schamus, even after Hulk.