A Film a Week - The Stories

 previously published on Cineuropa

When we get to see some of “big history”, such as wars, political assassinations and military coups, unfolding virtually right before our eyes, it is safe to assume that, if we come out the other side unscathed, we will have many stories to recount about said events. This is the premise of Abu Bakr Shawky’s (Yomeddine) newest feature, The Stories, which has premiered in the official competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The place is Egypt, the time between 1967 and 1984. The film is structured into five chapters, each following our hero Ahmed (Amir El-Masri) and his colourful extended family during an episode set against a historical event, such as two wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973, the street riots against the pro-market reforms in 1977, and the assassination of president Anwar Sadat in 1981. When we first meet him, Ahmed is a gifted pianist living in a cramped house with his homemaker mother Fairouz, civil-servant father Ragheb and two brothers: his twin, Russian language and Soviet politics enthusiast Hassan, and Sharaf, who is into football, particularly the unlucky Zamalek club.

Their home is often visited by uncles and neighbours, his father might have got into trouble for uttering the word “corruption” on live television, the whole family is waging a “noise war” against the neighbour upstairs, and the brothers are targeted by bullies who support another club. Hassan has been drafted into the army just in time to participate in the Six-Day War, and Ahmed has started a pen-friendship with an Austrian girl called Elizabeth.

Six years later, Ahmed is in Vienna on a scholarship, courting Elizabeth (Valerie Pachner, from A Hidden Life), trying to dodge the proverbial bullets from her family, which is as chaotic as his own, and navigating his academic life under the wing of a casually racist bohemian professor and in the shadow of his more industrious rival Shams. When he hears the news about his brother getting killed in the Yom Kippur War, he has no choice but to return home. Four years later, Elizabeth comes to join him and his family, to fall into their chaotic dynamic, to witness the turmoil, to listen to their stories and start writing her own…

The Stories is a rare animal on the festival circuit, as it is an audience-friendly form of organised chaos that operates in a heightened emotional register and speaks about troubled life experiences in a fairly light-hearted way. In order to do so, Shawky relies heavily on a number of clichés, tropes and commonplaces, such as the actors’ rapid-fire dialogue, some hectic pans in Wolfgang Thaler’s cinematography and rapid cuts in Roland Stöttinger’s editing, as well as the loud sound design and even louder music, usually consisting of nationalist anthems and marches from the TV, contrasted with the modern, virtuoso pieces that Ahmed plays.

The thing is that these broad strokes usually work perfectly well, although more demanding viewers may pan the film on the grounds of exoticism exemplified by the slightly kitschy production design, the wild acting and the over-the-top sentimentality. But those things are here for a reason: they work in movies. And The Stories is just that, a fun movie that would fare better in theatres than on a festival circuit dominated by gloomy arthouse pieces. In a milieu like this, it constitutes a refreshing change.

A Film a Week - The Holy Family / Sveta obitelj

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in 2012/13, the debut fiction feature by Vlatka Vorkapić, Sonja and the Bull [+], became a smash hit at the Croatian box office with just under 100,000 admissions. After that, she went on to direct documentaries like Delayed Revolution (2015) and Our Daily Water (2018), while also taking part in omnibus projects, such as Transmania (A Twisted Game) from 2016. A decade after her biggest success, Vorkapić is back with a period romantic drama called The Holy Family. After the world premiere took place at the Sao Paulo International Film Festival in October, it has been released in theatres in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The plot is set in the Croatian eastern flatland region of Slavonia in the 1960s, then part of socialist Yugoslavia. Our protagonist, Janja (Luna Pilić), is a seasonal worker from Bosnia who comes to Slavonia at harvest time. Her first encounter with the village and its culture is her visit to a shop managed by Communist Party representative Milan (Aleksandar Cvjetković) and operated by his wife, Nota (Judita Franković Brdar), whose family used to own the store before the war. Janja stares at some sweets in a glass jar, probably seeing them for the first time in her life, and since she cannot afford any of them, Nota gives her some for free.

Soon enough, Janja gets selected by the village’s richest land owner, Marko (Serbian thesp Nikola Đuričko), who has a reputation as a well-meaning, soft boss who does not press workers too much and rather enjoys his jovial lifestyle. When Janja proves to be a hard worker and an honest person, Marko gets the idea to arrange a marriage between her and his only son, Iva (Ivan Čuić), much to the disapproval of his wife and the young man’s mother, the snobbish religious fanatic Ana (Anita Matić Delić).

At first, this might seem like a stroke of good luck for poor Janja, but she is not heading for a fairy-tale ending. The villagers look down on her, and Iva does not seem happy from the get-go, spending his time drinking with his friends or going hunting at night, instead of showing his wife any affection. Also, it turns out that Marko is not that well-meaning or jovial after all, but rather predatory when it comes to younger women. Other family secrets slowly come to light, and in order to survive, Janja has to forge alliances with different members of the household at different times.

The cinematography by Filip Tot channels the mood of the film from a pastoral aura early on to darker tones later, while the editing by Ivor Šonje is meticulous, especially during the wedding-party centrepiece, which gets some horror-like undertones added to it. The ensemble cast does some fine work, but the actors with more star power (such as Đuričko and Franković Brdar) make their characters appear meatier with more ease. Although the script for The Holy Family is an original work by the filmmaker and Slavica Šnur, the film itself seems like an adaptation of a rather conservative novel. Having said that, the old-fashioned flavour of it makes it seem rich in detail and handsome, especially in the visual department. The soundtrack, consisting mainly of lascivious, folksy songs, also adds to that feeling.

Vorkapić obviously knows how to juggle all of these details and draw the viewer’s attention to them. The trouble is that she is not that apt at handling the characters’ secrets any better than they do, dosing them out until it’s time for the revelation, making the whole story quite predictable, and even causing the titular metaphor to fall flat. In the end, The Holy Family is a handsomely packaged piece of confectionary.

A Film a Week - The Word / Slovo

 previously published on Cineuropa

Events from the past have a tendency to come back a long time after they originally happened, to haunt the next generations, or at least demanding to be remembered. In the context of the Czech Republic (and Slovakia), that event is the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which happened in 1968, and its aftermath. Every family probably has a story about 1968, and Beata Parkanová has just told us one in her second feature, The Word, which has premiered in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s competition.

Václav Vojíř (Martin Finger, a veteran of Czech television who also collaborated with Parkanová on her 2018 debut feature, Moments) is a man of noble principles. He is a strict and meticulous law expert and a highly respected notary in an unnamed Czech town, as well as being an authority figure of sorts for its inhabitants. But his expertise, clean record and upstanding principles are not enough to secure his position, since he is not a member of the ruling Communist Party, and there is even a record of him having voted against the communists in 1946. The Party, represented by agents who visit his office to put pressure on him, states that Vaclav owes his entire career to it and its benevolence towards his “transgressions”.

Václav is, naturally, worried about his future, since he is living in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, but his wife, Vera (Gabriela Mikulková, mostly active on television), stands firmly behind him, sacrificing her comfort to be the support he needs and to take care of their two children. Their friends advise them to “do the smart thing” and make a deal with the Party, because it is actually a minor nuisance, but Václav cannot betray his principles. He awaits his “punishment”, which could be having his licence revoked, being transferred somewhere else, or even being demoted to a menial job that he does not feel suited to doing – and the waiting could prove to be more like torture than the “sentence” itself.

Parkanová divides her film into long scenes: these dialogue-driven, somewhat static sequences are filmed in either longer, mid-to-long-distance shots or in a series of reverse shots, so The Word does not exactly give us a “cinematic” feeling all the time. The sense of watching a stage play is further amplified by the acting, which features heightened expressiveness and a slightly declamatory tone in the line delivery. Short intermezzos between the scenes, containing still photographs of the actors in their characters’ roles, provide a bit of relief from the heavy, gloomy atmosphere.

On a visual level, The Word looks a bit like a TV movie due to its unfiltered imagery drenched in natural colours and its slightly austere production design, in which the items of the present day are removed, but are not replaced with props from the period the film is portraying. However, for her part, Parkanová occasionally demonstrates that she has some interesting directing solutions, and cinematographer Tomáš Juriček is similarly resourceful with some of his attractive, ingeniously composed long shots.

In the end, The Word feels like a film made with a sincere motivation to tell the story. The trouble is that these stories have been told before, and so it could struggle to find an audience outside its specific region.

A Film a Week - Ghost of the Golden Groves

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Recently we had "Tumbbad", a formally conventional, yet mesmerizing, demons-infested tale of greed, reviewed here by yours truly. Another brilliant, yet differently dressed, debut comes also from India - "Ghost of the Golden Groves", penned and helmed by a Bengali duo Aniket Dutta and Roshni Sen, hidden under the pseudonym Harun al-Rashid (after an Arabian Nights character who is always masked). These two titles are not even remotely same kind of cinematic works, but now it is possible to argue that horror scene in India is gaining momentum quickly.

"Ghost of the Golden Groves" comes from Bengal and relies a bit on its tradition regarding the art house cinema dating from the 60's and Indian New Wave, but it is not the only clue needed for the interpretation of this diptych of strange ghost stories set deep in the backwoods and in the time when civilization started to visit those virgin lands. Some of the clues are spelled out, literally, early on: we can hear names Seijun Suzuki, Kaneto Shindo and Teshigahara, which are all the names of Japanese New Wave auteurs and if we were not listening carefully, Dutta and Sen will treat us with a couple of references to their work. Also, some other influences can be read: David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, acid western, experimental cinema as well as early and fairly basic science fiction B-movies, all of that shot predominantly in crisp black and white, or, better said, shades of grey.

The title is a bit misleading, there is not just one ghost, but more of them in those two stories that are connected only through the sheer strangeness of events and the clash of modernity and ancient, almost animalistic superstition as a lifestyle. The first, shorter part of the film titled "The Polymorph" and based on Dutta's own short story, follows the survey officer from Kolkata named Promotho (and played by Joyraj Bhattacharjee, glimpsed in Ronny Sen's astonishing "Cat Sticks") who came to the titular forest to map the roads that would run through the area in the future. He is met with hostility from the locals and tricked by a demon who took the shape of a local performer, so he ends up lost in space and time.

The second story, titled "Maya" and based on a short story by Bibhutibhusan Banyopadhyay, follows a poor, unemployed cook (Soumyajit Majumdar) who becomes a caretaker of a secluded, old villa owned by an eccentric old rich man (Jayanta Banerjee), despite the warnings about what happened to the previous men on his job. He does not seem to care even when a gas-masked woman, obviously from the future, starts visiting him in his dreams, followed by a group of similarly dressed people referred to simply as the others...

It would be easy, lazy and plain to write off "Ghost of the Golden Groves" for its awkwardness, because here it actually serves the purpose to tell an archetypical story about the clash between the new and the old, the civilization and wilderness. And Dutta and Sen do their best to tell it in a quite unique way, laced with humorous moments and striking visuals, effectively creating a memorable universe and using the storytelling means to the maximum effect.

Two things stand out here. One is the use of colour, first just suggested in the film's text when Promotho notices the green light in the forest only to be told by the carriage driver that people there see everything in black and white, then shown literally in cook's dreams and finally in the epilogue sequence where he recounts his story from a stage to the alien audience. That kind of use is far from the usual, it might even seem counter-intuitive a bit, but it makes sense and looks good paired with the rest of the black and white material shot by Basab Mullick that captures the attractiveness of the deep forest and primitive villages, complete with the "decay porn" of the crumbling villa.

The second one is sound design that is being used as a storytelling tool in a fresh way. Paired with an eclectic choice of music (done by Dutta), that includes rock, folk, jazz, blues, as well as electronic and modern pop, it creates a lasting impression, making "Ghost of the Golden Groves" one of the most pleasant surprises and arresting first-time filmmaking efforts in the terms of the strength and clarity of auteur vision.