A Film a Week - Frantz

Either you love or hate François Ozon’s work. It is that simple. His tricks and quirks can be considered either completely brilliant or totally gimmicky. And he loves them, oh so much. I am a huge fan, just for the record.

In my book, In the House is one of the most effective takes on meta-media, written and filmed. Young and Beautiful was really beautiful in its lyricism and the lack of bourgeois morality. And A New Friend was an outlandish fun worthy of mid-90’s Almodovar. There is no need to go through the earlier works, some of them were and still are great pieces of cinema, and every single one of them was fresh, fun to watch and vibrant.

So what should I, the fan, think when I bump into Ozon’s latest film, Frantz, a normal, toned-down anti-war drama set in Germany and France in the aftermath of WWI and filmed mostly in black and white which amplifies the effect of death and destruction? On top of that, it is a louse remake of one of the Ernst Lubitsch’s lesser-known films, Broken Lullaby, which was based on Maurice Rostand’s play that hit its time pretty well, but feels dated from the nowadays perspective. Has Ozon become a predictable film-maker? Is he going safe? Does he need a break after the tempo of almost a film a year?

Not at all, my dear friends. Sure, Frantz is the least Ozon film ever, but the “bookishness” of the whole thing is just the first impression. Ozon takes some clues from Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, mostly visual and atmosphere-wise, but is still quirky in his own way. For instance, the use of color sequences for dreams and memories might seem pedestrian at first, but it gets the whole new meaning when it is expanded to every genuinely pleasant moment in unpleasant times.

The story starts in 1919, in a small German town, with Anna (Paula Beer in her first major role) visiting her dead fiancé's grave (the title character played by Anton von Lucke in flashbacks) and finding out that someone else has left the flowers there. A Frenchman! When asked, Adrien (Pierre Niney of Yves Saint Laurent) introduces himself as Frantz’s friend from before the war, from his life in Paris. It turns out that Frantz was a francophile and a pacifist, so, after initial hesitations, his family accepts Adrien and welcomes him at their home, much to the disapproval of their fellow neighbours. But Adrien still feels awkward and after a big revelation (not to be spoiled by me, but it is not that unpredictable), goes back to Paris, leaving his German friends confused and Anna half-way in love with him.

It is convenient that both of the main characters speak both of the languages, so the story keeps shifting perspectives. The problem with the revelation is that it opens several huge plot-holes, but that is the problem Ozon inherited from the source material, which he tried to muffle with mood, atmosphere and focus on actors. Paula Beer is pretty expressive and compelling as Anna, but Pierre Niney seems to have more chemistry in the flashback scenes than in ones with Anna. Partially, it is the matter of the character and the fact that he is a war veteran, but Niney sometimes overplays the scared and awkward card.

And then comes Ozon with his trick. This is just a half of the film, but most of the Rostand’s play and Lubitsch’s version. What comes next is Ozon’s original work: Anna goes to Paris trying to find Adrien. And it works on an universal level, pairing the despair of the defeated side with the arrogant nationalism of the triumphant one, reducing the people, the living and the dead, to objects. In a world like that, there were no chance for friendship between the people and the nations and triumphalism on one side and humiliation on the other lead the way to another, much bloodier and more monstrous war.

Strangely, Ozon’s take on post-WWI melodrama feels more timely than ever thanks to his interventions and the recent development of events in Europe. It is Sunday. The second round of elections takes place in France, the key state for the idea of Europe united. The wars between the nations of Europe might seem to be over now, but history has a cynical habit of repeating itself to the ones who are quick to forget it.

A Film a Week - Nocturama

There is a point in the fact that the script for Nocturama, a Bertrand Bonello’s study of a seemingly unmotivated youth terrorist attack in Paris, was written some five years ago, before Charlie Hebdo and Batlacan events. There is even some kind of “nouvelle vague” quality implied by how it works in sync with contemporary France. For years if not decades, there was a strange feeling of impending violence and doom in the air. The society was and still is frozen in its old ways, the new generations are either in the state of political apathy or heavily radicalized by nationalist, religious or anarchistic ideas. The cars were burning in the Banlieu (the suburbs of Paris) almost every year since the 90’s and nobody asked why. The things needed to change, and the change is usually for the worse.

Before revealing it all in the cathartic ending of the film, Bonello is also more interested in “how” than he is in “why”. In the first half, we see youngsters doing seemingly mundane stuff during the day, riding the metro, picking up some stuff, checking into a hotel room or having a job interview in the Ministry of Interior building. Only the time, periodically given on the screen, gives us a sense of urgency and a thought that their actions might be connected.

There is no internal communication in a standard way of phone calls and text messages, but everything is masterfully co-ordinated. The targets are not at all random: a Ministry building, an empty floor of a skyscraper in the business district, several cars and a statue of Joan of Arc that burns evoking the ordeal of the aforementioned saint. On top of that, a bigshot banker gets the bullet in his home. The motivation behind the attacks remains unclear, since there is only one conversation on the topic, in a flashback scene, for that matter, and the bottom line is that our “perfect” democracy, like any other civilization, has a built-in mechanism of self-destruction by producing enemies and being defined by them.

Once the attacks are carried, the group gets together in a department store one of members works at as a security guard. The idea is to hole up there until the air clears sometime tomorrow. Needless to say, the plan is utterly stupid, they stood a better chance everyone for themselves in the street. So, spoiler ahead, there will be no tomorrow for them, and they kinda know it since they are more interested in partying and music than in news showing the consequences of their deeds.

But at least we have some time to meet them and try to figure out why such diverse gallery of young people just did something unthinkable. Two of the guys are missing already, one of them being the “brains” behind the operation. The rest of the crew played by young French actors known from the festival circuit is too unique to try to put them under one label. Some are white, some are of North African descent. Only one of them is a disillusioned member of the upper classes, while the others are either middle-class or straight from the poverty row. Only one of them is religious, while the others are not. No one is especially political. Some are scared, the others are trying to play it cool. The place they are hiding is something they fought against, but also a place of their fascination.

Most of the critics will draw parallels with Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (thematically, since the style is different, with quick cuts and repeating the key moments of violence in quick succession from different angles) with obvious clues from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. The references won’t stop just yet, since there is a drop or two of French comedy of manners a la Jacques Taty, “student movies” like Assayas’ Something in the Air, and the department store is the very place of the Kylie Minogue sequence in Leos Carax’ Holly Motors.

But with all the music clues, this portrait of desperate youth would be a perfect European companion piece to Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which is in its poetic documentarism still a better film than Nocturama. The problem is that Bonello wants to show the understanding for his subjects and their deeds and, at the same time, to remain objective towards them. It is a noble effort, but pointless because of the simple fact that in that way he made terrorism look cool, and beyond that, like a justifiable, sometimes the only method of stating the dissatisfaction with society.

A Film a Week - Afterparty / Afterparti

In his interview regarding the film’s world premiere at Belgrade International Film Festival, Afterparty writer-director Luka Bursać made a point that he was not criticizing social tendencies among the youth in Serbia particularly through the prism of Belgrade clubbing scene, but merely noting them. It sounds so smart and neutral, but it is also impossible. Usually, filmmaking is not a sociological research that can note something in an objective way, filmmakers have to have a standpoint, and try to point their views out the best way they can.

The choice to open the film with the archive material of building of New Belgrade, one of the biggest 20^th century newly founded settlements in the world, is a filmaker’s decision. The choice of main characters, a bartender / wannabe-actor Mare (Rade Ćosić), his next-door neighbour / part-time love interest Tića (Jana Milosavljević) and his drug-dealing bouncer buddy Stefan “Chinese” (Nikola Šurbanović), that all live in the same block and work at the same nightclub is also a filmmaker’s decision. The choice of surroundings, drab gray buildings, lazy days and heated-up nights is also a filmmaker’s decision. The choice of music, bad techno, bad hip-hop and Serbian special called “turbo folk”, is also a filmmaker’s decision. The choice of clothing for both male and female characters and extras is also a filmmaker’s decision. The choice of finishing the film with blending images of the “old New Belgrade” and contemporary clubbing scene and nail the point with a pseudo-existential pseudo-philosophical quote about going places and getting there taken form a “turbo-folk” song is a filmmaker’s decision.

It should carry some weight as a standpoint. And it would in the hands of a more skilled director. But here, all of the decisions and choices seem just random, disjointed, futile or just plain weird, attempting and failing to shock for its own sake. Sometimes the whole thing is offensive, cringe-worthy and completely uncalled for.

Unlike much of the contemporary Serbian cinema, Afterparty has no visible problem with its production value. The film actually seems more expensive than it probably was, with its clubbing scenes with a bunch of extras and copyright-protected music. However, almost every theme party in the club looks and sounds pretty much the same, just like some Serbian trash music video clip, but that can also be a comment of sorts. What gets lost in there is the character of the club owner Gagi, played by usually terrific Dragan Jovanović who is kinda boorish, but neither intimidating (as a character like that should be) nor funny (as the actor’s persona usually is), and, well, not even seen clearly because of the dimmed lights.

What the film lacks is the basic idea what to do outside of the club. We have some outlines of the story about Mare, his acting career, his on-again-off-again hooking up with Tića and his parents played by mismatched duo of late 80’s TV actors Slobodan Beštić and Lidija Vukićević, which is one of the rare touches of inspiration, sadly not developed into something more meaningful. We know a little bit about Chinese, his business and his family situation and sometimes we even see another of their buddies called Wig (Vladimir Gvojić) who is a comic relief of sorts. But it goes nowhere and takes a lot of time to get there. The payoff and its pseudo-funny punchline in the end is too weak and not worth the bother to see the whole film.

Instead, we get a casual bashing of another Serbian film, Stevan Filipović’s Skinning completely out of the blue, a casino robbery without any sort of explanation, some forced politically incorrect humour, a really bad porn moment and a fine share of wtf moments. How come an actor cannot tell the difference between a globally popular TV series and its bad gay porn parody just by its title? How come the producers of the same gay porn offer him a girl for a test shooting? Why does every apartment look exactly the same with the same outdated furniture? Why does a Spanish tourist speak English with a heavy Balkans accent? We could let any one or two of those things slide, but the sheer amount of them makes the case against the film.

Even if we dismiss all of that simply as Bursać’s weird sense of humour, there are some undertones of misogyny that cannot be overlooked. Up until one particularly disturbing scene, Afterparty can go under the radar as a misjudged, undercooked, weak mixture of “New Belgrade depression movies” from the beginning of millennium and movies about over-sexed aimless youth a la Clip. After that, it can be seen just as a vile little film. Sometimes not taking stand is simply not an option. And not trying to tell anything can be considered talking trash. Unlike his brave and prvocative diptich social realist drama / science fiction debut Blackness (Tmina, 2013), Afterparty is a huge miss.