A Film a Week - Oxygen Station / Kysneva stantsiia

 previously published on Cineuropa

The history of the Crimean Tatars is a long and complicated one, but the events of the 20th and 21st century, seen from the Crimean Tatar perspective, could only be described as tragic. The Tatars were affected by the Russian famine in the early 1920s and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, only to be collectively accused of collaboration with the Nazi occupier and deported to Central Asia (mainly Uzbekistan) in the 1940s. Every attempt of protest and every effort to go back to the homeland was further punished, using the system of penal colonies in Siberia. The resistance did not completely die out, and some figures such as Mustafa Dzhemilev, nowadays a people’s deputy of the Ukrainian parliament, have kept the proverbial flame alive. He is the protagonist of Ivan Tymchenko’s historical thriller-drama Oxygen Station, which has premiered in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

We first meet him as a boy (played by Danylo Bondarev) in a strange, stylised dream sequence involving a sinister-looking magician and a political conversation no child should get involved in. Later we realise that the adult Mustafa (Borys Orlov, who played Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in the 2019 biopic Taras: Homecoming) lives in the Zyryanka penal colony in Siberia, where he fills the oxygen tanks in a facility next to criminals and ex-convicts. Although he is a good worker who does not complain much, the prosecutor Shalandin (Viktor Poltoratskyi, the same actor who plays the magician in the dream sequences) is set on pinning him down for the murder of Lunin, a local news reporter and communist provocateur. Mustafa is still labelled and remembered as an enemy of the state, although his recent protests are only recorded in the form of letters and in a personal journal.

Back in Uzbekistan, Safinar (Khrystyna Deilyk, glimpsed in Roman Bondarchuk’s Volcano) is concerned that the national hero has stopped fighting for the cause, so she boards the train from Tashkent to Moscow, not realising that KGB agents are following her. What is her final destination? Does it have anything to do with the criminal plot and the investigation of it in Siberia? And what is the role of the mysterious man Hani (Edem Ibadullaev)?

The script written by Mykhailo Brynykh (who previously collaborated with the director on the 2019 title Beshoot) runs on two parallel tracks to show that free life in the USSR was not very different from life in the gulag. Up until the very end, those two plot lines are very different in style and nature, and very far apart story-wise, which puts tremendous pressure on Tymchenko to balance and blend them into a relatively smooth whole. The opening is rather stylish, and he shows an ability to control both plots individually (the one set in Siberia follows the genre guidelines of the crime and political thriller), but a slower pace in the second act seems inevitable. However, the jumps to dream and fantasy sequences are a good solution to that problem.

Tymchenko makes the best of the components at his disposal. The performances from the ensemble are overall convincing, although the luckier actors get the “meatier” characters. The cinematography by Thomas Stokowski uses murky colours to underline decadence and the futile efforts to cover it up, and the production and the costume design remain faithful to the Cold War period, while the music composed by Jun Miyake offers short bursts of extra tension. In the end, Oxygen Station works rather well as both an issue-driven historical drama and a political thriller.

A Film a Week - Lunatic / Šterkijada

 previously published on Cineuropa

The central figure here is the filmmaker’s father, Jure Šterk (played by Janez Škof), a seaman and adventurer who was the first Slovenian to sail around the world and the first man to do so in a boat that was only 6.5 metres long. In January 2009, he disappeared in the Indian Ocean, following a technical issue with his vessel, the titular Lunatic, and his own attempt to fix it. Šterk was sailing around the world again, but this time, it was a non-stop trip, and since he was 73 years old at the time, if he had completed his voyage, he would have been the oldest person to do so.

However, Lunatic is less of an account of Jure’s maritime adventures, and more a study of the family dynamics Jure shared with his wife Vojka (played by Silva Čušin) and son Igor (played by Tito Novak as a child and Jernej Gašperin as a young man). Right from the start (the mid-1970s), one can see that said dynamics are volatile, as the opening scene is a heated argument in which Jure’s womanising clashes with Vojka’s jealousy, while little Igor is in bed, listening to his parents fighting. But when Jure is at home, he can be a fun father who bribes his son with scoops of ice cream to get him to do some more swimming and who smuggles him into a music school so he can practise the piano. However, Jure can also be a strict disciplinarian who does not tolerate the carefree moments of childhood.

Jure can also be pretty careless himself, which is amply demonstrated in the next sequence, set during the 1991 Slovenian War of Independence, in which Jure jeopardises his planned trip around the world, for which he accepted sponsors’ money and got into debt, so he can take part in the war. But even when he triumphantly completes his quest in 1994, he does not wish to rest on his laurels, so he thinks up new outings and manages to persuade Igor to invest in a newer, bigger and more advanced boat. As Jure’s actions get less and less predictable, Vojka slips into superstitions and alternative medicine, which brings on physical illness, and Igor, unable to strike a balance between these two selfish and impulsive people, starts to snap under the pressure.

In the script, Šterk might have been aiming for some more humour of the absurdist kind and some more warmth to balance out the toxicity of the family relationships, but in the end, Lunatic serves better as a densely packed, intense family drama in which Jure’s absence can be as stressful as his presence. Šterk’s tone is sincere, rendering his motivation to try to figure out how living with these two people affected him completely believable. However, his execution in the form of long, dialogue-driven scenes puts a lot of pressure on the actors, who sometimes lose control and end up in the realm of theatrics.

Technically, Lunatic is an accomplished work. Miloš Srdić’s cinematography smoothly transitions from the warmth of the 1970s, through the murkiness of the 1990s, to the coldness of the new millennium, the production design by Marco Juratovec is fabulous, while Petar Marković’s editing keeps the running time more than pleasant at 77 minutes. However, a less linear approach could have generated some additional tension and – why not – added some lunacy to the picture.

A Film a Week - Alma & Oskar

 previously published on Cineuropa

Passionate love affairs between exceptional artists might only last for a brief period of time, but are remembered for far longer. That was certainly the case with the stormy romance between pianist and composer Alma Mahler and painter Oskar Kokoschka, which occurred some 110 years ago in Vienna. The pair are the titular and lead characters in Dieter Berner’s new film Alma & Oskar, in which the Austrian-German filmmaker continues exploring his interest in the public perception of the private lives of great artists, which he probed in his previous feature, Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden (2016).

After enjoying its world premiere at last year’s Goa International Film Festival, the movie’s Austrian premiere occurred at this year’s Diagonale. However, this type of period, audience-friendly film could fare considerably better in theatres than on the festival circuit, and it has already secured distribution in a few territories.

We meet Alma Mahler (Emily Cox, from the series The Last Kingdom) while she is on a tour of the United States with her husband, Gustav, who uses her as his assistant and represses her artistic ambitions. She admits to him that she has started an affair with the German architect Walter Gropius (Anton von Lucke). When the great composer dies shortly after the tour, the multi-talented and provocative artist Oskar Kokoschka (Valentin Postlmayr, predominantly a TV actor) comes to their home to make a face mask of the deceased for one of his many artistic projects, which is enough for Alma to take an interest in his work. The affair will, however, really blossom when Alma, out of her sense of adventure, hires the young, aspiring painter to make a portrait of her.

Their romance is passionate but volatile, owing to Oskar’s character and Alma’s delicate position in society. Not only does she have to choose between the young, passionate painter and the more sensible, but also conservative, architect as a suitor, but she also has to secure the legacy of her late husband by ensuring that his last symphony gets a premiere, while also trying to forge ahead in her own career, which had been overshadowed by Gustav’s genius. She wants independence, but still has to obey the norms of that time, imposed on women and socialites. On top of that, the beginning of the Great War will change everyone’s lives…

Serving as the focal point of the film, Alma is the actual lead, since the audience can feel for her, and sympathise with her position, choices and dilemmas. Compared to her, Oskar seems a tad two-dimensional, torn between his artistic genius and the dark side of it, while the other supporting characters are boiled down to a trait or two in the linear script written by Berner and his collaborator Hilde Berger. Since Berner’s directing is competent, but conservative in style, it is the actors who have to pull most of the weight. Cox is perfectly cast for her role, not just because of her physical similarity to the character she plays, but also for the way she channels the tactility expected from such a character. On the other hand, Postlmayr plays Kokoschka always in an elevated, almost hysterical, emotional register.

However, the film makes up for this in the craft department, with a lot of attention to detail that can be both seen and heard, such as the pristine production and costume design, captured beautifully in the seamless melange of analogue and digital cinematography handled by Jakub Bejnarowicz, while the score by Stefan Will suitably relies on Gustav Mahler’s opuses. All things considered, Alma & Oskar is a solid period drama.

A Film a Week - u.Q.

 previously published on Cineuropa

 

The name Uku Kuut might not sound familiar outside Estonia or selected music circles in Europe and America, but he was quite a phenomenon both regarding his art and his life story. The story about Uku and his mother, the jazz diva Marju Kuut (also known as Maryn E. Coote) is told by Ivar Murd in his second feature-length documentary u.Q. which just world-premiered in the Baltic Competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

After a quick prologue in which various people, mostly musicians, both Estonian and foreign, talk about how they got to know of Uku or got in contact with him, the story turns to his mother Marju and her beginnings as the singer of a hotel band. It was the '60s, she was 17 and usually the only woman in the band, so she often got hit on by her fellow band members. From her relationship with the trumpet player Ivar Krull, she got pregnant and gave birth to Uku who, apparently, gave himself this name by repeating the same sound. Their life journey full of adventure led the nice boy and his mother to Sochi in the '70s (where the two got really connected and where Uku discovered his interest in music), Stockholm in the early '80s (where Uku had his first electro-pop band) and eventually to Los Angeles in the late '80s where the duo created and produced music in the pop-funk and soft jazz register.

They returned to Tallinn in the early '90s, just before the final collapse of the Soviet Union, and tried to power and ride the wave of change, bringing their Western experiences to Estonian society. Uku got married twice, could never handle his money, went into several business ventures, got ALS, tried to combat it by getting back to music and eventually died of the illness. His relationship with his mother who was also his best friend and frequent creative partner was the central one in his life.

Ivar Murd covers the whole story of Uku's relatively short but somewhat adventurous life, during which he travelled to many places and saw many changes of system, in a very snappy fashion and in the compact format of an 83-minute documentary. The end result might as well have been a superficial film, in which the filmmaker checks the boxes of the clichéd portrait musical documentary, but it is not the case here, despite a structure divided into numerous short chapters. Murd's approach is smart enough to avoid the usual traps: there are no talking head interviews, the interviewees\ talks and remarks which sound as though they are coming over the phone line (kudos to the sound designer) are illustrated by a variety of different visual materials from different sources (personal and official archives) in different video formats (mostly Super-8, Beta and VHS, but also modern digital ones) edited by the helmer himself in a rapid fashion. With music by both the mother and son Kuut, u.Q. serves as an apt introduction to Uku's work, an intriguing view into his personal life and also as a testimony to some interesting times in recent history.

A Film a Week - The Diary of Vaino Vahing / Vaino Vahingu päevaraamat

 previously published on Cineuropa

Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet has often found his inspiration in literature. For his previous two movies, The Idiot (2011) and November (2018), he adapted the novels of Dostoyevsky and Andrus Kivirähk, respectively, into modern, artful fiction films. In his newest work, The Diary of Vaino Vahing, premiering in the Baltic Competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, he takes the life, work and importance of Estonian psychiatrist, writer and playwright Vaino Vahing, and turns it all into an inspired, deftly dramatised documentary.

Outside Estonia and maybe the rest of the former Soviet Union (most notably Russia), Vahing (1940-2008) is not that well known. Born in the village of Aravu, he left for Tartu at the age of 14 to study Medicine, which was the best opportunity for him to get a scholarship. He decided to specialise in Psychiatry, in order to be able to truly know his patients and to exercise his interest in how the human mind works. That led to him taking an interest in literature and theatre, with his focus falling on two crucial, contrasting topics. On one side, there were the pain and suffering (usually induced by love) usually dealt with in his prose, and on the other, the nature of various games and game-playing (as a potential path to salvation from one’s suffering in life) in his dramas and his ventures into the domain of theatre.

From 1968-1984, Vahing kept a diary of real events that happened around him, passed through the filter of his own subjective interpretation, which serves as the primary source material for Sarnet’s film. Sarnet, however, opens the movie with a scene filmed in black and white, with a young woman dancing to a Beatles song, jumping from one block of books to another, before she gets interrupted by a man stating that he wants to have intercourse. It proves to be an excerpt from Vahing’s short story The Rapist.

Sarnet maintains material from both the fiction and the non-fiction works of Vahing until the end of the film, combining them with more standard documentary elements, such as interviews with scholars, literary experts and surviving family members (his ex-wife, writer Maimu Berg, and their daughter, judge Julia Laffranque), plus excerpts from archive material. While the interview parts are filmed in colour, with bright lighting, and the archive material is, naturally, grainy black and white, the dramatised re-enactments of the passages from his literary works are filmed in a modern, digital, polished, graduated palette of black-and-white cinematography.

More importantly, everything from the diary and the works of fiction is staged – always on the same stage, as Sarnet even shows by casually breaking the fourth wall around the midpoint – while different actors play Vahing and his female partners at different points in their lives. Their different sets of characteristics simulate the internal dialogue the writer probably had with himself. Their style of acting is a tad theatrical, but in a way that is intentionally faithful to Vahing’s games and experiments. The cinematography by Erik Põllumaa is beautiful and evocative, and the editing by Martin Männik and the film’s producer, Marianne Kõrver, is simply magnificent in its associative approach, and completely in sync with Sarnet’s vision, making The Diary of Vaino Vahing an artful, beautiful, compact and deeply thought-provoking piece of cinema. One could argue that Sarnet has nailed the very essence of Vaino Vahing’s life and work.

A Film a Week - Loving Pablo

There must some kind of competition between the high-profile Spanish-speaking actors who will serve as the best Pablo Escobar ever featured on either big or small screen. And after Édgar Ramirez (Killing Pablo), Benicio del Toro (very good in Escobar: Paradise Lost, even though the film itself was a kind of bland experience) and a brief episode by Mauricio Mejía in last year’s American Made, the turn came to Javier Bardem to put on his fake belly / fatsuit and his mask and to try his luck as the notorious drug kingpin in Fernando Léon de Aranoa’s Spanish-Bulgarian co-production Loving Pablo. Maybe somebody should tell the whole crew behind this silly challenge that the goal has been already set pretty high by the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura of the Netflix TV series Narcos.

For his angle to this well-documented, told and re-told story, de Aranoa chose the best-selling memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar by the drug lord’s former associate and lover, celebrated TV journalist Virginia Vallejo which he adapted himself. Generally speaking, de Aranoa is a reliable scriptwriter and even more reliable director of Mondays in the Sun fame, but after interestingly drafted, though cliché-ridden feature A Perfect Day and “on the right place at the right time” documentary Politics, Instructions Manual, Loving Pablo makes him look amateurish like a bottom of the class college boy trying to emulate the ultimate crime-drama bio-pic classics in the likes of Goodfellas. Long story short, everything he could do wrong – he did with vengeance.

His writing is lazy, relying to much on the source material and therefore clumsily patched with the god-awful voice-over narration done by Penélope Cruz who is also present as the semi-active co-leading character Virginia. The end result is that the voice-over is overlapping with the visual narration which would look better and more elegant without explaining the obvious. Even the structure is kinda pedestrian, lacking any kind of personal or political angle and simply lining up the biographical events in a chronological order. When he finally distances himself from the book, he does so in an atrocious fashion completed with borderline moronic dialogue and even more idiotic monologue.

The musical choices which were aimed to channel the scorsesian style of sorts are also lazy, reduced to often-heard 80’s cheesy pop, Latino and rock standards, with Carlos Santana’s Black Magic Woman (as the pillar of Latin rock) used completely out of context somewhere around the half an hour mark. The only interesting and humorous piece of soundtrack is the Christmas standard Let It Snow in the scene when the cartel’s transport jet lands on an American highway, but even this is too much on the nose (pun intended).

Also, the attempted use of torture and shock does not do any good for the film because it usually ends with some half-hearted brutality and over the top animal cruelty with a “top-down” approach in which a horse gets killed in the beginning, a dog gets beaten in an elaborate human torturing scene around mid-point and a flock of pigeons flies into the helicopter propeller near the end. And let us not speak about ripping off de Palma’s Scarface’s signature chainsaw scene.

Let us maybe speak about the use of the language(s) here. Filming mostly in English might seem as a reasonable, business-friendly solution, but with a heavy (as in totally fake) Spanish accent it just sounds ridiculous, especially underlined with Spanish curses and phrases known to every owner of a TV set. Unfortunately, that puts the central pair of actors between the rock and the hard place. They have some chemistry in the scenes they share (which is understandable given that they are a real-life couple), but their cartoonish accents, his constant mumbling and her occasional telenovella styled hysterical over-acting just remind us how both of them are not really on the top of their game when acting in English, like one The Counsellor or Vanilla Sky was not enough already. Finding the counter-argument might prove futile: Bardem’s performance in No Country for Old Men was wordless and the interaction between two of them in Vicky Christina Barcelona was mostly in Spanish which suits both of them better.

Speaking of acting, not that the rest of the crew fared better, with both Spanish or English dialogue, like Peter Sarsgaard as a DEA agent or Julieth Restrepo as Escobar’s slightly less glamourous wife Maria Victoria Henao, but that again is a strong case of seriously under-developed characters due to the lazy writing.

We might compare Loving Pablo to a car crash, but that would not be accurate. Trainwreck would be more adequate comparison, but still would not describe it completely. No, what comes to my mind is a mid-air collision over a densely populated area: leave any hope to be a survivor of this one.

A Film a Week - The Happy Prince

It is obvious that Rupert Everett’s debut as a writer-director, Oscar Wilde biography focused on his last three years of life The Happy Prince, was a passion project. Everett played Wilde’s literary alter-ego in Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband and Wilde himself in the theatre play The Judas Kiss as he does in his own film, so we can even debate that he developed some kind of Wilde obsession. However, it is hard to see that from the meandering beginning of the film.

The good news is that The Happy Prince and the portrait of Wilde in it as a troubled man, fallen socialite and literary genius just needs a bit more time to kick in, and the film gets better and more emotionally resonant with time. Those acquainted with the biographical facts will not find anything that new here, but Wilde’s fall from grace shown a couple of times in the flashback scene on the train station where Wilde as a prisoner was spat on by an angry mob serves really well. On the other hand, the other recurring flashback scenes of Wilde telling his titular tale to his children as a bed-time story seems a bit sentimental and does not do much to establish his character as a man longing for family life as intended.

The focus is somewhere else, on relationships with his wife Constance (Emily Watson) which is more on the financial side and his friends and lovers sometimes providing support like his publisher Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) and loyal friend Reggie Turner (Colin Firth), but usually leading to more and more trouble like Alfred “Boise” Douglas (portrayed as a divine-looking, but charmless spoiled brat by Colin Morgan), Wilde’s financial struggle not just to get by but also to maintain the hedonist lifestyle, constant moving from one place to another, writer’s block and schemes to somehow get around it. Most of all, it is about his desperate search for love anywhere he could (not) possibly find it.

Which brings us to the title. The tale itself was, like most of Wilde’s work in that genre, atypically dark and with a bleak ending instead of a happy one, which goes well with the generally dark tone of the film. But Wilde as character is not selfless like the statue of the prince in the story. Maybe he is in an emotional sense (to all the wrong people), but in his actions he is quite selfish. The parallel has been drawn somewhere else – to the decay and his crumbling physical and mental health pictured by John Conroy’s cinematography in grayish rainy colours and underlined by Rupert Everett’s acting always a notch above his sense of directing the film. Wilde here is an unhappy prince, like the statue stripped of its glamour desperately trying to revert the time and to be loved and accepted.

A Film a Week - Tom of Finland

Is it possible for us, the inhabitants of contemporary world, to imagine all the forms of discrimination that were not just socially acceptable, but also incorporated in the official laws just a few decades ago? How the racial segregation was possible, not only in America, but also in the communist Eastern Block? Can we imagine that women had no right to vote in Switzerland less than 50 years ago? How about gay rights in socially conscious Scandinavia? Can we believe that in Finland it was illegal to be gay until the 70’s, that it was declassified as a disease in the 80’s and that gay propaganda (whatever that is) was punishable by law until the end of 90’s? Dome Korukoski’s Tom of Finland is a story about such times.

The title is a pseudonym of an artist, the author of hyper-sexualized, pin-up style gay-themed drawings that gained a lot of popularity in gay circles in America and subsequently in Europe in the 60’s. Let us be frank, it can hardly pass as art, and it never got mainstream, but it got the attention in the circles it was aimed to. The author of the drawings was a WW2 veteran and an emloyee of McCann-Erickson Helsinki office Tuoko Laaskonen, the man who had to spend his life flying under the radar in his own country.

We meet Tuoko, played with an elegance by Pekka Strang, as a soldier fighting both the Soviets and his own desires, or pursuing them covered by the fog of war. The peace does not bring him any good either: having his first lover and the muse Kake lost, he struggles with depression, constant nagging by his conservative sister (Jessica Grabowsky) and the oppressive society in the form of the police hunting down gay people in parks and clubs. Though, his work provides him a steady living and he can express himself through his art. His trip to more cosmopolitan Berlin ends as a near-disaster, having his drawings and belongings stolen, and barely saved from exposure by his ex commanding officer. However, Tuoko is determined to live his life his own way, especially when he starts the relationship with his tenant-boyfriend (Lauri Tilkanen), and he sends his art to American magazines. The drawings were a huge success and the rest is history: as a cult figure, Tom went to California several times, meets the budding scene (among others Jakob Oftebro’s Jack and Seumas F. Sargent’s Doug) and became a celebrity.

Even though the issues of intolerant society and AIDS panic are addressed, Tom of Finland is not an activism-minded, awareness-rising film. It is more of a standard bio-pic. Having that in mind, the framing with an old Tom in a space resembling waiting room is completely unnecessary and the niche value of Tom’s art is never stressed enough, since the its conventional value is highly questionable. But Korukoski and his army of hired scriptwriters succeed in portraying the uncertain times and one man’s struggle for a life on his own terms. The production does not seem exactly lavish, but the locations look real and the period details were recreated nicely. With a strong lead, an important topic and a neat storytelling, this international co-production works as a solid piece of cinema.