A Film a Week - The Milky Way

 previously published on Cineuropa

Monetising something related to our body is a taboo and always has been. Different “products” sold incur different judgements: cutting hair and selling it is not such a bad thing, but selling “extra” organs is. However, breast milk was always exempt from such rules for practical reasons: wet nurses have saved millions, if not billions, of lives throughout history. The concept was upgraded to human milk banks in the first half of the 20th century, but with the rise in baby formula in the second half of the century, they became somewhat obsolete and their popularity waned.

Now, Israeli filmmaker Maya Kenig takes the concept and gives it a slightly hipster-dystopian twist in her sophomore feature, The Milky Way, which has just premiered at Tallinn Black Nights, in the Critics’ Picks section.

Tala (Hila Ruach) is a single mother and a musician who never attained any significant success. Unable to support herself in any other way, she applies for a job donating her breast milk to the titular company. While she is working, pumping her own milk for rich clients to use, she must rely on the help of the company’s daycare system, led by a judgemental caregiver, or on her own mother’s (Orli Roth Feldheim) assistance, which also comes at the price of having judgement passed on her. When she breaks the company’s strict rules, and gets caught and suspended, she enlists the help of a delivery truck driver (Evgeny Moliboga) to satisfy her curiosity and see where the milk goes.

Realising that her own milk is being sold to a single, very peculiar buyer, she decides to take a look around the person’s house. After a series of mishaps and attempts to get out of trouble, only to get herself into even more problems, she meets Nili (Hadas Yaron), who has an indecent proposal for her. The offer comes with great benefits that could allow Tala to clear her debts and even try to pursue her singing career, but it also entails unclear and ever-changing rules of engagement coming from the bossy and moody Nili…

Although Kenig basically just takes a familiar concept and puts a cold, absurdist and dystopian twist (which seems lifted from Yorgos Lanthimos’s films) on it, she knows how to play with it in order to achieve what she wants in the first place. In this case, it is an examination of motherhood, capitalism and the ever-growing social differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots”, always putting our protagonist on the losing end. The danger of taking the premise in the “misery porn” direction is averted by the director’s choice to deal with such serious topics in a light-hearted way. To do so, she can rely on her main actress, Hila Ruach, whose energetic performance and instant chemistry with the rest of the cast prove to be essential for setting and maintaining the tone of the film.

The aesthetic and craft choices also prove to be sound judgements on the part of Kenig, who, along with writing and directing the movie, also serves as its editor. Kenig opts for a breezy, indie aesthetic powered by the contrasts between the spaces that our characters (coming from different social strata) occupy, and for lively pacing, where the synth music by Tom Armony, Assa Raviv and the lead actress herself gently manipulates and massages the viewer’s mood. The Milky Way hits the right spot as a blend of a serious topic and a gentle touch – something that is increasingly rare at film festivals today.

A Film a Week - Silence 6-9 / Isyhia 6-9

 previously published on Cineuropa

This year, the Greek Weird Wave has added another name to its roster of auteurs. Christos Passalis, formerly recognised for his acting (he played the role of the son in Dogtooth and the part of Manolis in The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea), has turned his attention to filmmaking, first with the Berlinale-premiered experimental essay documentary The City and the City, which he co-directed with Syllas Tzoumerkas, and now also with a fiction feature, Silence 6-9, which Passalis directed on his own. The Crystal Globe Competition at Karlovy Vary might prove to be a fitting launch pad for a cryptic, dream-like, retro-futurist love story like this.

The title comes from one of the key rules in the largely abandoned dystopian town that our hero Aris (Passalis himself) comes to: the inhabitants must remain in complete silence between 6 and 9 o’clock in the morning, so the antennas surrounding the town can do their recording. And what do they record? Anything related to the people of the town who have gone missing, not to be found. But before they went missing, they recorded their own cassette tapes so that the others who stayed would be able to remember them.

Similarly to the beginning of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, here, a stranger comes to a strange town to do a strange job for a strange man, called the Manager. His new post is not yet entirely his, and he has to wait for confirmation from the Manager, who might have lost his mind. While waiting, he is stationed in a hotel with Anna (played by Passalis’ co-star in both Dogtooth and The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, Angeliki Papoulia), a woman whose job it is to act in a show based on the recorded cassettes of the missing people. Since they have a lot of time on their hands in a desolate town, they get closer and closer until they fall in love. Or is it just a dream that two strangers share while comatose in the hospital, perhaps a reference to Christopher Nolan’s Inception?

Stories set in an altered world, such as a dystopian future or present, demand some additional attention to the world-building details, and are usually hard to pull off in a brisk format of just 80 minutes. In that regard, Passalis’ work is commendable in all three roles he takes on here – as the leading actor, director and co-screenwriter. His vision is well written to the extent that it keeps the audience intrigued for the whole running time, while slowly revealing the information, and it is also perfectly executed on a visual level, along the lines of the Greek Weird Wave classics, with thoroughly composed and highly symmetrical, largely static shots of an arid landscape lensed in sun-bleached colours by Giorgos Karvelas, accompanied by the melancholic and toned-down retro soundtrack by Yiannis Loukos and Antonis Georgou. The production design by Márton Ágh, in which there is no item from a period more recent than the mid-1990s (apart from the antennas), is also one of the highlights, while the love story is convincingly powered by the chemistry between the two lead actors.

The only potential trouble with Silence 6-9 is its cryptic nature. A film like this is clearly a metaphor for something (or things), and the answer to the question of what this movie might be about will not please some audiences, especially given the potential meaning of the anti-cassette and anti-silence protests, and the new government that leads them. But still, Silence 6-9 is a smooth blend of style, substance, emotion and provocation that leaves the viewer with plenty to ruminate on.

A Film a Week - The Dawn / Zora

 previously published on Cineuropa

Dalibor Matanić’s The High Sun (winner of the 2015 Jury Award at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition) was arguably the biggest international success for Croatian cinema since the country’s independence. The prolific filmmaker revealed at the time that the film was the first instalment in an intended trilogy. The second part, The Dawn, has just premiered in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The story is set in the dystopian near future of 2021, in a sparsely populated valley. A married couple, composed of Matija (Krešimir Mikić, the star of Predrag Ličina’s The Last Serb in Croatia and Rasmus Kloster Bro’s Cutterhead) and Ika (Tihana Lazović, whose role in The High Sun made her the rising star of the Croatian and European cinema) live with their two children in a shack. Poverty is the least of their problems, their relationship marred by unresolved issues revolving around the disappearance of their third child and a sense of the impending doom in the whole area driving out the population at such rates that even the local church is about to close.

Apart from Matija’s radio-amateur efforts, there is no TV or radio signal here, and enemy forces referred only as “them” are coming from the city, reportedly wreaking havoc on their way. Moreover, Ika and Matija are from different backgrounds: Ika from that of the village folk, and Matija from the city, which makes him look suspicious in the eyes of his neighbours who fear that he might be one of “them”. The two of them also find themselves on different sides of the dilemma about whether to move to the relative safety of the city, or to stay here and keep looking for their missing son.

The arrival of a stranger also named Matija (Slovenian actor Marko Mandić who also left the mark in German cinema with the role in Thomas Arslan’s western Gold) who decides to build his house close to the couple’s home, and of a religious woman (Nataša Matjašec Rošker) also named Matija, stirs the confusion further, both for Ika and for “the original” Matija. While Ika tries to find her true self in the material and religious world, Matija is engaged in a fight within himself, which he must win in order to protect the loved ones.

Contrary to the clear coding of “us” and “them” along ethnic lines in The High Sun, Matanić here goes for more complicated and abstract divisions, filling his film with a dense atmosphere and heavy-hitting symbolism. He is at his best when playing with supernatural elements, creating a kind of slow-burning horror and even an action sequence blended with musical elements near the film’s end. The characters seem to be mesmerised by bodies of water and lights, both natural and artificial, while the plot takes a turn at the break of dawn.

The actors are likewise at the top of their game here, mixing their strong instincts with the clues from Matanić’s script. Both Lazović and Mikić dig deep within themselves to channel complex emotions, with Mandić especially wild as he uses his natural expressiveness to channel a snake-like charm, while Serbian actor Boris Isaković is the film’s moral anchor in the role of the local innkeeper. Beautifully lensed by his The High Sun collaborator Marko Brdar, who makes the best of rural Italian locations, and rhythmically edited to perfection by Tomislav Pavlic, The Dawn is an outstanding work of cinema.