A Film a Week - AMS - Work Must Be / AMS - Arbeit Muss Sein

 previously published on Cineuropa

Work has to be done. In theory, job seekers have to do their best to find work, and employment services have to help them in that process. But in practice, both sides often go through the motions, pretending that they are doing their part in order to tick certain boxes. “AMS” is the acronym for the Austrian employment service, and its central office in Vienna stands at the very core of the newest feature co-written and directed by Sebastian Brauneis, AMS – Work Must Be, which has premiered at the Diagonale.

Mari (Margarethe Tiesel) has been a client of AMS ever since she lost her job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office when said doctor retired. She genuinely wants to find a new place to work in order to support her daughter Lisa (Lola Mae), a student, but the services shuffle her around, making her attend various courses (the last one being led by the racist Roger, played by Franz Solar) and appointments. When she misses one such appointment, agent Theresa (Isabella Knöll) cancels her support cheque. When Mari dials the phone number, she randomly gets to speak with the only sympathetic person in the company, support-line operator Markus (Lukas Watzl), who becomes her unofficial personal advisor and teaches her how to survive this rigged system.

A woman of immigrant heritage, Mahdiya (Mariam Hage), wants to take a police course, but her agent, Kathi (Marie-Louise Stockinger), enrols her on a language course instead. The reason for this might be Kathi’s inherent racism, but the decision could also stem from the “game” of promotion-chasing currently going on at the AMS. Eventually, Mari, Mahdiya and Markus, as the inside man, join forces with the rest of the desperate job seekers from Roger’s class in order to manipulate the system from within and take their revenge by rigging the race for promotion.

What could have been a deadly serious, socially charged drama, after starting out as a snappy satirical comedy, veers towards heist-movie territory and, by the end, even resembles a quirky musical. The last act is certainly overkill, adding to the movie’s excessive 100-minute running time. But up until that point, the ride we take with Brauneis’ characters is a fun one thanks to the brisk pacing achieved both through the script (written by Brauneis, Helmut Emersberger and Lily Ringler) and through the editing, handled by the filmmaker himself along with Antonia Adelsberger and Paul Eckhart. The acting also serves the purpose of contributing to the snappy narrative, as the characters are envisioned as types, rather than palpable, life-like people, so the actors have clear and simple tasks that they fulfil with a decent sense of comedic timing.

However, Brauneis sometimes tries too hard to play it cool, and in order to do so, he relies too heavily on motifs, tricks and puns from other, predominantly US, movies. Along with The Dirty Dozen (here referenced directly both in the dialogue and through the theme song), recognisable bits and pieces from Office Space, The Big Short, and an array of heist and caper movies are recycled here. In the end, AMS – Work Must Be is sometimes messy, overcrowded and overambitious when we consider the means at the filmmaker’s disposal and the quality of his choices, but overall, it’s a lightweight piece of filmmaking that may fare well with broader audiences.

A Film a Week - Piety / La Piedad

 previously published on Cineuropa

Eduardo Casanova’s second feature, Piety, is a film like no other, for better or for worse. His debut, the 2017 Berlinale title Skins, certainly was excessive, but with Piety, Casanova brings the excess to the next level in order to tell a deep and necessary, realistic story in a completely unrealistic, fantastic and allegorical manner. It has premiered in KVIFF’s new Proxima competition, but its next stop, Fantasia in Montreal, could actually decide its destiny because Piety is something that would theoretically suit fantastic festivals better than arthouse ones.

Casanova opens his film like a thriller, with a pulsating score, close-ups on the clock, and cuts that add to the tension just to throw his first of many curveballs in the title sequence. Printing the title in both Spanish and Korean, one might assume that he is actually paying the tribute to the recently deceased filmmaker Kim Ki-duk and his 2012 film of the same name, but the function of the Korean is something else that will be revealed later. Kim’s Pieta was certainly weird, and so is Casanova’s, but it is another kind of weirdness we are dealing with here.

Mateo (Manel Llunell) lives in a pink-and-pastels-covered world that seems like something straight out of musicals and is ruled by his mother, Libertad (Ángela Molina, seen in a number of Pedro Almodóvar films). Ironically, liberty is something Mateo does not enjoy, since he is a grown man relegated to the role of her little boy that she takes in tow to her musical rehearsals, and asks for insincere feedback about anything from the quality of her performance to the quality of her cooking. She also gives him baths, clips his nails and regulates his diet. Their days usually end with the news from North Korea (the plot of the film is set in 2011, the year of Kim Jong-il’s death) and they go to sleep in the same king-size bed.

When they learn about Mateo’s cancer diagnosis, Libertad tries to firm his grip over him, while he makes his best efforts to break free from her. Also, the people on North Korean news, a couple fleeing to South Korea when the authorities poisoned one of their daughters and executed the other one, find their way into the film in short excerpts, but Casanova has even stranger stuff in store for us: not so subtle hints at incest, breastfeeding and giving birth to a grown man in a nightmarish dream sequence.

There is no box Piety could be put to, since its elements are basically different types of bizarre, so maybe a description of something that would come out of the mind of Álex de la Iglesia if he would wake up in a pastel-coloured rehab centre is the most fitting one. The question, however, is whether the best way to treat such an important and complex topic as the co-dependence a person forms with a dictatorial regime, whether it rules a household or a country, is an exercise in excess.

On the other hand, Casanova demonstrates a unique and singular vision, the steel will to pursue it and some of the necessary skills to do so, such as envisioning and executing a proper genre movie set piece. Also, the counter-intuitive colour scheme used to portray the freedom and captivity and North and South Korea is an obvious metaphor, but also a nice touch. In the end, not all of Piety’s ingredients blend well together, but some parts of the film are really hard to forget.

A Film a Week - Stomp / Chavittu

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Chavittu Nadakam is a performance art form resembling European forms of opera and ballet that is rooted in the Indian state of Kerala and practiced by the state’s Catholic community. The language of the performance is the state’s official language (Malayalam), the actors perform the dancing and singing alongside acting, while the musical background is on various percussion instruments, but dominated by bells and drums, while the floor boards of the stage also fulfill the soundscape.

It was rarely portrayed in cinema, so the film “Chavittu” (or “Stomp”, according to its international title, for a good reason since stomping is the core part of the mechanics of the dance itself) written and directed by Rahman brothers Sajas and Shinos of “Toy Maker” (2015) and “Vasanthi” (2021) fame is something of a novelty both on the topical and on the approach level. The film premiered at the Harbour section of International Film Festival Rotterdam, where we had the chance to see it.

The brothers open the film with a wide shot of a small group of people unloading a minibus parked in front of a provincial theatre called Highness Auditorium. When the bus moves, it is revealed that the people we saw are a part of a larger group – a theatre/dance company and that they are about to perform at the mentioned venue, as it is shown with the following succession of static shots of their preparations.

From that point on, Chavittu goes in various directions. One follows the preparation process on a remote location that preceded the performance itself, the other shows the content of the play that is both folkloric and contemporary, while it differs from the usual Chavittu Nadakam Bible-related topics, while the third one covers the day of the performance and the distractions posed by people holding various official positions, since our guys are not the only ones to perform at the show. The nature of their distractions and disruptions are actually the most telling thing in the film, as they expose the nature of the still caste-dominated society.

It is not an exceptionally new thing to point out that the creative and the performance processes are not apart from the world that surrounds them, and Rahmans are not trying to re-invent the wheel here in that regard. However, their approach is actually quite new and refreshing, as it is focused on blurring the lines between the documentary and the fiction, the observation and the scripting. From that point of view, they manage to achieve a balance that feels quite organic.

The majority of the cast comes from the ranks of Little Earth School of Theatre and the guys play the double role here: they are the subjects of the observational documentary and the actors in the play, constantly balancing between the most natural of the behaviour disregarding the camera and the theatrics needed for them to do their job. The technical components of the film are also impressive, from the versatile camerawork by Mukesh Muraledharan to the gentle original guitar theme by Ajeesh Anto that stands in stark contrast with the drum-dominated score of the company’s performance to Arun Lal’s choreography. Sajas and Shinos Rahman, who serve as their own editors, blend the whole thing smoothly, making “Chavittu” quite pleasant, informative and unique viewing experience that paints the layered picture of a world that is unknown for the majority of the viewers without exoticizing it.