A Film a Week - The Days That Confused / Päevad, mis ajasid segadusse

A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.

Note #2: This review has been developed through the NisiMasa workshop on this year's edition of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It has been originally published on Nisimazine.

For Eastern Europe, the nineties consisted mostly of days that confused many people and left a whole generation in a limbo of shifting identities. Simply put, the transition from socialism to capitalism was not an easy process, and most certainly not a uniform one. The actress-turned-director Triin Ruumet tried to tackle the subject in a specific context of Estonia for her feature debut The Days That Confused.



After the introduction scene of driving wild on a patch of a gravel road, the story starts as our protagonist Allar, played by Hendrik Toompere Jr. Jr. (not a mistake - it is the full name of the actor, also known from Elmo Nüganen's WW2 epic 1944), hangs out with his group of friends at a practice session of a local women volleyball team, drinking and blasting saucy comments. The setting is summer in a rural, wooded area, and the feeling is that for these young people there is not much else to do. Allar has just finished his high-school and is not sure whether he wants to continue his education, while the prospect of becoming a woodsman or a carpenter in the only lumber company in town, does not seem appealing to him.



But when he accidentally meets Juulius (Juhan Ulfsak from Autumn Ball), a mid-level henchman for a local crime lord, the things quickly get into perspective for him. Why not become a criminal, making easy money stealing lumber instead of sweating his days in the workshop? Juulius sees the potential in the ambitious kid, and has big plans for both of them.



The problem is that the film feels disjointed, both thematically and style-wise. The reason for that can be the fact that Ruumet (born in 1988) was in her early teens during the period, so her perspective is certainly clouded, coloured by an illogical nostalgia with very little attitude towards the political moment. This is evident from the themes she keeps opening, from the base story that feels like a combination of coming-of-age story and standard crime rise-and-fall narrative, to the topics of generational and lifestyle differences between the rural and the urban that she barely touches upon.



In terms of style, the film is also inconsistent, varying from the grim realism of dusty colours, to very filtered nightmarish and dream-like sequences accompanied by score of varying music styles, from piano and strings to moody folk tunes, and aggressively loud pop hits of the period. But on the other hand, Ruumet's timing is pretty accurate, making the shifts in rhythm and pace in all the right places.




However, there is a feeling that the film is not going anywhere, not just because of thin motivations of the characters, with the exception of Allar and maybe Juulius, but because of the confusion that it creates in the terms how the audience should perceive the genre and themes. It is an interesting debut by an inspired and passionate director with a lot of good ideas that could be covered in several different films, but lacking the structure to put them together in just one.

A Film a Week - Mother / Ema

Note: A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.
Note #2: This review has been developed through the NisiMasa workshop on this year's edition of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It has been originally published on Nisimazine.

Mother, the third feature directed by Estonian novelist and TV personality Kadri Kõusaar (Magnus, The Arbiter), opens with our titular character at a green market, talking to an off-screen saleswoman and buying vegetables. Most of the rest of the film is set in and around her house in a small Estonian town. The early feeling is the one of a kitchen-sink drama: we see her dusting, cleaning, cooking, working in the garden and taking care of her comatose son, while her husband goes hunting with his friends or watches football on TV. Beautifully portrayed by Tiina Mälberg, Elsa, credited just as The Mother, is a stand-in for every middle-aged woman living in a man’s world: constantly tired from all the heavy lifting, a bit depressed, with her dreams shattered long time ago.

Her son Lauri is in a coma due to a shooting during a stick-up at an ATM. Since Lauri was in the process of buying an apartment, he had a lot of cash on his hand, and the gallery of characters, including his girlfriend, friends, colleagues, and even students, keeps coming to visit him on a scavenger hunt to find the money.

This is where things start to get interesting, as the (attempted) murder mystery takes a comedic turn, balancing deadpan humour and farce as if Coen brothers mashed-up a Kaurismäki film. On one hand, we have a pressure-cooker of emotions hidden under a stoic surface, and on the other people doing stupid things desperately, trying to live a life they dream about.

Cinematography by Jean-Noël Mustonen is fluid and enjoyable, especially for the film that is sort of “locked” in the house. The DoP keeps changing the camera angles in the few rooms the proceedings are confined to, and the palette of colours, varying from drab beige to cold bluish-gray, works perfectly in combination with dynamic editing.

With a deliberate pace, Kõusaar expertly peels off the layers of mystery. But after some time it gets repetitive and somewhat tiresome, since the said mystery is a relatively easy to figure out. The too-convenient and over-explanatory ending is not doing any favours either. Mother is a bit uneven piece of cinema, with background themes speaking louder and clearer than the main story. With all the Agatha Christie-like mystery, clever observations and sense of humour, maybe a novelization of the story, perhaps by Kõusaar herself, might be a good idea.

A Film a Week - The Traveller / Le Voyageur

Note: A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.
Note #2: This review has been developed through the NisiMasa workshop on this year's edition of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It has been originally published on Nisimazine and Cineuropa.

A life devoid of travelling can be frustrating, especially for those who are stuck in one place that they don’t particularly like, or which they even despise. But once that dire existence of doing the same things day after day is changed for the better, the sudden surge of new experiences can prove to be too much to handle. This is the theme of Hadi Ghandour's The Traveller [+], which world-premiered in the Tallinn Black Nights First Feature Competition.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Adnan (Rodrigue Sleiman from Halal Love (and Sex) [+]) is a travel agent who can sweet-talk and impress customers with his broad knowledge of sights from around the world, but he has never left his home country of Lebanon himself. His luck is about to change, however, when his boss sends him on a business trip to Paris. 

But the vibrant metropolis proves to be too much for the first-time traveller. The conference he is attending is confusing and overwhelming, shown in a montage with ever-increasing speed. Things are no better at his temporary Parisian home: he gets in the middle of a generational clash between his cousin Insaf (Aïda Sabra), a traditionally minded divorcee who has never adjusted to life abroad, and her daughter, Layla (a confident Donia Eden), a completely integrated, modern Parisienne. The fact that his boss is pushing him to close a deal and his wife Souad (Romy Melhem) is feeling insecure about him being in Paris doesn’t help, either. The only pleasant and friendly moments are the ones he shares with restaurant owner Jean (Sebastian Bertrand), born in Lebanon but raised in Paris by his adoptive parents, and dreaming of the country he has never seen. But if he ever went there, he would probably be just as lost as Adnan is in Paris. Insaf knows both worlds and tries to make the best of them, but she has never found true happiness in Paris, and Layla is the only one who feels comfortable in her own skin.

Writer-director Ghandour is no stranger to multiple identities: born in Jordan to Lebanese parents, and having grown up in Belgium, this London Film School graduate living in Paris tackles the issues of migration, integration and the clash of cultures. Films that bet all their chips on these broad themes generally tend to lose their characters halfway through, but this is not the case here. Adnan is not only on a journey towards his dreams, nor to Paris; he is on a life journey, during which he will learn new things about himself.

The city of Paris as an additional character was not picked by accident: the symbolism of the place is strong, especially for the Lebanese people, for both historical and cultural reasons. It is portrayed as a big, chaotic, modern metropolis, but without using images of well-known tourist hotspots. In contrast with the early scenes in Lebanon, which are shot with a static camera, the ones set in Paris feature more noticeable camera movements.

Confidently acted and shot in natural colours, this is a solid debut, albeit with its faults, such as the sometimes oversimplified characterisation and its 100-minute running time, which proves to be a tad excessive. But the author certainly has something to say and has articulated it in a satisfying manner.