A Film a Week - In the Face of Gravity / Magasmentés

 previously published on Cineuropa

Hungary has, and has always had, a very high suicide rate. It would be too easy and unhelpful to search for the reason for that statistic in the so-called national mentality, its geography, weather or climate, although the numbers remain much the same regardless of the social and political system of the country currently in place. Part of the reason why preventive measures do not work are those systems themselves, which are not too different from one another. 

Filmmaker András Fésős proves he is well aware of that problem in his newest feature In the Face of Gravity. The film already went through national theatrical distribution at the end of last year, but it has just recently started its festival tour. After the Transylvania International FF in Cluj-Napoca, it screened in the European Film Festival Palić’s Parallels and Encounters competition. More festival bookings should ensue.

Our protagonist Sándor Félix (Romanian actor Bogdan Dumitrache, seen in Constantin Popescu’s 2010 Portrait of a Fighter as a Young Man and 2017's Pororoca) is a rescue specialist in Budapest’s central firefighters unit. On top of the physical work, he also serves as negotiator, with the reputation of being 100% able to persuade suicidal people to give up on their plan. He is dedicated to his job to the point that he follows up his “patients” later in their lives, and therefore enjoys the status of local, if not national, hero. 

However, things are not so stellar on the home front: his son Kristóf (Olivér Benjámin Börcsök) is one of the people secretly filming his department’s actions and selling the videos to a sensationalist TV station. With the wife and mother out of the picture, possibly because of Félix himself, the rift between them is wide.

These home issues soon spill onto Sándor's career. First, he becomes the victim of an elaborate prank for a popular TV show, then one of his patients, Gábor Beke (László Keszég) proves to be very persistent in his intention to kill himself due to his troublesome marriage with his wife (Andrea Takács). When a woman whose profile does not fit into the boxes of the typical suicidal person manages to surprise him, Félix’s facade crumbles completely…

Threading the fine line between the psychological drama and the genre thriller, Fésős manages to detect and address some of the issues of contemporary Hungarian society (and beyond), such as the rampant lack of compassion and the need for spectacle and sensationalism that lead to estrangement, which can result in suicide attempts. He does so primarily by creating a dense and thick atmosphere with his genre literate albeit sometimes overly expressive directing, which points viewers towards details that reveal their significance later on. There are also some subtle yet polyvalent hints to classics, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, while the use of trademark Budapest locations, especially one of the iconic bridges, is also brilliantly executed in Péter Szatmári's and Tamás Dobos's cinematography. The neoclassical score by Gábor Keresztes successfully creates the illusion that the film is more grandiose than its budget would suggest.

The problems with In the Face of Gravity arise in the acting department. With a lead actor who nails the facial expressions but does not speak the language and thus has to be dubbed, and the rest of the cast coming mainly from the stage and being too histrionic, line deliveries become a little declamatory, influencing the general tone of the film. However, Fésős adapts to the situation, turning something that should look realistic into a subjective vision of the protagonist’s crumbling psyche, resulting in a solid, rewarding film.

A Film a Week - Safe Place / Sigurno mjesto

 previously published on Cineuropa

Everybody needs a safe place, both in the physical and the metaphorical sense. For instance, safety is the key component of the concepts of home and family, which are rooted so deep in our society and our psychology. But what if the safe place is denied for somebody? That is the question the characters have to deal with in Safe Place, the feature-length debut by Croatian filmmaker Juraj Lerotić that premiered in Locarno’s Cineasti del presente competition.

The opening quote is as foreboding as it is poetic. It states: “If none of this had happened, I could have told you: Look, this is your building, count to twenty and I’ll come running into the scene”. It could probably be attributed to the protagonist of the film, Bruno, played by Lerotić himself, because it is just what happens in the first twenty or so seconds of the film, as he comes running into a scene, rushing towards a nondescript building and breaking the door to enter it. The next door Bruno breaks is that of the apartment his brother Damir (Goran Marković of The High Sun fame) lives in. As we learn, Damir has attempted suicide and the intensity of his effort in that direction far exceeds the level of a common “cry for help.”

Safe Place follows the two brothers and their mother (character actress Snježana Sinovičić Šiškov, as reliable as always), who comes into the picture over the course of the next 24 hours. During that period of time, Bruno and the mother have to protect Damir not just from himself, but also from the unsympathetic system consisting of rude and suspicious members of the police and the robotic, sometimes even arrogant medical personnel. The safe place they want to reach in every sense of the word proves to be quite elusive.

Lerotić's film is certainly moody, not just because of Damir's incoherent stream of thoughts, but also because of the filmmaker's unorthodox but fitting stylistic decisions that provoke thinking and open different possibilities for plot-steering. For instance, the choice of a 5:3 aspect ratio and the angles the Zagreb exterior locations are filmed from suggest that Lerotić tries to highlight Damir's anxiety, but when the action moves to Split, filmed in a different fashion by cinematographer Marko Brdar, the expected relief does not come after all. At one point, Lerotić even manages to seamlessly transfer the action from the realm of hyper-realism to some kind of speculative dream reality, only to end it with an abrupt cut by editor Marko Ferković, while the droning noise present in Julij Zornik’s sound design right from the start slowly fizzles out.

Not everything works perfectly logically in Lerotić's vision. There is a stark contrast between the deliberately slow pacing laced with quite a bit of idle running and the sheer number of events and actions taken over the course of supposedly just one day, but it can also be seen as a step into Bruno’s quite fuzzy perspective of the situation in which he can only be a limitedly active participant. In the end, Safe Place is a tense psychological drama that treats its serious topic from a sincere point of view belonging to those indirectly affected by it.

A Film a Week - The Forest of Lost Souls / A Floresta das Almas Perdidas

What if the suicide were just the beginning of the problems? The young and aspiring Portuguese genre auteur José Pedro Lopes poses the same question with his lean and artsy feature-length debut The Forest of Lost Souls. Judging by the result, he is someone we can count on in the future of genre filmmaking.

After the title card quoting Neitzche, the action is about to start with a middle-aged man named Ricardo (Jorge Mota), who is parking his car at the edge of the wooded area, supposedly popular with the people planning to take their own lives. He follows the signs that lead him to the part of the forest designated for suicides, all completely fictional but all too familiar with the Aokigahara woods at the foothill of Mt. Fuji in Japan portrayed in Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees.

As soon as he finds his spot, Ricardo realizes that he has company consisting of a “manic pixie goth girl” in her late teens or early 20s named Carolina (Daniela Love), who first mocks his chosen method (a knife), and then his general unpreparedness for the act, like forgetting to bring his own pen and paper for suicide note, which she readily lends him. The sarcastic banter between the two of them continues and it seems like that they are determined to save each other’s life, but still firm about the decision to take their own.

At least it is the case with Ricardo who cannot handle his life any more. One of his daughters, Irene (Lila Lopes, seen only in flashbacks) committed suicide herself a year ago and he feels threatened by the constant nagging of his wife (Lígia Roque) and the cynical attitude of his other daughter Filipa (Mafalada Banquart) to whom Carolina reminds him of, regarding both her age and the treatment she gives him. Also, it turns out to be that Carolina lacks the courage to take the final step and that she is more of a morbidly curious tourist in the forest, and more of the theoretitian than a suicide practitioner.

Or is she? After a sharp turn somewhere around midpoint, the film takes the course away from the casually dark comedic tone Lopes established early on, which is transforming more to the direction of something really sinister in the vein of home invasion thrillers, stalking chillers and slasher horrors. Smartly enough, he holds the cards regarding the motivational explanation up until the end, amplifying the cynicism he plays with right from the start.

He also avoids bloodbath and cheap shocks, though the stalking parts are a bit too much tongue in cheek, staying true to his darkly poetic realism realized through Francisco Lobo’s stark black and white cinematography, Ana Almeida’s meditative editing and Emanuel Grácio’s sometimes prevalent music score, transforming the budgetary limitations into an artistic statement. He gets a lot of help from his actors, especially Love who plays her clichéd part with a bit of dark hipster irony of her own. The brisk runtime of 71 minutes is also more than helpful to make The Forest of Lost Souls an easy watch as well as a stylish and assured, albeit at moments nonsensical debut.