A Film a Week - Wasted Eggs

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The mixture of ultra-modern technological achievements and ancient-old traditions, norms and codes of conduction in Japan might seem to work perfectly, but an in-depth look would reveal some major flaws and injustices of the system. In a deeply traditional and patriarchal society such is Japanese, women often find themselves on the receiving end, and that topic rarely finds its way to movies. Having that in mind, Ryo Kawasaki’s debut feature “Wasted Eggs”, world-premiering at the first films competition of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) might seem like a maverick effort addressing the important topics from a distinctively female point of view.

It is expected for a Japanese woman to find the meaning of life in marriage and having children and the presumed “due date” would be her 30^th birthday because after that she would be considered somewhat undesirable candidate for a bride and a mother. Also, as we are informed early on in the film, Japanese policies on artificial insemination are quiet restrictive: while it is not illegal per se, the procedure has to take place abroad. However, women of certain age with no marriage prospects in sight who still want to leave the trace, genetically speaking, can become egg donors in fertility clinics and the perks for the candidates selected include a winter vacation in Hawaii and a paycheck of 500.000 yens.

One of them is our lead Junko (Mitsue Terasaka) who we meet doing a survey at the clinic. She is a quiet, mousy type, has no career to speak of, working a secretarial kind of job at the office, lives alone and is not into dating, while her mother pushes her to give her the grandchildren. At the same clinic she meets her younger cousin Aoi (Sora Kawai) who is in financial troubles and is still trying to get herself together after a breakup with her girlfriend. Needless to say, she is not the marrying type either with her tomboyish appearance and rebellious attitude and she is facing a severe pressure from her family. The two women start living together, but their differences in character and way of life get in their way…

Kawasaki’s directing is competent, but far from astonishing, relying on the combination of shots by the DOP Kyohito Tanabe’s hand-held camera and the dialogue scenes done in a shot-reverse shot fashion. Since her past credits include mainly television and some shorts, her achievement here can be considered a step forward.

She takes her time (of the brisk 70 minutes total) to get to the point and to the main topic which is quite universal: the fear of getting old, but it has a specially bitter flavour in the context of being a woman in Japan. Both of the characters need some kind of change, but they are not sure about it or if they are able to handle it. Some of the metaphors developed from the title in the film’s script are extremely clever, like the economic cost of the menstruation (on hygiene, for instance), which is a clear manifestation of wasting eggs. On the other hand, the central, recurring metaphor of eggs (chicken) being scrambled in a bowl from the beginning only to be wasted in the moment of an artificial dramatic climax in the end is a bit vulgar, though sometimes neatly incorporated in the film’s sound scheme, adding some rhythm to Miki Kobayashi’s piano-heavy soundtrack.

The feeling of the artificial drama is highlighted by pretty stale character development and almost no development of the relationship between the two women, while somewhat clunky dialogue does not help either. Having that in mind, both of the relatively inexperienced actresses are doing a decent job in their roles and are quite successful in bringing the positions of their characters close to the audience.

Modest in the terms of budget and artistic aspirations, “Wasted Eggs” works best as a subtle expose of concrete social issues and can be commended for its activist value.

A Film a Week - Fashionista

There has been a lot of fashion in the cinematic year of 2016. But, after Nicholas Winding Refn’s visually astonishing, but story-wise utterly banal extravaganza The Neon Demon and Nocturnal Animals, the stylistically polished thriller by fashion designer Tom Ford, it is easy to overlook Simon Rumley’s (Red, White & Blue) take on the world of street fashion and cautionary tale about addiction set in Austin, Texas. And, boy, wouldn't that be a pity, because Fashionista is the bravest and most emotionally effective of the bunch.

Set around the vintage clothes store owned by April (Amanda Fuller, star of Red, White & Blue) and her husband Eric (Ethan Embry, Fuller’s partner in Cheap Thrills), Fashionista creates a genuine atmosphere early on. Their business is booming, but their relationship is not doing that well. For Eric, clothes are strictly business, but for April they are a matter of passion on the verge of addiction. After confirming her fears that Eric is cheating on her, Amanda burns all the clothes she can find in their cramped apartment. For her, it is the act of liberation, but also a leap into the unknown.

Trouble comes to her soon enough in form of sharply-dressed and obviously filthy rich Randall (Eric Balfour). At first, she enjoys the perks of moving up the class ladder, changing from vintage T-shirts to designer dresses, but everything comes with a price. Here, it’s Randall's pretty extravagant lifestyle that gives her the creeps.

Is it just her, drowning in paranoia, obsession and taste for wrong men? Or is there something more sinister going on, as it is shown in recurring flash-forwards of a mansion in crimson-red, sensing the impending doom looming over our heroine? And what’s with the nameless young woman (Alex Essoe) checking out of a mental hospital and cruising the streets and clubs of Austin? How does all of that add up?

Initally the whole story may seem a bit pretentious, with all the manic non-linear editing, flash-forwards and mystery that casts its spider-web as broad as it can, combined with a washed-up look and unlikely angles from hand-held camera that Rumley favours. Rumley's crediting Nicholas Roeg as an inspiration in the closing credits is no surprise at all, because the whole film works completely as a tribute to the British genre auteur. The look of a vintage cult classic seen on an old VHS tape is completely in tune with its feel and the hipster clothing culture it celebrates. The mystery is somewhat predictable for a trained viewer, some repetitions of certain scenes could be trimmed off and the ending is a bit neat but still enjoyable, as is the whole movie.

But still, this is not just an exercise in style. Rumley masterfully catches the spirit of Austin and its culture and creates the unique, sticky atmosphere, drowning us into the story. The key performance of Amanda Fuller is a tour de force, as she is both manic and fragile, not conventionally pretty, but magnetically attractive. All in all, Fashionista is a great piece of inspired genre cinema: trashy, classy, campy and sexy at the same time, which makes it an almost perfect midnight flick.

A Film a Week - I, Daniel Blake

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.

“I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less.”

This last line of Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winning film is probably the strongest quote since The Network's "I am mad as hell and I can't take it anymore". I, Daniel Blake is a powerful exposé on the topic of dismantling the socially responsible state since the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night, and probably the best film of the year.

It is a Newcastle-set story about titular character, played by comedian and stage actor Dave Johns, stuck in a Catch-22 state of fight with the bureaucracy. After the 59 years old carpenter had survived a heart attack at his workplace, his physician finds him unfit to go back to work just yet. But, the “medical care professional” finds him healthy enough to go back to work, denying him benefits. He can appeal and wait for months, but he will run out of money soon. Meanwhile, he can try to get something called “Job Seekers Allowance” and for that he must put up a show that he is actively looking for a job, while being unable to accept any. And most of the bureaucratic procedures and applications are happening on-line, which puts the computer illiterate Daniel in a very frustrating position.

What starts a farce, ends up as a tragedy. Surely enough, we know that Ken Loach is not aiming for amusement in his portrayal of corrupt bureaucracy going rampart. This is not Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or The Double, or any kind of comedy of absurdity and vileness. This is a bold statement about Great Britain now, its Tory government and the proof that the system is rigged against an individual.

Comfortingly, Daniel is not alone in his fight, since on one of his meetings he bumps into Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two who just moved from London. Soon enough they forge a family-like relationship of mutual support in emotional and logistical way. But how long can they stand in a fight against more powerful enemy, a fight that is probably rigged?

Shifting the focus from one character’s life to another, Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty succeed in their intent to make us feel for their characters and identify with them. There are really emotionally charged moments, not to mention the ending, there are even melodramatic ones, but still we see Daniel and Katie as our own folks: simple, decent, stubborn, proud and in danger of losing everything. More so, Daniel is our future: we are not getting any younger, we are going to be old, ailing, maybe alone as he is and we will become dependent on someone or something like the state.

It is very much a Ken Loach film. It’s simply composed, there are no hidden layers and secret meanings, and his intentions are clear. We are about to get furious, enraged, revolutionary engaged, but also humane, compassionate and hopeful. Ken Loach doesn’t give up on his traits, like choosing less famous actors and non-professionals for starring roles, picking just the right location for the story, such as Newcastle, once blooming industrial city in Northern England that has suffered in the past decades. Even the aesthetical choices are expected, like opening every outdoor scene with a telephoto shot from afar.

Still, it is an essential Ken Loach film and the great director here is as passionate as ever and can be seen in all three forms. There is “Happy Loach”, a warm, hopeful humorist, there is the “Loach the Ultimate Social Realist”, socially aware, dramatic, and emotional, sometimes even sentimental, and in the end, there is Ken Loach, a life-long activist. The end result is a masterful film that is very hard to shake off.

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.

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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.