Breathing (movie review)

Breathing (drama) (2011) (1 hr 30 mins)

This Austrian film written and directed by first-time film-maker Karl Markovics is a very assured debut. It reminded me of films like The Son by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne in its understated approach and its depiction of ordinary routines that gradually reveal deeper emotions felt by the main characters.

The film tells the story of Roman Kogler (played by Thomas Schubert), a young man at a youth detention centre on the outskirts of Vienna, awaiting parole after serving time for killing a man. He’s uncommunicative and sullen, appears to have no family or friends and faces the prospect of a bleak future. To improve his chances of parole, he’s urged to show he can hold down a job. He chooses work experience at a morgue, collecting and transporting dead bodies. Perhaps he feels more of a connection with the dead than with the living.

 

One day a woman is brought to the morgue who shares his surname.  Kogler decides to track down his mother and find out why she surrendered him to the care of social services when he was a young child. Their meeting provides the emotional crux of the film.

The director apparently spent many weeks accompanying the morgue workers and attending a detention centre to research the script. The attention to detail pays off as the film has a very authentic feel throughout. It doesn’t offer any easy answers to Kogler’s plight but there are moments of hope: a friendly encounter with a young woman backpacker on the train; his work colleagues gradually accepting him as one of the team; and a stirring of remorse for his crime. The crime is never really explained but remains there as a shadow, a constant reminder of the personal demons he struggles with.

The director, an actor himself, extracts a wonderfully natural performance from Schubert in his very first acting role. Schubert manages to convey both Kogler’s detachment and his longing to connect, his toughness and his vulnerability.

There are poignant moments throughout the film: the humiliation of being strip-searched every time Kogler returns to the detention centre; Kogler and his work colleagues weighing one another up and not quite knowing what to make of the other; Kogler being shown by a work colleague how to tie his tie. There is a moving scene where Kogler and his colleagues go to collect a woman’s body in her home. Kogler sees the photographs and mementos decorating her room and telling of a family life and history that he has never had.

There is some inventive use of the camera: Kogler underwater seeing the legs of other boys as they dangle in the swimming pool; and the final scene as the camera rises above a graveyard and turns slowly to the majestic sky above. The title Breathing refers to Kogler’s solitary swimming sessions at the detention centre where he is learning how to breathe underwater, a symbol perhaps of a rebirth which Kogler may be undergoing as he edges towards some kind of future. This is a thoughtful, moving film that will stay with you afterwards.

 
Rating: 8/10  

About Elly (movie review)

About Elly (drama) (2009) (1 hr 59 mins)

With A Separation (2011), Asghar Farhadi became the first Iranian director to win an Oscar for best foreign film. Now his previous film, About Elly (2009), has been given a limited UK cinema release. Catch it if you can because it is an outstanding film, exploring personal relationships, moral dilemmas and the dangers of deception.

Three married couples, old friends from university, set out on a weekend trip to the Caspian Sea. Elly, a young nursery school teacher, is invited along by Sepideh, the mother of one of her pupils. Sepideh is trying to match-make, hoping Elly will hit it off with the recently divorced Ahmad. The party is due to stay in a comfortable villa but the woman in charge tells them they can only stay one night. To get the woman to let them stay the whole weekend in another villa, Sepideh tells her that Elly and Ahmad are on honeymoon.

After some initial game-playing and banter, during which the friends are appraising Elly and deciding whether she would make a suitable wife for Ahmad, Elly reminds Sepideh that she can only stay one night. Sepideh presses her to stay longer and hides her luggage and mobile phone to stop her phoning for a taxi.

Matters take a sudden turn for the worse when Elly is left on her own at the beach to look after the children and promptly disappears, feared drowned. This leads to recriminations among the adults, and matters become complicated when they find Elly’s mobile phone and realise they have to notify her family. What seems like a simple task turns into a series of moral dilemmas as they discover that Sepideh has omitted to share with them some pertinent information about Elly’s personal life. Should they tell more lies to spare her family further pain or tell the truth?

After the opening ten minutes or so, when the characters are being introduced, the film becomes utterly gripping, initially as we wonder what the mysterious Elly makes of the others and particularly of Ahmad, who is trying to take things slowly but is clearly smitten with her. When Elly disappears, it dawns on the others that they actually know very little about her or her family, which soon leads to complications they could not have envisaged. Subtle plot twists ramp up the emotional tension as the characters argue, cajole and harangue one another. What starts as a simple tragedy threatens to escalate into a situation none of them can control.

The script, written by Farhadi, is outstanding. Just when you think the film is about to reach a resolution, it takes off in another direction, creating more dilemmas for the characters to wrestle with. It touches on interesting questions such as the power relationships between men and women in Iranian society, whether it is right to tell lies to try to avoid causing pain to others, and the way people try to control others in subtle ways. The acting and direction are excellent throughout.

The final scene shows the characters trying to push a car out of the wet sand as the tide comes in. Try as they might, they cannot shift it. It is a fitting image for a film in which ordinary people wrestle to cope with an extraordinary situation.

The film won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival and was Iran’s submission for an Oscar for best foreign film. It was voted by Iranian critics the fourth best Iranian film of all time. Look out for the DVD release of Farhadi’s earlier film, Fireworks Wednesday (2006), which came out in Autumn 2012.

  

Rating: 10/10

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (drama) (2011) (2 hrs 37 mins)

The first thing you need to know about this film is that it’s slow. There are a lot of long takes and passages when nothing much appears to happen. But it’s worth persevering with because there is much to admire in this Turkish drama from director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The critics thought so too. It was co-winner of the Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The film is based on the experience of one of the film’s screenwriters. It follows a long night spent by the police looking for a dead body in the Turkish countryside. Three cars transport a group of men (police officers, a doctor, a prosecutor, gravediggers, army officers and two murder suspects) from location to location in what seems like a fruitless search for a body that the suspects have confessed to burying. The trouble is they were drunk at the time and can’t remember clearly where the body was left.

The opening scenes are shown in long shot. We hear the characters’ conversation during their car journey but at first we only see the cars from a distance. We don’t even know who is speaking. But then we are inside the car with the characters and they gradually reveal themselves through conversation on a number of subjects, including yoghurt, health problems, work, family and death.

The search seems to be getting nowhere and the leading police officer is growing more and more frustrated. The prosecutor who is in charge of the search decides to go to a village so that they can have a break and eat a meal. The mayor of the village extends hospitality and the chief suspect eventually tells the police where the body can be found. Once the body is found and taken to a hospital for an autopsy, the pace picks up as the film focuses on the uneasy relationship between the doctor and the prosecutor, which leads to a revelation about the prosecutor’s personal life.

The richness of the film lies in the subtle characterisation and the visual details. There are several moving moments: the doctor, exhausted and downcast, looking at photographs of his ex-wife and of himself as a boy, the men captivated by the beauty of the mayor’s daughter as she serves them drinks, the prosecutor’s facial expressions as he slowly moves towards making a confession to the doctor.

The characters spend a lot of the film waiting for things to happen, growing bored and drifting into philosophical musings. The film reminded me of Tarkovsky films such as Stalker and Mirror, while the bleak landscapes put me in mind of Antonioni.  What action there is happens slowly but is beautifully filmed.  The film is maybe half an hour too long but if you have the patience to let the film unfold, you will find it offers much to ponder.

Rating: 8/10