Spring, summer, autumn, winter...and spring (movie review)

Spring, summer, autumn, winter...and spring (2004) (drama) (1hr 43 mins)

This film from Korean director Kim Ki-Duk is a parable about a Buddhist monk and the pupil he raises. It’s a change of direction for Kim, who is best known for violent films like Bad Guy and The Isle.

Living on a floating temple in the middle of a lake, surrounded by forests and mountains, they live a simple life, attending to their interior world.

In the spring section, the monk observes the boy tying a stone to a fish, a frog and a snake. To teach him a lesson, he ties a stone to the boy’s back and tells him he must release the animals before he is released, adding that if any of the animals has died, he will carry that death within him forever. When the boy finds that the snake has died, he cries.

Summer sees the boy, now a teenager, fall for a young woman who is staying at the temple. They soon become lovers and when she leaves to return to the world, he goes in pursuit.

In autumn he returns, now a man and scarred by life.

In winter, he takes the role of the monk and the everlasting cycle of life continues. The seasons are presumably intended to show the stages of a man’s life.

There is a lyrical, reflective quality to the film which makes it absorbing. The spiritual message, if less than subtle, just manages to keep from straying into preaching. There is little dialogue but the unfolding scenes portray the major dramas of life: sin, love, suffering and redemption.

The film won the Audience Award at the 2003 San Sebastian film festival.

 Rating: 7/10

Stranger than paradise (movie review)

Stranger than paradise (comedy) (1984) (1 hr 25 mins)

Director Jim Jarmusch is a leading figure in American independent film-making and is probably best known to a mainstream audience for Broken flowers (2005) starring Bill Murray. But he first came to people’s attention with Stranger than paradise, his second film. It was made on a tiny budget of $125,000 and Jarmusch also wrote the screenplay.

Filmed in black and white, the film has Jarmusch’s trademark slow pacing and focus on mood and characters above plot. The story is straightforward. Willie (John Lurie) lives in New York and spends his time in card games and at race tracks with his friend Eddie (Richard Edson). He’s irritated by the arrival of his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) from Hungary. He has to put her up for ten days while his aunt is in hospital. Willie resents her being there but grows used to her as the ten days unfold.

One year on, Willie and Eddie win hundreds of dollars by cheating in a game of poker and decide to visit Eva in Cleveland. But when they get there they are as bored as they were back in New York. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, they troop along with Eva to the cinema, much to the annoyance of Eva’s friend Billy. Billy ends up paying for them; they repay him by eating his popcorn.

Willie and Eddie decide to drive to Florida and persuade Eva to come with them. While they’re blowing their money at the dog track, Eva comes into some money by chance and decides to go to the airport and catch a flight to Europe. Willie and Eddie rush to the airport to stop her, with comic results.

The comedy in the film is very dry and understated. Willie and Eva don’t seem to know what to make of each other. Eddie seems interested in her but can’t manage to articulate his feelings for her. The locations are strangely uninhabited, almost ghostly. Run-down sections of New York are succeeded by desolate parts of Cleveland and empty parts of Florida. As Eddie comments to Willie as they leave Cleveland, ‘You know, it's kind of funny. You're some place new, and everything looks just the same.' It is perhaps this sense of being trapped that binds Willie, Eddie and Eva together. And as the film closes, for all their modest efforts to escape to somewhere different, they all end up somewhere they don’t want to be.

The film is punctuated with breaks between scenes where the screen is black, a kind of film equivalent to the white spaces between words in a text. The spaces themselves are what give the action meaning.

The film won the Camera d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 National Film Critics Award for Best Film. Perhaps Jarmusch’s greatest achievement in this film is to make the viewer care about characters who say and do nothing of consequence.

 Rating: 9/10

This is not a film (movie review)

 

This is not a film (2010) (1hr 15 mins)

In 2010 Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested by the authorities and placed under house arrest, banned from making films for 20 years and given a six-year jail sentence for allegedly making propaganda against the regime. This fascinating documentary shows him struggling to cope with the circumstances he finds himself in.

Filmed with just one camera and a mobile phone, the film takes place entirely within the flat block where Panahi lives, and mainly inside his living room and kitchen. Early on we witness a phone conversation with his appeal lawyer, who offers her opinion that the ban on making films might be overturned but the best that can be hoped for with the prison sentence is a reduced term.

Trapped within the flat, Panahi films a film director friend and asks him to come around. When he arrives, Panahi starts exploring the notion of making a film that isn’t really a film and so might not land him in further trouble. In a fascinating sequence, he starts outlining an idea for his next film, reading excerpts from a script and marking out with sticky on his living room carpet the building he had researched before his arrest. In one of the most affecting scenes in the film, Panahi, while telling the story of his proposed film to his friend, he has to stop and walk away to compose himself. The story concerns a woman locked in her home and the similarities with his own situation seem to suddenly overwhelm him.

What makes this documentary so fascinating is watching Panahi reaching towards something, not quite knowing what he’s doing but instinctively sensing that he needs to do it. Though generally sombre as he contemplates his likely future, he comes alive on screen when he starts talking about this next film project. Before your eyes, you see him become energised and passionate, his creativity bubbling to the surface.

In the long final sequence, Panahi gets chatting to a man who has knocked on his door to collect his rubbish. He follows the man into the lift, filming him all the while, and you can see the director in him taking over, searching for meaning in this random encounter.

The film was saved onto a USB flash drive and smuggled out of Iran in a birthday cake. It was shown to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival.

 Rating: 9/10

What Richard Did (movie review)

What Richard Did (2013) (1hr 28 mins)

This gripping Irish drama from director Lenny Abrahamson (Garage, Adam and Paul) is built around an interesting study of its main character. We first see Richard (Jack Renyor) joking around with his mates. He appears to be popular and carefree, the good looking star of the school rugby team relaxing in the summer holidays before starting university. Our first impression is of a young man who has everything he could want, especially when he entices the attractive Roisin to leave her boyfriend Connor and pair up with him.

But it’s not long before we realise that first appearances are deceptive. We begin to see another side of Richard, someone who can be a loner, insecure, brooding, melancholy. When Roisin talks to her ex, he is immediately jealous and on guard. He expresses his hurt by criticising her for not talking enough to his father. We learn that Richard’s father has suffered from depression and seems anxious that his son doesn’t wrestle with similar problems. It seems his family have high expectations of him.

When Richard and Roisin attend a party, Richard is troubled that she doesn’t spend any time with him. He goes outside to smoke and his mood is not improved when Connor arrives. Then Richard is stopped from rejoining the party and has to wait outside, knowing Roisin and Connor may be together. When Roisin finally appears, Connor is with her and starts a fight with Richard. In one moment of violence, Richard releases his pent-up anger, with tragic consequences. Although when Richard leaves, Connor seems to be okay, there’s a report on  the radio the next morning that he has been found dead at the scene of the fight.

The second half of the film shows us how Richard struggles to come to terms with what has happened. His first instinct is to deny any involvement but the guilt proves difficult to live with, and he receives scant support from Roisin or from his father, who sends him away as if wanting to be rid of the problem.

What makes the film fascinating for the viewer is that Richard has many facets and we are unsure how to react to him. He can be witty and warm-hearted but also selfish and manipulative. Is he to blame for what happened? Or is he a victim of a tragic accident and of Roisin’s apparent willingness to spend more time with Connor than with him.

Abrahamson wisely gives us plenty of space to observe Richard as he struggles to make sense of his situation and decide whether or not to hand himself in to the police. But at the end of the film you might still be undecided quite what to think about him.

 Rating: 8/10

The Hunt (movie review)

The Hunt (drama) (2012) (1 hr 46 mins)

In a village in Denmark, a nursery teacher named Lucas is popular with the children, and particularly liked by a girl named Klara. When she kisses him on the lips, he points out that such affection is not appropriate and she takes it as a rejection. She then makes comments to the nursery manager, Grethe, that lead her to think that Lucas has sexually abused Klara. From this moment on, Lucas becomes the subject of a witchhunt as he is rejected by most of his friends, suspended from his job and interrogated by the police.

It is made clear to the viewer that Lucas is innocent so that we experience with him the injustice of his treatment. He is initially too shocked to defend himself properly, and the manager at the nursery mishandles the investigation, too readily assuming that he is guilty and giving the impression to all the parents of children at the school that there is little doubt about his guilt.

To make matters worse, Klara is the daughter of Lucas’ best friend, Theo, which makes the apparent betrayal of trust all the more upsetting. Like almost everyone in the town, Theo assumes that Klara is telling the truth and therefore Lucas must be guilty. In fact the only people who are sure he is innocent are his teenage son and the boy’s godfather, .

It’s not long before Lucas is forcibly confronted with the judgment of his community. A brick is thrown through his window, his dog is murdered and he is violently thrown out of the local supermarket. But he stubbornly and courageously refuses to leave the town and instead confronts his persecutors.

In a scene of almost unbearable poignancy, Lucas goes to the Christmas church service and sits alone in a pew while the congregation stare at him with grim fascination. When the nursery children are brought out to perform a song, Lucas snaps and confronts Theo. In fact it is the strength of his anger that makes Theo wonder if Lucas is innocent after all. Only then does he coax out of Klara the confession that she told a lie.

The emotions portrayed in the film are painfully raw and director Thomas Vinterberg manages to capture an almost primeval struggle for justice. It’s impossible not to identify with Lucas’ pain and his powerlessness in the face of a situation that is threatening to ruin his life.

Mads Mikkelson, winner of the best actor award at Cannes, gives an outstanding performance as the distraught Lucas, having to be strong for the sake of his son but clearly in great emotional turmoil. Annika Wedderkopp is haunting as Klara, bewildered and unnerved by the power she has discovered she can wield in the complicated world of adults. The script by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm is superbly constructed, with no extraneous scenes or dialogue.

This is a film that will move you deeply and that you won’t forget in a hurry.

 

Rating: 10/10