This far behind, at least one had to slip through the cracks...

#30: Terribly Happy

This 2008 Danish (Czech?) film has been compared to Blood Simple, The White Ribbon, an (any?) Eastwood western, and films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. And this is just the NYT review. What is to be made of a film that apparently evokes films from so may genres and across so much time? Either it is so original that it can be described only via analogy or it is a pastiche of influences: Quentin Jerome Tarantino in the land of the midnight sun!

My own notes on this film suggest that I was extraordinarily stoned when I watched it. I do not believe that I was. All I can really make out now is:

• Blood Simple?
• Everybody knows everything as it happens
• Full embrce of community--knows his secrets

I have no idea what any of this means. Just go see the film before the remake comes out and we'll be compelled to compare it to all of the other remakes in the history of film--It's like if in Jaws II the shark had been played by Robert De Niro!!!

What is a "scripted documentary" and does it matter?

#29: Araya

On occasion, when getting ready to go to work, I've been known to compare my job to working in salt mines. After seeing this 1959 film I no longer do so.

More illuminating than any number of Marxist dependency tracts, this film almost wordlessly shows what dependent development looks like. In a moment of 1960's post-colonial optimism, in the end of the film the salt mining process is being industrialized, with machine power replacing human labor. Looking back, it is difficult to muster the enthusiasm for this process suggested by the cinematography.

Araya puts the lie to the neoconservative/neo-colonial position on the causes and consequences of underdevelopment. Plus it is beautiful, heartbreaking, and mesmerizing.

Having said that, director Margot Benacerraf calls Araya a "scripted documentary". Such characterizations make me nervous. Not that any documentary can, or should, reach some objective truth but comparing her characterization of Araya, the actual place, after revisiting it years later with the observations of others ...

Over 50 years later, it seems Araya is still the end of the road but whether it is the road depicted in the film, well, who knows.

First of Several Japanese Classics

#28: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

This 1960 classic from Japanese director Mikio Naruse feels like a strange amalgamation of Italian Neorealism and pre-war American melodrama. Neorealist in its cinematography, melodramatic in its characterizations, Naruse's film focuses on Keiko, a young widow turned aging "bar girl" in post-war Tokyo, as she realizes that her days of cajoling businessmen into spending their evenings drinking are numbered. Her future is either to marry or to buy a bar of her own. Neither seems to be in her cards.

The bar girl culture is depicted as something between dating and prostitution: more overtly commercial than dating but not as straightforward as prostitution. Businessmen follow the girls from bar to bar where the women work as something like independent contractors. Their welcome is dependent on their ability to attract men, which depends on their fulfilling some chaste fantasy (sex was apparently career suicide) for these men, who, in turn, spend substantial resources on drinks and gifts. Clearly a young woman's game, Keiko finds herself losing both clientele and interest.

The bulk of the movie consists of Keiko wandering through her life encountering a number of archetypal Japanese men as she struggles to make a living and a future. Women in this film are more nuanced and better characterized but only Keiko is depicted as fully human. Laden with worry, responsibility, and feckless men Keiko emerges as strong and noble, even as her problems are not resolved with any sort of happy ending.

Proto-feminist in its sensibilities and with a remarkable cast, this film is definitely a gem of Japanese cinema.

Go See This Film Now. I'll Wait.

#27: A Prophet

This remarkable film by French director Jacques Audiard follows the development of Malik, a young petty criminal of Arab descent from his first adult arrest, and imprisonment with the adult population in the French penal system, through his education as a criminal until he emerges six years later as a formidable leader of a crime syndicate.

This film is amazing. While violent and brutal in places, its real contemplation is on the soul of a smart and sensitive outsider who is confronted by the simple choice of oppressed or oppressor and chooses the latter. Violent and bloody in places, funny and charming in others, brutal and loving and loyal all at the same time, this film sugarcoats none of it. No house soundtrack and jump cuts take the edge off of someone bleeding to death, no soft focus and sunsets set a romantic tone. Malik wins not in a blaze of glory but in persistent hard work, a willingness to do the ugly jobs when necessary, a high tolerance for humiliation, strong and dependable friends, and a cultural invisibility and bigotry that leads everyone to underestimate him until it is too late. In short, this is an allegory for the universal immigrant experience.

This film covers similar cultural ground as the District B13 films reviewed earlier--ethnic conflict and French culture, the effects of political and social marginalization on immigrant communities--but whereas B13 played those fissures as revenge fantasy this film just looks directly at them.

Fantastic film. Go see it now.

So you think your high school reuion was uncomfortable...

#26: Prodigal Sons

This documentary is directed by Kimberly Reed who, in her youth, was voted most likely to succeed, was the star quarterback of her high school football team, was handsome and popular, and apparently the chief nemesis of her older, dumber, uglier, less athletic and (as if that weren't enough) adopted older brother named Marc. She returns for her 20th high school reunion as a post-operative transsexual and stunning lesbian with girlfriend in tow who is still smarter, more popular, prettier, and more likely to succeed than her now literally brain-damaged older brother.

Poor Marc just can't get a break.

The strangeness of the high school reunion (which, despite whatever stereotypes you may harbor about Montana, actually goes off without a hitch) is just the beginning. It gets stranger as the story veers away from what must have been it original conceit (what happens when you really are the most changed at your high school reunion?) to just hanging on as Marc becomes increasingly unstable and a brotherly rivalry--clearly left far behind by the victor who was only dimly aware of it in the first place, wrapped up as she was in her ideal life and pantomime of perfection--metastasizes into full blown hate.

The first-person urgency of this documentary wears a bit thin and if Kimberly is as narcissistic as this film suggests then some of my sympathies certainly lie with the difficult to like Marc. Nevertheless, this is a curious and engaging story.

The tag line really says it all: " A brotherly rivalry between a man and a woman . . . and Orson Welles "

"Children are people. They are no better or worse than any adult. They are merely more helpless." M. Haneke

#25: White Ribbon

This bleak, black and white, film by Austrian director Michael Haneke is set in a German village in the year immediately prior to World War One. On the edge of the end of the Hundred Years Peace and in a bucolic rural hinterland, the film suggests the last gasps of a dying era, not yet aware that it is at its end but clearly having lived beyond its usefulness and into caricature.

Told as a flashback from the perspective of the idealistic young teacher, the story is of the secrets of the village, its hierarchy, and its civic leaders within the context of how he met his wife. Both his shy fiancee and the teacher exemplify the aspiring working class--she the daughter of laborer in a neighboring village enlisted to work as the governess for the town baron and he the impoverished professor brought in to indoctrinate the children of the village. Both are in jobs that require them to impose discipline on the children and both are, in turn, disciplined into a repressive Victorian culture. Both aspire to a level of propriety and moral rectitude, aping of their social betters, as a mechanism of social mobility. They are dimly aware that these social betters (the Baron and Baroness, the doctor, the pastor, the children themselves) are not the pillars of virtue they appear to be but at the same time the social code of the era does not leave room for the aspiring petite bourgeois to notice, not to mention judge, those above or empathize with those who occupy the lower social strata.

The dramatic heart of the film is a series of accidents, or maybe criminal acts, and the mystery that surrounds them. Are they divine punishment? Cruel and mindless acts by jealous villagers? Acts of retribution from a secretive cabal of children resisting and replicating the oppression and violence of their own treatment as the had of prim and moralistic adults? Or as suspected by the Baroness, just more of the animal violence of the German peasant and by extension, Germany itself?

The film is clearly allegorical. Pre-war culture has ossified into a rigid and overt morality occluding the violence, perversion, and human indifference of the adults. The children are both the victims of this hypocrisy and its most vigilant defenders. Both the decadence of the Wiemar Republic and the Nazi hive are seeded in this one village in this one moment.

This film is beautifully shot with little narrative. The story is told largely through the images and through half-observed moments when the Victorian facade falls away. One is made to feel an accidental voyeur; turning corners or peeking through doors only to see flashes of perversity that are immediately suppressed when they become aware that they have been observed and making all involved feel uncomfortable.