Drama

(Πίσω από τις θημωνιές)

dir: Asimina Proedrou

2023

Alas this is not a biopic about the legendary wrestler Haystacks Calhoun, which is a pity...

This Greek film, Behind the Haystacks, which was Greece’s submission for 2024 in the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards (don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean anything: every country submits their most critically acclaimed movie from that year, and all but 5 are ignored), starts grim and ends grim, because it begins and ends at exactly the same place, near a lake.

It’s grim up north, on the border between Greece and Macedonia. It is a particularly irritating area for Greece, because there is a state in Greece called Macedonia, and an entire country just outside its borders calling itself Macedonia, which Greece, peevishly, refused to acknowledge as being called that since 1991, wanting it instead to be called “the Former Yugoslavian Republic Known as Macedonia” up until recently. Kinda like that time the musical artist known as Prince changed his name to a symbol in order to fuck with his record company, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.

In 2019 there was a compromise that neither country liked resulting in the name change to North Macedonia, which means they’re still both going to keep mewling about it forever.

This flick isn’t at all about two dumb nations fighting over stuff that doesn’t matter to any other sensible person. This flick is about people’s consciences, and a country’s soul.

The film begins with a glendi, a get together of various townsfolk, with food, booze and music free flowing. Some kids wander away from their parents during the festivities and play in the reeds by a lake. And of course, while playing, the kids find some bodies.

These are young children: when they run back and tell some adults, someone sits them down and starts gaslighting them immediately, telling them they didn’t see nothing, and anyway have they ever heard the story about the fisherman who accidentally drowned? Maybe it was his ghost they saw?

Adults are the worst. The point is, the bodies were real, and the vast majority of the people not that far away don’t seem to give much of a fuck.

(Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii)

dir: Radu Jude

2023

This is a lot of film to unpack.

I can’t say I know much, if anything, about Romanian cinema, having not knowingly ever watched a film from there as far as I know. I know about this director here, and Cristian Mungiu, and that’s about it.

And I know even less about Romania itself. Based on this flick, or these flicks…I am not going to pretend I know anything about Romanian life, but I do have impressions. I have opinions.

The title of this flick intrigued me too much for me to ignore it, and now, after nearly three hours of this experience, I feel like I can talk about it, finally.

There is a lot of driving in this flick, as in, a lot of a camera focused on a woman, being our main character Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache), driving around the city of Bucharest for hours and hours as she tries to make her living. There are also scenes from a Romanian movie from the 1980s called Angela Moves On, about a woman driving a taxi around the streets of Bucharest, interspersed throughout the movie. Both of the leads are called Angela. And later in the movie our main character Angela meets up with the actress who played Angela in the earlier movie, being Dorina Lazar, again playing that character as if she’s a real person.

What does it all mean? I have no idea. I don’t know enough about anything to really know. There are the obvious elements of paralleling of their lives and times onscreen, but there’s also the element that films contemporary Angela in some / many of the same places that 80s Angela drives through or around. And some of it shows how little the place has changed, whereas some scenes are shot in areas where nothing remains due to the depredations of former despot Nicolae Ceauşescu.

悪は存在しない
Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2024

This film’s title is awfully similar to another film from a few years ago, being There is No Evil, by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, but they are making very different points.

The earlier film is about how terrible the theocratic regime in Iran is and has been for the last forty years, tormenting, executing and terrorising its own citizens for having the temerity to exist and breathe. This Japanese film makes the point that no evil exists, in the natural world. Until maybe it spontaneously pops into existence for brief moments in time.

Mohammad Rasoulof has now fled from Iran, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since, for his crime of accurately representing the barbarity of his home country’s ruling totalitarian regime, he has been convicted of crimes against the state. Ryusuke Hamaguchi probably isn’t facing any such punishment from the Japanese government, mostly because, for all their faults, they don’t execute or convict people for making movies, or for being artists, or for being women.

That being said, I can imagine that there might be a fair few people who would wish this director bodily harm over the way the film ends…

If you’re familiar with Hamaguchi’s work, or his celebrated 3 hour low-key epic Oscar winning flick Drive My Car, you know his films spool out at a leisurely rate. He is in no rush to do anything, ever. He’s happy to plonk a camera down in a spot and have it record acres and acres of footage of stuff happening or not happening, until the batteries run out. Perhaps like in the gargantuan films of Andrei Tarkovsky himself, Hamagushi uses the opening hour or so of a flick to weed out the impatient and the hyperactive from the audience.

Thankfully, this flick is only an hour and 40 or so minutes long, and it practically flies by. In comparison. Only in comparison.

The first ten minutes of this flick is footage of a camera being pulled slowly through a forest, as the camera records the overcast sky through the treetops. A lush orchestral piece plays as an accompaniment, but whatever warmth or comfort it might have provided, the music becomes strident, and almost threatening, before cutting off abruptly. The next twenty minutes or so is spent recording a man chopping wood and filling containers with spring water, chat with a guy about wild wasabi, and then rush to his young daughter when he realises he’s forgotten to pick her up from day care.

dir: Warwick Thornton

2023

This flick is a bit of a wonder.

I think when it was screened at Cannes the year before, it was in the form of a two hour movie. When it was released in cinemas it had been trimmed down to about 90 minutes. The version I watched is the two hour version, so I can’t comment on the theatrical release, because…

Why would anyone want a Warwick Thornton film to be any shorter?

If you are a fan of his films and of his cinematography, you would want everything to be fifteen hours long and never end.

One of my favourite things he’s been involved in was The Beach, which was a strange 6 episode 3 hour ‘doco’ about Warwick in a shack on a beach, and that’s about it. You watch him curse at some chooks, plant some seeds and call them “bastards” while doing so, drive in an ancient jeep, do some fishing and cooking, and… it goes on for hours and hours, with lots of drone footage, and lots of static shots that go on for eternity.

They played this on NITV / one of the SBS channels way back during the lockdowns, under the banner of “slow tv”, which was something, perversely, many of us got into during a time when we couldn’t go anywhere. Four hour train journeys with minimal cuts. Drone footage of beaches that go on for days and days. It was very therapeutic, thanks.