A Hijacking

A Hijacking is available for streaming on Netflix.

(This review was originally published in the Sight & Sound magazine under my maiden name Anna Fomicheva.)

The shaky opening shots of the Danish drama A Hijacking immediately introduce a slight sense of sea-sickness and discomfort as we see one of the film’s protagonists, the ship’s cook Mikkel, making a phone call to his wife and daughter. The nauseating confines of the ship and the brief but touching exchange between Mikkel and his family - the speakerphone underlining the lack of privacy - are all we need to be emotionally hooked. 

Such sleight of directorial hand is further on display as we are next introduced to the film’s second protagonist, Peter, the CEO of the shipping company. Peter’s environment is all pristine office rooms and corridors, while his language is all tough and competitive corporate speak. When he wins a bidding war against a group of Japanese businessmen his macho smugness is repulsive because it is so recognisable. This bidding war and its arrogant negotiation tactics is soon echoed in a whole new context as Somali pirates hijack the ship and the film develops into an excellent procedural thriller.

A Hijacking is the second film directed by Tobias Lindholm, best known to British audiences as the scriptwriter of last year’s superb The Hunt and the acclaimed TV series Borgen. The two leads will also be familiar to those who are following the current Renaissance of Danish film and TV drama – Peter is played by the impressively versatile Søren Malling from The Killing, Borgen, and A Royal Affair; and Mikkel is played by Johan Philip Asbæk from Borgen as well as R. The latter is Lindholm’s 2010 directorial debut and another exploration of male tensions and survival tactics in a confined space, in this case a prison.

The visual style of A Hijacking is recognisable from Lindholm’s previous work - claustrophobic framing, disorienting cuts and generous use of close-ups, none of which is breaking new ground but the style is deftly employed to create tension and a sense of panic. We never see how the ship is hijacked and we don’t need to, as the post-hijacking scenes on the ship are distressing enough: oppressive both visually and sonically, and without one drop of blood. In fact, the film’s only weakness is an unnecessary shedding of blood at the very end, which feels as though the producers thought the desired emotional impact could not be achieved without senselessly killing off an innocent character.

In interviews Lindholm has stressed that he always strives for realism in his work. He filmed A Hijacking on a genuine cargo ship, in fact a ship that had been hijacked by pirates in the past. He also cast a professional pirate negotiator, initially brought in as an advisor, in the role of a professional pirate negotiator. All of this must have been helpful on the set, but what really impresses about the film is the masterful concision of form and precision of characterisation. This allows Lindholm to focus on the complexities of the situation and the nitty-gritty of the psychological game at hand. The film’s exploration of the power structure between the pirates, crew, and shipping company is intricate and ambiguous as one’s loyalties and sympathies keep shifting with every new development.

The pressure on the CEO and his emotional involvement are clear, but one cannot help but feel some resentment towards him, his team, and their world of office desks and pie charts as the film cuts between their cynical discussions of how to save money on the ransom and the increasingly desperate situation on the ship. The big and objective picture is difficult to grasp and the film is not interested in providing it, but the bitter aftertaste of global socio-economic inequality left by this struggle between people with money, people with guns and those caught in between is difficult to shake off even as an agreement is reached and the crew returns home.

Journey to Italy

Journey to Italy is streaming on BFI Player.

Roberto Rossellini has always placed great importance on the rhythm of his movies. In one of the dialogue scenes of perhaps his most famous and important film, Rome, Open City, there is a barely perceptible sound of the director tapping his finger on a wooden chair. The resulting subtle thumps are eerie and dark, affecting not just the mood, but also the unconsciously perceived rhythm of the scene.

With his war trilogy - Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), Germany, Year Zero (1948) - Rossellini launched Italian neorealism, redefining what cinema could be, influencing generations of directors and other cinematic movements around the world. This was raw, uncompromising filmmaking that became a much-needed cathartic and rehabilitating experience for the devastated societies of post-war Europe. 

But as Martin Scorsese rightly asks in one of his Criterion interviews about Rossellini: “What do you do after you change how the world thinks of cinema? What’s next?”

Journey to Italy (1954), a painfully intimate portrayal of a marriage in disintegration, felt like a radical departure from Rossellini’s neorealist roots for the audiences at the time, and the film was not well received.

It is indeed a very different film, but death, tragedy and the pain of war are haunting presences throughout Journey to Italy. And Rossellini’s uncanny ability to wield his cinematic magic with absolute rhythmic control is also intact. However, he puts it to a completely different use here in creating what François Truffaut called ‘the first modern film’.

It opens with marvellous shots filmed from inside a car swiftly moving along an Italian road - our journey has started. The couple are Katherine (played by Ingrid Bergman) and Alex (George Sanders), English aristocrats who are in Italy on business. Following the death of Alex’s uncle Homer the couple are here to arrange the sale of his house, and they do not plan to stay long. But they will, of course. And their time in Italy will plunge them into the depths of soul searching, leading to the collapse of their relationship. 

It’s as if by coming to Italy these uptight northerners enter a different time-space continuum. Just as their confident, pacy drive through the Italian countryside is quickly brought to a halt by a herd of cows leisurely crossing the road, our characters are stopped in their tracks and their life is thrown into disarray by the rhythms of local life and the weight of both recent and ancient Italian history. It’s as if they suddenly find themselves in zero gravity, floating around aimlessly, with nothing that is familiar or structured to ground their anxieties and fears of mortality. 

The innovative aspect of Journey to Italy is how the direction of this story affects the film’s structure. Very soon Rossellini abandons any traditional focus on narrative development and fills the movie with scenes and episodes that do not seem to move the story forward, but instead function as digressions that explore a variety of themes, locations and ideas. There are parallels here with the innovations of modernist literature, and the central couple’s surname - Joyce - is surely no coincidence.

The film’s meandering structure and seemingly unconnected episodes are not purposeless, however, and are central to our understanding of the characters’ most private emotions. Rossellini’s thematic preoccupations with Neapolitan history and geography, with its physical manifestations of death and tragedy - Vesuvius, the ruins of Pompeii, the catacombs, the visible social effects and recent memory of WWII - become an indivisible part of our characters’ psychological states and emotional journeys. But it isn’t all death and gloom: folk music, the leisurely pace of local life, breathtaking landscapes, and elaborate religious processions are just as much a part of the film’s emotional core.

In my favourite scene Katherine visits the National Archeological Museum and encounters a series of ancient statues. Rossellini’s camera moves gently around the statues, as if caressing and enveloping them. There is great drama in the way the camera gradually reveals the details of the sculptural compositions and the way it swooshes into a close-up of one of the statues’ faces. It’s a perfect marriage between still and kinetic art, and for a moment these ancient faces become knowable.

This scene is greatly complemented by the nervous and quivering musical score by the director’s brother Renzo Rossellini. The music underpins the drama of Katherine’s encounter with the past and with beauty, and suggests to us that she is on the verge of an aesthetic and personal revelation. Who thought a visit to a museum could be so visceral?

All the magic of the setting, the music, and the cinematography, however, would not count for as much as they do if it wasn’t for the subtle and raw performance by Ingrid Bergman. Her ability to communicate strength and vulnerability at the same time can only be compared to that of Rossellini’s other great muse, Anna Magnani. Within a split second Bergman can go from delight to heartbreak, from gentle affection to contempt. George Sanders makes for a weighty and chewy presence, but the unfolding emotional journey of the central relationship hangs pretty much entirely on Bergman.

The movie’s final scene is particularly telling. Counter to everything that preceded it, our couple end up in a loving and forgiving embrace, a perfect Hollywood ending. The moment is difficult to believe, even if one considers Laura Mulvey’s interpretation of it as a literal miracle - it takes place in the middle of a crowded religious procession, after all. Despite the unlikeliness of the final scene, Bergman’s delivery of Katherine’s touching plea to Alex in that moment throws a powerful emotional punch which is not easy to shake off.

The Firemen's Ball

The Firemen's Ball is streaming on Curzon Home Cinema.

I want to praise The Firemen’s Ball (1967) for things it’s not often praised for. All too often it gets trapped in its historical context, which is understandable. It was the first colour production of the prominent member of the Czech New Wave and already well established director Miloš Forman. A few months after the film’s completion, Soviet troops marched in, cracked down on the remaining bits of freedom, and the film was not just banned but “banned forever”. It would be the last film Forman made in Czechoslovakia. Following the ban, Forman fled to the US, where he would eventually make an illustrious career with films including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984).

It is inevitable that this fateful story and the historical forces around it have overtaken the film’s identity. The Firemen’s Ball has become a symbol of dissident filmmaking, and its merit has been reduced to its political stance.

This is a shame, because political commentary is only one aspect of the film and, for my money, the least intriguing one. Or rather, the least difficult one to grasp and appreciate. What I find most fascinating about it is the way Forman chooses to communicate his frustrations and the stylistically heightened world that he creates.

The late great Roger Ebert, in his review of The Firemen's Ball, suggests that the film belongs to the ‘slice of life’ tradition of Eastern European cinema and describes it as “a series of vignettes that have the savor of real life, perhaps because Forman cast all local people - no professional actors - in his roles”.

Miloš Forman directing The Firemen's Ball

Indeed, apart from a few leads and Forman regulars, most of the film’s cast are non-professionals. Moreover, these non-professionals were participants in the real-life firemen’s ball that inspired the film. Forman and his screenwriter Jaroslav Papoušek stumbled across the event in the provincial town of Vrchlabí whilst on sabbatical, and it made a huge impression on them. They spent six weeks writing the script in Vrchlabí, intermittently playing cards and drinking beer with the locals, and later invited them to participate in the filming. 

Many of the film’s plot points are directly inspired by happenings at the actual ball, including an ill-fated raffle, one mess of a beauty pageant and a building that burns down just across the road. But despite its origin in real events, the world Forman creates has about as much ‘savor of real life’ as a Wes Anderson movie. While Forman’s style here is completely different from Anderson’s, both are equally conspicuous in their artificiality. And the fact that most of the people in the frame are non-professionals makes the director’s achievement of stylistic consistency all the more remarkable. 

The world of the movie is not just absurd in the way that decisions and policies of short-sighted political systems tend to be, but it is in fact absurdist. And in that sense it is part of a much larger tradition that is not limited to the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Socialism was undoubtedly fertile soil for absurdism, but no more than Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy was for the works of Franz Kafka or bourgeois morality for the works of Luis Buñuel. 

The reality that Forman is satirising is magnified to the point of allegory and his heightening of the drab socialist everyday turns it into its own unique aesthetic. By avoiding the literal representation of the world around him and the ‘slice of life’ tradition of movie-making (that Ebert mistakenly perceives) Forman brings his film closer to universal human experiences. Its characters become symbols of human weakness, incoherence and general cluelessness. Beyond a satire on the socialist regime, it becomes a satire on the absurdity of social conventions and the human insistence on putting people and everything else into inflexible categories.

In one of my favourite scenes the people at the ball organise a collection to help an old man whose nearby house has just been destroyed by fire. But what people are donating (in all earnestness) are their raffle tickets. The absurdity of the old man being pompously presented with a tray of colourful pieces of paper is intensified by our knowledge that all the raffle prizes have been stolen. Would this not make a wonderful metaphor for the capitalist system exposed by the recent financial crisis? Or of the earnest clicktivism we all regularly encounter and participate in on social media? In the classic absurdist tradition this scene signifies the futility and emptiness of all effort.

The incoherence of human society is deftly captured by Forman’s loyal DP Miroslav Ondříček (who would go on to shoot much of the director’s Hollywood oeuvre as well). The faux-documentary gaze he employs in some of the establishing crowd scenes is also used in Forman’s previous films, including Loves of a Blonde (1965) and Black Peter (1964), but to a slightly different effect. Here it emphasises how extremely crowded the space of the ball is: the frame is often entirely sardine-packed with human figures, which the superb impressionistic editing makes into a wonderfully affecting mess of arms, legs, heads and shoulders. You can almost smell the sweat and feel the stuffiness of the room. 

At the heart of the movie are the members of firemen committee, who are in charge of ensuring that all the fun at the ball goes according to plan. But they are not - as one might expect from angry political satire - cold, cruel, and stupid grey suits. They are funny, simple and endearing, like naive art drawings. They do not posses any depth, any passions or desires. Their decisions are not driven by their individuality, but by their collective consciousness. And in their simplicity they are confused and helpless when confronted with expressions of non-conformity. 

What’s particularly interesting is that the non-conformity the committee members are faced with comes not from rock’n’roll youth or passionate dissidents, but from the befuddled young women they are trying to select for the beauty pageant. The women’s own cartoonishly simple cluelessness is marvellously played to comic effect by the non-professional actors, and chaos ensues.

In the film’s world, this chaos is not a result of a clash of political wills, but of the impossibility of mutual understanding. This fundamental failure of communication is part of the absurdity of human existence that Forman depicts, reminiscent in a way of the works of Beckett or Ionesco.

But Forman retains enough humanity to mix the absurdism with sorrow: there is a scene of a crowd watching a burning building, and as so often in movies this functions as a moment of collective reflection and sadness. The firemen’s futile attempts to put out the fire are watched with resignation by the locals. This moment of profound existential melancholy is just one of the reasons The Firemen’s Ball deserves consideration beyond its (undoubtedly sharp) critique of the socialist state.

Calvary

Calvary is currently streaming on Netflix UK.

There are two immediate hooks in the opening scene of 2014 Irish drama Calvary. The first one sets up the central suspense that will quietly hang over the rest of the film, and will go almost unmentioned again until its dramatic resolution at the very end. The second hook, and arguably the more powerful one, is Brendan Gleeson’s face. The marvellously expressive wrinkles, the beautiful beard - almost unlikely in its tameness and softness - the sad, tired and infinitely kind eyes tell us everything we need to know about Father James. 

The scene is masterfully framed and lit and is set in a confessional booth where Father James hears the shocking opener: “I first tasted semen when I was seven years old”. 

Sadly, with the dialogue comes the first false note of the film: “It’s certainly a startling opening line”, is the priest’s too-apt response.

The man on the other side of the booth voices the concern of the viewing audience: “What is that? Irony?”. 

“I’m sorry, let’s start again.”

It’s as if writer-director John Michael McDonough recognised the artificiality and theatricality of such a response, but just couldn’t help himself. It’s an awfully clever way to open a film, isn't it?

That first scene sums everything that is good and bad about Calvary, everything that works beautifully and everything that rings uncomfortably false.

The snappy opening is immediately followed by a heart-wrenching account of child abuse and a death threat directed at the innocent protagonist, who is expected to answer for the crimes of another priest as well as the whole of the Catholic Church. It seems the mood is set. But as Father James makes the rounds of his small sea-side town we encounter a parade of characters and with them an incoherent mess of acting styles that makes us question again what film we’re actually watching.

The most dumbfounding of these is Killian Scott’s portrayal of Milo, who seems to have landed straight from an episode of The Big Bang Theory, with his nerdy hairstyle, his bowtie, and that rather tired indie-movie cliché of playing Asperger’s for laughs.

Is Calvary a drama that explores the ills of contemporary Ireland - the Church’s paedophilia scandals, alcoholism, the financial crash and the cynicism that followed - or a black comedic study of Irish small-town quirks and local weirdos?

Many have argued that this constant switch of tone is deliberate, and that we have to laugh lest we despair. Of course it is deliberate, but a successful balance between tragedy and comedy is insanely difficult. In fact, it might be the most difficult thing to do in any art and Calvary stands as a great testament to this truth. 

Apart from eliciting laughs, much of the dialogue seems to be focused on showing off the writer’s verbal panache. What this means for the film’s characters is that each of them, no matter who they are and where they are in life, is remarkably articulate and self-aware. Every single person Father James encounters demonstrates almost shocking frankness, a sharp wit and a perfect understanding of their existential predicament. A local doctor who no longer believes in what he does, a flamboyant male prostitute who hides a tragic past, a dying American writer, a desperate housewife who is having an open affair with a car mechanic from Ivory Coast, and the car mechanic himself - each one of them is equally masterful at spelling out their role and position in the structure of the story. 

One character refers to his life as an ‘affectation’ and that word is then difficult to shake off in relation to the film as a whole. Stylised dialogue works best when the fictional world is appropriately stylised around it. Here, it clashes with the attempt at social and moral commentary, making it seem flippant and insincere.

This becomes most problematic in a scene in which Father James visits a prisoner (played by Gleeson’s son Domhnall) serving life for serial torture and cannibalism. In it, the description of harrowing crimes and individual victims serves as an excuse for witty verbal exchanges between the symbolic good and the symbolic evil, betraying a certain amount of emotional tone-deafness.

On the other hand, Calvary contains quiet moments of genuine emotion and beauty: Father James hugging his dog Bruno - big, kind and soft, like the priest himself; his reaction to a burning church; a moment of connection and forgiveness between him and his daughter. And, of course, Larry Smith’s majestic wide-angle cinematography: so controlled, so precise, and so affecting with its deep blacks and muted blues, greens and greys. Particularly when it captures the Irish coastal landscape and the sea, the sea… 

The central mystery of who threatened Father James in the confessional booth at the beginning is not resolved until the very end, but for those paying attention, the cinematography provides some heavy hints, albeit in a wonderfully poetic, associative way.

And last, but not least, there is one performance in Calvary that manages to achieve the rare feat of successfully balancing comedy and tragedy, overwritten dialogue and sincere emotion. As an insanely rich, desperately lonely, and empty-on-the-inside financial crook, Dylan Moran goes from pissing on Hans Holbein’s original of ‘The Ambassadors’ (for kicks) to baring his tortured soul to Father James without seeming forced or unnatural. His Michael Fitzgerald is a whole person - funny and pitiable in equal measure.  

Moran’s performance brings together harmoniously all the things that clash uncomfortably in the rest of the film, giving us a glimpse into what Calvary is actually trying to achieve.

5 Broken Cameras

5 Broken Cameras is currently streaming on Netflix UK.

In order to document the growth of his newborn son, Emad Burnat, a farmer in a small Palestinian village called Bil’in, buys a camera. This event coincides with the beginning of Israel’s encroachment on the agricultural lands of Bil’in and the villager’s resulting peaceful protests. Emad documents these protests over the next five years, which also see the development of his newborn into an unsettlingly conflict-aware child. Moreover, this five-year old is not above the occasional tear-jerking symbolic gesture, like presenting a literal olive branch to a fully-armoured Israeli soldier. Emad also has three elder sons, and each one of them, he tells us, is a phase of his and his country’s life. The eldest boy was born in the time of hope after the Oslo Peace Accords, when the family “could go to the sea every summer”. The second boy was born three years later “in a time of uncertainty”. And the fourth was born on the first day of the Intifada, a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian violence, so the hospital was full of the dead and wounded.

Such retrospective imposition of narrative structure on the events of the past is something that humans do instinctively in order to make sense of their lives, to give them shape and ultimately meaning. This process is not dissimilar to what Israeli director Guy Davidi must have had in mind when he took on the project of gathering together and editing Emad’s hundreds of hours worth of footage in order to filter them into the 90 minutes of cohesive storytelling, character development, narrative arc and leitmotifs that make up 5 Broken Cameras (2011). The eponymous cameras that Emad uses throughout the period of filming and their unfortunate fates become the structural carcass around which the story of the documentary is built, as the breaking of each camera marks the end of a chapter.

However, despite the moving subject matter and all the clever structural and editing decisions behind the film, the final result leaves one cold and unmoved and the story feels weak and unconvincing. The reason for this may lie in the lack of the initial artistic rationale and design behind most of the footage used in the movie. It is clear from the beginning that the footage we see was never intended to be in a full-length feature film with a narrative and character development. It was not even intended as a video diary, although Davidi tries to impose elements of this format on the material. The attempts at tying the private family footage and the protests into a narrative don’t produce a cohesive whole and ultimately fail. The story is often in need of propping by visibly staged material, like the above-mentioned olive branch incident, or a family trip to the sea which signifies the opening of the border and provides an obligatory and somewhat forced happy ending. Interestingly, however, the film’s central problem is quite revealing about the nature of filmmaking, suggesting as it does the importance of the intention of the person behind the camera.

Other aspects of 5 Broken Cameras, like Emad’s voiceover and the mournful score by Le Trio Joubran, feel too conventional and lack emotional punch. Even the home-video aesthetics and the shaky camera that have come to signify ‘authenticity’ in fictional filmmaking as much as in documentary, are nowadays too much of an established convention to be effective on their own. Our desensitisation means that in order to be shocked we need a striking contrast like the ‘raw’ footage that comes at the end of the beautifully animated Waltz with Bashir (2007), a superior documentary that deals with conflict in the troubled region.

Nonetheless, it would be too harsh to suggest that 5 Broken Cameras isn’t worth watching, because it is, even if only for its subject matter. But there is more. The most striking thing about the film is the landscape, which only very rarely leaves the frame. The villager’s attachment to the land is not just spoken about in Emad’s voiceover, but is visible in the very way they walk its hills, sleep under its trees and know every corner of its geography. The images of this land, which is of course at the very heart of the conflict, bring in Biblical and mythical associations, and add an epic aspect to what we see. This is why the brief footage of burning olive trees (the result of arson attacks by the Israeli settlers) is some of the most powerfully symbolic and poignant imagery I have seen in recent times.

To Rome With Love

To Rome with Love is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

This 2012 Woody Allen film has been much derided by critics for its flippant, shallow, and ‘touristy’ representation of a great city. However, said critics might be missing the point, as the inherent shallowness and superficiality of tourism are the central themes explored in To Rome With Love.

Structurally, the film consists of four seemingly unrelated stories, all set in Rome. Each one depicts a short-term, holiday-like foray into a new life experience from which the characters safely return “home”, having only had a taste of the life of a celebrity (Roberto Benigni), the success of an opera superstar (Fabio Armiliato), a bohemian dream of a reckless love affair (Jesse Eisenberg) and sexual freedom (Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi).

The exploration of the superficiality of - and ultimate dissatisfaction with - such experiences is not new to Woody Allen, who has already dealt with these issues in Midnight in Paris, which wittily turns nostalgia-tourism into something quite literal and, arguably, in Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, whose American protagonists go on a tour of European bohemia and romance of a kind they must have read about in novels. 

For the last ten years or so Allen has enjoyed the financial support of various European organisations and thus has set his latest films on this side of the pond, but he admirably has never pretended to be anything but a tourist in the great cities of Europe and manages to turn this potential weakness into a thematic strength. The picture-postcard cinematography of To Rome with Love works wonderfully to reinforce the theme of the superficiality of tourism, which helps the film achieve a rare unity of style and substance, while at the same time allowing the audience to indulge in this short-lived pleasure.