Le Silence de Lorna (2008, Directors: Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne): Sadly, once again I come to the work of acclaimed filmmakers with no previous experience of their work. The Dardenne brothers have been mining their own seam for many years now, exploring the lives of the poor, unglamorous and desperate in unfussy realistic films. Their latest provoked polarizing reactions at Cannes this year, where some found it stylistically too similar to their previous work, or thematically too much like other films about the intersections of the old and new Europe. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying that baggage.
Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a young Albanian woman living in Belgium whose dream is to one day open a snack bar with her boyfriend Sokol. In order to be eligible for bank loans and other benefits, she enters a marriage of convenience with a heroin addict to gain her citizenship. We quickly learn, however, that this is only a small part of a larger, darker scheme masterminded by a local small-time hood named Fabio. Both Lorna and her husband Claudy (Jeremie Renier, a stalwart of the Dardennes’ recent films) have been paid, with the understanding that Lorna will divorce Claudy as soon as she gains her citizenship so she can remarry a wealthy Russian, allowing him to obtain citizenship as well. At least that’s what Claudy thinks. But Fabio’s plan is to stage Claudy’s death from a heroin overdose instead. Will Lorna go along with this deception? At the beginning it appears that she will. She and Claudy live under the same roof, but keep separate rooms and there is little in the way of sympathy. But when he decides that he wants to kick his habit and begins begging her for help, Lorna’s attitude slowly begins to change. After a successful hospital stay, he is released and his relationship with Lorna seems to enter previously unknown territory. The plan is in jeopardy because people who started off using each other start to feel connected. Fabio, meanwhile, is desperate to complete the deal with the Russian at all costs.
Dobroshi is in almost every frame of this film and she is wonderful, showing a single-minded stoicism punctuated with some unexpected outbursts of emotion. Remarkably, despite the dehumanizing aspects of the scheme, it’s one Lorna entered into willingly, and at no point is there any sexual exploitation. In fact, when sex does enter the picture, it’s as an expression of rebellion and of passion, and it throws the whole greed-fuelled plan into disarray. She soon comes to realize her powerlessness and expendability and by the end of the film, her dreams have been replaced with a desperate desire simply to survive. Along the way, though, this solitary and determined figure becomes more alive and less alone, even as her carefully-ordered life loses all of its stability. If this is minor Dardennes, I can’t wait to catch up on the major stuff.
Trailer
(9/10)
Tagged as:
belgium
As always, here is a list of the films I’ve requested tickets for. Depending on how the ticket lottery goes, I could get anywhere from none to all of these. Disturbing news this year: “donors” to the new Bell Lightbox facility will have their orders processed before the rest of us, in order of “donor level.” In other words, the rich will be served first. As if it doesn’t cost enough for the average person to attend this festival. Oh well, every year they give us something new to complain about, but they also bring us some amazing screenings. Let’s just hope I can get to all the ones I want to see.
- Thursday September 4: 7:00pm
Country Wedding (Sveitabrúðkaup) (Iceland, Director: Valdís Óskarsdóttir)
- Friday September 5: 7:45pm
Wendy and Lucy (USA, Director: Kelly Reichardt)
- Saturday September 6: 9:30pm
Hunger (UK, Director: Steve McQueen)
- Sunday September 7: 1:00pm
Food Inc. (USA, Director: Robert Kenner)
- Sunday September 7: 4:00pm
Waltz with Bashir (Israel/Germany/France, Director: Ari Folman)
- Tuesday September 9: 9:00pm
The Brothers Bloom (USA, Director: Rian Johnson)
- Wednesday September 10: 7:45pm
Adam Resurrected (Germany/Israel/USA, Director: Paul Schrader)
- Thursday September 11: 8:00pm
Detroit Metal City (Japan, Director: Toshio Lee)
- Saturday September 13: 10:30am
Tears for Sale (Carlston za Ognjenku) (Serbia, Director: Uroš Stojanovic)
- Saturday September 13: 9:00pm
Patrik 1,5 (Sweden, Director: Ella Lemhagen)
What (and how many) are you planning to see this year?
Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale) (2008, Director: Arnaud Desplechin): Much like family life itself, Desplechin’s film about a profoundly dysfunctional family coming together over the holidays is chaotic, confusing, messy and a little bit infuriating at times. The director uses some very old melodramatic gimmicks (iris effects, stagey intertitles) and even has his actors address the audience several times in an effort to provide the amount of exposition needed to keep this thing going. For me, it was only partially successful, and too much plot summary here would threaten to blow up the word count exponentially. I’ll try to be concise.
Catherine Deneuve plays Junon, the rather chilly matriarch to three children. A fourth (the firstborn) died of leukemia in childhood, and his absence haunts the film, since the other children were conceived in a futile bid to find a bone marrow donor to save him. Now she has developed the same type of cancer and also needs a bone marrow transplant. The only two compatible donors are her son Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the family screw-up, and the teenage son of her daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), who himself is suffering after a mental breakdown. To make matters worse, Elizabeth “banished” Henri from the family five years earlier, for reasons that seem unclear. There’s plenty of other family intrigue at work as well and no one comes off as wholly sympathetic. Despite that, I was heartened that by the end there had been some tentative (re)connections formed.
It felt to me very much like Un conte de Noël was a melodrama trying to both poke fun at its melodramatic elements and rise above them. There was some fine ensemble acting (Deneuve and Amalric stand out in particular), and a few clever medical metaphors (Junon’s family fear that her body will “reject” Henri’s marrow, in the same way Elizabeth fears Henri’s “poisonous” influence on her son; Junon doesn’t trust marrow from Elizabeth’s “crazy” son), but overall the film left me a bit underwhelmed, especially in light of its 140 minute length.
Trailer (en francais)
Official site of the film (en francais)
(7/10)
Tagged as:
cancer,
christmas,
family,
france
24 City (2008, Director: Jia Zhang-ke): Despite my best intentions, I have yet to see a film from the man some critics are now cheekily referring to as “Jay-Z.” Known for films like The World (2004), Still Life (2006) and Useless (2007), Jia explores the seams between China’s ancient traditions and the dizzying pace of modern life in the world’s most populous nation. In this, his latest film, he mixes documentary filmmaking with fictional storytelling to weave together a larger narrative involving the workers of a venerable military factory which is now being turned into luxury condos in the southwestern city of Changdu.
Since this was my first exposure to Jia’s work, I can’t say for certain that it’s representative of his style, but I sure hope so. Essentially the film is a series of monologues framed in long or mid shots interspersed with stately pans over the factory buildings. His patient camera demands that we pay attention to what we’re looking at. While some of the fictional stories are slightly more melodramatic, all of the workers’ recollections are moving. Combined with the reverential camerawork, Jia makes a poignant statement about the dignity of work. 24 City is an elegy for a way of life many in China are eager to leave behind, but in many ways it’s simply about the passing of time and about the way individuals have little control over it. Even though their work seemed crushing in its monotony, sinister in its purpose and at times overwhelming in the demands it placed on the workers’ lives, all of them seem to miss it. Or rather, they miss the small tragedies and romances that flourished and then faded, along with their youth, just like the factory itself. Lovely stuff.
Clip
(8/10)
Tagged as:
china,
work
Entre Les Murs (Director: Laurent Cantet): Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, this film was shot documentary-style in a real French classroom with nonprofessional actors. The teacher (François Bégaudeau) plays himself in a screenplay he wrote based on his own novel, which follows the life of a young teacher of the French language in a multicultural classroom. I’ve read about the wonderfully naturalistic performances of the students, who collaborated and rehearsed together well before shooting began.
Trailer (en francais)
Official Site (en francais)
***
Waltz with Bashir (Director: Ari Folman): Animation can sometimes be a good way to deal with difficult subjects. In this case, it’s the memories (or rather, the lack of memories) of the director, an Israeli soldier who took part in the 1982 Lebanon war. In one of the war’s more gruesome atrocities, the Israeli army stood by as “Christian” Phalangist militias entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacred men, women and children for three horrific days. More than 3,000 were killed. Despite the militias’ stated aim of rooting out Palestinian fighters, the vast majority of these fighters had been evacuated weeks before. The bloodbath was widely seen as revenge for the assassination of the Phalangists’ leader, the recently-elected President Bashir Gemayel. This sounds like a very personal film, and also promises to explore memory and issues of post-traumatic stress disorder in an innovative way.
Trailer
Official Site
***
Brúðguminn (White Night Wedding) (Director: Baltasar Kormákur): As a longtime fan of Icelandic cinema, I try to see as many of the country’s films as possible, and after enjoying Kormákur’s Mýrin (Jar City) (review) at last year’s TIFF, I’m interested in seeing this one, too. This looks like more of a comedy, and it’s apparently based on a Chekhov play. The scenery of rural Iceland looks spectacular, which means it will be a good warmup for my own visit to the country later in September for the Reykjavik International Film Festival.
Trailer
Official Site
***
Tagged as:
france,
iceland,
israel,
lebanon
