Once Upon a Time In Anatolia

Nuri Bilge Ceylon Investigates
The Impurity of Human Motivation
By Cole Smithey

Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylon continues his minimalist yet universal exploration of society (in the meta sense of the word) with a fascinating police procedural that values story over plot and character over prejudice. The mastermind behind such instant classics as "Climates" (2006) and "Three Monkeys" (2008) uses every shaded detail of time, atmosphere, human condition, and verbal and non-verbal communication to tell a quietly complex story about a murder investigation and the imperfect methods of the men assigned to solve the crime.

Ceylon is one of the world’s few truly gifted filmmakers capable of using film as a broad yet clearly defined canvas for meting out staccato and legato pulses of narrative text and subtext. Patience is a key ingredient to his art. There are always multiple layers of crucial information seeping from the screen. His patience for storytelling matches Michelangelo Antonioni, whose films Ceylon must surly have studied.

“Once Upon a Time In Anatolia” is about the nature of human motivation, and how it folds back upon itself under the microscope of external pressures—whether from co-workers or from a natural flow of events. As in all Ceylon's films clouds play an important role in the landscape. There is nothing showy about Ceylon’s unique brand of cinema. Here is a filmmaker who creates a bond of trust with his audience, who are invited to interact with his films.

Ceylon’s regular cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki supplies visually intriguing compositions that tempt the viewer to study the story’s dichotomy of rural and industrial landscape. You have the sense of being allowed to see every aspect of the story. Nothing seems to be hidden. The delicacy with which Tiryaki’s camera slowly zooms is a thing of precise beauty.

At night Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) accompanies a group of police officers and a soldier as they drive around the dark outskirts of the Anatolian steppe. The group has with them two incarcerated suspects they hope will lead them to the grave of a missing man. Every distance is remote. Only car headlights cut through the blackness. The young doctor strikes up a friendship with the local prosecuting attorney. Surely justice will prevail. If the body is found, Doctor Cemal will perform the autopsy.

Police Commissar Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) lets his temper flare at the uncooperative prisoner who leads the three-vehicle caravan on a wild goose chase in search of a "round tree" by one of the road's many fountains that provide water for travelers in the dark arid region. Prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) reigns in Naci when the Commissar turns violent against the prisoner—not because he cares particularly about the prisoner, but because he understands the demands of the job. The cops joke about food and engage in a bland kind of non-specific repartee that diffuses tension even as it subtlety discloses fragments of personal information. Every character and theme line rings with authenticity. The time-consuming search takes its toll.

The men stop for food in the middle of the night at the home of man whose beautiful daughter momentarily entrances them. The respect her devastating beauty, yet know exactly how her life will unfold. All life is a cycle. Part of their job is to recognize patterns, even the ones that shame them about their own personal lives.

The story is about how detectives communicate. It’s also about how entrusted public servants wrangle with overpowering emotions and personal secrets. Anger and sadness are traits to be submersed under rote routines of professional conduct. Their personal sense of justice can be confused and arbitrary. And yet, these men are doing a job that must be done.

Nuri Bilge Ceylon is a lover of humanity. His great concern for every one of his characters goes beyond their innocence or guilt. He recognizes the balance of both qualities in their actions. As a sociological study, the film is edifying. As a drama, it is at turns enigmatic, revealing, and moving. The cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylon is a transformative one. It is unique and honest. Most significantly, it offers a rare experience to be treasured.

Not Rated. 151 mins. (A-) (Four Stars - out of five/no halves)

The Girl Who Played With Fire

Stressed Rhythms
Stieg Larsson's Trilogy Takes a Dive
By Cole Smithey

The second installment in the filmic adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson's large-scale crime trilogy "Millennium" pales in comparison to "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo." The compelling Noomi Rapace returns as the series' bisexual goth girl computer hacker heroine Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth has taken the money she appropriated at the end of the first film to see the world and purchase a chic apartment in Stockholm. Lisbeth's court-appointed guardian, who raped Lisbeth at great personal expense when Lisbeth took revenge in the first installment, turns up dead shortly after she pays him a visit. Lisbeth becomes a fugitive from the law after learning that she is the primary suspect.

Meanwhile, two romantically attached journalists working on a sex-trafficking story for Lisbeth's journalist/publisher pal Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), also turn up murdered. Once again, fingerprints at the scene of the crime point to Lisbeth as the shooter. Convinced of her innocence, Blomkvist initiates his own investigation into the upper echelons of Swedish society implicated in the sex trafficking cover-up. The trouble with the story is that the mystery isn't as compelling as that of the first installment, and the story is back-loaded to a fault. We wait impatiently for Lisbeth and Blomkvist to unite and work together as they did in the first film, but the moment never arrives. As with this year's "Red Riding Trilogy," the "Millennium" triad proves a problematic format for sustaining thematic energy and emotional truth.

Where "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was layered with a depth of dramatic tension around a 40-year-old mystery involving the disappearance of a woman connected to a Kennedyesque political family, the sequel spells out a more prosaic storyline. Lisbeth seems to have gotten past her romantic attraction for Blomkvist and is ready to return to Stockholm and resume her swinging bi-sexual lifestyle, albeit from a more adult perspective. Mikael Blomkvist has served his jail time and is back to running Millennium magazine, sleeping with his same-aged editor, and hiring upstart journalists to cut their teeth on a big scandal story. Part of the problem here is that the sex trafficking subplot isn't personalized enough to serve as anything more than narrative window dressing. The politically powerful bad guys are painted with broad strokes that minimize the effect they have on their characterless female victims.

The most gratuitously entertaining scene takes place in a barn where Lisbeth and a local champion boxer take on an oversized villain who suffers from a neurological disorder that prevents him from feeling any pain. It's a convincing all-out brawl that appropriately comes to a fiery conclusion, but doesn't do much for moving the narrative in any meaningful direction.

The story takes on a few too many pulpy B-movie tropes to support an otherwise serious tone that the filmmakers strive to achieve. It's fun to see Lisbeth use a taser to take on a couple of badass bikers sent to haul her in to the local kingpin, but a certain buried-alive sequence pulls the drama into the realm of farce. The tonal shift between "Dragon Tattoo" and "Girl Who Played with Fire" can be attributed to a change of directors. Daniel Alfredson's sense of creating suspense and focusing in on small details served Stieg Larsson's source material better than newcomer Niels Arden Oplev. Oplev wants the film to be flashier and less gritty than the story mandates. The director stresses the narrative rhythm. The result is a film that clangs when it should glide, and leaves you always wanting something that the characters are no longer able to deliver--believability.

Rated R. 128 mins. (C) (Two Stars - out of five/no halves)

Tokyo Sonata

Recovery
Kiyoshi Kurosawa Shines a Light
By Cole Smithey

Winner of the 2008 Jury Prize at Cannes, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata" is a lyrical family drama about a father emerging from a fog of denial after losing his administrative job when his department is outsourced to China. Teruyuki Kagawa is brilliant as Ryuhei Sasaki who, along with many other unemployed Japanese businessmen, pretends to go work everyday in order to retain some semblance of dignity and routine. At home, Teruyuki's wife Megumi (well played my Kyoko Koizumi) takes care of the house and their youngest son Kenji who secretly repurposes his school lunch money to pay for private piano lessons because his father refuses to allow him to study the instrument. It's in this atmosphere of deception that an ordinary Japanese family discovers a new sense of fundamental human values. "Tokyo Sonata" is an engaging picture that brings out the universality of modern existence through a prism of Japanese life. 
 
There's something uncomfortably comical in the way Ryuhei walks around the streets of Tokyo after being fired. His disorientation with the world around him provokes a tone of absurdist humor. Teruyuki Kagawa is a stone-faced actor who uses his stoic expression to evince a heart-on-sleeve sensitivity burning  beneath the surface of his skin. There's Buster Keaton quality to Kagawa's facial features, and his deportment suggests Keaton's discreet intensity. In his steely blue business suit, Kagawa becomes a downsized everyman caught in a web of confusion and humiliation. His feet are stuck in a concrete corporate structure that makes no allowances for the personal hopes of the human cogs in its system.

Kagawa's Ryuhei finds some relief when he runs into Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), an old friend from school, who is also unemployed but keeping a brave face by also pretending to go to work every day. Kurosu keeps a tight reign on maintaining a regiment of smoke and mirrors to disguise his desperate predicament while he stands on line for hours at a job center for employment that never comes. Kurosu's cell phone rings five times an hour to retain a perception of work related activity as he goes through his day eating at free lunch lines and sitting for hours in a public library. The dynamic influence of Kurosu's subplot occurs between two call-and-response scenes where Ryuhei comes to dinner with Kurosu's family before returning to his friend's vacant home. The dramatic weight of the story arrives with a sobering narrative punch that sends Ryuhei to grapple with the immediate demands of his own family.

Ryuhei's wife Megumi discovers her husband's daily charade when she notices him in public, but keeps it to herself just as she similarly learns of her son Kenji's covert piano lessons with a teacher who recognizes his prodigious talent. The family's communication breakdown takes its most uncontrollable toll their older son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) who chooses to join the American Army fighting in Iraq.

"Tokyo Sonata" loses some steam in its third act when a burglary/kidnapping hijacks the story into a realm of unnecessary dramatic preoccupation. Nevertheless, the self-esteem that Ryuhei regains in his new job as a maintenance worker at a shopping mall brings the story to a catharsis that resonates with the piano sonata that Kenji plays at a conservatory audition. Kenji's self-discipline and inspiration unites his family and the audience in a hope for the future of Japan and for the economic future of the world. The effect is mesmerizing.

(Regent Releasing) PG-13. 119 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

I Served the King of England

Old Spirits--New Decade
Czech New Wave Crests Again
By Cole Smithey

Writer Jiri Menzel's ambitious filmic adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal's picaresque novel about a diminutive Czech waiter with dreams of becoming a millionaire and of owning his own extravagant hotel, is a rich black comedy steeped in wartime experience and sexual exploration in WWII Czechoslovakia. Jan Dite (brilliantly played by a Chaplinesque Ivan Barnev in Dite's younger incarnation) works his way up through the ranks of elegant hotel restaurants while enjoying a libertine existence. Politically oblivious to the Nazi invasion, Jan becomes infatuated with a German girl named Liza who refuses to marry him until he proves some amount of German ancestry. Jan's bittersweet date with success comes at the expense of a prison sentence under the country's Communist liberators. Oldrich Kaiser plays the older and wiser Jan, who returns to the shattered remains of his favorite bar after being released from jail to restore it as a place for locals to congregate.

Jiri Menzel was part of a group of young Czechoslovakian filmmakers who participated in making socially challenging films between 1962 and 1968 as part of cinema’s New Wave ushered in by French auteurs that included Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Louis Malle. On the heels of Milos Forman’s "Loves of a Blonde" and Ivan Passer’s "Intimate Lighting" (both 1965), came Menzel’s Oscar-winning "Closely Watched Trains," which he adapted from his friend Bohumil Hrabal’s coming-of-age story about a naive boy working at a train station in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

"I Served the King of England" finds Hrabal’s pet preoccupation with the myopic pursuit of personal liberation as a self-inflicted enabler of fascist colonization juxtaposed against the accrued wisdom of a man who paid dearly for his profound nescience of the military and political threat around him. Jan has a childlike view of the world and finds immense pleasure in tossing coins on the floor of the luxurious restaurants where he works to watch wealthy patrons humiliate themselves by crawling around to pick them up. Jan’s pound-wise-and-penny-foolish philosophy proves effective in his relatively quick rise from selling hot dogs on train station platforms to working as a waiter to foreign dignitaries. His hearty appetite for sex veers in a more generous direction toward beautiful women, as depicted in his proclivity for decorating their post-coital nude bodies with carefully placed flowers or food, depending on what’s available.

Jan is apolitical to a fault, and the film can easily be read as an allegory for modern America’s fixation on consumerism that ignores its own wholesale loss of civil rights and economic stability with barely a squeak of resistance. At 70, Jiri Menzel has created a deeply political movie that makes a powerful delineation between morals (as imposed by the Nazis) and ethics (as displayed in Jan’s misplaced concern for the enemy). There’s also a wealth of humor here that recognizes the fleshy importance of humanity and the starry-eyed ignorance that dooms it.

(Sony Pictures Classics) Rated R. 118 mins. (A-)

Volver

Almodovar Goes Home

The Women of La Mancha Confront Their Ghosts
By Cole Smithey

The ubiquitous Pedro Almodovar adopts Penelope Cruz as his latest muse for his 16^th film. Cruz leads a predominately female cast in a cross-generational story about the culture of death in Almodovar's native region of La Mancha, Spain. The effect is mesmerizing. Raimunda (Cruz) moves back to her hometown of La Mancha from Madrid to hide the corpse of her husband Paco after her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) kills the man who may or may not be her father after he attempts to sexually molest her. Following the death of their Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), Raimunda’s hairdresser sister Sole (Lola Duenas) finds herself covering up the presence of their mother Irene’s ghost (Carmen Maura) who has moved into Aunt Paula’s house. The entire pueblo already believes that Irene’s ghost has returned because Agustina (Blanca Portillo), the daughter of a woman who died in the same fire that killed Irene, was taking care of Paula when Irene’s ghost first appeared. If all this narrative nitting sounds complicated; it is.

And yet Almodovar effortlessly weaves together the complex story toward an airing of familial secrets and problems that bring the film to a satisfying ending. For her beautifully sustained performance Penelope Cruz shared this year’s Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actress with her co-stars Yohana Cobo, Lola Duenas, Chus Lampreave, Carmen Maura and Blanca Portillo.

Female family members brush away dirt from gravesites in the opening of “Volver.” The scene takes place in a real cemetery being kept up by peasant women who are actively connected to the same soil that they themselves are destined to be buried in. A prosthetic butt gives the apron-wearing Penelope Cruz a lower center of gravity that informs Raimunda’s sense of place and duty as symbol of motherhood. One of the crucial themes that Almodovar manipulates is the idea that returning to a birthplace means making peace with ghosts both real and imagined. He presents his hometown of La Mancha as a place where men die young and women live on to sort out their personal relationships, as well as their shared histories that are clouded with lies. The setting suggests a removed acknowledgement of the AIDS epidemic, but Almodovar has too many other familial fish to fry to get bogged down with something so obvious.

Raimunda takes advantage of the challenge she inherits from her daughter of disposing of her husband’s corpse as an excuse to change jobs. After depositing the body in an empty restaurant freezer Raimunda agrees to cater lunch for a film crew shooting a movie nearby. Such self-reflexivitiy comes easily to Almodovar. The homey atmosphere she creates as a chef gives impetus for the film’s musical centerpiece where Raimunda serenades her dinner guests with the film’s title song "Volver," which translates as "to return." The musical sidebar works as a charming bit of sidelong character revelation.

As the deceased mother to Raimunda and Sole, Irene’s ghost ostensibly returns to open up a dialogue about her death as it relates to her late husband's infidelities that are more shocking than the tone of the movie would forecast. There are surprises here that tilt at the windmills of La Mancha as metaphors for the lasting effects of the cruelty that men do to their own families. The way that Almodovar’s resilient women rise above their traumatic pasts to serve one another and their community is a microcosm of idealized reality that welcomes scrutiny. Under his admiring lens, the predominately female cast represent a vocabulary for reconciliation and forgiveness that is consistent with Almodovar’s thoughtful attention. These women are in charge of thier destinies.

Rated R. 106 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

 

Guillermo del Toro Relishes the Horrors of Childhood By Cole Smithey

In discussing the leftist political themes of "The Devil’s Backbone" and "Pan’s Labyrinth," gothic horror maestro Guillermo del Toro responds by condemning what is considered "normal" because "normal creates inadequacy immediately." The transplanted director from Mexico embraces abnormality and moral ambiguity in "Pan’s Labyrinth." It's a film he wrote and directed as a deeply personal treatise on the defense mechanisms of a child dealing with war and death. "Pan's Labyrinth" is a surreal and dark fairytale about resistance and sacrifice from the point of view of a resourceful child.

Ofelia (played with immeasurable grace by child actress Ivana Baquero) is uprooted with her ailing pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) during Franco's 1944 postwar Spain to go live with Ofelia’s stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) of Spain’s Civil Guard. Mother and daughter arrive at an abandoned rural mill that Vidal has converted into a military headquarters to oppose the local "maquis" freedom fighters. Ofelia momentarily escapes the farm’s oppressive ambience to explore an old garden labyrinth where she meets a peculiar faun (Doug Jones) who acts as a mentor. The strange creature assigns Ofelia three tasks to prove her royalty as a princess. Ofelia's dark fantasies of fairies and monsters are matched by the savage hostilities incited by Captain Vidal’s obsessive reign of power. The hideous but friendly faun gradually becomes beautiful as Ofelia fulfills his commands of obtaining a key from a repulsive toad, visiting a pale monster with eyeballs in the palms of his hands at a banquet from which she must not eat, and releasing the blood of an innocent. This is thought-provoking stuff that del Toro presents with fluid attention to detail. You couldn't hope for a more visually lush experience. 

After the film’s premiere in Cannes del Toro said, "In this movie, I think the fascist is more terrifying than any of the creatures Ofelia encounters in her fantasy. I feel that the more humanist point of view is the one that I like. I love "Beauty and the Beast" by Jean Cocteau. I love "Frankenstein" by James Whale. I like "Night of the Hunter."

Taking into account del Toro's stated influences, you can see where each have an impact on the film he has crafted from every angle. Here we have gothic horror combined with fantasy in a purely original way that nevertheless breathes with a sense of tradition.

"Pan’s Labyrinth" is set at the end of World War II when the Spanish resistance still had a fighting chance against Franco’s regime if allied support arrived in time. The movie works intriguingly opposite Steven Soderbergh’s "The Good German" as a phasmagorical reflection of an underground reality seething beneath the scorched and bloody soldier-inhabited earth above.

Guillermo del Toro is a bold creator of modern fairytales in the tradition of the Grimm Brothers, as mixed with a healthy sprinkling of Greek mythology. In planning his films, the director draws colorful drawings of the creatures he will bring to life, such as the mandrake root that Ofelia places in a bowl of milk-and-water beneath her mother’s bed to cure her sickness and protect her unborn child. As del Toro points out, "There is a mythology that you can grow a baby out of a mandrake." Mandrake is another name for ginseng, but del Toro proposes the plant was traditionally born under the gallows at the feet of hanging victims who spasamed as they died. "You had to look for it under a full moon with a black dog and wear protection on your ears because when the dog digs for it, the mandrake screams and the dog dies. And if you don’t have protection, you die." The childhood desperation that permeates his dramatic sensibility is elevated by del Toro’s sincere devotion to imaginary belief systems rooted in cycles of nature.

Del Toro says, "Pan’s Labyrinth" is an adult movie about being a kid. My favorite kid movies are "The 400 Blows," or "Au revoir, les enfants" by Louis Malle or "The Tin Drum." None of these are movies that I would play along with "Chicken Little" for my daughters, but they are movies, nevertheless, about childhood."

Add "Pan's Labyrinth" to that list.

Rated R. 120 mins. (A) (Four Stars out of five/no halves)

Turtles Can Fly

America’s Invasion Hit Parade
The Kurdish View
By Cole Smithey

On the eve of the 2003 US-led invasion of Baghdad, a Kurdish refugee camp near the Turkish border is the ravaged site for director Bahman Ghobadi’s trenchant look at a violently oppressed people hoping for salvation in the guise of their mutilated children. A self-possessed 13-year-old boy named Soren (AKA "Satellite") unites his impoverished community by linking up satellite dishes for his neighbors to receive news broadcasts about the looming US attacks. "Satellite" makes a living by salvaging landmines that are sold to UN peacekeeping troops. Since many of the area’s children have suffered the loss of arms and legs due to mines, they are predisposed to risking their lives in the dangerous job of locating and disarming the horrendous devices. "Turtles Can Fly" is a poignant movie that intimately captures the cataclysmic effects of military despotism on human beings, and children in specific.

Satellite becomes infatuated with an attractive refugee girl named Agrin who wanders into the village with her armless brother Hengov and her blind little boy Rega. Rega is the consequence of a rape by Iraqi soldiers that has left Agrin suicidal. Satellite digests leaflets dropped from American war planes. They read, "We will make this country a paradise… We are the best," he attempts to woo Agrin by swimming in a polluted lake that he insists teems with large red fish.

President Bush’s televised post 9/11 propaganda disinforms the refugee Kurds, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Satellite discovers the physical limits of his quickly adaptable intellect that has him opportunistically saying "hello" to American military invaders. The insanity of America’s zooming military occupation takes an effect on the impoverished refugee children who attempt to look at every dismembered object with unfounded optimism. "Turtles Can Fly" is a bleak yet hopeful movie that breaks your heart with an invisible crack that never goes away.

Not Rated. 97 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)