The Great Passage
Yûya Ishii has become something of an LFF regular in recent
years with his comedies Sawako Decides and Mitsuko Delivers. I've enjoyed his
films while simultaneously being slightly frustrated by them – there's always a point where his manic comedic style trips itself up – but it
appears that the move to a big studio project has given Ishii the firm
foundations that he has so desperately needed. The Great Passage is based on a
novel by Shiwon Miura, which has been adapted for the screen by Kensaku
Watanabe, and perhaps that's why the film's structure feel so much more solid
than Ishii's previous efforts. This is by some distance Ishii's most ambitious
film as a director, but being freed up from writing duties has apparently given
him the confidence required to make it his most accomplished work too. The
Great Passage is the tale of a small team at a publishing firm who spend 15
years researching and compiling a new dictionary, with the film loosely
structured in two parts. The first half of the film deals with the tentative romance
between cripplingly shy bookworm Majime (Ryuhei Matsuda) and the woman (Aoi
Miyazaki) to whom he can't express his feelings without reeling off the various
definitions of each word. The second half of the film deals more with the
business of putting the dictionary together, with looming deadlines and
last-minute hitches allowing Ishii to generate a surprising amount of tension. Both
the humorous and dramatic aspects of the film work perfectly because all of the
humour and drama has its basis in character. As well as the dedicated introvert
Majime, there's his laid-back colleague Nishioka (a hilarious Joe Odagiri) and
the elderly head of the programme Matsumoto (Go Kato), whose advancing years make
him wonder if he'll be around to see the finished product. The Great
Passage is very funny without ever being too broad and it's very moving without
ever slipping into sentimentality, and there are a number of fascinating themes
under the surface that lend the story additional depth. It is a film about the
love of language, pride in a job well done, and about the importance of not
letting life pass you by in your determination to reach a goal. There's also
the fascinating nuts-and-bolts business of how exactly words are chosen and
defined, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds and is often the source
of unexpected comedy; although maybe we shouldn't be so surprised given that
Ball of Fire – one of the greatest comedies of all time – explored similar
territory. Perhaps lexicographers are a lot funnier than we've ever given them
credit for.
Kon-Tiki
The story of Thor Heyerdahl seems tailor-made for the big
screen. In 1947, this Norwegian ethnographer and a crew of five men built a
wooden raft and used it to sail from Peru to the Polynesia, with the
aim of proving that South Americans could have discovered the islands centuries
earlier. Their subsequent adventure has passed into legend, but little of the
drama, danger and excitement of that passages has made it onto the screen in
Kon-Tiki. Instead, this film – a long-gestating passion project for British
producer Jeremy Thomas – has been streamlined into a drearily formulaic narrative
structure with every detail being presented in the most simplistic of ways.
Heyerdahl is played with plenty of gusto by by the lanky, grinning Pål Sverre
Hagen, but we learn little about him beyond some brief, expository notes, and
a couple of rote scenes with his long-suffering wife. We learn even less about his almost
interchangeable crewmates – this one is a photographer, this one is a fridge
salesman – or their motivation for joining him on this foolhardy mission, and
it's hard to feel too involved in their fates. I never felt like their lives
were truly in danger despite the stormy conditions, their rickety craft and the
constant presence of sharks, because those scenes of peril are handled in the
most perfunctory "And then this happened" manner by the co-directors Joachim
Rønning and Espen Sandberg. There's no sense of life here, there's none of the
imagination required to make this story breathe on the screen. All of the
dialogue simply serves the purpose of sharing information – what on earth did
these men discuss at sea for over 100 days? When the caption "Day
101" appears on screen, announcing the imminent end of their voyage, I felt
like the filmmakers had jumped forward simply because they had run out of
ideas. Where is the passion to make these men come to life? My suspicion that Rønning
and Sandberg were using this project as nothing more than a calling card was
confirmed by a ridiculous CGI-assisted shot halfway through the film that
served no purpose beyond drawing attention to the flashy direction. It seemed to work –
they're now in Hollywood working on the fifth (fifth!) Pirates of the Caribbean
film – and a comfortable life of hackwork lies ahead, but they've wasted a fine story here.
Of Good Report
When a film opens with a man screaming in agony as he pulls out broken
teeth that have somehow become embedded in his scalp, it's safe to assume that the
picture you're about to watch is not going to be an easy one to sit through.
That proves to be the case with Of Good Report, a South African film that made
international headlines earlier this year when it was temporarily banned in
that country for child pornography, despite the underage character in the film
being played by a 23 year-old actress. Now that the dust has settled on that
controversy, we can see Of Good Report for what it is – an interesting and
promising piece of work from a young filmmaker that is nevertheless crippled by
some of Jahmil X.T. Qubeka's storytelling choices. His central character is a
school teacher in a rural community who is recovering from some kind of war-related trauma in
the Congo. Parker (Mothusi Magano) is a quiet, bespectacled introvert who hides secret passions, which he unleashes one night when he meets teenage
temptress Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma) in a bar and takes her back to his shack
for sex. He is horrified to discover the next morning that she is actually 16
years-old and one of his students, but the pair continue their affair,
occasionally even flirting with disaster by having sex on school premises and coming within inches of being discovered in one of the film's standout scenes.
Parker's love for Nolitha eventually manifests itself in obsessive jealousy and
murderous impulses, but it's hard to take anything this character does
seriously because of the absurd choice Qubeka has made to not let his
protagonist speak during the entire film. He can speak – we see the other end
of a phone conversation, for example – we just don't hear it for ourselves, and
the contortions that Qubeka puts himself through to maintain this silence,
including numerous scenes in which he is cut off just as he's about to open his mouth,
are self-defeating. I can't see the purpose of such a tactic, which achieves
nothing more than to distract from the content of each scene, and it leaves a
black hole in the centre of the picture where there is supposed to be a complex
character. Magano is not a strong enough actor to convey Parker's multitudes
with his face alone, and he spends too much of the film gaping gormlessly. With
this problem scuppering the picture early on, Of Good Report ultimately feels
unnecessarily sadistic as it degenerates into a series of barbaric sequences,
which is a terrible shame as Qubeka certainly shows enough flair to suggest
he's someone worth keeping an eye on. He uses the black-and-white widescreen
frame to craft a number of undeniably vivid images, and he draws some strong
performances from the actors surrounding Magano, including the excellent Petronella
Tshuma.
Parkland
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22nd
1963, and with the 50th anniversary of that date fast approaching I
suppose it was inevitable that a film would be made to commemorate/exploit it.
The film we have been given – for our sins – is Parkland, an exasperatingly
shallow and muddled attempt to recreate the events of that day as seen through
the eyes of people tangentially connected to JFK's death. We meet Abraham
Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), whose 8mm film remains seared in the memory of all
who saw it, but there are many lesser-known characters sharing their
perspectives here too. Zac Efron and Colin Hanks are the doctors who tried to resuscitate
JFK at Parkland Memorial Hospital; Marcia Gay Harden is a nurse; Jackie Earle
Haley is a really creep priest; Ron Livingston is an FBI agent; James Badge
Dale is Lee Harvey Oswald's brother. Anyone who saw Emilio Estevez's Bobby in
2006 might be feeling an encroaching feeling of dread in the pit of their
stomach right now, and sadly Parkland does turn out to be little more than
Bobby 2: Electric Boogaloo. Writer/director Peter Landesman seems to have
no clear sense of what the story is here, or what point he is trying to make by
dropping in on these people, and much of Parkland just consists of obvious reconstructions
of what took place, with Barry Ackroyd shaking his camera for all it's worth to
suggest some kind of verisimilitude. Unfortunately, any attempt at sustaining a you-are-there realism is doomed by lines like "Nice day for a
motorcade" or Landesman's obvious confusion over how exactly to use the
most iconic figures in the story (why do we hear Lyndon B. Johnson's
inauguration as a scratchy recording? Why have Jackie Kennedy in the scene at
all if you're going to try and hide her in the background?), but the film's
biggest obstacle is the simple fact that none of the characters are developed
enough to make us see past the actors playing them. This is bad news for a
couple of them in particular. Zac Efron is left stranded in an awful scene
where he tries to beat the dead JFK back into life, Jacki Weaver's pantomime
turn as Oswald's mother is excruciating for every minute she's on screen, and
Billy Bob Thornton is reduced to shouting at various people in corridors
("This was NOT supposed to happen!"). Parkland is apparently adapted from
Vincent Bugliosi's excellent book Four Days in November, but that was a deep
and complex work of reportage that compiled all available facts; it deserves
better than to be associated with a film so half-baked, inert and tasteless.
Teenage
The archive material that much of Teenage consists of is so
good it makes me despair that the filmmakers didn't put more faith in it.
Instead, Matt Wolf's documentary is a weird hybrid of old and new, with clips
from films, television, newsreels and other sources being spliced together with
recreations artificially scratched to look like found footage, and the two
types of film mix like oil and water. This documentary aims to explore the
genesis and development of the teenager – a relatively new concept – during the
first decades of the 20th century. Beginning with the outlawing of
child labour, Wolf and his team have assembled an extraordinary variety of materials
that show adolescents embracing their newfound freedom. We are introduced to
the 1920s "Bright Young Things" in London, the Swing Kids of Germany
and the US Jitterbug craze, before a darker side to the teenage experience
emerges with the rise of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. As we move from one
area to another, the voiceover narration changes hands between four narrators
(Ben Wishaw, Jena Malone, Julia Hummer and Jessie Usher), whose reading of
diary excerpts and other first-hand testimonies attempt to give us a subjective
perspective on what it was like to be inside these movements as they happened.
It all sounds like a much better idea in theory than it turns out to be in
practice, as the filmmakers' approach frequently left me feeling uneasy rather
than enlightened. The lack of attribution provided for the text that forms the
voiceover makes it too often feel more like a script that has been written than
a genuine sentiment taken from the mouths of real teens, and the recreated
footage that Wolf uses to highlight these individual tales sticks out like a
sore thumb. Teenage feels terminally confused about what point it is trying to make and it ends up failing to examine any aspect of its vast subject in a satisfying
way. It feels like a primer on the subject rather than a proper exploration,
and one hopes that Jon Savage's book Teenage: The Creation of Youth, on which
this film is based, offers much more insight than this frustratingly flimsy effort.
We Are the Best!
We Are the Best! is very much the work of the man who made
Show Me Love and Together, and it's good to have him back. After making those
two films – and the bleaker, but still brilliant Lilja 4-Ever – Lukas Moodysson
swerved into nihilism with the ugly double-bill of A Hole in My Heart and
Container. Those pictures were followed by talk of a premature retirement, and
although he returned to filmmaking with Mammoth in 2009, this is the first film
in over a decade that actually feels like a Lukas Moodysson film. It allows him
once more to display his uncanny ability to draw natural, playful and entirely
convincing performances out of untried young actors, and to navigate the
turbulent emotional territory of life at the cusp of those difficult teenage
years. Adapted from his wife's graphic novel, We Are the Best! is the story of
13 year-old best friends Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin), a pair
of wannabe punks in 1982 Sweden whose musical ability sadly doesn't match their
enthusiasm. Nevertheless, they are inspired to write a political song based on
their hatred of their PE teacher (sample lyric: "People in Africa are
dying, but you only care about balls flying!"), and they team up with
devout Christian wallflower Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) – who, unlike them, can play an instrument – to form a band. That's pretty much all there is
to We Are the Best!, which is a lightweight effort in comparison to his
previous work, but it's hard to dismiss a film that's so infectiously
enjoyable. Moodysson gives his girls the opportunity to create a friendship and
an us-against-the-world mentality that feels entirely true, and his nuanced
handling of teenage angst is evident in the way he handles the jealousies and
insecurities that arise when a group of boys enter the picture. The perfect
judgement he shows in the moments makes me wish that he'd go a bit deeper, and
take the opportunity to add a little more depth and complexity to the film. For
example, the reaction of Hedvig's mother to her daughter's sudden
transformation is glided over in a single scene, when such a situation would
surely be a source of enormous drama within such a devout household.
Nevertheless, such quibbles are greatly outweighed by the pleasures that We Are
the Best! provides; pleasures that Lukas Moodysson can deliver in a way that few
other directors can. This may not be his best, but it's the closest he has come
for many years.
