Touch of Welles

Orson Welles was born on this day in 1915. In tribute, we humbly submit the magnificent opening shot from 1953's Touch of Evil

Touch of Welles

Orson Welles was born on this day in 1915. In tribute, we humbly submit the magnificent opening shot from 1953's Touch of Evil

Treeless Mountain (2008)****1/2

In Treeless Mountain, director So Yong Kim tones down the bleak introspection she crafted to dominant proportions in her debut feature In Between Days, in favor of a simple view of the world through the eyes of children. But Treeless Mountain is no lavishly illustrated fairy tale, but an agonizing story of tender innocents slowly swept into chaos by adult selfishness and irresponsibility.

Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) and Bin (Song-hee Kim), ages 7 and 5 respectively, live what appears to be a quiet, happy life in Seoul with their mother (Soo-ah Lee). Jin ambles off to school each frosty morning - her uniform complete with knee socks and maryjanes - while Bin goes to daycare where finger painting and frequent naps await her. But underneath Mom’s sheltering wing lies a heart laden with anger and desperation. Her husband abandoned the family months ago – positive male role models are alien to Kim’s playbook – and the time has come for her to venture out in a last ditch effort to drag Daddy home.

Kim carefully keeps the camera at the children’s eye level, and through long lens compression creates a sense of restricted view. The children lack a complete understanding of their circumstances, with small, palatable bits of information doled out like strained carrots, and the viewer shares their confusion and dismay. The unfathomable notion of adult perfidy has entered the gentle souls of Jin and Bin, with all its turbulent angles reflected in their innocent eyes. Kim’s insistence on tight close-ups of the girls has the feel of a Bergman-esque baring of the psyche, yet audiences are never allowed to forget Jin and Bin’s vulnerability despite their displays of courage and pluck.

First, the pair is left for safekeeping with Big Aunt (Mi-hyang Kim), their Dad’s spinster sister. Childrearing is not exactly Big Aunt’s chosen field - that would be oblivion drinking – and under her influence the girls’ expectations and prospects begin to whither. When Bin is hit in the face with a rock by a neighborhood bully, Big Aunt confronts the hooligan’s family and, after a heated exchange, extracts payment for Bin’s medicine, which Big Aunt promptly spends at the neighborhood bar.

The girls’ once tidy playground is replaced by a nearby slag heap, where they futilely attempt to coax a dead tree back to life while buses and delivery vans roar past at breakneck speeds. Kim cleverly uses a piggy bank as a symbol of the girls’ deferred dreams; their mother vowing to return when the bank is filled. But as the girls launch amusing moneymaking initiatives (fried grasshoppers, anyone?), Big Aunt has her fill of domesticity, and dispatches the girls to their grandparents’ hardscrabble farm.

The film plays with scale, both of physical objects and emotional needs. The mountain in the title is actually just a discarded pile of fill dirt, but to Jin and Bin its lofty peak offers a fine prospect of the bus stop from which their mother departed. The dire plight of Jin and Bin is contrasted with two other examples of helplessness. The first is a young playmate afflicted by Down’s syndrome coupled with their surly, constantly complaining grandfather, both of whom are dependent on the attentive care of kindly women for their very survival. The girls stubbornly cling to the fantasy that their finally full piggy bank will harbinger their mother’s return, until cold reality inspires Jin to consider more selfless and beneficial uses of their earnings.

So Yong Kim has expanded her palette from the starkly minimal In Between Days to an impressive and quite challenging interpretation of the confusing swirl of adulthood from a child’s perspective. She somehow gets the very best from her impossibly young actors, who over the course of the film run a full gauntlet of emotions without the slightest hint of falsity. And while the film lacks a clear resolution, the ending doesn’t feel the least bit vague. Miraculously, Kim has reassured us that these virtual toddlers, despite the long and difficult path that confronts them, will be just fine.


Trailer

Treeless Mountain (2008)****1/2

In Treeless Mountain, director So Yong Kim tones down the bleak introspection she crafted to dominant proportions in her debut feature In Between Days, in favor of a simple view of the world through the eyes of children. But Treeless Mountain is no lavishly illustrated fairy tale, but an agonizing story of tender innocents slowly swept into chaos by adult selfishness and irresponsibility.

Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) and Bin (Song-hee Kim), ages 7 and 5 respectively, live what appears to be a quiet, happy life in Seoul with their mother (Soo-ah Lee). Jin ambles off to school each frosty morning - her uniform complete with knee socks and maryjanes - while Bin goes to daycare where finger painting and frequent naps await her. But underneath Mom’s sheltering wing lies a heart laden with anger and desperation. Her husband abandoned the family months ago – positive male role models are alien to Kim’s playbook – and the time has come for her to venture out in a last ditch effort to drag Daddy home.

Kim carefully keeps the camera at the children’s eye level, and through long lens compression creates a sense of restricted view. The children lack a complete understanding of their circumstances, with small, palatable bits of information doled out like strained carrots, and the viewer shares their confusion and dismay. The unfathomable notion of adult perfidy has entered the gentle souls of Jin and Bin, with all its turbulent angles reflected in their innocent eyes. Kim’s insistence on tight close-ups of the girls has the feel of a Bergman-esque baring of the psyche, yet audiences are never allowed to forget Jin and Bin’s vulnerability despite their displays of courage and pluck.

First, the pair is left for safekeeping with Big Aunt (Mi-hyang Kim), their Dad’s spinster sister. Childrearing is not exactly Big Aunt’s chosen field - that would be oblivion drinking – and under her influence the girls’ expectations and prospects begin to whither. When Bin is hit in the face with a rock by a neighborhood bully, Big Aunt confronts the hooligan’s family and, after a heated exchange, extracts payment for Bin’s medicine, which Big Aunt promptly spends at the neighborhood bar.

The girls’ once tidy playground is replaced by a nearby slag heap, where they futilely attempt to coax a dead tree back to life while buses and delivery vans roar past at breakneck speeds. Kim cleverly uses a piggy bank as a symbol of the girls’ deferred dreams; their mother vowing to return when the bank is filled. But as the girls launch amusing moneymaking initiatives (fried grasshoppers, anyone?), Big Aunt has her fill of domesticity, and dispatches the girls to their grandparents’ hardscrabble farm.

The film plays with scale, both of physical objects and emotional needs. The mountain in the title is actually just a discarded pile of fill dirt, but to Jin and Bin its lofty peak offers a fine prospect of the bus stop from which their mother departed. The dire plight of Jin and Bin is contrasted with two other examples of helplessness. The first is a young playmate afflicted by Down’s syndrome coupled with their surly, constantly complaining grandfather, both of whom are dependent on the attentive care of kindly women for their very survival. The girls stubbornly cling to the fantasy that their finally full piggy bank will harbinger their mother’s return, until cold reality inspires Jin to consider more selfless and beneficial uses of their earnings.

So Yong Kim has expanded her palette from the starkly minimal In Between Days to an impressive and quite challenging interpretation of the confusing swirl of adulthood from a child’s perspective. She somehow gets the very best from her impossibly young actors, who over the course of the film run a full gauntlet of emotions without the slightest hint of falsity. And while the film lacks a clear resolution, the ending doesn’t feel the least bit vague. Miraculously, Kim has reassured us that these virtual toddlers, despite the long and difficult path that confronts them, will be just fine.


Trailer

Camera Buff (1979)****

A small town rube’s home movie hobby threatens to steal his very soul in this tragicomedy from director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Filmed in the dreary exurbs of Krakow, Camera Buff tells the story of Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a worker in one of communist Poland’s grimy widget factories, who acquires a super-8 movie camera to chronicle his newly born daughter’s formative years. But Filip’s short subjects of ga-gas and diaper changes attract the attention of his supervisors, who enlist the fledgling filmmaker for a self-serving puff piece documenting a visit to the factory by state big-wigs.

Filip’s epic draws praise from his superiors, effectively throwing gas on the fire of his new passion. He becomes more and more obsessed with the creative possibilities of narrow strips of celluloid and soon is filming everything from lackadaisical street repair crews to soaring birds of prey (not the film’s only allusion to Ken Loach’s Kes). But Filip’s pastime stirs resentment from his wife Irka (Malgoraza Zabkowzka). Filip has become practically useless as a childrearing partner, and Irka would welcome more help with the 2am feedings and less cinematography.

Kieslowski cleverly examines the ramifications of filmmaking and in particular the role of the filmmaker in a society that thrives on half truths and heavily tailored messaging. When Filip enters a documentary about a disabled coworker into a film festival, the powers-that-be see the production not as a simple, heartfelt portrait but a patriotic tome celebrating the empowering glories of Soviet economics. Polish TV executives assign Filip a series of films designed to show the success of a social engineering project undertaken in his hometown and Filip’s all too happy to be a useful idiot, despite the fact he knows the project is a fraudulent failure.

What started as a harmless way of capturing family history morphs into a Faustian bargain with enormous consequences through Filip’s disheveled naivety. But Kieslowski tells this tale with such gentle humor that the audience, like Filip, are blindsided when he finds himself in a sticky trap of his own making. Despite the entertaining cocoon Kieslowski presents, he pulls no punches as he elevates bumbling Filip into an iconic figure: the innocent artist too quick to believe his own press clippings, allowing his work to be manipulated by those he foolishly trusts.

As a director, Kieslowski had a wonderful ability to combine the mundane with the magical, creating stark textures imbued with allegorical possibility. It was a quality he would fully exploit in later films like The Double Life of Veronique and the Colors trilogy. Here he examines the filmmaker’s lot without self pity and victimization, but with a harsh assessment of an artist’s individual responsibility. Directors who engage in the navel gazing act of making films about their craft usually go way too easy on themselves, or portray their alter-egos with extreme cartoony ruthlessness. As Filip realizes that his 16mm dreams have come true at a terrible price, he finally turns the camera on himself, both in an act of symbolic suicide and in recognition that he has become as pathetically twisted as his former subjects.

Camera Buff (1979)****

A small town rube’s home movie hobby threatens to steal his very soul in this tragicomedy from director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Filmed in the dreary exurbs of Krakow, Camera Buff tells the story of Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a worker in one of communist Poland’s grimy widget factories, who acquires a super-8 movie camera to chronicle his newly born daughter’s formative years. But Filip’s short subjects of ga-gas and diaper changes attract the attention of his supervisors, who enlist the fledgling filmmaker for a self-serving puff piece documenting a visit to the factory by state big-wigs.

Filip’s epic draws praise from his superiors, effectively throwing gas on the fire of his new passion. He becomes more and more obsessed with the creative possibilities of narrow strips of celluloid and soon is filming everything from lackadaisical street repair crews to soaring birds of prey (not the film’s only allusion to Ken Loach’s Kes). But Filip’s pastime stirs resentment from his wife Irka (Malgoraza Zabkowzka). Filip has become practically useless as a childrearing partner, and Irka would welcome more help with the 2am feedings and less cinematography.

Kieslowski cleverly examines the ramifications of filmmaking and in particular the role of the filmmaker in a society that thrives on half truths and heavily tailored messaging. When Filip enters a documentary about a disabled coworker into a film festival, the powers-that-be see the production not as a simple, heartfelt portrait but a patriotic tome celebrating the empowering glories of Soviet economics. Polish TV executives assign Filip a series of films designed to show the success of a social engineering project undertaken in his hometown and Filip’s all too happy to be a useful idiot, despite the fact he knows the project is a fraudulent failure.

What started as a harmless way of capturing family history morphs into a Faustian bargain with enormous consequences through Filip’s disheveled naivety. But Kieslowski tells this tale with such gentle humor that the audience, like Filip, are blindsided when he finds himself in a sticky trap of his own making. Despite the entertaining cocoon Kieslowski presents, he pulls no punches as he elevates bumbling Filip into an iconic figure: the innocent artist too quick to believe his own press clippings, allowing his work to be manipulated by those he foolishly trusts.

As a director, Kieslowski had a wonderful ability to combine the mundane with the magical, creating stark textures imbued with allegorical possibility. It was a quality he would fully exploit in later films like The Double Life of Veronique and the Colors trilogy. Here he examines the filmmaker’s lot without self pity and victimization, but with a harsh assessment of an artist’s individual responsibility. Directors who engage in the navel gazing act of making films about their craft usually go way too easy on themselves, or portray their alter-egos with extreme cartoony ruthlessness. As Filip realizes that his 16mm dreams have come true at a terrible price, he finally turns the camera on himself, both in an act of symbolic suicide and in recognition that he has become as pathetically twisted as his former subjects.

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Les regrets (2009)***1/2

Cedric Kahn’s tale of romantic obsession drips with confusion, passion and uncontrolled horniness. Yvan Attal stars as Matthieu, a 40ish architect from Paris who has returned to his provincial home town to sit at his mother’s deathbed. At the hospital, he accidently bumps into a sweetheart from his youth - willowy, mysterious Maya (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) – and the pair find that the intervening years have done little to dampen their animal attraction. But other things have changed; Matthieu is now married to a kind, supportive woman (Arly Jover), while Maya has wed an unstable fellow named Franck (Philippe Katerine) who is a Gallic version of what Americans would call a redneck drunk. The bulk of the film is quite good, with generous amounts of intrigue, peril and schtupping. The final reels lose some intensity, but Attal’s performance is so impressive Les regrets remains a worthy watch.

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The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)****

The Secret in Their Eyes comes so close to being a truly special film its wobbly and too-clever-by-half ending is a bitter disappointment. Told mainly through flashbacks, the story is all about a retired prosecutor in Buenos Aires (Ricardo Darin) and his attempts to solve a long closed rape and murder case of shocking brutality. The script features biting wit and extremely clever dialogue, and is just as entertaining as it is engrossing. And there’s some unrequited romance, as Darin’s old flame for his former boss (Soledad Villemil) gets re-ignited. Director Juan Jose Campanella guides most of the film with brilliant conviction, then inexplicably spends the last 20 minutes vomiting on himself, cinematically speaking. But the movie’s strengths are so appealing The Secret in Their Eyes still gets a grudging 4 stars.

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Father of My Children (2009)***1/2

Kind of like two films in one, Father of My Children features a wonderful performance by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as Gregoire Canvel, a film producer based in Paris. The nattily clad Canvel spends his days on a cell phone, putting out fires at various film sets throughout Europe. Despite the high pressure lifestyle, he still tries to be a good family man, spending weekends with his wife (Chiara Caselli) and 3 little girls at their country house. Directed by Mia Hansen-Love, the film captures the harried essence Canvel’s life through details that have an authentic ring. As someone who has spent a significant part of his life loitering around the offices of assorted production companies, Hansen-Love captures the buzzing intensity of Canvel’s workplace with perfect pitch. When the pressures mount to the breaking point, tragedy ensues and a shocked Caselli is left to pick up the pieces. The film then takes a surprisingly unsentimental approach and focuses on the nuts and bolts of practicality as the family attempts to dig out from the financial mess left behind. Based on a true story, Father of My Children accomplishes what it sets out do: it entertains and depresses while offering very little in the way of catharsis.