Tag Archives: foreign language films

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Mommy’s Little Angel

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Armand

by George Wolf

If you’re the parent of young children, your first reaction to troubling accusations against them is likely to be denial.

There must be some mistake, right? My child would never do such a thing.

It’s a catalyst that almost demands taking sides, and one that writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel explores to unique effect in Armand.

The mesmerizing Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World, Handling the Undead, A Different Man) is Elisabeth, a Norwegian actress who is summoned to her son’s school for an urgent conference. Six year-old Armand has been accused of bullying his friend Jon in the boys restroom. The incident apparently involved acts of “sexual deviation.”

Jon’s parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit) are waiting at the school with two administrators and the boys’ teacher. And what begins as a calm attempt at fact-finding slowly dissolves into a fascinating unraveling of mystery, fantasy, and outright curiosity.

Ullmann Tøndel and cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth keep us inside the sterile school building for nearly all of the film’s two hours, puncturing the strained decorum with an array of devices. There are persistent nosebleeds, the sound of heels echoing on hard floors, moments of psychological performance art, and one alarming fit of laughter that purposely strains your patience.

It all helps to distinguish the film from similarly themed dramas such as The Teacher’s Lounge or even Mass, but also threatens to keeps us detached through self indulgence. The can’t-look-away excellence from Reisve never lets it happen, and Armand – which won the Caméra d’Or, for Best First Feature last year at Cannes – rewards audience commitment with a satisfying, if not exactly revelatory, resolution in Act Three.

The characters may be talking about children, but the film is talking about adults. Armand presents a challenging, but ultimately haunting take on the lingering dangers of convincing ourselves that everything is fine.

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Family’s Feud

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Bring Them Down

by George Wolf

Just weeks ago, Christopher Abbott was wrestling with wolves. Now it’s sheep, and the bloodlines still get bloody.

In Bring Them Down, Abbott is Michael O’Shea, a sheepherder who lives with his ailing father Ray (Colm Meaney) in the Irish countryside. Their farm shares a grazing hill with the Keelys – Gary (Paul Ready), Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) and their son Jack (Barry Keoghan), and Irish eyes are seldom smiling.

Michael and Caroline share a past, as well as a painful tragedy that the villagers still whisper about. So relations are already chilly. But when Michael catches the Keely boys trying to sell two O’Shea rams as their own, things escalate quickly.

This is grim stuff, as desolate as the Irish landscape. And much like the bare-fisted feuds that the Irish travelers in 2011’s Knuckle cannot exist without, the Keely and O’Shea men seem held by an enabling bond of generational trauma shattered only occasionally by the more pragmatic Caroline.

In a feature debut that fluctuates between the English and Irish languages, writer/director Chris Andrews crafts a taut family drama fueled by pain, violence and a tight circle of engrossing performances. Abbott’s intensity shows Michael has learned to navigate his guilt and anguish with quiet resolve, while Keoghan again proves adept at fleshing out the vulnerable shades of a dangerous character.

These are deeply committed and affecting turns, consistently elevating a story that’s left searching for that final thread to make its truly memorable. And in the third act, Andrews does introduce a sudden time shift, rewinding to reveal new angles of previous events. The attempt at an added layer of narrative depth is warranted, but this one lands with a curious and negligible effect.

Still, with a solid sense of setting, cast and framing, Bring Them Down heralds Andrews as a filmmaker of great potential. Once his actors get a little more character to chew on, he may start building his own legacy.

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Sowing Suspicion

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The Seed of the Sacred Fig

by George Wolf

Mohammad Rasoulof’s films have shown him to be an insightful storyteller. His backstory reveals a courageous activist who continues to endanger his own life and freedom in support of artistic expression.

His latest, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, weaves in important details and actual footage from protests that erupted in Iran after the government’s brutal killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022. As the narrative evolves from hushed family drama to frantic thriller, writer/director Rasoulof again shows his skill at turning intimate details into an allegory for oppression from a religious patriarchy in his homeland and beyond.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just been promoted to an Inspector’s post in Tehran (on the court that actually sentenced Rasoulof just three years ago). It’s a big moment for the family – Inspector is just one step below a judge – and Iman’s wife Najmeh (Sohelia Golestani) is hoping they’ll soon be awarded an apartment big enough for their teen-age daughters to each have their own bedroom.

Instead, Iman is awarded a gun.

Inspectors are involved in very serious cases. So serious that Iman must watch his back, Najmeh must not ask questions, and daughters Sana (Setareh Maleki) and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) must choose their friends very carefully and stay off of social media.

Naturally, the girls have trouble adjusting and plead with their father to help when their friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) gets caught up in student protests and is arrested. This is a delicate issue, indeed, but it is when Iman’s gun turns up missing from the home that fear and suspicion completely overtake the household.

The loss of his gun could ultimately send Iman to prison, and the father turns to desperate measures against his own wife and children to root out the culprit.

Often filming in secret, Rasoulof assembles the escalation of events so carefully, and the performances are so achingly real, that nearly every frame of the film’s two hour and forty-five minutes seems necessary. The young daughters ask the defiant questions their parents abandoned long ago, supported with subtlety by an Iranian filmmaker daring to show women without head coverings (even in their homes).

Rasoulof has now fled Iran, while Zareh and Golestani have both been banned from travel. The Seed of the Sacred Fig stands as a testament to their courage, and as a sobering act of revolution.

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Life of Illusion

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All We Imagine As Light

by George Wolf

“It’s like this place isn’t real. You could just vanish into thin air and no one would ever know.”

“We would know.”

With All We Imagine As Light, writer/director Payal Kapadia creates a triumphant portrait of friendship and Indian womanhood. In her narrative feature debut, Kapadia unveils a wonderful voice, one full of clarity and grace, with an assured command of how to reach us through her characters.

Kani Kusruti is gently spellbinding as Prabha, a nurse in Mumbai who has not heard from her husband in over a year. After their arranged marriage, he has been working extensively in Germany, and when his unexpected gift to Prabha arrives in the mail, it only punctures her guarded routine.

Prabha’s roommate is Anu (Divya Prabha), a younger nurse who is resisting her parents’ desire for an arranged marriage by taking up with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). While the other nurses whisper about her “boy,” Anu and Shiaz look forward to finding a place to become intimate.

While Prabha advises Anu to be more responsible, the lesson is underscored by Prabha’s attempts to help Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), who works as a cook in the hospital, stay in her chawl (tenement apartment). Parvaty’s husband has suddenly passed away, and now a developer wants to evict her to make way for a skyscraper.

As the lives of the three women intersect, Kapadia illustrates the struggle of Indian women to balance tradition with the desire to control their own destinies. And whenPrabha and Anu join Parvaty on a trip back to her village, separate events will push all three women closer to changing their lives.

There is a poetic nature to Kapadia’s storytelling. With only the most gentle of nudges, Kapadia speaks for the scores of Indian women who come to Mumbai for the promise of a better life in the city, only to be disillusioned. All We Imagine As Light draws its power from how clearly it sees them, and how real it makes them feel.

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Stardust Memories

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Close Your Eyes

by George Wolf

Thirty-two years later, Spanish auteur Víctor Erice returns with his fourth feature, Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), a patiently exquisite study of memory, identity, and the reflecting power of film.

Former film director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) spends his days in a fishing village on the coast of Spain. He reads, writes the occasional short story, and dodges the conspiracy theories that still exist about his old friend Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado).

In 1990, Julio was starring in Miguel’s film The Farewell Gaze when he disappeared without a trace. The mystery is being revisited on TV’s “Unresolved Cases,” and Miguel travels to Madrid for his guest appearance.

The broadcast prompts a call from a woman from an elder care home in another Spanish village. There is a handyman they call Gardel who tends the grounds and keeps to himself. She is sure it is Julio.

Miguel must confirm this for himself, and the journey back through his past includes reconnecting with his film editor (Mario Pardo), a former lover (Soledad Villamil), Julio’s daughter (Ana Torrent), and one painful, tragic memory.

Erice (El Sur, The Spirit of the Beehive) sets a pace that is unhurried but necessary, and he fills the nearly three-hour running time with exquisite shot making, insightful dialog and meaningful silences. He also crafts the film-within-a-film as a compelling narrative in its own right, one that adds important elements to the touching and deeply resonant finale.

Now in his mid-eighties, Erice makes Close Your Eyes more than just a rumination on “how to grow old.” Expertly assembled and deceptively understated, it is a beautiful ode to the pleasure, pain, friendships and memories of a life well lived.

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Limbo Time

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Coma

by George Wolf

Bursting with contrasts of art and ideas, Coma lands as a captivating time capsule of creativity, waiting to be savored by future viewers looking to understand a uniquely unsteady time.

Writer/director Bertrand Bonello casts his own daughter, Louise Labèque, as “L’adolescente,” a teenage girl trying to cope with life in lockdown. She FaceTime chats with friends and looks to YouTuber Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) for guidance on living in a present that has “come to a halt.”

Coma calmly and seductively stresses the need for achieving “limbo” – where we become “blank spaces waiting to be filled,” no longer needing to worry about making our own choices.

Bonello (The Beast) weaves together existential dread, dream and dreamlike narratives, and some black comedy with alternating live action and animation styles to create a hypnotic patchwork that probes a simple idea with utter fascination.

Among the understandable glut of lockdown films, this one stands out as a different animal indeed. The true effects of the pandemic – particularly on the young – may not be fully known for decades. Bonello wants us to realize that now, and Coma is an intriguing and insightful thought starter.

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Handle With Care

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Handling the Undead

by George Wolf

With his source novel and screenplay for Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist mixed vampire bloodlust and emotional bonds. Handling the Undead (Håndtering av udøde) finds Lindqyist turning similar attention to zombies, teaming with director/co-writer Thea Hvistendahl for a deeply atmospheric tale of grief, longing, and dread-filled reunions.

We follow three families in Norway, each one dealing with tragedy. An old man and his daughter (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) have lost their young son/grandson; an elderly woman still grieves for her lifelong partner; while a man (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Worst Person in the World and Personal Shopper) and his children struggle to accept that the wife and mother they depend on (Bahar Pars) may now be gone.

Hvistendahl sets the stakes with minimal dialog and maximum sorrow. Characters move through sweaty summer days in a fog of grief that’s expertly defined by cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth. They grasp at memories and battle regret over feelings left unexpressed.

And then an unexplained electro-magnetic event hits Oslo…and the dead aren’t so dead anymore.

In the film’s first two acts, Hvistendahl unveils these awakenings with a barren and foreboding tenderness. Everyone knows this can’t end well, but the tears of joy that come from seemingly answered prayers create moments that straddle a fascinating line between touching and horrifying.

How much of our grief is defined by selfishness? And how far could it push us before we finally let go?

Those may not be new themes for the zombie landscape, but the way Hvistendahl frames the inevitable bloodshed goes a long way toward making her shift of focus less jarring. While so much time is spent exploring the pain of those left behind, we know that eventually zombies gonna zombie.

And indeed they do, but Hvistendahl sidesteps excess carnage for a more subtle form of gruesome. The interactions between the living and the undead take on a surreal, experimental quality that seems plenty curious about whether we’d really think dead is better.

After all, the grieving family in Pet Sematary went asking for trouble. Here, the trouble comes calling, and Handling the Undead answers with a bleak but compelling study of desperation meeting inhuman connection.

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Nature Boy

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Evil Does Not Exist

by George Wolf

Two years ago, the magnificent Drive My Car became the first Japanese film to garner a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and earned Ryûsuke Hamaguchi well-earned noms for writing and directing.

Now, writer/director Hamaguchi rewards his wider audience with Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa sonzai shinai), another thoughtful, gracefully intellectual tale that finds him in an even more enigmatic mood.

Takumi and his young daughter live in Mizubiki, a Japanese village near Tokyo. Father teaches daughter about the wonders of nature, and about her place in the village’s careful balance of give and take.

That balance is threatened when a big firm plans to build a ”glamping” (glamorous camping) site very close to Takumi’s own house. Two P.R. reps come to convince the villagers that the company will also be careful, but these townsfolk know manure when they smell it.

The reps try to curry favor by offering Takumi a job as caretaker of the glamping site, but the more time they spend with this pillar of the simple life, the more they start to see wisdom in his ways.

Hamaguchi delivers some salient points on ecology while showcasing his skill with probing character purpose, motivation and the different ways they interact.

At a town meeting, an older villager gently reminds the P.R. reps about the responsibilities that come with “living upstream,” and the speech becomes an eloquent metaphor that the film begins dissecting with sometimes abstract detail.

And though the one hundred six-minute running time might seem rushed for a filmmaker that has favored three, four, and even five-hour films, Hamaguchi’s storytelling here is more patient than ever. Yoshio Kitagawa’s exquisite cinematography often showcases nature’s beauty in wordless wonder, always buoyed by an Eiko Ishibashi score that is evocative and moving.

What Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t do is provide any easy answers for the dramatic choices Takumi makes once his daughter goes missing. The film ends as it begins, staring into the natural world and asking us to ponder how we best fit in.

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Memory Lane

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Lie With Me

By Rachel Willis

Past memories and present regrets mix in director Olivier Peyon’s film, Lie with Me.

Returning to his hometown after decades away, celebrated author Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquédec) looks to dig up the ghosts of his past in hopes of inspiring something lost. Or in this case, one ghost. 

In 1984, a young Stéphane (Jérémy Gillet) begins a relationship with popular student, Thomas (Julien De Saint Jean). The only condition of their relationship is that no one can know. What starts as something tawdry deepens as the two boys spend more time together. Scenes from the past intermingle with scenes from the present, as memories of his first love overwhelm an older Stéphane.

It’s not clear if Stephane expects to encounter his past love when he returns, but he is floored when instead he meets Thomas’s son, Lucas (Victor Belmondo). 

There are two very touching relationships in the film as we watch the budding romance between Stéphane and Thomas unfold, along with Stéphane’s friendship with Lucas. The two actors portraying Stéphane are equally skilled at bringing the character to life in a seamless blend of one person at two different times in life. It’s as effectives as the contrasting natures of Thomas and his son, Lucas. Where Thomas is reserved, never revealing who he is, Lucas is at ease with himself.

The slow steps the film takes in trying to reveal Thomas are elusive; can we ever really know a person who doesn’t know himself? In hiding a part of himself from everyone but Stéphane, he essentially lives a stunted life.

There are some scenes that don’t always work. A few are too heavy-handed and sentimental in a film that works better when it embraces restraint. As the older Stéphane, de Tonquédec can convey a range of emotion with his expressions. When his controlled façade slips, we see sadness and radiance as he recalls moments of love and loss. 

The movie isn’t perfect, but it’s touching. There is a quiet sadness that haunts Stéphane as we follow him through his memories. While some scenes carrying a heavy weight, the film is not without hope. While it’s true there are some people we can never really know, often they leave hints, revealing as much of themselves as they can. It’s depressing, but it’s hopeful, too. 

Perhaps one day, the world will learn the accept others for who they are and there will no longer be a need to hide.

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Rules Are Rules

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The Teacher’s Lounge

by George Wolf

“What happens in the teacher’s lounge, stays in the teacher’s lounge.”

Mrs. (Carla) Nowak uses that line as a condescending quip to avoid some pointed questions from her students’ even as she’s starting to desperately wish it were true.

Carla (Leonie Benesch, fantastic) teaches 12-year-olds at a German grade school. Carla exchanges small talk with her fellow teachers, and doesn’t look away when she notices one who helps herself to what’s in the office coffee fund jar just minutes after Carla donated some change.

It’s a small but meaningful moment that writer/director Ilker Çatak uses to effectively illustrate Carla’s idealism, and to foreshadow her coming clash with reality.

The conflict begins to simmer when Carla witnesses two other teachers try to coerce some “good” students into naming who they think might be behind the recent rash of thefts at the school. Carla objects to the line of questioning, and reacts by using her wallet and laptop camera to set a trap and expose the guilty party.

What follows is a tense and utterly fascinating parable of accusation, distrust, paranoia and anger that has garnered an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature. Çatak crafts the school community as a Petri dish of contrasting agendas, one where teachers, students and parents fight for claims on the moral high ground.

Benesch is simply wonderful. Carla’s care for her students is never in doubt, but as the gravity of her situation begins to dawn on her, Benesch often only needs her wide eyes and tightened jawline to deliver Carla’s increasingly desperate mix of emotions.

As perspectives change, you may be reminded of Ruben Östlund’s insightful Force Majeure. But with The Teacher’s Lounge, Çatak moves the conversation to how the tribal nature of modern society can lead to separate realities, and how quickly those dug-in heels can be weaponized.