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The Making of  a Family: Shoplifters

Shoplifters is the latest gem of Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, who in his two-decade long career has become renowned for his delicate domestic dramas. Absences threatening the family dynamic is a central theme running through all his films, exemplified by a mother walking out on her children in Nobody Knows and the trauma a family faces by the death of a son inStill Walking. Nevertheless Kore-eda treats these issues with such loving quality and light humour to demonstrate both the beauties and idiosyncrasies of family ties. Shoplifters bears all of Kore-eda’s cinematic traits and has power to leave even the most resilient tear-stricken. Winning the 2018 Palme D’Or as well as numerous other awards, Shoplifters depicts a group of poverty-stricken people brought together by circumstance struggling to make ends meet. Although its social criticism has led it to be seen not too favourably by the Japanese authorities (Kore-eda even controversially rejecting a commendation by the government), its moving performances and transcendental themes has made it resoundingly popular with Japanese and Western audiences alike.

Shoplifters follows Osamu a construction site labourer (played by Lily Franky in the same money-scrounging yet whole-heartedly loving father figure as in Kore-eda’sLike Father, Like Son), Nobuyo, a brave, hardened hotel launderer and her good-looking presumably younger sister Aki working in a hostess club. The grandmother Hatsue (acted by Kirin Kiki, and was subsequent to her passing in September her last feature) supports the group through her deceased husband’s pension. Then there is Shota, a plucky boy picked up by Osamu and Nobuyo and now sees them as parent figures. Osamu and Shota regularly shoplift, using a system of signals to communicate, within the moral strictures of only being able steal what hasn’t already been bought. Despite their random circumstances, the darker truths of which are only revealed at the end of the film, they make-shift a family that in all improbability functions. The film starts when Osamu and Shota find Yuri, a little girl abandoned by her parents, and decide to take her home for dinner. When they notice she’s been abused they don’t return her instead incorporating her into their family.

The rest of the film, in very much Kore-eda’s style, unhurriedly reveals the family’s day-to-day life. Yuri adjusts to the household, and even when reported missing by the police, crops her hair and changes her name to Lin. The film explores in its nuances the process of doing something that isn’t legal but feels right. Sakura Ando is magnifying as Nobuya, a woman unable to give birth and nurtures her love for Shota and Yuri as if they were her children of her own. In a heart-breaking scene, she burns Lin’s old dress and tells her that the people who care for you don’t hurt you but hug to show they love you. Shoplifters explores the moldable nature of family in a story of those who have created a household to bear their hardships together. Nobuyo says jokingly that Lin chose them, and that “maybe you’re stronger if you choose your own parents:” Lin here has found her kin knowing they will support and embrace her. And this group does carry all the traits natural for a family. Shota reacts to Lin like a child would react to a newborn sibling but it’s not long before he warms up to her. Nobuyo and Osamu act like husband and wife in the way they look after the kids and in an intimate sex scene suggesting that love and not just money binds them. Only once the ugly truths of their past emerge, that Nobuyo killed her husband in a crime of passion assisted by Osamu, do we realise that this family is in many ways built on false premises. Yet Kore-eda has up to that point crafted his characters’ personal lives with such intimate details that they are without a doubt family, even if an unconventional one.

Shoplifters bears many similarities to Kore-eda’s 2013 film Like Father, Like Son about two 6-year old boys accidentally swapped at birth and having to adjust to new households. Kore-eda admits himself that the question his film asks on what makes a family inspired his new feature. Both films show parents bringing a child into the family unit and learning to love them as if they were their own (one of the mothers in Like Father even calls the idea of switching children shoplifting). This shows Kore-eda’s fascination with the nature of familial love and whether it can extend beyond one’s kin, showing it takes nurture as much as nature for a child to belong to a parent and vice versa. The father’s obsession in Like Father, “can you really love a child not of your blood?” mirrors Nobuya’s heart-breaking interrogation scene once she’s arrested for her crimes. When told that Lin needs her mother, Nobuya holds the camera’s gaze and responds “does giving birth automatically make you a mother?” after which every viewer at the screening watched with baited breath as she continuously, despairingly wipes her teary eyes on her sleeve.

Whilst the multifaceted family portraits and depictions of the traditional Japanese household have led him to be associated with Yasujiro Ozu, Kore-eda has questioned this comparison and likened himself more to Ken Loach’s social-realist portrayals. His films are striking in that they are steeped in such poetic detail with unresolved associations. One of my favourite moments in Shoplifters is when Aki embraces her most frequent, desperate visitors at the hostess club clearly beyond help. This is a moment unexplained and not lingered upon but illustrates in and of itself a token of her kindness. Viewers know Kore-eda has mastered a piece of emotional storytelling when they are so wrapped in the skins of the characters before they are even aware of it. At the film’s closure and the family’s separation, we crave in spite of its improbability, for any one of the family members to find and be with each other again.

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5 Directors and The Way They Ace Pace

Published on the Raindance blog 05/09/2018

Someone once compared watching a film to listening to a piece of music. Thinking about the whole process, it makes sense. Music notes on sheet paper guide musicians to play a piece of music in harmony led by a conductor. And yet music is not just about fitting all those components together like a puzzle. Instead they meld and cohere so invisibly to create a mood and flow of that piece. This is like film. Cinematography, sound design, editing, writing and actors all lift a story onto the big screen but don’t work in and of themselves. Their roles sync to create the right atmospheres for engaging narratives.

Understanding film like music cannot be a better comparison to situate pace in film: because pace is all about establishing mood and flow. Watching a film is about experiencing its patterns, the symmetry of its parts and, very importantly, timing. Pace relates to the progress of the narrative arc; how we are guided through the story. We engage with the scenes in terms of the flow of dialogue and action, in other words, its rhythm.

But understanding what we mean by pace can be very difficult because it is subtle. Let’s just say that bad pacing is when something happens too long on screen or contrarily too short: we’re either twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the next piece of information to reveal itself or are confused because we haven’t had enough time to process what we see. Good pacing constantly mediates that middle ground, adjusting between fast and slow to keep us emotionally engaged through one and a half hours of storytelling.

I’ve chosen to examine how 5 contemporary directors use pace in order to understand how films can be read this way. Although it’s not often explicit, the way these directors have paced their films have been influential in defining their specific directorial style.

1. David Fincher

David Fincher is perhaps most known for his hard-boiled, fast-thinking and emotionally twisted protagonists. Think the insomniac narrator in Fight Club, whiz brain Zuckerberg in The Social Network and the frantic but driven cartoonist Graysmith trying to find a killer in Zodiac. By following the journey of these characters, the pace of Fincher’s films are mostly fast, sharp and succinct. His punchy dialogue is definitely key to this, but also his slick editing and camerawork. Fincher for instance has this camera technique of following the movement of characters, tracking alongside them as they walk; lingering as they pause. It’s as if we’re experiencing the events alongside them, searching for truths the same time they are. Fincher always provides us with a lot of information to grasp in a short space of time, often jumping between different points in time, yet his films’ steady pace helps us process all of that whilst focusing on a clear plotline. As a result, you can pick up new details in his films with every viewing. However, Fincher’s best achievement lies in the way he brings his viewers to the level of his protagonists’ pace of thinking. When we watch the Social Network we can’t help but start think fast like Zuckerberg. This is the crux to the way Fincher builds suspenseful plotlines.

2. Quentin Tarantino 

People usually associate violence with fast-paced thrillers. Violence in Tarantino’s films however occurs at a purposefully measured pace, usually at the end of a very long piece of dialogue, to make it all the more unexpected and ruthless. If you think of the opening scene of Inglorious Bastards, SS colonel Hans Landa has a pretty banal conversation with the dairy farmer, but psychologically transforms him into such a nervous wreck that he is led to reveal the Jewish family hiding under his floorboards. This scene draws out the characters’ conversations line by line, dragging out the tension without changing pace for as long as possible to the point of becoming unbearable: then he brings out the guns. Pensive but suspenseful pacing is particular to Tarantino in making viewers wait to jolt at newly erupted action. Additionally, Tarantino often utilizes confining claustrophobic spaces to establish power dynamics between characters. The intrusion of a Nazi officer in the basement bar of Inglorious Bastards for instance is a visual disruption because he walks in from a different camera angle within that space. This change in framing is disarming and considerably changes the flow of the scene, showing how instrumental shot composition is to pace.

3. Damien Chazelle

Music has been the main subject of Oscar-winning Damien Chazelle first two features, Whiplash and La La Land. As a musical, La La Land is obviously filmed and edited according to the film’s soundtrack but I found Chazelle’s other film Whiplash equally fascinating in a rhythmic sense. Chazelle’s debut feature centers on an ambitious student drummer challenged physically and psychologically by a renowned but abusive conservatory teacher, Terrence Fletcher. Whiplash opens on the protagonist, Andrew Neiman, playing on his kit, his drum roll in gradual crescendo as the camera pushes forward to a close up. This audio-visually establishes the increasing emotional frustration Andrew experiences throughout the film on the pulse of a drumbeat, pushed further to the brink of sanity. Sound architects Andrew’s state of anxiety and the film’s spiraling tension. In a finale jazz performance, when Andrew realizes he has been cheated by Fletcher he takes the orchestra into his own hands with an electrifying drum solo. Conductor and drummer lock heads in battle on the basis of whether Andrew will lose his furious beat, at times matching viewers’ racing heartbeat. Chazelle’s method of pacing posits Whiplash’s key point of contention: is Fletcher trying to screw Andrew over, or by challenging him does he help him become famous?

4. Terrence Malick

Whilst for Fincher pace is key to locking viewers into characters’ minds, the films of Terrence Malick remove them from the main narrative focus altogether. Malick’s films have often (controversially) been described as poetic essays, extended philosophical enquiries on the meaning of life. This is because he has a specific form of cinematic storytelling that is based on loosely associated images, using a drifting camera wafting in and out of a scene, placing characters in an out of focus. This is particularly distinctive to the flow of Malick’s work that doesn’t impose a particular way of viewing action according to characters’ perspectives. Malick builds his filmic narratives around moments and gestures, as if we’re guided by characters’ stream of consciousness. In Tree of Life for instance, Malick tries to express how protagonist Jack searches the farthest recesses of his mind to bring back his earliest childhood memories. The dislocated images and snippets of voices embody that indeterminacy of remembering. It’s Jack’s sensorial rather coherent experience that Malick tries to convey in his particular cinematic language. His sense of pace establish that illusion of what is floating, lilting and lyrical; to show how action doesn’t have a purpose or ending but just wafts in front of the camera.

5. Lynne Ramsay

Studying the pace of Lynne Ramsay’s work is intriguing on the basis of her formal background as a photographer. Her aesthetic practice weaves into her cinematographic work because they are as detailed as photography itself. What we see in her films are studies of characters, focusing on details that break free from the confines of the plot and set up a  pace to her films both tender and meditative. Ramsay tells stories of ordinary people’s lives, oftentimes harrowing or burdened by grief or pain, and within the worlds they inhabit she unfolds images and sounds that make us immerse in its folds and textures. As opposed to Whiplash’s plot-driven sound and image, to Ramsay they are part of her attention to detail. This is to show the way James in Ratcatcher wraps himself in a curtain, as if shrouded by his friend’s death who drowned in a bog. There’s this memorable close-up shot of ants crawling on a jam sandwich in We Need To Talk About Kevin. This not only reveals the mess left by an ill-mannered boy, but also how his parents, by post-poning the problem, let it grow into a bigger one. Through careful framing and shot choices, both films portray different portraits of childhood and adulthood, revealed in the visual pacing of their day-to-day lives.

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I, Tonya (2017) review

I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017) is an emotional rollercoaster ride on the adrenaline-pumping but short career of American figure skater Tonya Harding: from her bewildering rise to national and international fame to the ultimate ‘scandal’, which brought her life on ice to a premature halt. Interspersed by staged “irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true” interviews of Tonya and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, I, Tonya brings the unbelievable skater’s story to the cinematic screen.

As far as biopics go, I, Tonya impressively blends the facts of Tonya’s life as told in hindsight with the fictional unfolding of events from the first moment she steps onto the ice until her last. Director Craig Gillespie by far does not even try to create an illusion that any of the accounts could be reliably told, as is evidenced by one of Tonya’s most memorable quotes in the film: “The haters always say, ‘Tonya tell the truth.’ There is no such thing as truth! Everyone has their own truth. And life just does whatever the fuck it wants.” As Jeff and Tonya deny or altogether tell different stories from what unfolds on-screen, the film documents the ultimate confusion of events, which unfurl rapid-fire and largely beyond Tonya’s control – eventually costing her her career. Gillespie even shoves some brusque moments of humour into the narrative by crossing the fourth wall, exemplified by Tonya taking aim at her husband with her rifle after which looking angry and deadpan the camera, “I never did this!” Punchy, defiant statements such as these emphasize the unreliability of any tale but one which in this particular case carries the inevitability of Tonya as victim to its core.

I, Tonya is punctuated by the persuasive punchy performances of Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding and Allison Janney as her sour-faced, bitter mother (Janney subsequently won best Supporting Actress in the 2018 Academy Awards). The film is thought to be the first time for Tonya’s story to be told from her perspective, and is exceptionally convincing in bringing the confusing nature of her case to the surface in a suspenseful manner, one leaving viewers on the edge of their seats after each dramatic episode. The film stands out stylistically in the fraught energy generated through swerving camera shots of Tonya on ice and the punchy 80s sound-track summoning the time period it is set. It won’t be an understatement to call I, Tonya a blast from start to finish.

Point taken, the subject of violence is an important aspect of the film’s drive but also a matter of controversy. Tonya Harding is subjected to violence from a young age, abused firstly by her mother and later her husband. From the outset, the on-going violence depicts the way Tonya is ‘built’ to be tough, the beatings making her an angry fighter and ultimately a champion. The film nevertheless glosses over some bouts of violence that to some critics’ opinions lightens the subject matter of domestic abuse. Nevertheless, the violence does depict the reality of Harding’s tough life and the ways it led her to shift the emotional support she was craving for from her mother to her equally abusive husband. Gillespie shows the interplay of Jeff’s supportive and detrimental role in Tonya’s sporting life: both loving and violent, with the best intention but whose dumb actions eventually cost Tonya her skating career. Violence therefore can be bluntly construed to be very much part of the harsh world Gillespie shows Tonya to inhabit.

Underlying I, Tonya is the equally contradictory, but ultimately cruel portrait of America brought to the surface. As pointed out by Tonya’s coach Diane Rawinson at the beginning of the film: “Generally people either love Tonya or are not big fans. Like people either love America or are not big fans. Tonya was totally American.” The film mirrors the way her rise to fame and passion for skating was mired by the social prejudices against her and the image of a wholesome American woman she was required to be. These too are some of the obstacles Tonya faces in the competitive sporting world she was struggling to be a part of.

Gillespie ends his passionate portrayal of Tonya taking a beating on a boxing rink: after being evicted on the ice, this is one of the only sports she could do. Tonya as punch bag carries metaphoric resonances of the abuse she receives throughout the film both from the people who love her and the robust environment of competitive skating. Punchy and altogether ruthless, I, Tonya is an original and soul-captivating retelling of true events that shook the sports world at a certain point in time.

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On growing up, first love and learning in An Education (2009) and Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Coming-of-age films explore the slippery slopes of firsts: of mistakes, big time crushes and any encounters away from the parents’ home. Treading on unknown paths that could leave them susceptible, young protagonists are in turn rewarded with the treasures but also perils of life. An Education (2009) and Call Me By Your Name (2017) tell two such stories with bittersweet idiosyncrasy, shedding along its way small pearls of wisdom. Both teenagers find themselves crossing social and personal boundaries in their exploration of the thrills, challenges and beguiling possibilities offered by liaisons with older men. Whilst heedlessly following their feelings brings some trying blows, the life lessons they gain shape their own, and audience’s, understanding on the nature of giving and receiving an education.      

Set in 1960s London, An Education follows intelligent 16-year old schoolgirl Jenny falling for the older gentleman David. Whisking her away to concerts, restaurants and art auctions, David offers Jenny a life of culture and luxury she has always craved for. However, as she immerses herself in David’s exuberant world and is eventually offered a marriage proposal, Jenny faces the question whether to give up her education, which, in being comparably more tedious, she can no longer justify having a use for. Call Me By Your Name begins when the handsome and confident scholar Oliver arrives to the house of archaeology professor Perlman in an idyllic Northern Italian village to spend the summer as his assistant. A powerful romance blossoms between him and the professor’s 17-year-old son Elio, their bond unravelling in a lazy summertime drawl. Elio tests his personal limits by falling head over heels for Oliver: in discovering the power of consuming unruly attraction, he is left no choice but to hand over to another his heart and soul entirely.

Jenny and Elio are fleshed out as subjects of desire. Met with growing feelings of attraction, both come to terms with, and find an answer to, their innermost longings whilst mustering up the nerve to act upon their impulses. This mirrors a story Elio’s mother tell her son of of a knight unable to tell a princess he loves her, tormented which side of the coin to pick: “Do you speak or do you die?” Both Elio and Jenny decide not to bottle up their feelings but take the plunge. As a result, they learn not only the pleasures their actions can bring but also its pains. Whilst Elio and Jenny experience the thrills of first love and sexual awakening, the circumstances and the shape their desires take differ. Call Me By Your Name focuses more specifically on the psychological effects of Elio’s intimate physical encounter with Oliver, resulting in unexpected nose bleeds and teary breakdowns. Similarly, the pace with which their emotional connection matures is slow and pensive. By the time they fall for each other, their connection is so fully-fledged and to the brink with such emotional intensity that Oliver’s departure when it does come is as clear-cut as a knife edge, leaving Elio reeling in pain. Jenny on the other hand finds herself as much seduced by David as by the luxuriant lifestyle he leads, offering fancy restaurants, dresses and weekend trips at the tips of her fingers paid directly from his own pocket. She sees a future with him more desirable than laboriously plowing through Latin homework in school and later at university that cannot even guarantee her the fun she is having now.

Given this difference, the stakes for Elio and Jenny differ dependent on their social circumstances. The narrative of Call Me By Your Name revolves around Oliver and Elio’s interchangeable acts of trepidations, playfulness, craving, impatience and lust. The film’s romance can easily be translated for everyone and for all times, as viewers are able to relive the feelings they had when they first fell in love. Importantly too Elio’s parents not only recognize but also embrace their romance, making the home a safe environment for Elio to discover his sexuality. Neither Oliver nor Elio need to justify themselves but can instead enjoy the rare opportunity to live out their passions to their full intensity. Jenny’s experiences on the other hand do not play out in a bubble of safety but are very much rooted in the real world. Her relationship with David puts her in a position to make compromises with regards to her future Elio does not face. An Education is in that sense much more a social narrative on the choices women face in the 1960s, at a time of rising educational opportunities for women but still the recognition of marriage’s financial security. Jenny’s parents are strict, overbearing and stringent with money partly for their fear for Jenny and her future if she does not get the best education. Jenny’s temptation therefore to accept David’s marriage proposal is not only formed by the lifestyle she desires but also because it provides an alternative for finishing her education and one her parents could feasibly support. A risk shared by many women in her position, Jenny’s shortcut to happiness comes at the expense of her independence.

The role of parents, the advice they give and the meaning of education are in both films fundamental. It is often pitiful the way Jenny’s figures of authority, her parents, schoolteacher and headmistress assume stereotypical do-it-don’t-question roles that do not offer her, as an intelligent, ambitious student, a meaningful explanation as to why she needs an education. Even after Jenny discovers David was cheating on his wife, she accuses her parents for not having warned her from making the mistakes thousands of other young girls make. She therefore not only accepts her own mistakes but also the reality that her parents hadn’t steered her in the right direction. Elio’s parents on the other hand, acknowledge his romance with Oliver but do not force him to shove his feelings under the carpet. In one of the film’s most heart-breaking scene, Elio’s father tells his son that he should not suppress the feelings he had for Oliver but instead embrace them and live them to their fullest potential: “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of them faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30.” His advice is that one should not only plummet straight into feelings of love and beauty, but also of sorrow and pain and be careful to quench neither. For if they are suppressed, one gets trapped by one’s desires that prevent one from maturing into the people that they are and want to be. Perhaps both films in the contrasting role given to parents and the guidance they offer depicts the importance of a good education, seen not only in the decisions Elio and Jenny make but also the manner in which they pick themselves up afterwards. 

With education comes also the value accosted to knowledge, intelligence and learning. Italy’s timeless landscape and the discovery of ancient archaeological findings complements Elio and Oliver’s transient, sultry summer of love. Significantly, Elio’s father as a man of learning teaches his son that in order to fully understand one’s history and humanity, one must come to terms with the shape and nature of one’s own emotions and behaviour. An understanding of the world complements the knowledge a person carries of themselves: of one’s body, desires, dreams and of learning the perils of putting oneself at the mercy of another. By the end of An Education, Jenny’s has withstood complete failure to find her intelligence stretched to new capacities. By pursuing her education and retaking the final school year she lost by dropping out, Jenny takes her own life back into her hands to learn the hard way that one must persevere in order to live out one’s ambitions: that there are no short cuts to get what one really wants. Now as knowledgeable students of learning and life, Jenny and Elio have watched their emotional intelligence grow alongside them. Both stories depict with sincerity the way their journey showed them the prices of vulnerability and necessities of being honest with oneself and towards others. Whilst they may take a fall and graze their knees, they can also get up again and nurture their open wounds.

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Call Me By Your Name Review (2017)

To the brink with fresh, youthful emotional energy Call Me By Your Name (2017) indulges in the treasures of first love and leaves us gasping for more. The fresh honesty with which director Luca Guadagnino carves out the growing attraction between two people makes it a romance locked in a capsule of time for all times. He takes the subject of sensual desire from earlier works I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015) to different dimensions in both a wise and naïve coming-of-age story that inspires us to act on our impulses, take the chances of encounter and embrace both beauty and the pain that comes with it.  

Call Me By Your Name begins when Oliver, a handsome, confident scholar arrives to the house of archaeology professor Perlman in a northern Italian village for the summer as his assistant. Slightly condescendingly the professor’s 17-year-old son Elio gives him the status of an ‘usurper’ on arrival. However, as Oliver settles into their life and Elio as a good host shows him around the neighborhood, Oliver proves himself not only to take up a position in their household but also seize possession of Elio’s heart. What ensues is a summertime drawl knitting Oliver and Elio’s bond tighter and unprecedentedly setting off the spark to Elio’s own sexual awakening.

 Whilst Elio might seem restless and a bit precocious, he is also musical talented and book-learned expressing a deeper level of introspection and emotional sincerity. And whilst he does hang out with the local teenagers, he finds more excuses to spend time with Oliver bathing and cycling in the idyllic countryside. The symptoms of falling-in-love are all there and exquisitely portrayed: the playful glances, excuses for touching one another; Elio scribbling on scraps of paper tormented for saying the wrong things. Elio also begins wearing his own star of David necklace once seeing it on Oliver’s neck, consoled to find a piece of common identity. Their story of love is slow and pensive, interchanging acts of playfulness, trepidations, impatience, craving and lust. As such their emotional connection matures over time and intensifies the built-up tension between them, of what lies on the cusp but remains unsaid. Framing this, Elio’s mother reads him a story of a knight unable to tell a princess he loves her, questioning “Do you speak or do you die?” Similarly, Elio and Oliver equally struggle whether they dare make the next step instead of keeping their desires locked up inside them forever.

Guadagnino admits in an interview at the New York Film Festival of his preference for a narrative that is “at the very centre of his characters. To let leave the flesh and bone and blood and sperm and every other biological fruits of his characters that is in a way connected to an audience because we are like the people on screen.” As a sign of any good film, Oliver and Elio evolve into such whole emotionally fraught characters that we as viewers are hungry for their on-screen presences: because we also like to see what is most true to ourselves. Fighting personal impulses, Elio and Oliver fall head over heels for one another. Given the time Guadagnino affords for their emotional connection to develop means that Oliver’s departure when it comes is as clear-cut as a knife edge, Elio left reeling with grief.

This honesty manifests on the spotlight Guadagnino gives to bodies, skin and its vulnerabilities. Elio’s adolescent body reacts whilst processing the emotional intensity of his relationship with Oliver: he gets a nose bleed, throws up unexpectedly; cradles to the ones he loves to cry. His physical culpability suggests that Elio and Oliver, by laying claims to each other’s hearts, surrender themselves entirely before one another. Complementing this is the timeless natural landscape and the film’s archaeological musings. Swimming in vaults and the discovery of ancient findings from the sea is contrasted with the transience of Elio and Oliver’s summer of love. Their connection is as youthful as it is ripe, like the purity of the apricot juice they drink and typifying the heartfelt moment when Oliver caresses a shamed Elio in his arms having ejaculated into a peach.

Questions of knowledge frame their fleeting romance; of the world, of themselves and what it means to know: “If you only knew how little I know about the things that matter,” Elio admits to Oliver. Elio’s parents are pivotal in making Call Me By Your Name as a coming-of-age tale a narrative on education and the treasures yet also the prices of knowing. Rather than shunning or brushing their relationship under the table, Elio’s father in a heart-breaking speech tells him not only to embrace his emotions but do so with the utmost intensity. “What you two had, had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. When you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding out our weakest spots.” He beckons us to link the knowledge of the earth and of history with that of us, our bodies, desires, dreams and the perils of opening up and exposing yourself to another.  

Call Me By Your Name’s endearing romance looks at what it means to become a subject of desire. Guadagnino describes it as the “need to act out”, to “start seeing things outside of you and question yourself in front of the other in its otherness.” It is about accepting and bringing your feelings into fruition, to its fullest potential before it’s too late. “Feel something you obviously did,” Elio’s father tells his son, “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of them faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30.” The ripening of Elio and Oliver’s relationship suggests that we should let things happen in the time they take. We should not only plummet straight into feelings of love and beauty, but also of sorrow and pain and be careful to quench neither. As a father’s advice, keep those emotions alive like we treasure ancient findings. But unlike tinkering artifacts, “our hearts and our bodies are only given to us once. And before you know it, your heart’s worn out.”

[ellie-steiner]

On Ruben Östlund’s Dystopian Realities: ‘Force Majeure’ and ‘The Square’

(published on Vague Visages 01 December)

Colossal would be an apt word to define Ruben Östlund’s cinema. Whether facing ominous mountain-scapes or lost in overbearing architectural structures, Östlund’s characters always appear to be facing something fantastical, horrifying or otherwise a greater force beyond their comprehension. Marvellously, however, Östlund pulls in the reins to reveal relatively “normal” filmic realities, where nothing too exaggerated or out of place occurs. Force Majeure opens with grand establishing shots of sharp-edged French alps set to Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, followed by a boy peeing in the grand waterfall of the hotel bathroom. This montage series is typical Östlund: punchy, ironic and progressively building up an ominous tone to a pristine family skiing holiday. In The Square, the life of a contemporary gallery owner, Christian, is depicted with equal uncomfortable grandness. At the film’s inception in the confronting empty white space of his gallery, Christian is grilled by a maddeningly awkward interviewer on the meaning of his new hyped-up exhibit “The  Square.” This installation intends to scrutinise and strip away the social conventions according to which people behave responsibly. This relates to the way Östlund addresses morality and social behaviour in both films, criticising the complacency of the middle-class by proceeding to turn his characters’ lives on their heads and hold them at knife’s edge.

Two of these protagonists are male and assume hierarchical middle-class roles: the successful (yet somewhat awkward), model-faced Christian (The Square); and Thomas, the head of the household family matched perfectly even to their clothing (Force Majeure). Östlund further proceeds to trash their complacent bourgeois worlds. In Force Majeure, the key turning-point occurs 10 minutes into a relatively content skiing holiday, as the family is struck by the blasts of a fake avalanche explosion. The moment they realise that the enormous blast of snow will wash over them, Thomas — in a state of shock — abruptly picks up his phone and flees, abandoning his wife and children. As the scene clears and Thomas refuses to admit to his actions, his wife Ebba becomes frustrated and angry to the detriment of their blissful family dynamic. In The Square, Christian gets robbed outside his art gallery. Although a relatively small occurrence for a gallery owner, he goes on a grand quest to take revenge on his perpetrator. Tracing his belongings on a “Find My Phone” app to a block of apartments, he sends threatening letters into every mailbox. The morals behind his own exhibit shadow his daily life as his own behaviour is put under scrutiny. Both of the character portrayals are surprisingly intimate, coming to terms with the reality that neither of them can be the person they want to be or are expected to be. This results in Christian being attacked by everyone and Thomas literally cast out of the family into the hotel corridor and breaking into a pathetic meltdown.

The beauty of Östlund’s films is that the reality he depicts is quite normal yet subtly threatening, as characters have absolutely no control. Against the craggy mountainous face, the canon-fire of controlled avalanches and impending storms, there is a sense in Force Majeure that the lives of the characters are always precarious — as if a “bigger force” is at play. Christian is also presented as a victim after a series of events take place to his own detriment. After releasing an “edgy” yet wildly inappropriate promotion video for his installation, he is brutally hashed by the press. One of the flat’s inhabitants, an angry boy banned from his play station after being wrongfully blamed for planting Christian’s letter as a prank, hunts him down to request an apology. Christian frustratingly refuses, claiming that it wasn’t his fault, as he had to make this decision in the first place. So, what Östlund really wants to talk about — from one bizarre display to the next — is people’s lack of altruism and oblivion to the problems of others: an inability, in other words, to think outside their own “box.” By aggressively exposing his characters, Östlund squeezes out what hitherto remained suppressed. Thomas screams into the hills as the expectations of his masculinity have been trumped. Christian sends a long text message to the boy (eventually beyond his comprehension), mostly to justify his behaviour given his social standing in life. He never receives a response and, upon realising the boy has moved out of the block of apartments, never will.

Östlund takes great joy in immersing his films with what he calls “horrifying, awkward moments,” and with the end goal of putting human behaviour to the test. He brings to the fore perfect situations and socially deconstructs them into dystopian nightmares, placing in both of his films the primacy of survival over altruism. In Force Majeure, Ebba conceives of the necessity that Thomas — as a husband and father — should have instinctually put the needs of his family over his own (in a moment of crisis). This is pushed even to the next level by a performance piece in The Square: a man with ape mannerisms walks into the gallery’s decadent hall where the guests are having dinner. What initially starts as a performance soon gets out of hand and involves chasing a prominent artist out of the hall and violating the crowd. The enclosed space that situates predator and prey is a perfect display of the animal hunting instinct — that if one displays fear or tries to run, the animal will sense it and hunt the prey down. Therefore, the only way to be safe is to remain still, and blend into the herd — which is what happens when the ape begins harassing a girl and no one responds. As Östlund himself describes, “Being a prey is something involuntary. We put quite some guilt in the individual when it comes to situations like this… but the reason that we end up in this situation is that we are herd animals, and we don’t know how to react.”

Painfully ironic, aggressive and humorously on point, Östlund’s films are timely cinematic pieces that put their characters’ moral compasses at stake.

[ellie-steiner]

Deux Irenes (Film Fest Gent)

(Published on Unsung Film 03/10/17)

Thirteen-year old Irene (Priscilla Bittencourt) calls out her name into the vast Brazilian drylands: it echoes before falling away into the hilly expanse. “Stop wasting my name!” mutters her friend Irene (Isabela Torres) as she catches up with her on the ragged hilltop. Two Irenesreverberates Irenes. Fabio Meira in his latest searching, delicately crafted piece of film-making messes around with doubles. The film follows a shy and gangly teenager discovering her father (Marco Ricca) having another family: a woman and another 13-year old girl with her name. As Irene suspiciously gets closer to inspect her imposter sister, her distrust soon transforms into an allure of her double’s more confident and grown-up mannerisms. Irene finds that as her bond of friendship with Irene grows, she herself becomes more tangled up in the double life her father leads.

Meira’s narration from a young girl’s conflicted point-of-view has made the film one of the more sensitive coming-of-age stories I have recently seen, captured in the hot Brazilian climate. Irene is overlooked by her family (especially in favour of her more beautiful older sister) and spies the way her father Tonico is more affectionate towards the other passionate, outspoken and, to her mind, transgressive Irene. This impression is formed as she first lays eyes on her strutting up a catwalk, showy, fiery and far less disciplined than she is expected to be in her own traditional household. As they eventually become friends, Irene shows her how to pick up boys at the cinema and lends her revealing crop tops to the shock of her mother. A wonderful parallel depicts Irene eating a local pork dish at her house with a knife and fork; later the other Irene’s mother instructs her to devour the same dish with her hands to better enjoy the succulent meat.

Read at Unsung Films: The Kid with a Bike.

What is fascinating and sadly not fully given the attention it deserves in Two is the role Irene’s father plays in shaping her friendship and own coming-of-age. After Irene discovers her Tonico’s other family, she refuses to call him ‘father’ not only out of anger and resentment but also because she feels he has betrayed his position as a parent. He appears to favour the other Irene more, permitting her to act and dress as she wishes whilst calling out Irene for even putting on nail polish. What’s important is that Irene’s desire to express herself is driven more by wanting to be like the other Irene and win back her father’s position. And this does happen – Tonico appears to like her the more she picks up the other Irene’s habits such as refusing food at the dinner table and wearing revealing clothes. Irene desires to be a part of the other Irene’s household intrigued by what draws him to it: glimpsing the other Irene run her hand through her father’s hair, she tries to copy her affection by taking off his shoes when he gets home. And so the growing friendship between the two Irenes is complemented by a tension concerning the way their father comparably acts towards them. Crucial therefore is the attention Meira draws to Irene’s striving to make herself seen again as her father’s daughter: the presence of her double therefore threatens to waste her value to him much like her name trailing in the winds of the hilly valley.

Yet Tonico is barely given a voice. There’s this poignant scene when Irene edges closer to her father nestling on his shoulder in an act of seeming reconciliation. This is followed immediately by the finale: both Irenes swap households and disclose his lies and cheatings. Keeping the father elusive might be part of Meira’s subtlety in filming; his presence after all does emerge from the growing bond between the two girls and is inextricably tied to it. This did not however satisfy what seemed to be a somewhat unfulfilled ending.

[ellie-steiner]

1945 (Film Fest Gent)

(published on Unsung Films, 29/10/2017)

Ferenc Török’s 1945 casts fresh light on cinema’s much-featured and debated time period, the Holocaust. At odds with the contemporary outlook of the rest of Film Fest Gent’s Official Selection, 1945 is set in a small, conservative Hungarian village on a hot August day in the aftermath of the Second World War. Shot with the prominent beauty of the New Garde of Hungarian cinema, it celebrates to my eyes the way cinema casts emotional sensibility on turbulent times.

Aesthetically fascinating (and as one would describe it a ‘feast for the senses’), watching Török’s masterpiece stirred within me some thoughts: given continuous technical improvements, could films made today express the collective consciousness, even traumas, of another time period with greater emotional weight than ones made closer to the time they had occurred? This likely determined my own viewing experience of 1945, which in part due to its cinematic style I found to be more emotionally captivating than many previous Holocaust films I had seen despite its distance from the occurrence of events (with some exceptions like the award-winning Schindler’s List).

Read at Unsung Films: Klimov’s Come and See and the War Film Genre

After the screening in Gent, Török described to audiences in the packed screening hall his influences from American Westerns both in terms of the stark, blistering landscapes (the image at times blurred by the capture of sweltering heat-waves) and the fact that 1945 begins and ends with the coming and going of a train. These features are important in bringing the film’s prominent focus on retribution to the fore. The train brings and carries away two mysterious Jews in traditional black clothing. They hire a horse and carriage to journey gravely through the village, their destination unbeknownst until the very end. Their arrival disturbs the villagers’ busy wedding preparations stirring suspicion, restlessness and eventual panic. Their march functions like the narrative thread unravelling and exposing the village’s buried collective guilt as a fundamental question eventually gets raised: could these have been Jews betrayed by the villagers during the war which led to their capture and deportation? This burning mystery lingers in the sizzling oppressive air.

1945’s attention to nuanced detail is heightened by the black and white cinematography.  Török focus on close-ups draws particular attention to the textural details on the surface of skins, characters’ emotional burdens lined intangibly in their expressions. This is complemented by the excellent soundtrack punctuating the non-dialogue scenes and part of the film’s melancholic pacing. Doors slamming, glass crashing, chairs scraping; faces slapped, a hangman’s rope harrowingly creaking: these are sounds which shape the narrative and construct an unsettling, implicit sense of violence contributing to the atmosphere of evil, shame and paranoia. 1945 reveals more every time it is watched and more layers are unpeeled: conveying feelings’ internalisation, what remains unsaid, Török‘s content and style can be likened to Michael Haneke’s tormenting The White Ribbon.

Török expresses post-war sentiments with the pioneering force of a cinematic sensibility, bringing a new intelligent outlook on the subject.

[ellie-steiner]

The Square (Film Fest Gent)

(published on Unsung Films, 27/10/2017)

Of all the films I had the opportunity to see at the film festival in Gent, Ruben Östlund’s painfully humorous The Square was the only one which brought tears to my eyes with laughter. Östlund’s cinematic portrait is as satirical as it is dark, teasing one absurd misfortune after another in the life of the straight-edged but seemingly innocuous Christian (played by Danish actor Claes Bang), lead curator of a highly successful contemporary art museum. The tale he tells continuously jabs at society and holds it at knife’s edge. Wanting to make his gallery a big hit, he is persuaded by his PR team that a provocative, performance-related installation is needed to stir up a great social media scandal. Thus he inaugurates “The Square”, an enclosed space dictating the way people should behave responsibly. Dramatic music accompanies the carving of a luminescent square into the pavement at the gallery’s entrance (Östlund here uses soundtrack with sarcasm not too dissimilar from his equally dramatic film Force Majeure).

This introduces the way The Square incorporates humour to cast a shade of irony on the world of contemporary arts and compare it to societies’ absurdities. That being said, Christian’s philosophy is immediately put to the test when his wallet and phone gets stolen with a show of empathy tricking better than any performance that could take place in his gallery. After locating his device to a block of apartments on a ‘Find My Phone’ app, he sets outs in a bizarre mood of aggression to take revenge on his perpetrator – soaring down the highway blasting Genesis’ ‘Justice’, he arrives at the block and shoves letters into every mailbox threatening to impose terror if his belongings are not returned. Although he miraculously does get his possession back, his act catapults into a series of other unforeseen events.

One can see Östlund takes great pleasure filling his films with what he calls “horrifying awkward moments.” Encounters are all too frequently so embarrassing they are painful and funny to watch. Protagonists are uncomfortably faced with more than one possibility how to act that there are only inappropriate ways of doing things. In the film’s absurd universe, Christian all too frequently finds himself to be the victim of every situation he is faced with: his colleague, who comes up with the idea of sending letters forces Christian to enter the apartment block to do his own dirty work. His encounters with an American reporter (Elizabeth Moss) are as fierce when she grills him on the meaning of his art as she is confronting him about stealing his condom after they have sex. When his wildly inappropriate promo video backfires, he is slaughtered by the press.

Finally, the film’s highlight is the appearance of a young boy and one of the block’s unfortunate inhabitants. Accused by his parents of sending the letter as a prank and unrightfully banning him from his play station, he hunts down Christian and goes on a rampage to try make him apologise for his actions. At this point Christian is so frustrated by his own predicament that he refuses to apologise in spite of the boy’s persistent pleads because, well, why should he be culpable for a series of stupid events when he could not foresee his own mugging? And why should he bother with other people’s problems when he only wants to return to his own ‘normal’ life?

Read at Unsung Films: The One I Love

What Östlund really wants to talk about from one bizarre display to the next is people’s lack of altruism and oblivion to the problems of others: an inability, in other words, to think outside their own ‘box’. In the beautifully choreographed scene of his own robbery, Christian at first refuses the request for money from a by-standing beggar only to find himself afterwards being refused help from the crowd. The irony of the square’s meaning is pushed to the next excruciating level, bordering on violence, in a scene of the gallery’s inaugural dinner.

This event is commenced by a piece of The Square’s art installation: a man with mannerisms of an ape walks into the decadent hall. What initially starts as a performance soon gets out of hand and involves chasing a prominent artist out of the hall and violating the crowd. The enclosed space situating predator and prey is a perfect display of the animal hunting instinct – that if one displays fear or tries to run, the animal will sense it and hunt the prey down. The only way therefore to be safe is to remain still, and blend into the herd: which is what happens when the ape begins harassing a girl and no one responds. As Östlund himself describes, “Being a prey is something involuntary: we put quite some guilt in the individual when it comes to situations like this … but the reason that we end up in this situation is that we are herd animals and we don’t know how to react.

Film Fest Gent‘s programmers picked films working to “unveil modern utopias”: The Square in this regard is a perfect example of a film that tries to pick up apart the modern societal condition. The case of the man-ape is just a mockery of the surreal situations Christian is confronted with and forcing him to think outside of his square. When he finally sends a voice message to the boy to apologise, he continues trying in vain to explain the bigger picture from which his behaviour emerged, and also his segregation from the boy’s way of life that has made him turn a blind eye. The Square is Östlund‘s next cinematic achievement to critically and cruelly inspect human behaviour.