EUROPE IN FOCUS: STORM (THE REVELATION)

By SAÏDEH PAKRAVAN - The long-awaited trial by the International Tribunal at the Hague of Radovan Karadzic, one of the Serbian leaders responsible for the Bosnian genocide and accused of crimes against humanity has not yet taken off. Like his mentor Milosevic who actually died before sentencing—a death that in its timeliness, one might think orchestrated by the devil himself—the Serb uses every kind of loophole to avoid allowing international justice, such as it is, to be served.

Smack in the middle of this drama that Karadzic is preventing from being played out comes “Storm” (“La révélation” in France) that has had screenings for one day only before its official release a few months from now. A totally gripping drama about the bureaucracy of international organizations (imagine!) it follows prosecutor Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox) whose first witness against a Serb war criminal, General Goran Duric, turns out to be useless. She then puts all her energy into presenting a solid case with the help of another witness played by Anamaria Marinca (Otilia in Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) though she doesn’t have much support. Her direct boss whom she resents since he received a promotion for which she was more qualified only wants to keep his bosses happy by making as few waves as possible, even at the cost of letting walk the war criminal, a nationalist hero among Serbs. Her sometimes boyfriend is a United Nations official who is only interested in making sure that these trials don’t jeopardize Serbian entry into the EU. And the witness and her family are terrified of reprisals by thugs still at large. But the prosecutor doesn’t let go. The dramatic finale, though not quite believable and not quite satisfying still sees the villain punished, sort of. “Storm” leaves us deeply conscious of the imperfection of our too-human organizations in dealing with higher questions of ethics and morality versus expediency. Also with the nagging question: does evil know it’s evil? Would it make us sleep better to know that the Hitlers of the world hate what they see in the mirror?

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: SIN NOMBRE

By SAÏDEH PAKRAVAN - Near the Mexican border, scraps of cardboard bear the scrawled words “Sin Nombre” or “nameless,” for the migrants who died trying to make the journey to El Norte. That heartbreaking qualifier was one of the inspirations for the eponymous film by Cary Fukunaga, adding “Sin Nombre” to the vast literature about the great migrations of our times covered in detailed essays, films, novels, and news articles. We knew or could guess at the misery and determination of the wretched of the earth desperate to reach El Norte where flow rivers of milk and honey (as shown to great effect in Emanuele Crialese’s lyrical “Nuovomondo” in 2006). But who knew that the freight trains going from Central American countries to the United States through Mexico carry, huddled on the roofs of wagons, thousands and thousands of clandestine immigrants, an endless column of ants on the move, undeterred, unstoppable, intent on reaching their goal? The trains reminded this critic of nothing so much as Costa-Gavras’s “Amen” where freight trains from all over Europe carry Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Birkenau. The difference with “Sin Nombre” is that here people board the trains on their own volition, starting a journey fraught with all kinds of dangers and risks to flee El Sur, their homelands of poverty and misery where they have no future and basically no life. Growing up in shantytowns amid piles of garbage, prey to disease or violent gangs, all they want is out but only a minute number will succeed.

Critics call Cary Fukunaga, born of a Japanese father and American mother, raised in California, the director whom every one loves to hate. Imagine a gifted young man, barely out of film school at NYU, turning his thesis into a screenplay, having it produced by Focus, and showered with praise and awards—richly deserved one and all. Fukunaga says he never dreamed anything like this could happen. Before “Sin Nombre,” all he had under his belt was a short film about a number of illegal immigrants who die in a van in Texas. Captivated by the plight of the clandestine travelers from Central and North America, he himself made the trip several times, though in his case he could always hop off and go home to California. As he says in an interview, he had the luxury to leave. “It wasn’t my journey to make,” he adds.

Not only did Fukunaga get firsthand all the information he needed regarding the actual trip but he also unfolds the parallel story of Mara Salvatrucha or MS, the incredibly violent gang that has thousands of operators both in Mexico and LA. There too he gets his information directly from gang members who collaborated with the project once assured that the director meant no disrespect.

One is reminded of another young director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and his extraordinarily mature, intelligent, and well-constructed film, “The Life of Others,” which also describes a world the director gets right despite not knowing it—in this case East Germany whose doom-and-gloom atmosphere he perfectly renders.

Fukunaga, for his part, adds a couple of young people caught in this relentless tale of gang culture and an impossible goal. Like most of the actors in “Sin Nombre,” they’re unknowns (except for Paulina Gaitan, has been in several films including most recently 'Trade') who have never faced a camera before and all the more credible for it. The director who forms a strong emotional connection with his characters makes no political statement and has no political goals but shows us in “Sin Nombre” a reality that we may wish we could continue to ignore but no longer can after this powerful and poignant film that reminds us to count our blessings.

THE ROAD

By KEVIN BOWEN - Grade: A; Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce Director: John Hillcoat

The nature of the disaster that ends civilization in The Road is never explained. Not in the Cormac McCarthy novel. Not in the fantastic John Hillcoat screen version. Yet you would be kidding yourself to bet against a nuclear war.

It could be a comet strike, or an asteroid, or super-volcanic activity, as has been proposed. If it were any other author, those choices might make sense. But would a writer like McCarthy, who has so assiduously held forth on violence, leave the end of the world up to random astronomical chance? I’m deeply skeptical.

So it needs to be appreciated that the father and son of The Road are not only wandering across a slowly dying earth. They are wandering through the apocalyptic aftermath of the ultimate act of nihilism. And in this we connect The Road to the dream the Sheriff reveals at the end of No Country for Old Men, of his father leading him with a torch safely through an intimidating darkness. Here, the father and son speak of their mission of survival as “carrying a fire.”

The Road is already gaining a reputation for being “bleak” and “pessimistic.” Yet for all its cannibalism, dead forests and ashy winter sky, I think this is wrong – I find it enormously optimistic. Because what it says to us is that a world abandoned by hope does not need to be abandoned by our humanity. And what you find at the end of the road might not be sun, or shelter, or deep blue sea, but rather those Faulknerian virtues – love, and honor, and the willingness to endure.

Hillcoat earned this chance with his terrific Outback Western The Proposition, compared by Roger Ebert to McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian (The lead is one of Ebert’s all-time great lines, “The Proposition relocates the Western from Colorado to Hell.”).In The Road, he abandons that film’s violent, sun-drenched spectacle in favor of futuristic anti-spectacle – all ash, and gray, and grit. Every abandoned house echoes with the deadest of dreams.

The performances have the flavor of red meat, barely cooked, desperate. Both Viggo Mortensen and the remarkable Kodi Smit-McPhee give performances of scrawny vulnerability, with only love to shield them. As the resigned wife of memory, Charlize Theron gives us five minutes that deeply sting. Her mysterious walk into the dark forest will remind film lovers of the dame’s disappearance into the jungle in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God. And what is Herzog’s dictum – that extreme conditions reveal the human essence? There is no better description of the events of The Road. Yet it remains a movie of fathers teaching sons and sons teaching fathers, as manfully tender as anything in Field of Dreams. This strange confluence of love and desperation will sear itself into your mind and stay there.

JANE CAMPION'S BRIGHT STAR

By KEVIN BOWEN - Grade: A; Cast: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Paul Schneider, Kerry Fox; Director: Jane Campion. In Bright Star, the poet John Keats explains poetry as going into a lake only with a mind to luxuriate there, not to think about how to swim to shore.

This could be known as the Jane Campion dilemma, after the film’s talented, maddening director, who always gets caught thinking about how to swim to shore. Sometimes she swims to shore even when she’s not in the lake. At her best she is the absolute master of ritual, passion and restraint. At her worst, she is an over- decorator of temporarily fashionable received wisdom that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the camera.

The referendum for this dilemma is the moment in The Piano when Holly Hunter takes the plunge overboard strapped to the sinking ivories. Even the film’s admirers must admit this is an overly poetic gesture that nearly takes the film down to Davy Jones’ Locker with it, redeemed only by the shockingly sudden revelation of her first words. And if you’ve seen the last half hour of Holy Smoke!, then you know … Holy Smoke!

With the immaculate Bright Star, Campion allows us for once to swim to the middle of the lake and not worry about the shore, to simply luxuriate in her story of passion and her quiet directorial ferocity. Bright Star finds her at her most relaxed, most charming, most intellectually subtle and most passionate.

The story of the three-year long nineteenth century love affair between Keats and his neighbor Fannie Brawne, Bright Star is foremost about wildly passionate love. But given Keats’ early death, it is not an easy story of love. If things don’t work, there’s no going back to the architect Mom likes. It’s love as mystical investment, as frightening as it can be joyous. It also relates what it is like to be loved so thoroughly as to inspire some of the English language’s greatest words.

But this is not Keats’ film but that of Brawne, and Bright Star is a tribute to seduction and the mystique of feminine beauty. I say tribute quite deliberately. While American films associate seduction with feminine threat, here it is viewed as the greatest inspiration. Keats’ obnoxious best friend Charles Brown might dismiss Fannie’s talent for lovely and colorful dressmaking as flirtation and frippery. But we are invited to see it as the maximization of feminine adornment and her natural power. She cannot match her lover’s words with a pen, so she does so with a needle. As she is the muse for Keats’ poetry, he becomes – first exuberantly and then poignantly – the muse for her own form of expression.

Ben Whishaw never once lets you doubt his Keats-ness, and when was the last time that Paul Schneider didn’t steal his scene? Fanny’s quest for substantive acceptance is particularly telling for Cornish, whose roles until this moment have consisted of lovely adornment. I’m still not sure this signals a great talent, as the necessary characterization is so restrained that it is hard to say. But she fits it like a long elegant violet glove.

The real stars are the astounding art direction, set design, and composition. It’s a melody of mise-en-scene, with all things in the picture working to one harmonious end, under the stunning control of Campion. What interests her most is the ritualization of passion, and the way that human beings tapdance about the edges of propriety to satisfy their desire. In this she shares concerns with Stanley Kubrick’s great Barry Lyndon (I’ve called The Piano “the female Barry Lyndon.”). But whereas Kubrick shapes his story in part into an anti-authoritarian polemic that reflects upon modernity, Campion invests deeply in the personal feeling, and simply makes you feel what it was like to be that person living in that place at that time.

GOOD HAIR: A GOOD DOCUMENTARY

By KEVIN BOWEN - Grade: B, Cast: Chris Rock. Director: Jeff Stilson. What a pleasant surprise. Chris Rock channels Michael Moore, but instead of greed, he examines black women and their hair. The results is a refreshing look at the love and mania caused by our natural and unnatural tops.

We start the documentary at a yearly hair product extravaganza in Atlanta for hair products. There we learn that eighty percent of the market for these products comes from black people. Hairstyles are that important. Then we meet the flamboyant contestant and get a feel for their flamboyant performances. We move from there to black men and women jawing for nearly two hours about all facets of hair, from self-esteem to sex.

While that might seem trivial, the thing is that the film isn’t without substance. Special attention is paid to how hair in India shorn at temples ends up in the United States as part of a weave, which is the biggest trend in black female hairstyles. Likewise , the film pays attention to the fact that black hair products are now rarely sold by black-owned companies, a fact that makes Al Sharpton talk about how this constitutes economic exploitation. The film is also very frank about the near torture that the women go through to get their hair the way they want it, often as sported by white models. The most eye-opening moment is when a scientist dips Coke cans into the ingredients of hair straightener and watches them dissolve.

In this it sort of mirrors The Cove, except with more purpose and less porpoise. It is alternately humorous and engaging, while also gaining real interest and credibility in detailing the business and sometimes disturbing dealings behind finding the perfect do. Rock does an excellent job of bridging both sides and making this documentary something worth seeing.

CHILEAN DIRECTOR'S 'THE MAID' DEBUTS WORLDWIDE

By ALI NADERZAD - Latin America as a matriarchal society is a reality that’s alive and well in director Sebastian Silva’s ‘The Maid’ (La Nana). Raquel (Catalina Saveedra) has been a live-in maid for twenty-five years with the Valdes family, an outpost of affluence based in the Chilean capital. And from the looks and sounds of it in ‘The maid,’ women not only rule the coop but fathers are relegated to merely existing within their man-child role. At a post-screening discussion at the Angelika Theatre last night, the filmmaker, Sebastian Silva, stated he wanted the father--he spends his time between clandestine trips to the golf course (in one scene his wife admonishes him gently, “you should think about playing less golf sometimes”) and building model ships--to appear like he’s just one of the kids.

Domestic workers are still very much the norm in Latin American countries. Many older apartments in Rio de Janeiro (the custom is prevalent there as well) have servant quarters and maids often have their own assistants. This kind of issue is bound to be over-simplified by some and even turned into a political issue, and therein lies the film’s appeal no. 1: a wee bit of old world versus new world values controversy.

The Valdes family is a normal family, and if there are skeletons in the closet, we are not made privy to them and they are not relevant. Ninety percent of ‘The Maid’ focuses on Raquel’s morose and tick-prone mug as she carries out the various tasks of the day and sometimes unleashes a torrent of spite on the child she favors less, Camila. Again, we’re not told where or how the antagonistic relationship began but violence between the live-in maid and the teenaged daughter at first threatens to collapse the household's fragile equilibrium at any time.

Even though most of the film is focused on Raquel, we don't know much about her at all. The director said afterwards that he wanted to reveal as little as possible about her--he also mentioned did say that the film was very much based on his life. Of Raquel we learn this: she takes medication for an unnamed affliction that makes her dizzy and faint (she falls a couple of times while serving the Valdeses their breakfast in bed), and her relationship with her mother, with whom she talks on the phone, is fraught with an emotional awkwardness whose nature we never learn about. And in spite all these unknowns it’s refreshing not to be spoon-fed the subtext like in so many American movies, a reminder that movies ought to provoke thought, not annihilate it.

The rest of the time, the surly Raquel prepares breakfast for her charges, gets them ready for school and vaccums the house.

When he first about writing "The Maid," Silva thought of Catalina Saveedra as the main character right away. But when he offered her the role, initially she said, “fuck you, man. I've done too many maids!”' She actually had portrayed 17 different maids in sitcoms and soap operas. The maids on TV in Chile are always these girls showing their boobs and are just sort of silly characters. He told her, “I'm sorry, you're just the perfect one for this role. I promise you this is going to be a different kind of maid.”

Silva filmed everything with a digital handheld camera (a Panasonic P2 HD ) in his own parents’ house and confirmed the many borrowings from his personal life. In a surprising bit of reversal, Silva declared that having live-in maids was akin to slavery and talked, in passing, of the unions’ organizing efforts back home in Chile. That’s where my attention started to wander. If a kid is issued from the linen-scented folds of the gentrified class and his film does not portray the parents as tyrannical, then what’s the problem? In fact, Pilar (Claudia Celedón) seems like Raquel’s strong-willed benefactor: she was protective of her maid when she had a spat with the eldest daughter, and in spite some of the strife the maid caused, Pilar refused to fire her claiming that you can’t do this to someone after twenty-five years of service.

I thought it was interesting how the post-screening discussion could almost have led to the audience organizing a drive for Chilean live-in maids justice, and yet the film itself hardly scratched at the perceived immorality of keeping servants around the house. Surely there are plenty of families around the world who mistreat their servants—one would have to be a cretin to ignore it. But there is an upside to this live-in maid business: people who otherwise would have little prospects are lifted out of poverty and are able to obtain better living conditions, albeit by tending to another human being’s needs and sometimes their whims. Silva told us that the first official screening of the film was for the two main characters of the movie, the real-life Raquel and her consort, Lucy (Mariana Loyola) whom the family hired to help Raquel in her chores after her dizzy spells began. The second screening was shown to about three-hundred maids in Santiago, and apparently there was a lot of hooting and hollering and appreciating. Shot in sixteen days in the filmmaker’s own house in Santiago (“my parents took off on vacation and I seized the opportunity”), Sebastian Silva, who had made one film before this, has been making the rounds of film festivals and is traveling with the film in the U.S. for its limited release roll-out.

Last night was quite a marvel to experience for this writer: to see a good Chilean film by a young and up-for-it filmmaker with promise and also to see independent film awarded and recognized. This does not happen on the Chilean front very often. Oh, and the 250,000 + budget for the film has already been recouped by the filmmaker through multi-country sales. Bravo Sebastian Silva for a very strong film.

FRENCH THRILLER SET IN JOHN LE CARRE COUNTRY

By SAÏDEH PAKRAVAN - Christian Carion’s espionage thriller takes place at the height of the Cold War. Loosely based on actual facts, it tells the story of KGB colonel Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica) who for mostly idealistic reasons uses a French businessman (a sober performance by Guillaume Canet) to tell Western intelligence agencies about Soviet spying on military installations and structure in their countries. In 1965, with the first film based on a John Le Carré novel, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” --a somber, stark B&W film with Richard Burton in the lead role--the world discovered that spying was not all about smooth, urbane, tuxedo-wearing James Bond casually dropping fortunes at casinos on the French Riviera, jumping from the bed of one sexy broad to the next, and, time permitting, getting rid of the bad guys. Rather, Burton’s crumpled, exhausted face reflected that the reality of spying must be a dismal affair, learning to suspect everyone, living with the constant fear of being found out by the side you work for and the side you spy on--sometimes one and the same--the rapid loss of any illusion one might harbor as to ideals and principles, the certainty that all humans are worms only busy digging for a darker hiding place and an assured food supply. Also the realization, almost overnight, that agendas and motivations are not what you expect, there is no selflessness, nothing is straightforward, and no matter appearances, human beings, including ourself, are never good. All this to say that “L’affaire Farewell” fits snuggly into John le Carré country, as far from James Bond as imaginable. Don’t expect to be uplifted but rather ponder on the uselessness of so many pieces of our history. What was communism all about? Did people on all sides lose their souls? Is this why our world is now in the hands of thugs rather than those of murderous or peaceful ideologues? And are we better off?

LARS VON TRIER'S ANTICHRIST

By SAÏDEH PAKRAVAN- Has Lars von Trier ever made an accomplished film? To be sure, the man who stated flat out in Cannes that he was “the best director in the world” has an impressive filmography. But “Dogville,” “Breaking the Waves,” “Dancer in the Dark,” are any of these films actually good? One can argue, of course, that only the most pedestrian mind would expect art to be “good” when it can be so many other things. And a von Trier film is always many other things. Thought-provoking and provoking, disturbing, original, starkly and knowingly shocking, etc. But to this reviewer at least, they fall flat. They start out with a compelling premise but, like the road to hell, soon run into trouble. The problems that plague the Danish director’s films come to the fore in “Antichrist,” shown to much heated argument at the recent Cannes film festival. The film opens here this week. Did censorship prevail? Apparently not, but at what cost? The U.S. version received no cuts and will not have a rating. In a country where Janet Jackson’s breast is still infuriating censors several years after its brief exposure at the Super Bowl, the hardcore images and the harrowing scenes of sexual mutilation in “Antichrist” would not be allowed normally. So, “Antichrist.” I will not fall into either of the two camps that practically came to blows in Cannes—the one shocked by the extreme gore and the one engaging into metaphysical or theological discussions about a fairly sophomoric exposé of the degradation suffered by women through the ages and the pacts they may or may not have entered into with Satan. What’s the story here? A couple loses a child, goes into decaying, dark, deserted woods to recuperate—not the most obvious choice, one would think, but appropriate for what follows—the woman goes mad, or may have been mad, or possessed, or plain evil, from before. The film, divided into four chapters sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue, doesn’t work as a horror film—too much suspension of disbelief and of rationality required—doesn’t work as the unraveling of a relation—we can’t bring ourselves to care about this odd couple, the husband a moronic therapist encouraging his wife to get over the awful death of her baby by taking deep breaths and counting to five—doesn’t work as a history lesson, even in the chapter glibly titled “gynocide,” and doesn’t work as a Hyeronimus Bosch-inspired vision of hell in the nature around us and within us. Most unforgivably, the first part is rather boring and the second part rather grotesque. Anthony Mantle, the cinematographer behind “Slumdog Millionnaire” and “the Last King of Scotland,” does some nice work here but the slow-mo shots in a sea of ferns and dead trees grow repetitive as do too many jerky handheld images. A few years back, “The Blair Witch Project” with its dreadful sense of doom and its scenes all the more terrifying for never spelling anything out was far more shattering than this ambiguous amalgam of various themes into a pompous film that never takes off. Von Trier remains a director to be reckoned with but, beside his unsatisfactory tackling of subjects too complex for a two-hour overview, will be remembered for his Dogme95 movement—lightweight, perhaps, as compared to the influence of Italian neo-realism and, later, of the French new wave, but still, unlike “Antichrist,” opening doors into a range of possibilities.

JACQUES AUDIARD'S 'A PROPHET'

By SAÏDEH PAKRAVAN - A number of film critics and a good portion of the film-going public in France hold Jacques Audiard to be the country’s foremost director. Previous works such as “A Self-Made Hero” (1996) and “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” (2005) helped create this reputation. The absolutely stunning “A Prophet” confirms it. The film, which received the Grand Prix at the last Cannes Festival, tells the story of Malik el Djebena, a nineteen-year old second- generation Arab in prison with a six-year sentence for an unspecified crime. Malik makes himself indispensable to the Corsican capo, Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), after having passed with flying colors his first test--killing inside the prison a witness for the prosecution at an upcoming trial. A quick study, the young man keenly observes the way the game is played around him and starts putting his own pawns in place. He uses his occasional day out for drug deals, for eliminating the competition and generally establishing a strong position for himself so that when he finally completes his sentence and gets out, he’s already a major and respected crime figure who will presumably go on to even greater authority. The film is indeed stunning, quite extraordinary in the way it shows prison life as it has never been shown before. The all-around deals and arrangements--not least with prison officials—the ongoing trade of everything tradable, the corruption, the award and retribution system, are remarkably detailed and well-served by the superb, relentless, in-your-face cinematography that captures the agitation and vicious violence of prison life but also moments of respite and some briefly elegiac ones. The score by Alexandre Desplat deserves another high mark not only for accompanying the action but for being such a tightly integrated part of it that it underlines the story without any kind of intrusion. Only occasionally, becoming aware of the soaring accompaniment, does one realize how magnificent the score actually is. And of course the acting. The camera never leaves Tahar Rahim for a moment. This unknown actor without whom there would be no film is simply perfect in every expression, every nuance that passes on this mobile, young yet battered face as swiftly as summer clouds pushed across the sky by strong winds. Everything is there. You have to pay attention to the batting of lids, to a slight frown, to the shadow of a smile, to the beginning of fear or worry to understand the subtlety and strength of this remarkable performance. It might not be an exaggeration to say that Jacques Audiard, son of legendary screenwriter and director Michel Audiard, has not only surpassed his father but everyone else in the process. “A Prophet,” clocking in at slightly less than two and a half hours, never sags and is thrilling from the first moment to the last. It is cinema at its absolute best.