Reviews

It happened that I had seen this film in cinema about 20 years ago. Now I got this title again in a bundle of three Menzel films, not knowing that because I had forgotten it completely, so weak the content: unmotivated smiling, mating: very funny?! After the first few scenes I switched off the player, because I detest cruelty. It is not even for beer drinkers, the best beers nowadays made out of Plzen, even out of Czechia.

My interest in this film has very little to do with the fact that as a boy I read the book 'By Rocket into Planetary Space' written in 1929 by the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, Transsylvania. Or with the fact that I studied as a minor subject astronomy. But I bring with me some interest in the history and culture of the Middle East, which seems to be one prerequisite to like this work. Alike the Oberth effect which can be used in 'a maneuver in which a spacecraft falls into a gravitational well and then uses its engines to further accelerate as it is falling, thereby achieving additional speed'.

While the first two thirds are purely commented documentary, the film gains immensely in traction towards the end when phantasy overtakes in the form of a retrofuturistic anymated cartoon. A lot to be regreted. Not to have followed this story.

Hitchcock told once how not to devise a film: to photograph/record/film talking people. This principle here is violated to its extreme. Not only are the figures talking all the time: they talk very fast, at least two of them talk at the same time, they talk about inconsistent matters.

For the first time, I switched on my mobile phone to get distracted.

Twice, references are made to animal cruelty: kill cats, stab to death young goats. The scenes from the butchery are to be borne. Typical for bad directors from the South to shock people for hiding the absence of a good story.

And women's abuse: the boy tries incessantly to have sex with the innocent girl from the countryside. She tries to hold him off by all means: crying, spitting, biting. Of course, he succeeds, and in the end she finds it great, of course.

Nonetheless, abstain.

A watchable black-and-white film, which impresses rather by some scenes with violence and portrayals of Sicilian landscape and villages and workman's life in a surface quarry than by the story of the chief character.

The political/social backgrund was harder to grasp.

I got also enchanted by the film score and music shows with the nice, refined Italian music of the 60's.

Most cineast will have learned to know brilliant Volonté in one of the Spaghetti Westerns, but here, he appears very young. For fans of him, so, too.

If politics means autocracy and absence of democracy and justice.

The tension and axiousness of the spectator raises constantly from the beginning. Almost like an antique drama about the twilight of the god(s).

Many parallel, intertwined stories which do, however, not make it hard to understand the whole.

Remarkable the music, for a political film playing in the poor tropics: the brass band trying to intonate the national anthems for the fest. The American entertainer brought in, having to get risen on the last steps to the fort by mules, the main road being blocked. The children's choir singing a heart breaking song about the life and fate of Haiti. The recorder playing in the prominent refugee's car playing 'Nazi music' according to the wife.

Again an uneatable work by Ghatak.At least for the Westerner, who does not have much of a clue about Hindouistic mythology and the life style of the Bengali people. Confusing. Contains scenes where someone tells short stories. Deterrent for good film making. Hitchcock would have not liked.

I tried to remember pieces of seeming senseless conversation parts. I could for one: "I knew a man who could recite the whole Mahabharata ..." Would you embrace and be impressed by a Western film wherein you hear someone stating: "I know a man who knows the whole Bible by heart"?

These may be cultural relativity. But filmmaking should not be dependent so much on it, especially its technical aspects. I have hardly ever seen a worse photography, a worse soundtrack. When the scenery consists of a talking group of people, we see them occupying the lower third of the frame, the lower limb cut off. About half of the frame is filled by the sky! No sort of surrealism or experimentation or exxageration.

The sound in the mostly open air, natural village background sounds shouting like if recorded in a narrow hall.

There are films with a bad screenplay, but good techniques. And films with a good screenplay, but with bad techniques. This film features a mediocre script combined with lousy technique:

• the ubiquitous soundtrack (Vivaldi's Four Seasons) was not coincident with any scene. Even not with series of scenes, because that music was played across several scenes of quite different type. I would have liked to hear more Greek traditional music, especially when a corresponding landscape was shown. Seems that the director just wanted to impress with that impressive music, but to the expert, that does not work.

• in landscape scenes, the immediate foreground was hardly seen, an average of 40% was dedicated to the blurry sky. So the spectator had the tendency to interpret what was invisible under the knees of the actors.

• connected to that: the bad picture quality, too blurred. A pity, especially when nice landscapes were shown.

• helpless inspectors: always in a thick uniform (is it never hot in Greece?), the rifle always hanging down by the side of the shoulder or in the hand. Not a good image especially when running through the bushes.

• some animal inhumanity: indispensable in a film from the South from before 2000. Dogs kidnapped or shot, cats screaming, donkeys overcharged by two overweight inspectors.

That does not mean: A Disney cartoon for toddler and parents. Rather for a mature audience who knows about other civilizations. Not in space, but at remote places and during Paleolithic.

This film contains a rare combination of different themes: - the Romeo and Juliette drama - an ethnographic study, although it remains or must remain superficial, such that one seems to understand the cultural issues, which can hardly be possible in reality. - a nature film, with the primeval forest and a volcanic landscape as background - an escape/pursuit film (alike FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE, but without helicopter)

Also important the depiction of living in tribes which was also our common style during most of the time of the existence of humans.

For the fugitives, a window of opportunity is opened once they meet Christians. So we get instructed which role a common belief like a universal religion has in the formation of big societies.

This film was on the competition list of the 2016 'Bildrausch' ('Image Inebriation') Filmfest in Basel, Switzerland. It did not win the 1st price ...

Since all reviewers so far stem from the Indian cultural space, which will have a positive effect on the rating of any artwork from that area, I permit myself to add my modest review as an European, trying to be more neutral.

The film comes technically perfect. Content-wise, it cannot reach the quality of the major Western directors, though. So don't expect too much.

The background of the acting is always an urban area - lots of police stations and jails. The lacking of any natural environment (except in the end scene with a swamp surrounded by apartment houses), together with the lack of humour and irony, make the film a bit desperate and breathless to look, although corresponding to the reality.

There is a lot of violence, beatings, going on nearly all the time. These actions look often exaggerated, like punching a ball.

As the director revealed in the discussion following the watching, the story was composed of two different real stories, hence its extraordinary length.

Overall certainly worth to see (not for children or fainthearted).

There is only one thing that is extraordinary in this film: the ubiquitous prevalence of the colour grey, or of subdued colours like brown or green. The faces are greyish, the houses are grey inside and outside, the cars are grey, the hospital's waiting room is grey, the dresses and chadors are grey or at least black (!). All female persons, including the 5 years old daughter of the cleaning lady, wear a chador. It is only at the very end, while the camera depicts the scenery in the hospital, at least one young women appears in normal street gown.

I don't believe that this colour reduction was the intention of the director or cameraman. This grey here is not really a symbol for the hopeless position of the protagonists, it is not like the blueish prevalence in Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le samouraï" with Alain Delon.

This film is an intimate play, and not a bad one; however the absence of suspense at least half of the time creates some mild boredom in the spectator and the wish to see some setting in the nature - and not only the ones with battling and chopping adults.

I remember another Iranian film, a much better on i.m.o., wherein a man goes to the hillside to commit suicide. There is currently some hype about NADER AND SIMIN, but I remain convinced that it will be forgotten in a few years.

Carla, 37, and her husband are traveling in their car to a natural park in Chile. They encounter some other tourists who show their ridiculous behavior. After a dispute, the husband drives away, leaving her back. Now she has to find their own way back. Soon she learns to know another hiker, Ulrik, a medicine student from Norway, the dream country of the Latinos. He has left Santiago to enjoy nature, too. In his rucksack, he carries a tent. After some hesitation, he brings her to sleep in the tent, too. At first the relationship remains offish, but mutual attraction cannot be stopped in the course of their little adventures in the natural park.

Maybe more rewarding than this travel mate and slightly romantic story is the pinpointing of natural life in that Chilean forest in a temperate climate.

One recurring theme is the precondition, the act and the aftermath of theft of goods belonging to the neighbor: the children first steal vegetables, then even the beads of a necklace, finally only a coconut which had fallen from a tree due to the Monsoon wind. The embarrassment caused is understandable, as the people are very poor.

There was at least funny scene: a kitten playing with a dog. Else the kittens are always kept at their neck (as if we could not keep them under their belly) and thrown to ground.

In an extraordinary scene we see a Bengali steam train passing by, and the boy running beneath it. The boy, as meager as he is, anyway seems at every opportunity be running through backyard and field.

Note that I wrote SILENT PICTURES, not SILENT MOVIE, because this film makes a persistent static impression. So that I fell twice into sleep, something which had never happened to me before. Hitchcock warned not to make films by photographing people who are talking. This films shows a lot of scenes with mother, children, neighbors talking. In addition, we become witness of how to cook under that environment.

What kept me a bit under suspense: the people always walk or run bare-feet through the bosky backyard and garden, as if there could never be a snake.

The sound was of bad quality, the soundtrack by Ravi Shankar, too. It is not sufficient just to play the sitar a fast a possible.

I have the impression that it is the one and same person who wrote the other reviews, which are too good to be true. Or maybe they are employees of the Bengali film office, since that was the sponsor and producer of the work.

I have written reviews for films which are nearly 100 years old (and they are FAR better than this one). I have also annotated another upbringing film: Padre Padrone. Thus I don't consider it primarily due to my lack of understanding that I cannot agree with the adulations here.

If you are Romanian, Ex-Romanian, if you live or have lived in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, if you want to emigrate to the West, then you might suck up every detail of the film and find it good.

If not, like me, you could fall into sleep already within the 15 first minutes already, wake up later on and try desperately to find a clue. Occasionally you have to smile a bit, because the film is not that bad. It will however be funnier for you to compare Romanian with Italian or Latin expressions: 'Politia' is written on the police car, for instance.

This film consists mainly of views towards faces of speaking persons. The most sensational scene is the arrest of a thief by a police squadron. A dinner at McDonald's is also a special event. A ride and a discussion in the BMW of a temporary repatriate is another highlight.

The cinema director informed the spare audience that it was hard to get a preview and a copy. Not on DVD and to be ordered directly from the film director in Bucharest. So why has this film found no distributor abroad? Because no one would go to watch it there.

In the introductory and the ending part, the play is enthralling, but unfortunately the medium part consists of 'the last meal', during which the landowner tries to explain the bible to the uneducated slaves. They react by making jokes about this metaphysics and by replying with their own cultural convictions.

After half an hour of eating, drinking and preaching, the landowner himself falls into sleep, as is the audience inclined to. This is what Hitchcock denounced as 'shooting the faces of people who are talking'.

To sum up: 2 hours is too much for this content, 1 1/2 would have been better.

It is a rarer case that a film changes one's life, at least for a while. 'Padre Padrone' did it to me. The film made such an impression to me that first I read the book. Therefrom I got the details about the author's home village Siligo and its environment. As a child I was used to spend my holidays with mountain farmers, helping them here and there, thus I was familiar with rural and agricultural life.

At the time I saw 'Padre Padrone', I was 20 years old, was used to do bicycle trips in my home country, but had never gone abroad. Sardinia was only one day by railways and one night by ship away, so I decided to go there.

The first original place I came to was Sassari, where the author got his higher education and was also a professor. Some roaming through the hills brought me to his little village, Siligo. At the entrance, I noted an older man steering a cart pulled by a mule. This was not ordinary, because all other peasants used small and cheap motor-operated vehicles. Ledda's father being described as tenacious and closefisted, it is quite probable that the observed was him. But I didn't dare to ask him.

Up from the village, I pedaled through family Ledda's pasture called Baddevrústana, where I noticed again a being standing on a trail: another mule.

May be fascinating for Bulgarians, but for the rest the story looks often like a non-interrelated artificially constructed patchwork. The only enthralling scenes are from the life behind the iron curtain, where the ubiquitous police state shows its strength.

The director could not omit again to add a love scene, but it is the most ridiculous ever: the son dances, he retreats, his uncle tells him to go back to the girl for introducing himself, - cut - they are already naked swimming in a sea .... We have all seen this a thousand times already.

Also the decision to cycle strikes like lightning: the uncle just shows him the bike and tells him: get up. It is not explained how he got the idea and the vehicle.

The title means "The last postillion (stage-coachman) of the St.Gotthard-pass". A company of select people joins the horse-driven coach for crossing the center of the Alps over the traditional path high on the mountain valley. It is the time of railways as the means of modernization. A tunnel is going to be built, Louis Favre is the heroic entrepreneur, who dies in it before being finished 1880.

The new fast way would render useless the small transport industry from which local people had made their living.

The great mountainous landscape is the background for the conflicts which arise between rich and poor, local traditionalists and foreign modernizers. The daughter of a local, who is opposed against the tunnel, would like to get engaged with a tunnel engineer, but is also coveted by a local favoured by her father ...

This is the only detective film with silent era's star Asta Nielsen. It is also a story about a beginning liaison which is jeopardized by a crime.

Act 1. Adam, the son of Count de Rochard, is in love with Thilda, an actress. Everyday he waits before the theater to bestow a bouquet of White Roses to her.

One day, she tells him that she has got an engagement in Ostend, but is lacking the necessary adornment. Adam talks to his father and he gets a brooch with precious jewels leased from him.

Having arrived in a hotel in Ostend (separate rooms), a Gentlemen thief ("Lord Kelvin") and his comrade observe and get in contact with them. They engage a hotel maid for informing them and helping to steal the brooch, which is in a jewel case in Thilda's room. Eventually they manage to make a copy of the key of the case.

Act. 2. One of the thieves invites them for a trip by car to the countryside. Meanwhile Kelvin enters the room, takes the brooch and brings it to a receiver of stolen goods who replaces the jewels with faked ones. Back in the hotel, Thilda is already back from the trip in her room and it seems impossible to put the brooch into the case. But once more a bouquet of WHITE ROSES is brought, and Kelvin can hide the brooch in-between the flowers, and the maid puts it into that case.

Act 3. Count de Rochard is short of money and sends a telegram to his son, directing him to bring back the brooch for selling the jewels. His son returns, and at the jeweller's, the stones are found to be faked. Thilda is suspected of having done that and detectives are sent to investigate in Ostend. Adam informs her that this is the end of the relationship, but responds that she wants to see him again.

Both Thilda and "Kelvin" are at a ball, while the detectives arrive and surround that hall. Kelvin sees that they check everybody leaving the hall, and tries to hide again the jewels in a bouquet of WHITE ROSES. He engages Thilda to throw the flowers through the window, when he will be passing by in a car.

Will Thilda really help the thief to escape and thus be caught?