Reviews

This is one of those rare screenplays in which every line of dialogue is perfectly crafted to have a double meaning, yet comes off perfectly naturally. I don't speak Magyar so I can only guess it's that much better in the original. The whole thing is a very blatant religious parable, cloaked as a sort of thriller, with more than enough foot chases, conflict and humor to keep everyone satisfied. The lighting is absolutely genius. Considering the confines of the space and what the DP was likely forced to work with, it's incredible what he pulled off. Many shots seem almost inconceivable, and the color and texture of light is used very consciously to indicate the good and evil forces at play. With this quality of talent available, it's no wonder so many productions are going to Hungary.

The humor in this movie starts with goofy physical stuff and ends with self-consciously ironic '80s kitsch. It seems unsure of what it's trying to be, and throughout the movie the episodic glue runs pretty thin. It's not well-directed and it's horribly edited, with problems even in the basic continuity from day to night. Most of all I got the archaeological sense that under it was once something actually kind of like a good screenplay, that just got maimed by the production. Although the characters -- overdrawn to begin with -- are forced to a breaking point by the way-over-the-top performances delivered by actors who can't help rolling their eyes at every line, there are some very well-written -- if politically dysfunctional -- dialogue sequences in this movie, most notably when Cusack finds himself on an airplane where the majority of passengers have just voted to travel to a distant destination, and demonstrates to the stewardess what democracy really consists of by decking a threatening passenger and getting the passengers cheering together behind him...

I love almost everything Scorsese has ever done, save this film. It's too long by almost an hour. There's an adage that a director should never put something on the screen more than once to illustrate that which has already been clearly exposed. With the help of Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese has always succeeded in maintaining incredibly prolonged sequences of punch and great verve throughout his movies, up until now. It's not clear what went wrong. Maybe Ms. Schoonmaker wasn't given an adequately free hand in this one. I'm not a DiCaprio hater, but there's such a doting absorption with the way the camera lingers on his pretty face here that it's hard to come out of this movie without being sick to death of him. What's worse, Leo's terribly miscast in the role. When trying to play the older, disheveled Hughes, he appears not so much a sloppy eccentric as simply a man-child in an over-sized suit. There are exactly three instances of levity in this film, and all of them fall completely flat. Compare this with every other Scorsese film, from Mean Streets to Gangs of New York, all of which were alleviated by brilliant, memorable moments of gallows humor, and you'll understand immediately what would happen if the director were to completely lose his ability to play with his subjects. And while it's true that Hughes had an interesting life, it all seems like a very long life when you're forced to watch his unhappy compulsions replayed compulsively, what seems eternally, and worst of all, not very originally, for hour after hour after hour (after hour after hour after hour, as he might say.) The flight sequences don't do anything for us, because we've seen it all before. All the pretty tinting to make the film look like it was shot in hand-tinted black and white can't rescue this goose. Actually, the fact that it just won a Golden Globe says more about what's happened to the Globes than it does about this film. I wish I'd gotten my money back when I left the theater. I wish I'd downloaded it; watching the progress bar would have been more exciting than the movie itself.

It's true the imagery in this film is really compelling; a great example of shooting present-for-future aided by its primary setting in Shanghai. Especially in its use of the landscape of night-time, overpopulated, mixed-language neon artifice to invoke a close, believable future, the film visually has more in common with Blade Runner than anything else. There are other similarities here as well; the storyline is very reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, particularly in posing questions about belonging in human society and pitting the imperfect individual of free will against the wholly opaque, heartless forces of the state without which the individual would have nothing. I was really impressed that the film does _not_ try to explain through droll exposition the entire world these characters inhabit, as so many bad sci-fi films do. This has the dual effects of focusing our attention on the human drama (which makes the questions more pertinent to our own selves) and of keeping us intensely curious, trying to pick up as many clues as we can. The sci-fi of missing background exposition was pioneered by William Gibson and is used here to great effect, which makes it all the more curious that the filmmakers would choose to employ voice-overs to explain so many of the characters' interactions. Virtually everything said in VO in this film would have been better left unsaid, left for the audience to guess at, or simply expressed through the more-than-capable acting. Speaking of which, Samantha Morton is awesome; it's good to hear her actually speak more than a sentence at a time on-screen, but as always it's her capacity to emote vividly, wordlessly, and with utterly heartwrenching believability, that steals the show.

In relationships, the worm always turns. We've learned this from a million cliché Hollywood movies. What they so rarely portray is how the damage inflicted along the way, to oneself and one's lover, is so often irreversible in so many ways. Very few movies deal with changes of heart as well as this one does. It's written with a golden ear for dialogue, and it's acted out with the kind of naturalism that can only come from what appeared to be a two-weeks-straight shoot in which the DV camera was probably never turned off for more than a couple hours. You get the sensation that this film was shot very, VERY run-and- gun. I doubt they even got the permits to shoot at LAX for that hand-held scene. I was nervous for the filmmakers while I was watching it. But they pulled it off beautifully. As an aside, there's a certain visual style, including jump-cut editing, wide-angle shot choices and lighting that ranges from extremely flat to extremely beautiful, which arises from on-the-run DV production where poor shot quality on the set is made up for by the sheer quantity of cuts to choose from later. It allows for a lot of improvisation. At one point, a character points to the sky and shouts, "full moon!" and panning up, we actually SEE the moon in the shot...the real moon. Ah, DV. The result of these liberties is a strange mixture of very fine performances and a severely jangly look that can work both for and against the film. In this case, it mostly works. But it reflects a directing style completely unlike traditional film directing, taking advantage of the super-low costs and shooting without setup, rather sloppily at times, and it may be less of a stylistic choice than a reflection of the medium. In any case, we'll probably be seeing a lot more features like this in coming years, as the costs plunge even more. In terms of script and character acting, this movie strolls over ground that others fear to tread. It reminds me most of Eyes Wide Shut, only the choices are real and their repercussions can't be undone. It's brutally honest, especially in dealing with how, often, the one who ends a good relationship is the one who suffers more, and punishes themselves more, and becomes more of a disaster than the one who was hurt and moves on.

An incredible ratcheting-up of drama from beginning to end. Kingsley, as usual, gives a stunningly nuanced performance, and steals the screen when he speaks. His speeches are absolutely riveting. Excellent performances as well from Sigourney Weaver and Stuart Wilson, who round out the ensemble. Wilson is a vastly under-appreciated actor who does a phenomenal job portraying a very complex set of conflicts. Good choice by Polanski. Needless to say, the real star of the film is the screenplay. It's a shame that the film wasn't made more specific in terms of which country it dealt with. Although set in countryside intended to look distinctly Chilean, the dates it deals with more closely match those of the Argentine dictatorship. The film appears to have been designed this way in order to intimate to American audiences that it could have taken place in either country, and indeed it could have; maybe the aim was to help viewers focus on the universality of the emotions and trials involved, rather than involving them with the historical specifics of one particular dictatorship. The net effect, however, is unfortunate, in that it deprives the audience of a chance to actually learn something about a hideous part of world history in which the United States was overtly complicit. By mythologizing the territory, Polanski makes it easier for the audience to walk away feeling a sense of pity and mild remorse while remaining comfortably ignorant of historical realities the details of which they may simply not care to confront. In other words, the temporal and geographic displacement of the plot makes it easy to conclude that these sorts of things happen to "those people over there," but could never happen here. (How interesting it would be to remake this film now, in America, with a Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib detainee, her husband, and an DOD agent!) The movie also skirts the spurious so-called theory of two demons, that is, the fascista excuse that leftist guerrillas were equally guilty of crimes as the military. However, in so doing, it is actually simply being as apolitical as possible, and so can't really be applauded for that -- better had it addressed the issue directly when it had the chance. For a better understanding of the sociopolitical issues "Death and the Maiden" is really commenting on, it's well worth seeing "La Historia Oficial" (Argentina : 1985), "Imagining Argentina," (2003) and Oliver Stone's "Salvador" (1986), to get an idea of American involvement in the atrocities that took place in Latin America from the 1950s onward. Many books have also been written on the subject, including "Fear in Chile: Lives Under Pinochet" (Politzer) and "Pinochet's Chile: An Eyewitness Report 1980/81" (Macleod. Out of print.)

I'm not sure I got what I was supposed to get out of this film. As a piece of cinema it was an interesting way to shoot a low budget movie. With long, almost entirely wide-angle shots that hardly move at all, (except for a magnificent opening sequence and some hand-held work later on) it's staged and paced like a series of short plays. Some of the settings are just too simplistic; visually there isn't a lot going on besides the stories of the people coming in and out of the frame. There's no main protagonist in the film; numerous characters come and go, unresolved, sharing nearly equal screen time, but never quite enough of it to make any one of them more than a two-dimensional expression of a social theme. This dispassionate attitude gives "Kedma" a very documentary feel for the first two acts. It is the third act which is confusing, and even as a Jew with family in Israel, I feel severely underqualified to interpret Amos Gitai's true intentions with it. Watched with one set of eyes, it could be called a relatively simplistic portrayal of the birth of a nation, which throws its hands up to a certain extent and spreads the blame for the current situation around widely enough to defuse the certain blowback this film was to receive from the Orthodox community. On the other hand, in blaming Christianity, the Talmud and the Messianic tradition for enforcing the diaspora mentality over the past 2000 years, it stops right on the doorstep of declaring the modern State of Israel a product of the Jews' inheritance of the Nazi mentality which drove them there in the first place. Now: This isn't what I'm saying, but it might well be what the film is saying. At the very least it states boldly that the heroic Sabra stance is nothing more than the bitter side of the slave mentality, an ongoing form of self- flagellation. Only, the movie doesn't give you any inkling that this is where it's taking you as it leads you on in documentary form; and the result is definitely shocking. This is not a movie which apologizes for any outburst of emotion; nor does it pay much homage to the myth of the historical Maccabee. In short, it is about the weak preying on the weaker. Whether or not its stance is correct or covers the entire picture, again, I'm not qualified to say. There are certainly several other sides to the conversation than the one this film snakes its way into advancing. It's not a coincidence, either, that "Kedma" is the name of the refugee ship the Jewish characters arrive on; this movie, if nothing else, is the anti-"Exodus." None of the above, by the way, makes this film particularly enjoyable to watch. But if you like watching painful and well-crafted work that makes you think, well...it's still not that enjoyable to watch, but at moments it's completely riveting.