Reviews

Shoplifters, a film by Hirokazu Koreeda

reviewed by NC Weil

Shoplifters won the 2018 Palm d'Or at Cannes, and if you have a chance to see it you'll understand why. In a time when the divide between haves and have-nots grows more stark, the lives of a family on the edge draw our sympathy. We first meet the father and ten-year-old son as they steal dinner from a grocery store. On their way home, they pass a balcony where a small girl, maybe 4 or 5, huddles shivering. She won't speak, but worried that she'll freeze, they bring her home where Grandma, her granddaughter, and the father's wife are ready for dinner.

The little girl has a burn mark on her arm and bruises, but gradually their kindness coaxes smiles. Months pass; by the time someone reports her missing, they've grown attached to her, and vice versa, so they cut her hair and burn her old dress - she's one of them now.

But as calamities befall them, gradually we understand more about this group, and why they're together. The questions that linger include "What is a family?" and "Who is equipped to judge another's life and choices?" I won't spoil your experience by saying more - go see it!

An Elephant Sitting Still, a 2018 Chinese film by Hu Bo, just under 4 hours long, enters the lives of four people and those who impact them. First we have a high school student, Wei Bu. His parents constantly berate him, telling him he should go live with his grandma - he would, but her apartment has no heat. His friend has crossed the school bully, so Wei Bu backs him up, believing he didn't steal the bigger boy's cellphone. They meet in a stairwell to have it out, and the bully attacks Wei Bu for interfering. In a shoving match, the bully falls down the cement stairs, badly injured.

The next character, Yu Cheng, older brother of the bully, listens to his best friend's story about an elephant at the circus in Manjhouli: the elephant just sits there, even if people stab it with forks. Then Yu Cheng is caught sleeping with the friend's wife, but his friend rather than attacking him leaps from the high apartment window to his death. It's not Yu Cheng's fault - but if he hadn't been in his friend's girl's bedroom, it wouldn't have happened.

Wei Bu likes a girl, Huang Ling, but she rebuffs him - she's having a soon-to-be-revealed affair with the married Vice Dean at their high school. This man tells Wei Bu that their school, the worst in the city, is closing. "What will we do?" Wei Bu asks. "You'll be street vendors," says the Vice Dean, who then goes on to talk about the larger office he's looking forward to in the school he'll be transferred to. Huang Ling lives with her single mother, who drinks, complains, and lies around while the toilet overflows. Their hatred is mutual.

And last, we have Wang Jin, living with his daughter, her husband, and their young daughter. They want to move to another district for its better school, but apartments there are smaller and more expensive, so they'd like Grandpa to move to the nursing home. He tells them the place won't allow dogs, and besides, they're all living in his apartment. But he can see what's coming.

Everyone in this film is angry - with each other, with their lives - and most of them blame someone else for their unhappiness. Love and affection are in very short supply in this industrial city where we only catch rare glimpses of anything not man-made - a river valley one can look down on from a high overpass, a clump of weeds. And the built world is unattractive - rubble outside buildings, an abundance of concrete and rusty iron.

Misfortune caroms like a billiard ball, striking one person who strikes another who strikes a third - the only ones able to rise above the attack-and-blame cycle are those who have their thoughts on other things - Wei Bu escapes murder by telling Yu Cheng, who feels duty-bound to avenge his "piece of garbage" brother's death, about wanting to go to Manjhouli to see the elephant sitting still. That's really what Yu Cheng wants too - he despises his own thug life, but sees no alternative.

As we spend hours with these characters, their families, their enemies, we get to know each as an individual - whatever they do, harmless or evil, they are aware of it, and aware too of a sense of being trapped. And in the end, there is an epiphany, or an elephant. If you're one of those rare filmgoers who looks forward to spending four hours with a story, this one's for you! It won Best Feature Award at the Berlin Film Festival, so you might get a chance - at a film festival. Keep your eye out for it.

Paradise - a film by Andrei Konchalovsky reviewed by NC Weil

What to make of Paradise? This 2016 collaboration between German and Russian studios, set during WWII and shot in lustrous black and white, gives us a thousand- year-Reich rationale for Nazi policies. We are offered three central characters: Jules, chief of police in Paris - Vichy French, doing the dirty work for the occupiers; Olga, a Russian countess arrested for helping hide Jews in Paris; and Helmut, a Brad-Pitt-handsome young aristocratic German who believes wholeheartedly in the Nazi vision.

Spoiler alert! I'll be discussing the whole film. If you want to see it uninformed, stop reading now.

Jules lives in a grand old house outside the city with his wife and son. In his office an underling reports that the Russian they have been interrogating all night has nothing to say.

"You weren't trying hard enough," Jules scolds.

"I broke his knee with a hammer - he can't walk any more."

"Go back and try harder." The underling leaves the bloody hammer on Jules' desk.

Then Olga, an attractive mid-thirtyish Russian countess, is brought to his office. She eyes that hammer, admits to terror of torture, and offers herself to Jules if he will prevent that. They set an assignation for the next day. But before they can meet, a pair of Resistance fighters execute him.

Olga is sent to a concentration camp.

Helmut sells his ancestral country home and goes to Berlin to petition Himmler for a job with the SS. It's granted. Helmut has tears in his eyes when Himmler gives him an SS ring, instructing him to wear it on the ring finger of his left hand - truly he is wed to the organization: a perfect German: efficient, straight, incorruptible. He is dispatched to a concentration camp to look for profiteering and the like. Soon after arriving, he encounters an old school friend, Dietrich, with whom he studied Russian. Helmut regrets not completing his thesis on Chekhov - the war has put personal lives on hold. Dietrich is going mad from the pressure of what he must see and do, but Helmut has clean hands. He doesn't have to get involved with the horrific business of the concentration camp - he spends his days going through ledgers while the camp commandant attempts to bribe him, to reason with him, to persuade him that any human would do what he does in that situation.

And when Helmut walks through one of the women's barracks, he recognizes Olga, whom he met years before in Italy, when young men and young women with money and free time danced and drank and lounged at a Tuscan villa. He pursued her with letters she never answered. And here she is, a prisoner. He makes her his maid, and they enjoy sweet interludes from the surrounding madness.

Konchalovsky intercuts scenes from their lives with what look like interrogations: each, in a plain white shirt, sits unadorned at a table, confessing to an unseen camera what they did, what they expected, how they reacted to events. The puzzle is why Helmut is made so appealing. The other Nazis at the concentration camp are warped by their duties - whatever humanity they possess is tormenting their dreams, turning them to automatons, sadists, or drunks trying to smother all awareness. But not Helmut. He breezes through his tasks, Himmler's orders like a beacon blinding him to the surrounding madness. When it's time for the escape he has engineered for himself and Olga, he sends Dietrich. He himself dies in the air raids of the arriving Soviet army, but nobly, as a warrior.

Of the three characters questioned in an afterlife, only Olga is invited by the voice of God to ascend. Really? That's Konchalovsky's answer to the Nazi extermination machine? that they don't go to heaven? 'Scuse me while I find a hole to puke in.

Roberto Rossellini's film starring his lover Ingrid Bergman casts her as a spoiled wife in a wealthy set in Rome in the early 50s. Her 12-year-old son, striving to get her attention, succeeds tragically, and in the aftermath she throws herself into efforts to help some of the multitude of people impoverished by the war. A friend who's a newspaperman and socialist nurtures her interest with books and projects, but political solutions seem spiritually empty to her, so she continues to seek her own way. Though her friendly acceptance by poor people seems improbable, she revels in the vitality of their lives, in contrast to the chill of her aristocratic class. Some fine minor roles include Giulietta Masina (Federico Fellini's muse) as a single woman with six children, who can't wait to get together with the likely father of number seven. This cheery earth-mother, who bathes, feeds, and lovingly scolds her brood, through Bergman's intervention gets a factory job - I couldn't help wondering who was going to look after her bambini while she was at work all day. Later Bergman shields a young man involved in armed robbery, and though he turns himself in, the police chief's attention falls on her - what is she up to and why? Obviously, she must be insane. And off to the asylum she goes, more agreeably than I would have expected. Her husband visits to speak to the doctor, but not to her. As she settles into the community there, it grows apparent that she's getting further away from ability to return to a "normal life" in her class. The kindness she feels toward humanity finds an outlet in responding to the distress of fellow patients, and finally she becomes something of a saint. It's all so heartfelt and innocent - an antidote perhaps to the horrors of the recently ended war? Rossellini likes to put her in surroundings that contrast with her character, to heighten her changes of heart - but he also likes to dress her in expensive dresses and furs - this woman is not the Ilsa Lund of Casablanca - she has the passion to do good for others, but she is also a woman accustomed to luxury, for which the director offers no apology.

This 2015 film by German director Wim Wenders, set in a Canada where each character speaks with a different accent, tells over a dozen years the story of a young man, writer Tomas (James Franco), who driving home stops just in time to avoid hitting a child who sleds into the road. He brings the wordless boy, Christopher (Jack Fulton), up to the house, where his mother Kate (Charlotte Gainsbourg) asks what happened to his little brother. The younger child, under the car, died. SPOILER ALERT! I will now to discuss the whole film.

Over time Tomas recovers, and writes more novels. Occasionally he and Kate make contact. His relationship with Sara (Rachel McAdams) falls apart, and eventually he marries Ann (Marie-Josee Croze), a woman from his publisher's office, adopting her daughter, who's about the same age as Christopher. When the boy is sixteen (played by Robert Naylor), he writes to Tomas, by now a successful writer. After a confrontational phone call with Kate, Tomas agrees to talk to the young man, who's having trouble in school.

Christopher accuses him of profiting from the accident - writing better, using the experience as material for his novels, faring better than Kate who still struggles to make ends meet. And he picks out a character in one of the novels and asserts that it is himself. Tomas, trying to maintain distance, explains that experience and imagination work together for a writer in ways not easily teased apart; he will not accept blame for the way their lives have turned out. When Tomas leaves after their conversation, the youth pursues him across an open space, then tells him to wait and fumbles in his backpack. We, and Tomas, are tensed for a weapon to come out of the pack - but instead, it's a stack of Tomas's books Christopher wants him to autograph. The moment could have gone another way - a bloody outcome all-too-familiar to the modern film-goer. These days, distant camera-shots of interiors through windows give us the sense of spying and stalking: impending violence.

In the final scene, the night Tomas wins a writing award, Christopher, by now a college student, breaks into his house and urinates on his bed. When Tomas and his family get home, Ann notices the smell. Police come and investigate, but they turn up nothing. Ann and their daughter leave for a hotel, unwilling to stay where they feel violated and unsafe. As he darkens the house preparing for bed, Tomas notices a figure on his lawn. He opens the door wide, turns on his kitchen lights, sets out a soda and a bottle of beer, and sits. Christopher comes in, gets himself a beer, and they spend the night in conversation we don't hear. In the morning the young man is ready to leave. As Tomas walks out with him, they look at each other a long time. At last, Tomas embraces Christopher, who hesitates then hugs him back. Both are finally smiling as they go their separate ways.

The viewer is drenched in what it feels like to have a stalker know where you live, your habits, your family and friends. This story is ultimately an antidote to that sort of creepiness. Instead of the anguished blood-satisfaction of revenge, the filmmaker shows how heartfelt and fearless reconciliation bring grace that heals.

Wenders uses paired images throughout the film - during a phone call we see one speaker, then gradually in the other half of the frame the other, then the first fades, leaving darkness. Or we'll see Tomas and Sara in the same house, in different rooms, viewed from across the street - they look lonely. Wenders uses windows to look in on his characters, to expose them to the outside world, to bring light in to them (there's a beautiful shot of sunrise lighting Kate's rooms after Tomas has spent the night sitting on her couch while she sleeps, head on his lap, taking comfort in his wordless presence).

Wenders also loves landscape, using it not just for mood but to give energy to scenes - after Tomas leaves Kate's house, he walks down her long driveway to where it Ts into the main road. This is the site of the fatal accident, but now it is summer, everything green and gold, and Tomas comes to where the road goes left or right, and takes one fork - no threat, no sense of death. When Christopher is a teenager, he bicycles through a field of handlebar-high yellow grass - behind him we see no crushed or broken stalks; only his gasping breath tells us how he has struggled.

The presence of water includes the frozen lake where Tomas sits in a shack trying to write while his friends ice-fish, then the windy chop as Tomas and Sara stand gazing out, feeling they have lost each other. After one of his sleepless nights, Tomas stands by the shore watching a thunderstorm far across a lake. In a later scene, Tomas picks up his aging father to take him to a concert, but the old man, coming outside, sees light on the river through the trees and insists on going over. Father and son sit in a pair of chairs near the bank, looking at the water, holding hands, content.

As he gets older, Wenders does more with less, letting images tell his stories. This film's use of color is in brilliant contrast to "Paris, Texas," where his camera wandered the vast drab landscape as though in search of anywhere to rest, a metaphor for the bleakness in those characters' hearts. It is as though he has decided fascination with nothingness is a young man's art - age pushes us to celebrate light, color, vitality while we can - we lose all this so soon.