Review of the film I am Alive by Dino Gentili, Filippo Gentili

No matter how hard you’ve been hit by the credit crunch, don’t choose the same method of earning a little extra as the hero of the Gentili brothers’ intriguing directorial debut.Veteran scriptwriters in the Italian film and TV industries, their latest tale concerns Rocco (Massimo de Santis) a young factory worker with a dead-end job and mounting debt problems. When an older, and decidedly dodgy, friend offers him several thousand euros for one night’s work he jumps at the chance.

But if an offer sounds too good to be true... the job turns out to be standing guard for a wealthy businessman at his plush villa – over the body of his young daughter. Rocco’s mate immediately has a spliff and a beer, then drives off with a girl half his age in tow, leaving the more conscientious Rocco alone.

But not for long. Through the course of the night, the villa is visited by a series of people, each with their own connection to the dead girl. And it soon becomes apparent that the story of her short life is a good deal more complex and messy than the one her father told his hired hands. Her brother was jealous of her status as daddy’s favourite, and her Romanian boyfriend, ostracised by the family, is now bringing up the child she never knew on his own.

As Rocco tries to keep the peace between the warring factions, he finds himself more and more fascinated by the dead girl, and begins to question his own relationships with his girlfriend (a disembodied voice on the other end of a mobile phone) and his long-suffering father (a builder who lives out in the country and is constantly urging his son to come and “work for the family”). As he continues to find out secrets about the girl, her brother and her father, he decides to change from being a passive henchman, and try to do something positive for her family...

It’s a film that constantly keeps you guessing, and builds up a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. But it suffers from a few logic-defying plot turns. It’s never adequately explained why the girl’s father can’t simply stay with her for the night (though it’s strongly hinted that his wealth, if not exactly ill-gotten, is based on the kind of business that takes place after hours) and at one point Rocco simply leaves the house to grab a sandwich. This enables him to strike up a burgeoning romance with Stefania (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), a waitress at a nearby all-night cafe, and creates a dramatic flashpoint when he returns to find some more unexpected visitors, but you do find yourself wondering, wasn’t there anything in the fridge? And when such banal questions start occurring it’s a sure sign that a film’s lost its hold on you.

It also seems uncertain as to whether it wants to be an existential thriller, jet-black comedy or ‘state of the nation’ comment on Italy’s class divides, anti-immigrant paranoia and obsession with wealth and status. Such a lack of focus is stranger considering the Gentili brothers’ writing track record, but can perhaps be explained by a natural desire to shove as many ideas as possible into their debut, whether or not they actually fit.

But it does yield some effective moments, and they clearly know the characters inside out. The film is, if nothing else, an intriguing snapshot of modern industrial Italy, a world away from the travel guide clichés of Rome or Tuscany. The sense here is of trapped and circumscribed lives and a final shot of the majestic countryside outside the town feels like a breath of fresh air.

De Santis gives an excellent performance as a fundamentally decent, not too bright journeyman worker, simply trying to build a better life in an indifferent and occasionally hostile world; best-known in Italy as the star of the TV series Distretto Di Polizia 8, he has the looks and charisma of a young Gabriel Byrne. And Mezzogiorno makes the best of a somewhat underwritten part, proving once again that she was one of the better things about Mike Newell’s ill-conceived adaptation of Love In The Time Of Cholera.

Getting such a high-profile pair of performers for your debut is no mean feat, and shows the reputation the Gentili brothers have in Italy. I hope we’ll be seeing them behind the camera again, but perhaps next time they’ll play to their strengths and concentrate on a good, solid story rather than simply throwing ideas and incidents at the screen.

Review of the film A Fish Child by Lucía Puenzo

Coolly beautiful Inés Efron plays privileged 20 year old Lala, the daughter of a rich judge and a young woman with the world at her feet. Into her life comes the dark and simmering Guayi, the family’s similarly aged Paraguayan maid. Routinely abused by Lala’s father, Guayi conducts her love affair with Lala under the strictest of secrecy as the two methodically plan their escape to Paraguay.

Puenzo treats the lesbian love affair of the two women as secondary to their headlong rush to freedom. In fact they are escaping from the clinging vines of social dogma as much as from the cruel control of the moneyed upper class represented by Lala’s father the judge. La Guayi’s father Socrates is a mysterious, private man with secrets of his own. He tends the house that is falling down in ruin; the gate is covered with offerings to a deceased child, the fish child, who is seen now and then as in a dream. He is an actor, a stage performer living in a near-abandoned hovel seemingly outside of time. For him, time stopped when his daughter committed her terrible deed. No amount of offerings tied to the front gate can end his suffering.

Carlos Bardem, brother of Javier Bardem, plays hunky best friend Pulido who is instrumental is helping the two escape. Perhaps taking a page from his older brother's book Carlos plays a young tough with a heart of gold. He hangs out in the violent, dirty parts of town training attack dogs for his customers and driving the rattiest vehicle of a rattletrap van that can be imagined. Can the girls find help from someone like this? Do they dare trust someone of such tenuous circumstances with their very lives?

On the eve of their escape, the girl’s plan goes awry when Lala’s dad is found dead. From the audience point of view it doesn’t look like the girls committed the crime. Indeed, such a powerful man is very likely to have enemies in any country and there many prisoners’ friends and relatives sworn to revenge. But La Guayi is found with articles from the household, articles that could only have been stolen. As one of the under-class she is the immediate suspect. She will be easy to convict and represents a neat solution to a crime that if investigated too thoroughly will uncover deep seated corruption amongst the rich and powerful.

One night instead of simply delivering attack dogs to the grounds of the house of the local politico, Pulido drops Lala outside the house as well. Spying through the windows she sees the imprisoned women, her lover La Guayi included, entertaining the prison and law enforcement officials in the finely furnished house. This will be her last chance to redeem her forbidden love with an act of courage and self sacrifice. A mistake on her part now drops her into the caldron of sexual abuse that is the lot of the poor in the barrios of the world.

This film has great plot dynamics while presenting a valid commentary on South American politics and social inequality. Good acting and direction fill out the personalities of Lala, La Guayi, Pulido and Socrates. Good writing fills out those characters with mythical identities and the timeless qualities of guilt and redemption. The actor Socrates, played by Arnaldo Andre, is especially fascinating. Doleful and mysterious he tends his falling down residence as a combination hovel and church, nursing his past along to a slow and mournful end as his acting merges with his life. The camera follows the ins and outs of the barrios with fascinating accuracy as well as tracing the outlines of wealth and power in the suburbs where the prisoner girls are taken in the night to delight the ruling class.

The underwater shots are crucial to the film, showing the legendary fish child is his environment. We feel as foreign in his underwater world as do the rich in the barrios of those who form the core of the city. La Guayi leads us to explore all three places, the worlds of the rich and poor and the underworld of child spirits yet laid to rest in this fascinating thriller.

Review of the film Antichrit by Lars von Trier

Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier is in no danger of jeopardizing his reign as the most controversial major director working today. Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film von Trier has ever made. As such, commercial prospects appear slim, though many of the auteur's most ardent fans will want to see the film anyway. And they should.

"Antichrist" is relentlessly and solely focused on a married couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. As we learn in a rather pretentious prologue shot in slow-motion and black and white, their toddler son has fallen to his death through an open window while they were making love. Bereft, they retreat to Eden, their ironically named cabin in the woods, to recuperate from their loss. At this point, von Trier switches to color and his signature chapter headings. The fact that the first three are "Pain," "Grief" and "Despair" does not bode well.

In discussing this self-styled "most important film of my career," von Trier has referred to the forbidding Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Clearly, or rather not so clearly, von Trier is working in a full-out symbolic vein here, as did Strindberg late in his career, but alas, the film medium inevitably carries with it, like an albatross, a heavy charge of realism. Hence, many of von Trier's more outrageous, ultra-serious symbolic moments (such as a talking fox, its guts half ripped out, muttering "chaos reigns" in an "Exorcist" voice) will -- and did, in the press screening -- undoubtedly provoke unintended laughter. Or horror, as when genitals are scissored off, masturbation produces blood rather than semen and holes are drilled into legs.

The film's most successful thematic confrontation is that between frail reason (embodied in the pathetic, infantilizing attempt by the husband, who's a psychotherapist, to treat his deeply disturbed wife with cognitive therapy) and the uncontrollable forces of emotion and mystery that emerge victorious.

Another powerful idea, that nature is cruel and vicious and completely antithetical to human welfare, seems to align von Trier with the German visionary director Werner Herzog. ("Nature is Satan's church," the wife utters apocalyptically at one point.) This focus on nature subsequently gets conflated with human nature and finally with female nature, where von Trier's careerlong misogyny comes into fullest bloom. In any case, all the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged.

The film works much better on a purely visual level, if only viewers were able to forget that these are real people being represented in these voluptuous images, abetted by an often superb sound design. From the opening titles, abstract expressionism reigns powerfully and conveys a great deal of intense, if finally unspecifiable, meaning. Unfortunately at some point a story has to be told, no matter how minimalist, and with actual human beings, no matter how symbolically freighted. This is where the film falls apart.

Review of the Iranian film Shirin

Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin is inspired by an ancient Iranian love story, but we don't get to see any recreations of this tale in his latest experimental feature. Instead, the great director trains his camera on a cinema audience who are watching the drama unfold on screen, and through a series of close-ups, we observe the female viewers as they respond to what they see; laughing, flinching, crying, or smiling enigmatically. The film is lit solely by the flickering light of the cinema screen, and as it moves fluidly from face to face, it builds a strange cumulative power. Kiarostami has played with notion of watching the watchers before, in his short contribution to the 2007 anthology To Each His Own Cinema, but here he daringly stretches the conceit to feature length. The result is another challenging but rewarding piece of work from this consistently remarkable filmmaker.

There are 112 women in Kiarostami's audience overall (including one special guest, whose identity I won't reveal). A few men can be glimpsed sitting threateningly in the shadows, but Kiarostami elects to focus solely on the female contingent; and who could blame him? There's an almost comical distinction between the reactions of the male and female viewers, as the men sit with uniformly glum expressions, and the women display a vast array of emotions on their often strikingly beautiful faces. Who are these women, we wonder? How free are they to enjoy the film they're seeing? I was particularly struck by the sight of one who was wearing a huge bandage over her nose, between blackened eyes - what happened to her? We hear the soundtrack of the film in the background, and Kiarostami asks us to imagine the movie for ourselves as we see how it is affecting people. When we hear the sound of violence taking place in the film – screams and limbs being sliced – and see the women averting their eyes or covering their mouths in horror, the effect is more powerful than most explicit scenes of horror would be. Shirin is perhaps the most successful example yet of Kiarostami's oft-stated desire to create a work that speaks to each viewer individually, allowing everyone who sees it to create their own version of the movie in their mind.

Kiarostami seems to have lost interest in conventional, narrative filmmaking at this stage in his career, and is instead exploring the boundaries of cinematic form. Ten was told entirely from the point-of-view of a car dashboard, while Five was even more minimalist, comprising of mostly empty landscape views. Like that film, Shirin runs the risk of being dismissed as an indulgence more suited to a gallery installation than a cinema, but that would be a grossly unfair judgement. Shirin will undoubtedly not be to everyone's taste, but it is oddly mesmerising, and in its intimate observation of human emotions, it gets at the essence of why we go to the movies in the first place. In turning his camera on the audience, Kiarostami is inviting us to see cinema itself in a new light.

Shirin is made from simple closeup shots of faces as they themselves watch a film. Everything is angled toward a specific end: all the people inspected closely are women, and the film they are watching is the 800-year-old Persian love story of Khosrow and Shirin, a semi-mythic Persian romance of female self-sacrifice.^[1][2] The film depicts the audience's emotional involvement with the story. The story is skillfully read between the tragic and kitsch by a cast of narrators led by Manoucher Esmaieli and is accompanied by a historical "film score" by Morteza Hananeh and Hossein Dehlavi.^[3]

The film's production is replete with curious anecdotes. According to some reports, the women were filmed individually in Kiarostami's living room, with the director asking them to cast their gaze at a mere series of dots above the camera. The director has also stated that, during the filming process, he had no idea what film they were watching, and settled on the Khosrow and Shirin myth only after shooting had concluded.

review of the film True Noon by Nosir Siadov

This is a Tajikistan Film Directed by Nosir Siadov. In this Film what we can see is that a historical conflict between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan." a reasonably stirring drama that could take place almost anywhere on the globe right now, what with constantly shifting borders and nation-states reconfiguring themselves. Without any grandiose gestures or set pieces, director Nosir Saidov's modest portrait of a once functional town falling into chaos has little potential for broad distribution but could nonetheless see a fairly long life on the festival circuit.

In the mountain village of Safedobi, Kirill (Yuriy Nazarov) is training his apprentice Nilufar (Nasiba Sharipova) to become the town's next weather observer. Originally from Russia, Kirill is hoping she can take over from him full time so that he can be reunited with his family. The only problem with his plan is that Nilufar is about to be married to Aziz, the son of a rich local who expects the newlyweds to move into the fancy house he built them. Things take a turn for the worse when, out of the blue, the army moves in and announces that the town sits on a new international border, erects a barbed wire fence, and tells everyone to take their concerns to the district council. Nilufar and Aziz's nuptials become fraught with danger -- literally and figuratively -- and it's not long before tragedy ensues.

If a fence suddenly went up in any random border town on the American/Canadian border, residents that one time crossed freely suddenly needing paperwork would be little more than inconvenienced. For the denizens of Safedobi, however, the disruption is nearly disastrous. Trade, health care, schooling and courtship are among the workaday events that are made nearly impossible by the boundary. The village -- once distinct as simply Upper and Lower Safedobi -- finds the world around it has changed overnight.

Saidov makes his point even more vivid by keeping things matter-of-fact and occasionally comical. The villagers don't let civics interfere with their lives at first, and just mosey up to the fence and haggle with each other from opposite sides. But Nilufar's wedding brings just how serious the issue is into sharp relief. "True Noon" never considers nationalism a problem for its characters; with the exception of Kirill, everyone is from Safedobi and that's how they identify. What the film does consider is the hand centralized, distant bureaucracies have in creating nationalism and how fundamentally fragile our social connections are.