“Tricks” & “Cherry Blossoms”: Late Bloomers

On a family trip in the mid 1980‘s, we took the London to Edinburgh line and met a young Swedish couple. While the woman in her early 20s was attractive, she was routinely so, but in the post Borg age, when Edbergs, Wilanders, and Jarryds made such a racket, it was her companion with his preposterously perfect feathered hair, flawless English and effortless friendliness who my teenaged self and younger sister engaged in casual, convivial conversation as he poured Smarties into our hands.

The pretty pair departed the train before we crossed the border, and my sister recalls that it was in the “middle of nowhere,” so perhaps, we’ve surmised, they got off at York or Darlington to hike the Yorkshire Dales. We’ve always imagined that the intrepid Scandinavians were thrust into a wondrous adventure after they disembarked.

Hinging on a boy’s obsession with the comings and goings of a man he believes to be his estranged father at his local train station, the Polish film “Tricks” is an attractive effort with many commendable elements which is somewhat foiled, one feels, by a vague central theme of parental abandonment. There’s a gnawing sense that, like an interrupted train journey, there is vitally more to the handsomely illustrated story than director and screenwriter Andrzej Jakimowski was willing to tell.

Stefek (Damian Ul) is a young boy of eightish who spends his summer days hanging out at the train station in his country town. He discovers that one of the men who regularly travels to the station in a suit and carrying a briefcase is his father who left the family, started another, and has since chosen to cut off contact with Stefek and his older sister. Stefek watches him from afar, and they interact on the platform with only passing glances. One must deduce that the father (Tomasz Sapryk) left when Stefek was no older than a baby because he doesn’t appear to readily recognize his child, even though he travels through the town ostensibly on business on a daily basis and a boy of his abandoned son’s age is lurking at the station.

Stefek begins to karmically conjure a reunion with his father. He uses borrowed carrier pigeons and strategically placed toy soldiers and sticks for his quest in scenes that are some of “Tricks” most delightfully delivered. His eighteen-year-old sister Elsa, played by the photogenic Ewelina Walendziak, is the film’s most well-developed character and while she doesn’t dissuade her younger brother from his desire, she’s not terribly interested herself in retracing a relationship with her father. Stefek’s mother is a benevolently peripheral character who spends most of the film off camera running a modest corner shop.

On one particularly sun-dappled summer day Stefek shadows the suited businessman as he strolls through the town after missing a train, buying street fruit, wading in a bucolic stream, visiting with old chums and running into former acquaintances. During the walk, the father appears to spot in a window a photo of the three he left behind in their Sunday finery. As the sun begins to set, Stefek and Elsa watch from a recessed doorway as their father purchases a modest bunch of flowers, walks to the door of their mother’s humble shop, pauses, then turns away. In the film’s final scene when Stefek finally strikes up a conversation at the end of the day with this man at the station, the film concludes a crucial moment as his the dad utters, “I’m sitting on the platform but not waiting for a train.” And then the credits begin to crawl, the film abruptly ending at a departure, one which could be the crux of a movie.

Jakimowski has a knack for shooting fetching scenes. The film moves effortlessly through charming, winding narrow old-world streets shrouded by modern concrete apartment blocks. Vignettes of swooping carrier pigeons captured in the breaks between buildings and Stefek walking the train tracks around the town leaving toy soldiers on the railroad ties are filmed expressively by cinematographer Adam Bajerski. If the film had simply wished to unfold as a verdant narrative of a summer in a young boy’s life, it contains scenes like these in abundance, with further simple, sweet moments such as a picnic in the woods, walks across a looming bridge and a carefree motorcycle ride through the town.

Stefek perpetually carries a fretful countenance, habitually chewing the inside of his lip, but as a child observer, he isn’t provided with a view into the insights necessary to illuminate the audience to a greater understanding of the father‘s reasoning. Elsa’s escapades illustrates a story which doesn’t need to be enhanced by the father’s choices, or even his presence. She struggles in a plucky way with a hectic schedule filled with a mundane dishwashing job, studying Italian lessons as she attempts to secure a job with an Italian company, and just trying to enjoy the last summer of her youth with her likable, mechanic boyfriend, all the while serving as a surrogate mother to Stefek. Most puzzling for a film apparently so immersed in a theme of family bonds is the decision to make Stefek and Elsa’s mother (Iwona Fornalczyk) such a perplexingly undeveloped character.

If the attractive “Tricks“ suffers from a paucity that suggests it’s a prologue, then “Cherry Blossoms,” the latest film from German director Doris Dorrie, is essentially two excellent, fully-formed shorter films which coalesce into a satisfying whole.

Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) learns that her husband, Rudi (Elmar Wepper), a nearing-retirement-age, unassuming bureaucrat she dotes upon, is terminally ill. They depart upon her insistence for a number of trips while she believes Rudi can still travel. They visit the mountains, journey to Berlin to see two of their children, and embark to the Baltic for a beach holiday. They are a kindly but not saccharine couple who their children barely tolerate and their grandchildren consider a distraction and it’s a deft touch by Dorrie that the person who shows the couple the most simple kindness in Berlin is their daughter’s girlfriend (Nadja Uhl), who accompanies Trudi to a Butoh performance which is so clearly important to her. After these European travels, she has the intention of taking Rudi to Japan, a country which has always fascinated, enamored and moved her. But on a still morning in their Baltic hotel, Trudi has passed away and we have at her death the conclusion of the first half of the film which, upon reflection, is a completely contained, emotionally poignant 45 minutes.

Slowly in the second portion, Rudi, an instinctually unadventurous man, begins to understand that perhaps he was too accommodating to Trudi’s role as an at-home supplicant in their relationship and even though she gained great heart from her decades of nurturing he recognizes that as the person receiving this devotion, he should have been more aware of her sacrifice and that he should have been insistent that Trudi not subsume her desires and dreams for his contentment. As he rummages through her belongings, Rudi finds postcards of Mount Fuji and long ago photos of a face-painted Trudi in Butoh poses and realizes he was both overly influential and silently complicit in her self denial. So he decides to make a pilgrimage to Japan, to take her trip of a lifetime. The journey is complicated because their third child works in finance in Tokyo, and like his siblings in Berlin, he, sadly, finds his father‘s presence an imposition and uses the rigors of his work schedule as a convenient excuse for his absences and distant manner. As Rudi begins to investigate Tokyo on his own, he befriends Yu (Aya Irizuki), an 18-year-old Butoh street dancer. They develop a friendship and a connection which will help both of them confront and then embrace grief and loss.

Dorrie, who also wrote the script, has crafted a film laden with achingly emotional scenes but at 127 minutes “Cherry Blossoms” takes the time to develop the legitimacy of these tear-jerking wallops, especially with the characterizations of Trudi and Rudi, so that the weepy moments are not manipulative. The film ends with the married couple magically intertwined with Mount Fuji looming in the background, the journey of these two people and the two mini films both meaningfully and movingly merged.

(“Tricks” and “Cherry Blossoms” screened at the Portland International Film Festival earlier this month. “Cherry Blossoms” will be released to theaters in the United States by Strand Releasing.)

“Gomorra”: Dolce & Camorra

Diego Maradona, the coked up little genius of world football, was an artisan and a renegade and nowhere did his penchant for sporting sublimity and personal self destruction flourish more than in Napoli. The scruffy, diminutive El Pibe de Oro (the Golden Child) won a World Cup for Argentina in 1986 but the next year he accomplished something even more transcendent for his club side, SSC Napoli, by winning if not single handedly then with singular indefatigability the 1987 Serie A title. It was the first championship ever won by a southern Italian team after almost a century of competition, an historic moment with ramifications more far-reaching than the confines of a football pitch. The tifosi adore the skewed virtuoso with the low center of gravity and a high tolerance for the bacchanal even though he left the club, disgraced, in 1991.

Reports propagate that Maradona enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Camorra, the mafia of Napoli. As Richard Williams of The Guardian noted earlier this decade, “Maradona’s nocturnal adventures inevitably drew him into a demi-monde of intrigue and clan warfare.” In his 1996 book “The Camorra,” Tom Behan underscored this intimate connection the footballer shared with the city’s organized crime syndicate. “Furthermore, there is considerable circumstantial evidence to link Maradona to the Camorra: he was photographed socializing with some of the Guiliano brothers on more than one occasion, he had relationships with women closely linked to Camorra clans, and developed a cocaine habit which eventually led to his rapid departure form Naples as a result of a ban on playing and the obligation to face a trial.”

“Gomorra” is the film about those who couldn’t scurry off. Based on the 2006 non-fiction exposé of Napoli’s organized crime clans by Roberto Saviano — a book whose publication meant that the author reportedly never slept in the same bed two nights running until deciding to emigrate late last year to avoid the constant threat of retaliatory assassination — “Gomorra” is grim, violent, visceral, fascinating, unnerving and unrelenting. Ensnared and centered in derelict apartment blocks stacked like LEGO on crank in the Scampia quarter of Napoli, it’s a stark and brutal panorama from director Matteo Garrone of lives locked in mortar and moral squalor.

It is filmed through a macro lens, with an unnerving claustrophobic view. This tiny prism is tight on the foreground, blurring the background out of focus, and so close that only a part of a person is visible. There‘s very little visual perspective, and the foreboding sense of danger this creates is palpable and redoubtable. Characters are captive. But so is the audience. Opening with a tanning salon massacre, “Gomorra” announces itself in a close-cropped hail of gunfire, the blue-lit beds transformed into blood-stained coffins. The camera work by Marco Onorato is raw but not jutting about in the all-too-familiar hand-held staccato.

As the movie embeds itself into five intertwining and engrossing stories juggled beautifully by Garrone and editor Marco Spoletini, the tension only intensifies. Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese) is just entering his teenage years and recruits himself into the underworld. Sporting an England No. 7 sleeveless jersey, rings on almost every finger and plucked eyebrows, he endures an initiation both terrifying and uncomplicated in its warped crystalline concept of machismo.

The corruption of the waste disposal industry is unearthed by the travels of Franco (Toni Servillo), a snake smooth Camorra broker, and his fledgling protégé Roberto (Carmine Paternoster). Criss-crossing the country securing contracts doesn‘t leave much time for them, or the film, to sight-see., Even a Venice gondola ride is shot so tightly that we watch the wonder in Roberto‘s eyes but see very little of the sights.

Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is an earnest, kindly and respected dressmaker who perilously befriends a factory of Chinese immigrants by tutoring them at night, for a fee, on sewing techniques while his own boss is financed by the mob. His arc provides the film with its most altruistic moments — sitting on the edge of his bed regaling his sleeping wife and child about the sumptuous bass dinner cooked by his hosts or the car rides to the factory where he is tucked into the trunk for his protection and pokes his head through a hole in the backseat platform to chat — but even these are cloaked in danger and threat.

Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), the middle-aged bag man, is a beaten down money carrier who’s face is plastered with a Buster Keaton melancholy. His plight only becomes more precarious as shifting clan dynamics alter his existence from protected foot soldier to vulnerable pawn.

And finally, two stupid ass punks by the names of Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) smashing through the film quoting Tony Montana, stealing coke from Nigerian dealers, pilfering ammo from mob bosses, letting loose cannons on the briny shore, signing their death warrants with chicken scratch stunts. But “Gomorra” isn’t a film which lets you off the hook by telegraphing who survives and who gets snuffed. Everyone’s in the scope. The fact that Marco and Ciro each have a bullet with their name on it from their first steps on screen doesn’t mean there aren’t enough cartridges to go round.

Classic crime films such as the brilliant “Goodfellas” and “City of God” are phenomenal entertainment but they are filled with reassuring qualities. But “Gomorra” is bleak. It’s the mafia film redacted, stripped of the soothing effusions and familiar tropes; there is no guiding, helpful voiceover, no death rattle soliloquies, no cop from the neighborhood, no intrepid photographer, no sagely pontificator, no soundtrack to bop along to, and no body making it out of the neighborhood.

And there’s no code, either. Revenge is sought but splayed, directed in a spiral. A scene at the morgue where Toto and the older young men in his clan plot retribution underscores that they don‘t know who ordered the hit on their compadre. Yet they feel compelled to react, mercilessly. But there’s no color coded visual to distinguish friend from foe, no venerated and feared families, no regard for territory. It’s a horizontal hierarchy, not vertical, so it’s all happening at ground level. Nihilism can be born in those with no future, but what if a community populated by Toto’s has no past, just a cycle of living in a regurgitated present. “Gomorra” ends with a dump truck and corpses, a confluence of murder and waste disposal, in a present untended by a God, forsaken by man, with no hero, not even a footballing deity, in view.

(Previously released in New York and Los Angeles in January, “Gomorra” screened at the Portland International Film Festival earlier this month. It opens February 27th in Portland with an anticipated wider national release planned for the coming months.)

“Twilight” & “Let the Right One In”: The Kids Are All Fright

The infobahn is atwitter with “Twilight.” While the North American box office nears $200 million and the world-wide figures double that return, and stories abound of behind-the-scenes intrigue with machinations so rabid that the director has been excised from the sequel and a third film has already been marked on calendars for 2010, the clamor can’t conceal that this vampire movie is a trifle, an unremarkable film so slight that random episodes of “Buffy” bustle with more humor, charm, wonderment, and, most importantly, verve. Catherine Hardwicke has directed a film without magic or vitality, fatal exclusions for a fantasy flick.

The story of Bella, an Arizona teenager who shuttles herself off to small-town Washington state to live with her police chief father and subsequently becomes enraptured by a relationship with a dashing vampire, is told stiltingly, with too many scenes of high schoolers staring longingly at each other across the school cafeteria. (It suggests, as much as anything, that they are unimpressed by the tater tots and wiener wraps.) The voiceover from Bella adds very little to character understanding and fails to enhance the narrative. From a vampire flick perspective there‘s precious little pep so by the time anyone is Columbia Gorged, the attenuated “Twilight” offers nothing fresh in its execution with uninspiring special effects and meager action sequences, especially in a baseball game sequence which is equally hokey and undeveloped. The final battle in a hall of mirrors feels both forced and small — a fair reflection of the preceding story.

Exacerbating a tepidly told tale is the casting of Bella, a character of no particular individual spark in the first place, with Kristen Stewart, an actress so wooden it was difficult to distinguish the old growth forest from her tease. She delivers almost every line in an uninspired hushed rush, a breakneck breathless monotone that doesn’t evoke teenaged awkwardness as much as suggests laconic boredom.

As Edward, the perpetually 17-year-old vampire, Robert Pattinson exhibits some nice acting chops as Bella‘s paramour. He conveys Edward’s brooding intensity, conflicted impulses, and self-conscious sweetness with style. To compound Bella’s somnolence, the ancillary roles of her new, eager schoolmates (whom she appears to be find tedious) are played by an energetic and funny lot.

“Twilight” is a franchise in search of fangs and is devoured by “Let the Right One In,“ the Swedish masterwork, which despite currently earning less than $2 million on this continent and just over $5 million across the globe, is an enriching experience which deserves massive message board devotion and an audience more substantial than one delivered by midnight movie cult status. Director Tomas Alfredson redefines the vampire flick with a film that, while respecting the elements of the genre with beautifully choreographed genuine scares and unsightly frights replete with swirls of cats and bleeding eyes, is infused with intelligence, grace and humanity.

Based on the 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted his work for the screen, it tells the tale of 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a latch key kid bullied at school, who befriends a new arrival to his apartment block, a fellow 12-year-old, Eli (Lina Leandersson), who is actually a centuries old vampire. Oskar is adrift — not saddled with loneliness as much as that inexorable pre-teen sense of awkwardness and uncertainty that even the most self-assured youth is pursued by — and finds a quietly receptive partner to his unassuming desire to bond in Eli. She is alone, immersed in a secret life, and Oskar is a trustworthy ally with an affection that is more than a crush but not yet carnal. Alfredson does a remarkable job of building this burgeoning friendship, illustrating the tender uneasy steps of the pre-teens, and nurturing pitch-perfect performances from the pair as well.

But what makes “Let the Right One In“ so exceptional is the way Alfredson and his crew handles the ever-changing moods so deftly with the quieter, more evocative moments and the grisly sequences delivered with equal aplomb. The switching back between the differing tones is expertly mastered by co-editors Alfredson and Daniel Jonsater (and filmed compellingly by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema) so that the gentle moments never feel ingratiating and the eerie scenes are thoroughly dense and chilling. Nothing feels stop gap; every is integral. Similarly, the soundtrack by Johan Soderqvist is wonderfully adept at enhancing the variation, producing sweeping orchestration for the thrilling scenes but also very melodic, spare musical interludes during the softer, more introspective instances.

By the time “Let the Right One In” culminates in a brilliantly realized swimming pool sequence which submerges the film in an act of devotional vigilantism, it is clear that this is a superlative work, one of the finest films of the last year, whose quality is not hinged to any niche and which has no need for a sequel to embolden its legacy.

“Taken”: Schindler’s Pissed

When Liam Neeson lays siege on Paris, he transforms the capital into “The City of Lights Out.”

Before his turbulent arrival in the French capital, Bryan Mills (Neeson), is a retired operative for an unnamed US agency, previously stealthily deployed for years in the world’s hot spots as an ambiguously menacing “Preventer.” Suffering from a papa’s guilt of abandonment, he has moved to Los Angeles to be closer to Kim (Maggie Grace), his just turned 17-year-old daughter, who lives in opulent splendor with her mother (Famke Janssen, sporting almost Vulcan eyebrows) and a wealthy, obliging step-father (the dependable, bearded Xander Berkeley, whose name has always evoked the Ziegfeld Follies). Neeson smartly plays these California scenes with a halting and awkward undercurrent, his fussy remonstrating about Kim’s impending European vacation with a friend smacking of overcompensation. He’s well-meaning but still smothering, and Neeson adroitly transmits Bryan’s parental rustiness.

After Kim and her buddy unpack in the friend’s family’s spacious Parisian digs which the two teens have all to themselves, she takes a call from her anxious dad in LA and the movie alights powerfully with a well-constructed sequence by director Pierre Morel where, while Mills is on the line, she views the abduction of her friend by several men across the courtyard of the horseshoe-shaped apartment. His spy muscle memory kicks in as he advises his frantic daughter with specific instructions. The editing cuts and thrusts between the two cities until, as he predicted to her, she is kidnapped, drug from the beneath a bed, the cell phone left on the floor per his orders so that he can record every detail.

And then once he lands at Charles de Gaulle, the film tears along with his furious search, rarely dallying as Mills lays waste to swarthy contingents of criminal continentals (a demographic not overly vilified by the filmmakers but, still, perhaps they could have thrown in a puffin-eating Icelander). With martial arts expertise and Grand Prix driving skills, Mills erupts in full vigilante mode — he even wounds a main character’s wife with a bullet; this is clearly a dad in a hurry to make up for lost time.

For this brogue warrior, every clue is dissected instantaneously, every scenario scanned swiftly, and every contingency deciphered immediately so that when he happens upon a table of Albanians at meal time, he knows exactly where the butter knife goes. I thought it was on the top left, resting on the bread plate; apparently it’s the larynx.

Neeson, who turns 57 this year, is an uncomplicated and dependable actor, with a bit of Burt Lancaster‘s sturdiness about him, if not his magnetism. Clearly fit and energetic, Neeson executes the countless martial arts scenes with vitality. (As a point of comparison, the craggy William Holden was 58 when “Network” premiered.) He completes the transition from put-upon dad to rugged snoop quite nicely.

Morel, who helmed the frenetic “District B13,” oversees a taut, gristle-free thriller. He’s ably assisted by cinematographer Michel Abramowicz and editor Frederic Thoraval. “Taken” is co-written and produced by Luc Besson, who has found in Morel a worthy protégé.