SIFF - The Final Five
Jun. 10th, 2013 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
The festival has ended for another year (apart from the usual week-long 'best of' showcase), so here's the last of my selection.
The Hunt. A Danish film about a schoolteacher in a small town who is accused of being a paedophile. Mads Mikkelsen (yes, that one, the new Hannibal) won best actor for this at Cannes, and it's not hard to see why. A claustrophobic, intense drama about how gossip becomes presumption of guilt, and a man placed under intolerable pressure. 9/10
Free Fall. Young policeman Marc finds himself intensely attracted to another man on a training course. Which wouldn't be an insurmountable problem in modern Germany, if Marc hadn't just moved into a house with his heavily pregnant girlfriend.
This is essentially a love triangle story, and the fact that Marc's new lover is a man is irrelevant to large parts of the drama. There is some plot involving homophobia in the police, but mostly it's about Marc being a dick to everyone involved, and making all of them miserable, including himself, though it's hard to have much sympathy for the cheater. The film never rises above its soap opera plot, despite the best efforts of the actors. 6/10
In the Shadow. In 1950s Czechoslovakia, a policeman investigates a jewellery theft and finds all the evidence points to a known safe-cracker. An initially simple case becomes more complex when he discovers the man he just arrested has a watertight alibi. By then, though, both his prisoner and his case have been taken over by the Soviet-run State Security, and it is strongly suggested that he should stop asking questions.
This story of one man's pursuit of justice in a system that wants anything but isn't particularly unique or innovative. But it is well acted, and beautifully filmed, with a great noir feel throughout. I really enjoyed it. 8/10
Two Lives. Katrine has a wonderful family life, with her husband, daughter and a new grandchild. But in 1990, with the Berlin wall gone and German reunification in progress, the secrets of East Germany are becoming a matter of public record and Katrine lives in fear of her past being exposed. More than two decades earlier, she was sent to live and work in Norway as a spy for the GDR.
The film is fiction, but the background to it is real. During WWII, babies born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers were taken back to Germany as good Aryan stock. With the Nazis gone, the now unwanted babies were raised in German orphanages, and in the late 1960s, the Stasi infiltrated a number of agents into Norway, posing as the long-lost children of grief-stricken mothers. The plot focuses on Katrine's increasingly desperate efforts to hold her lies together in the face of ongoing revelations - what do all the years of love count for against such appalling deception?
Not a brilliant film, but an interesting one, and I'm glad I saw it. I hovered between scoring it 7 or 8, but in the end I think it's a 7/10.
Closed Curtain. A man goes into hiding into Iran, shutting himself inside a house because he is illegally keeping a dog, considered unclean under Islamic law. He uses his time to write a screenplay about his own experiences, but one night a brother and sister walk into his house, pursued by the authorities.
The Iranian film director Jafar Panahi is under house arrest for producing 'anti-government propoganda'. So he made a film set entirely in his own house, and the result is Closed Curtain. The intial set-up is intriguing, with its multiple layers of film-writer sealed in his house writing about a film-writer sealed in a house writing his own screenplay. But when the visitors arrive, it quickly becomes all very... odd. The film is trying to say a lot here about the nature of fiction vs reality, and mental vs physical prisons (I think), but it all starts to get very non-linear and just feels random. I much preferred it when it was a film about a man and a dog. The dog was great - the audience loved the dog. I think I have to classify this an interesting but failed experiment. 5/10.
None of the films I went to see won the awards, which is standard considering there were 271 films this year and I saw 14.
The Hunt. A Danish film about a schoolteacher in a small town who is accused of being a paedophile. Mads Mikkelsen (yes, that one, the new Hannibal) won best actor for this at Cannes, and it's not hard to see why. A claustrophobic, intense drama about how gossip becomes presumption of guilt, and a man placed under intolerable pressure. 9/10
Free Fall. Young policeman Marc finds himself intensely attracted to another man on a training course. Which wouldn't be an insurmountable problem in modern Germany, if Marc hadn't just moved into a house with his heavily pregnant girlfriend.
This is essentially a love triangle story, and the fact that Marc's new lover is a man is irrelevant to large parts of the drama. There is some plot involving homophobia in the police, but mostly it's about Marc being a dick to everyone involved, and making all of them miserable, including himself, though it's hard to have much sympathy for the cheater. The film never rises above its soap opera plot, despite the best efforts of the actors. 6/10
In the Shadow. In 1950s Czechoslovakia, a policeman investigates a jewellery theft and finds all the evidence points to a known safe-cracker. An initially simple case becomes more complex when he discovers the man he just arrested has a watertight alibi. By then, though, both his prisoner and his case have been taken over by the Soviet-run State Security, and it is strongly suggested that he should stop asking questions.
This story of one man's pursuit of justice in a system that wants anything but isn't particularly unique or innovative. But it is well acted, and beautifully filmed, with a great noir feel throughout. I really enjoyed it. 8/10
Two Lives. Katrine has a wonderful family life, with her husband, daughter and a new grandchild. But in 1990, with the Berlin wall gone and German reunification in progress, the secrets of East Germany are becoming a matter of public record and Katrine lives in fear of her past being exposed. More than two decades earlier, she was sent to live and work in Norway as a spy for the GDR.
The film is fiction, but the background to it is real. During WWII, babies born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers were taken back to Germany as good Aryan stock. With the Nazis gone, the now unwanted babies were raised in German orphanages, and in the late 1960s, the Stasi infiltrated a number of agents into Norway, posing as the long-lost children of grief-stricken mothers. The plot focuses on Katrine's increasingly desperate efforts to hold her lies together in the face of ongoing revelations - what do all the years of love count for against such appalling deception?
Not a brilliant film, but an interesting one, and I'm glad I saw it. I hovered between scoring it 7 or 8, but in the end I think it's a 7/10.
Closed Curtain. A man goes into hiding into Iran, shutting himself inside a house because he is illegally keeping a dog, considered unclean under Islamic law. He uses his time to write a screenplay about his own experiences, but one night a brother and sister walk into his house, pursued by the authorities.
The Iranian film director Jafar Panahi is under house arrest for producing 'anti-government propoganda'. So he made a film set entirely in his own house, and the result is Closed Curtain. The intial set-up is intriguing, with its multiple layers of film-writer sealed in his house writing about a film-writer sealed in a house writing his own screenplay. But when the visitors arrive, it quickly becomes all very... odd. The film is trying to say a lot here about the nature of fiction vs reality, and mental vs physical prisons (I think), but it all starts to get very non-linear and just feels random. I much preferred it when it was a film about a man and a dog. The dog was great - the audience loved the dog. I think I have to classify this an interesting but failed experiment. 5/10.
None of the films I went to see won the awards, which is standard considering there were 271 films this year and I saw 14.
