PERFECT DAYS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I guess you could say Perfect Days is a mood. In which case, your mileage may vary widely, depending on your frame of mind when you approach this film—if you approach it at all. This is another one of those movie where critics predictably adore it, and I know many people who would never have the patience for it.

Director and co-writer Wim Wenders focuses on Hirayama (a wonderful Kôji Yakusho, who is in nearly every frame of the film), an older man who spends his work days cleaning Tokyo toilets. The company he works for is apparently very literal when it comes to their business name: Hirayama’s jumpsuit is emblazoned with the words, in English, The Tokyo Toilet.

And to be clear: we spend a lot of time following Hirayama around, cleaning public toilets around the city. A more conventional film would spend a fair amount of time following him on his routine for, say, one day. And then the next day, maybe some variation. But Wenders really wants us to settle into Hirayama’s world, and we follow him around for multiple days, seemingly nothing of note happening to him. Any small variation that does occur—places he goes to eat, for example—prove to be just as much a part of his regular routine, just not necessarily on a daily cadence.

Watching this movie, I found myself thinking about the surprise #1 movie on the 2022 Sight and Sound list of the best movies of all time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both movies exist to make us feel as though we are living a person’s life with them. The key difference between Perfect Days is that we follow the character outside his home. He spends a lot of time driving through the mass of steel and pavement that is Tokyo—with a great many angles on the 2,080-foot Tokyo Skytree—and even more time cleaning toilets. But, many of these toilets are in city parks, small urban oases of lush greenery. And, in sharp contrast to Jeanne Dielman, whose point of view is ultimately bleak, Hirayama is a deeply contented man, living a simple life to which he is utterly suited. He is a man of so few words, he utters almost nothing in the film’s first 45 minutes.

And, over time, small details creep into notice. Other people passing through his orbit, using the toilets, indicate in very subtle ways how they think of him as dirty. When Hirayama finds a lost little boy and takes him by the hand to find his mother, the mother pays no attention to Hirayama and immediately disinfects the boy’s hands. I must admit to some ambivalence about this depiction, myself. I would also want to wash my hands immediately after, say, shaking the hand of a guy I knew just spent all day cleaning toilets.

Granted, there could be a cultural difference here. Hirayama cleans an astonishing number of single occupancy public toilets, and at least as depicted here, they look remarkably clean even before he gets to them. Whether this is typical of Japanese society or just a contrivance of this film, I have no idea. I just know that if these toilets were in the United States, they would look like a sewer exploded inside them within hours.

Hirayama indicates a tendency to notice and appreciate small pleasures, often while he’s doing his work. He takes photos, with an old camera that uses film, of branches overhead from his lunch bench in the park. He appreciates colorful reflective light under an overhanging roof of a toilet next to a busy street. The point is, if you are receptive to the specificity of what Perfect Days has to offer, it takes on a warmly compelling quality.

And, eventually, certain character details emerge. Hirayama’s young niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), shows up unexpectedly, having run away from home. Hirayama is a man of so few words, he accepts this stoically, although he does call his sister soon enough. If this were an American movie, the niece would show up on day two. Here, the movie must be half over before she appears, interrupting Hirayama’s comfortable routine, but in a way that he accepts with passive grace.

Perfect Days is somewhat long, particularly at the pace it unfolds, at two hours and three minutes (counting the credits). But two key scenes occur in the last quarter of the film, and I am unconvinced that their impact would be quite as effective if we hadn’t spent all that time with him beorehand. One of them involves his sister, and one involves the ex-husband of the lady who runs one of the restaurants he frequents. Neither of them are major surprises—nothing in Perfect Days is jarring—but neither of the scenes that unfold are quite expected either. In a way, they just further enrich Hirayama’s world, whis is explicitly described to Niko as wholly separate from her mother’s. I found them to be unexpectedly, almost sneakily moving.

They don’t particularly change the mood, either. Perfect Days takes on a tone that evokes those days you spent out and about in a solitude you find yourself particularly enjoying. Hirayama has made that his way of life. We’ve just been granted the privilege of a brief visit into his world.

It’s a lovely day in the park. And in toilets.

Overall: B+

THE TASTE OF THINGS

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

It’s been said that you shouldn’t watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach—and that is precisely what I did. And then I sat through this lengthy, gorgeously shot, expertly choreographed opening sequence of an elaborate dinner getting prepared in a large, late-nineteenth-century French kitchen.

Here’s the thing. If you are a carnivore, you might have greater need to heed such a warning: there is a lot of meat and seafood prepared in this movie. I am, however, a vegetarian—I don’t even eat seafood. I could appreciate the vividly shot food, clearly actually cooked on set, on a purely aesthetic level, but it certainly didn’t have me salivating.

Here’s what it did do. It made me think, a lot, about the way we eat our food. It made me long for a meal prepared with such intricate care, from ingredients sourced from the garden right outside the door. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of Eugénie (a luminescent Juliette Binoche, still a genuine stunner at age 59) harvesting produce straight out of the dirt. We throw phrases around like “farm to table” as though it’s a marketing concept, and then we witness it occurring onscreen in this movie, almost in real time. And here, in the real world, 140 years after the setting of our movie, we pass our days eating food made quickly or cheaply or, in most cases, both.

The Taste of Things is populated with characters for whom flavor is more important than anything. I marveled at the technical proficiency already achieved by the 19th century, the myriad combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques, and the amount of time that it takes—and took—to master all these dishes.

As I said, the meat based dishes—beef, veal, fish, you name it—still failed to make me salivate, in ways I am certain it will most audiences. And then Eugénie whips up this Baked Alaska dish and I nearly cried with desire: Holy fuckballs that looks amazing! And I don’t even like meringue. The men Eugénie serves this dessert to discuss the physics of how the ice cream stays frozen inside, and I was rapt. This was one dish with meringue I could imagine using as skin cream. I wanted to bathe in it.

The Taste of Things is about much more than vividly shot food preparation, of course. At its heart, it is a love story, between Eugénie, a longtime cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the restauranteur Eugénie worked for for many years. They now live together in a kind of perpetual romance, Dodin regularly proposing to her, and Eugénie regularly insisting she prefers things as they are. Their love and affection is quite overtly represented in the deeply rooted history and skill in the food they share. This includes both cooking and eating it, although Eugénie does most of the cooking.

There is a bit of sadness thrown in, and I won’t spoil exactly what that is, although it gets alluded to pretty early on, in the middle of the aforementioned, extended opening sequence. It’s easy to focus on that sequence, because of the incredible blocking and choreography and camera work, but most scenes in this film involve cooking, and without exception the food is shot with a cozy, loving eye. Beyond the focus on the food, the story is deceptively simple. But it stays with you.

There is a somewhat curious separation of genders in this film, and the heavy focus on Binoche notwithstanding, I kind of wish there were more women in it. Besides Eugénie, the only significant female characters are two younger cooks who work with her: Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who evidently has relatively mediocre still; and Violette’s niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who has an astonishing, precocious talent for gastronomy. Dodin, for his part, has a group of about five men friends who populate many scenes, often to pontificate on the prepared food or to provide support to Dodin, as needed.

But, it all comes back to Eugénie and Dodin, every other character serving their story. One of the great many things I love about The Taste of Things is the way it naturally veers away from any of the typical film tropes. Just because of the way I’ve been conditioned by decades of movie watching, I kept expecting one of the apprentice cooks to trip while climbing the many staircases in the house, or for one of the men to creep on young Pauline. But, nothing of the sort happens in this story, which is only about two character who are, as Dodin puts it, “in their autumn years,” and their earnest devotion to each other. Sometimes the simplest stories are the most moving and beautiful, and this is certainly one to savor.

Don’t insult this movie by eating cheap popcorn while you watch it!

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A
Music: B+

The Zone of Interest is a film that challenges you to pay attention, then makes you uncomfortable, forces you to sit in that discomfort, and regularly reminds you of the ease of complacency. It is within this context that I found how it ended to be one of the greatest endings of a film, perhaps ever.

Jonathan Glazer, who co-wrote the script and directed this film, previously gave us such wildly disparate films as Under the Skin (2014), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000), certainly takes his time between feature films, and has evidently honed his craft over time. Under the Skin in particular, a film now a decade old, is similarly subtle in both its profundity and provocative themes; it definitely has something to say. And, while it is imperfect, its ideas, its visuals, and especially its tone has me returning to it every few years.

The Zone of Interest is a bit more direct in its challenge, a slight irony given how it shifts nearly all the horrors of the Holocaust outside the borders of the frame. This is a story focused on Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), and their children, living their seemingly ordinary, every day lives in a home literally on the other side of the fence surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rudolf is the commandant of the camp, Hedwig is his wife, and in their minds, they are living the dream: everything they want in a home, with an elaborate garden, and a loving family.

The Jewish people loom large in this film, in that to the German family we are following—as well as the rest of their family, friends and colleagues—Jewish people are entirely incidental, no more or less worth considering than generic cargo. Their conscious thought about Jewish people is limited to questions of whether the few of them being used as slave labor on the grounds should be allowed inside the house. Occasionally an unusual consideration punctures their idyllic existence, such as when the ashes of human remains float down a nearly river and reach them while obliviously fishing or swimming. (That image of the ash flowing down the river toward them is not one I will soon forget.)

Glazer is a master of tone, particularly of the deeply creepy sort, but in The Zone of Interest, he quite intentionally does away with tone altogether. The proceedings are generally very matter-of-fact, the same approach the Höss family has toward Rudolf’s work. This only changes in sporadic fits, with Mica Levi’s truly nightmarish score, which reaches occasional crescendos over seemingly mundane images, like flowers growing in the garden. But, there is always something insidious under the surface of any particularly domestic image: those flowers are grown with human remains in the soil.

I might be tempted to call The Zone of Interest the 21st-century answer to Schndler’s List, except Jonathan Glazer is far removed from the kind of populist director that Steven Spielberg is. Even a film like Schindler’s List, which I would still regard as essential viewing, is similarly pointed in how it challenges its audience, but would never have reached the same number of people without the Spielberg name attached to it. Glazer, by contrast, is a longtime critical darling whose films just don’t get widely seen. Even with The Zone of Interest fairly likely to become his most-seen film, it’s never going to get genuinely mainstream exposure.

It’s too bad. The Zone of Interest is the kind of film you don’t particularly want to watch, but which you’ll be glad to have seen. I would hesitate to call it “homework,” but plenty of people would likely see it that way. For those who actively seek it out, and you absolutely should, it is likely to be seen as a profound work of art.

Is it a masterpiece? It’s too soon to tell. I was deeply impressed by almost everything about it—including Sandra Hüller, who also gave a spectacular performance recently in Anatomy of a Fall—but was left with mixed feelings about that jarringly severe score. I could feel differently after some time. And that is a specific thing The Zone of Interest plays with, time: nearly all of it is set in the last couple years of World War II, and that changes briefly only once, in a way that is incredibly effective.

I left this film thinking a lot about “the banality of evil,” and how easily it become part of our day to day existence. Rudolf recounts to Hedwig over the phone how he spent a party thinking mostly how he would gas everyone in the high ceilinged banquet room, and those were all people ostensibly on his side. This is a portrait of people far more concerned with logistics than humanity, and the casual way it invites us into their world is the most frightening of all.

The Banality of Evil: The Movie

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Fifty-one years ago, in 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Air Force flight, carrying a rugby team alomg with many of their family and friends, crashed in the Andes mountains on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile. There were twelve initial fatalities among the forty passengers and five crew onboard, a number that steadily grew larger during the seventy-two days the survivors spent stranded in the mountains.

This has long been a story widely known around the globe, and I haven’t even yet mentioned the most notorious aspect of it, the very thing that made those who ultimately survived able to do so.

I’m old enough to remember the 1993 film Alive, starring Ethan Hawke, and how riveting and harrowing the crash sequence was near the beginning. It was long ago when I saw this film, and I don’t remember much of it—although I certainly remember the passengers flying out the back of the torn-open plane after it hit the mountain ridge. I also remember the dramatic drop to the knees after the first time one of the survivors takes a bite of human flesh.

This might be the key difference between Alive and Society of the Snow, which does employ some fairly typical cinematic emotional beats, but doesn’t lean much into those kinds of rote dramatic moments. Curiously, the two films were based on different books: Alive was adapted from Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was published in 1974, only a couple of years after the actual events, but was written by British historian Piers Paul Read. Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) was written far more recently (2008) and thus without the event as fresh in anyone’s memory, but it was by Uruguayan writer Pablo Vierci.

It’s easy to see the potential pros and cons of these two literary accounts, but the disparity becomes wider when we look at the adaptations, with Alive coming straight out of Hollywood, and Socity of the Snow being directed and co-written by Spanish-born J.A. Bayona. Ideally, of course, Society of the Snow would have been made by an actual Uruguayan director. And there is some irony in the fact that Bayona also directed the 2012 film The Impossible, about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand—which cast Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland to tell a story based on a Spanish family’s real-life experience.

Socity of the Snow, at least, is a Spanish-U.S. coproduction, told in Spanish, based on source material that came from a Uruguayan voice. By all accounts, although there have been many adaptations of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, this one is the most accurate and the most realistic. In fact, there is a sequence well into the film in which one of the survivors takes out a camera and starts taking photos. It made me think: surely there are real life photos that were taken, then, of survivors posing around the wreckage? Indeed, there are—and Society of the Snow recreates them with impressive accuracy.

This is, indeed, a very harrowing film to watch. Thirty years makes a big difference in filmmaking capabilities, and the plane crash sequence in this film is rendered in far greater detail, on a comparable budget (in adjusted dollars). There is clear CGI at work in this movie, but it is put to good use, as the scene is no less jaw dropping for it. In just a few moments, what we see is very violent and horrifying.

The thing to remember about this whole experience, though, is that the crash was only the beginning. It happens about 12 minutes into the film, and the notorious cannibalism doesn’t even start until about 45 minutes in. Another major incident occurs well after that, which is just as harrowing as the initial crash itself. Even though I should have seen it coming, I was so absorbed by the film, it scared the shit out of me. Beyond that, many attempts are made at finding help, a nearly impossible task in the middle of the Andes mountains, unknown miles and miles from civilization.

This entire ordeal is a stunning story, and one could argue that, in motion picture form at least, Society of the Snow has done the best job of it. Everything about it is amazing, even how long many of the people who survived the initial crash lasted before later dying for various reasons. Only 16 of the 45 onboard that plane made it in the end, and this is the story of how those few made it—and many of those nearly didn’t. The film’s runtime is two hours and 24 minutes, but a solid 15 of those minutes are the end credits, which makes this film a solid, standard length, all of which is impossible to look away from. If you have even cursory survivalist interests, this movie, currently available streaming on Netflix, is definitely one to watch.

It wasn’t as much of a party as it looked.

Overall: B+

FALLEN LEAVES

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

Fallen Leaves is reveiving virtually universal acclaim, and I’m over here thinking: I must be missing something. It’s fine, but with all due respect, it has yet to strike me as being something particularly special. This is a very simple, surprisingly short (81 minute) tale of two middle-aged people awkwardly falling in love.

This film is being billed as a “romantic comedy.” Romantic, I can get on board with it being. I got a light chuckle out of it maybe three or four times. Otherwise, I’ll concede that Fallen Leaves has a unique sort of sweetness to it. This is about two people who lead very solitary lives, one a little more content with the solitude than the other. They meet at a karaoke bar, and in this particular scene, I did enjoy the furtive glances back and forth between a man and a woman who seem subtly taken aback by how attractive they’re finding each other.

We never learn the names of the characters, but Ansa is played by Alma Pöysti, who is 42; and Holappa is played by Jussi Vatanen, who is 45. Curiously, the story seems to be set over-so-slightly in the future: after getting fired at her supermarket job for taking expired food, Ansa is seen in the kitchen of a bar where she’s hired as a dishwasher, and a 2024 calendar is seen hanging on the wall. This might seem an insignificant detail given how close we are indeed now to 2024, but for the many scenes in which Ansa’s radio plays news reports of Russian attacks in Ukraine.

I had difficulty ascertaining the point of these news clips, in the middle of a love story between two people in Helsinki, Finland. Granted, Finland is the scandinavian country—indeed, the European country—with by far the longest border with Russia. But, there is no political element to the story here otherwise, and if there were supposed to be some symbolic element to these news briefs of war, they sailed right over my head.

Furthermore, the performances across the board are rather flat, muted, almost monotone. This was clearly a deliberate choice, something that happens in a lot of independent and/or foreign films. I wonder how this film is playing in its native Finland. Critics in America are loving it. Am I just jaded after being in my own relationship after twenty years? I’m inclined not to think so, but I’ve been known to be off base about things.

Holappa is a heavy drinker. Ansa doesn’t much care for it. Before they confront that issue, far more minor things occur that result in persistent missed connections: Ansa’s written phone number falling unnoticed out of Holappa’s pocket. Ansa’s playful but ill-advised decision to wait until their second date to tell Holappa her name. They both get fired from their jobs, although Holappa’s drinking is a good reason for it.

That’s not especially a spoiler. There aren’t any major plot turns in Fallen Leaves, which is appealingly unsophisticated in its execution. There’s not a lot to unpack here, really. Nor is there much in the way of emotion. Some movies are wildly emotionally manipulative; Fallen Leaves is the antithesis of that approach. Some might argue that this beautifully underscores the very simple love story at play, one about two people finding love much later in life than most people do. I would argue that this is just a pleasantly simple, straightforward love story and there doesn’t seem to be any more to it than that.

Yep. That’s about all that’s going on here.

Overall: B

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B+

There are many impressive things about Godzilla Minus One, but the one that sticks with me the most is its technical achievement: no special effects-laden American film has ever looked this good on just a $15 million budget.

It should still be noted: you can still recognize the effects here as CGI—this doesn’t have the jaw-dropping effects of, say, Avatar: The Way of Water. What it does have, however, is a far better story, one that references a decades-old history of a global pop icon without being derivative (something James Cameron has never managed). And when it comes down to it, the effects here are far more impressive on such a comparatively meager budget, than stunning effects that are the result of a limitless budget could ever hope to be.

There are arguments either way when it comes to how impressive that $15 million budget really is. A Japanese production has no unions for actors or filmmakers, and far greater potential for exploitative practices than even Hollywood. Of course, to suggest that Hollywood isn’t exploitative, unions notwithstanding, is preposterous, and these considerations hardly account for how expertly executed Godzilla Minus One is on virtually every level, at literally a fraction of the budget of American tentpoles that spend $250 million to make—and often still look like shit.

This much I can tell you for certain: Godzilla Minus One does not look like shit. And, far more importantly, it has a story that is compelling in its own right, even without a giant radioactive sea creature entering the picture. This was the first Japanese-production Godzilla movie I have ever seen, and it’s far better than any of the several American Godzilla films I have seen (Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla was a downright embarrassment; Gareth Edwards’s C+ 2014 Godzilla squandered its potential; Michael Dougherty’s C- 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a mess of chaos; Adam Wingard’s C+ 2021 Godzilla vs Kong was merely a minor relief in not being quite as bad). Godzilla Minus One is a clear indicator that it’s best to go to the source: this is the 33rd Godzilla film to come out of Japan since the first one was released in 1954, and I can verify it’s a great introduction.

Not a lot of those 33 films are outright sequels, and neither is this one. In fact, it takes the “return to roots” so seriously that writer-director Takashi Yamazaki sets it at the very end of World War II—when Japan has already been leveled. Rare is the blockbuster monster-movie that offers the level of nuance at play here, much of which likely went over my head just by virtue of my not being Japanese. Still, there’s a lot to consider even for the global audience, particularly this film’s fascinating point of view, which clearly indicates a cultural shift in Japan in which kamikaze missions are no longer seen as the ultimate in honor.

We meet the protagonist, Koichi (a truly wonderful Ryunosuke Kamiki), landing a fighter plane on an island for repair, and quickly revealed to have backed out of a kamikazi mission. His guilt over abandoning his “duty” informs everything he does from then on, including his inability to shoot the creature that suddenly appears and wreaks havoc on the military installation. (It’s clear to us, though, that he makes the right decision not to shoot at it: “What if it just makes it angry?”) He meets a woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who also has no family left, and who is taking care of a baby whose parents died in the war. They become a sort of tentative family, coping with all their own forms of PTSD in the wake of war, only to then be faced with a giant monster.

Okay, so let’s talk a bit about the monster, because I have some ambivalence about its design. Godzilla doesn’t look so much like a radioactive lizard as a barely-disguised guy in a monster-lizard suit—even as rendered in CGI. I understand the impetus to do this, as Godzilla is such an iconic character, and one might argue he should look, at least roughly, like he always did. Nevertheless, in many of the wide shots, which make Godzilla look like a strangely buff lizard-man, I just found the look distractingly hokey.

When Godzilla is swimming in the sea with his back spikes slicing through the surface, though, or he’s powering up to spew nuclear-strength heat rays out of his mouth, the look is pretty damned cool. The corny looking wide shots notwithstanding, Godzilla Minus One is packed with set pieces that are fantastically shot and edited, always giving us a strong sense of place with the characters, and using the effects shots exclusively in ways to convey the shock and awe of what the characters are witnessing.

And this is really what it comes down to: countless moments in this movie are genuinely thrilling, which alone would make it worth a look. But the drama unfolding between the characters grounds the story in a way that blockbuster disaster movies never bother with, because we are expected to be thrilled without consideration for expendable characters. This only raises the stakes when the thrills actually do happen, resulting in final scenes that actually offer a genuinely emotional payoff.

Here’s another great thing about Godzilla Minus One: this movie never asks us to think of the creature as just a misunderstood animal, something that deserves our empathy because he’s just acting on instinct. That’s often a good perspective to have with real-life animals—which Godzilla is not, and with Godzilla, that is not the point. In many Godzilla films, the creature is a symbol, and the possibilities of meaning are endless. In this case, he’s a stand-in for Koichi battling his own demons, and it really works.

There’s a lot going on in Godzilla Minus One, but in this case, it’s beautifully orchestrated chaos. This, right here, is the way Godzilla should be done, and a slew of American directors could learn a lot from it. Or, of course, we could just continue looking to the Japanese for how to shepherd one’s own aging creation into a vital future.

It turns out you really can make the old inventive again.

Overall: B+

ANATOMY OF A FALL

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A

Anatomy of a Fall is a spectacular specimen of cinematic craftsmanship. At 151 minutes, it does seem at first to move at a somewhat labored pace, and between that and the fact that the dialogue is in three different languages, this film won’t work for everybody. I would argue that it works for anyone with an appreciation for cinema that is elevated to high art through writing, editing and performance rather than dazzling visuals.

Mind you, the visuals in Anatomy of a Fall should not be underestimated. There’s a tracking shot early in the film that had me thinking, Why the hell are we suddenly going through the house from the point of view of the dog? Much later, during the second half of the film that is dominated by a trial, seemingly out of the blue we hear a clear recording of a recent argument between the woman accused of murder and her dead husband—and, at first, all I could think was, How is this happening? Who the hell recorded this?

I learned quickly enough that no matter what questions arise in Anatomy of a Fall, I need only to put my trust in the filmmakers—co-writer Arthur Harari, and especially director and co-writer Justine Triet. The early scenes in this movie seem to skirt the edges of inconsequential, but later prove important. This isn’t a “whodunnit” so much as a “did she do it?”, but in any case all the details we see onscreen are important.

As the title refers to, everything hinges on the discovery of Samuel (Samuel Theis), husband and father, dead in the snow outside the family home in Grenoble, having evidently fallen from the third-floor, attic window of the house. The key players in this mystery are wife and mother Sandra (Sandra Hüller, incredible); 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner, excellent); and of course, Samuel himself. Although a fascinating element of the storytelling here is how little we actually see Samuel onscreen. Aside from two scenes in which we see his dead body, he has only two flashback scenes, only one of them with his own audio—a visualization of the aformentioned argument, which ultimately cuts back to the courtroom when the audio becomes violent but ambiguous. In the second, Daniel is recounting a conversation with him in the car, and we see him, but his lips match Daniel’s voice quoting him as he tells the story. Beyond these spare examples, Samuel exists only in the abstract, as we follow Sandra and Daniel as they face Sandra being put on trial for murder.

I feel compelled to mention the dog, Snoop, again. I don’t want to get too close to spoiler territory here, but Snoop ultimately becomes one more key player, a pivotal part of the final days of the trial, the details of which make that earlier tracking shot from the dog’s perspective make sense. I’ll tell you that Snoop is fine in the end, but there is still a scene in the film involving him that is arguably the most horrifying in the movie, and if you love dogs, watching it might prove tricky. Side note: I can’t speak to any such intentions on Triet’s part, but this sequence is also provocative in regards to the notion that, when push comes to shove, people are more important than animals.

Broadly speaking, the genius of Anatomy of a Fall is how it skirts any of the details that might give us concrete answers about Sandra’s guilt or innocence—we are left to struggle with the same questions as the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), or Sandra’s old lawyer friend brought in to defend her (Swann Arlaud), or the judges, or the jury, or indeed even Daniel. There’s a moment in the film when Daniel is told that sometimes, when there are two possibilities that seem equally plausible, but it can’t be both, you just have to make your own choice. Such is the case with Anatomy of a Fall, which answers all the right questions and the right times, but also has just the right amount of ambiguity, leaving just enough questions unanswered to keep you guessing.

If you have limited patience with subtitled foreign films, Anatomy of a Fall might be a workable compromise: because Sandra is German and Samuel is French, but neither has mastered the other’s language, they speak to each other at home in English, making that the spoken language roughly half the time—even though it’s technically a French film. Rarely do you see films in which so many characters so casually switch back and forth between languages, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Here, it also proves to be a pertinent plot point, a source of resentment between Sandra and Samuel, as is the decision to relocate the family from London to Samuel’s hometown in France.

What this brings us back to is how, in Anatomy of a Fall, every detail matters. Sandra Hüller’s performance in particular is stellar in its ambiguity, easily gaining empathy but with an undercurrent of doubt, obstinately stoked by the prosecuting attorny, and indeed the inconclusive evidence itself. When all this ambiguity is the result of such deliberate intention, the result is a masterful achievement.

There’s a lot more to discover beyond the margins.

Overall: A

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C-

Here’s something I’ve never said about a movie before: The Origin of Evil might just be too French or its own good. Full of unlikably arrogant people, with an inflated sense of self. Not all of the French are like that, I’m sure; these are stereotypes. But this movie isn’t doing them any favors.

In spite of its bevy of talented performers, The Origin of Evil lost me early on. It gets progressively weirder, in less compelling ways. Nathalie (Laure Calamy) is visiting a father, Serge (Jacques Weber) she’s never met before. She progressively gains his trust, to the suspicion of his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); his daughter, George (Doria Tillier); his grandaughter, Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell); and their longtime housekeeper, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia), all of whom live in a giant, overly cluttered house together. I won’t spoil the many narrative left turns that follow, even though one of the few things that impressed me about this movie is how unremarkable it is for all its twists.

I will say this: we never get a sense of Nathalie as a whole person, or what really informs her actions. I knew little about this film going in, and when Nathalie is shown dialing Serge on the phone, she appears nervous to the point of terrified—a detail that makes less sense in retrospect once the film is over. “What are you playing at?” is something she is asked at one point, and I was already asking it. There are moments early on when it feels like The Origin of Evil will be a straightforward family drama, the title notwithstanding, but things prove to be far more complex than that. Just not in any way that particularly satisfied me.

This film has many unearned pretensions, not least of which is the title—these are shitty people, basically all around, but evil is a bit loaded for what ever actually happens onscreen. Nathalie works at a fish packing factory, and the opening title card appears superimposed over lined trays of fish, with ominous music. You would think the fish, or the factory, would play a particularly crucial part in the plot. They don’t.

If there is anything to love about The Origins of Evil, it’s the ensemble cast of nearly all women, with only one exception: Serge is the only principal character who is a man. He’s an asshole, but all the other women also prove to be either assholes in their own right or sociopaths, with the possible exception of Jeanne—but given the fucked up family she’s in, give her time.

The film runs slightly over two hours, though, and the first half in particular moves so slowly, it might play a lot better with a good fifteen or twenty minutes cut out. Things do pick up in the second half, and get a bit more exciting, but for me it was too little too late. I spent more time thinking about when this movie would end than I did about what was going to happen next.

I have to mention the cinematography, because some of it just plain sucks. Why the hell is a movie like this employing the use of retro split screens, with thick black lines separating the different feeds? The first time it happens, Nathalie is just sitting at a table having dinner with Serge and his family—five people, three sections of a split screen, each of them cutting to a new person saying something or making noise, including every time Jeanne gets a text notification. Why do we care about all this? I have no answer. A few later scenes employ the split screen as well, and you get the sense that director Sébastien Marnier thinks he’s doing something clever with this material. He isn’t.

I have to acknowledge that talent went into the making of this film, particularly the cast, and the set design. I’d love to see all of these people’s work in a less tiresome movie.

It’s not nearly as fun as this might suggest.

Overall: C+

THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

I’m not sure anyone else would dare call The Eight Mountains a love story, but I will. Even though there is very little romance in it, and certainly not between the two main characters—at least not of the sort that “romantic” movies are typically about.

This is really a platonic love story, between two boys, and then between two men, who are simply close friends. This is precisely the kind of story I have long pined for more of: about close friendship, about an intimate relationship that doesn’t have to be romantic or sexual. These types of relationships are plentiful out here in the real world, and we so seldom get to see it depicted onscreen.

I’d love it even more to see an American film about such a relationship, but I’ll take what I can get. The Eight Mountains is Italian, set mostly in the Italian alps, some of it in Turin, Italy’s fourth-largest city with a metropolitan population of about 2 million—more than enough to provide a stark, urban contrast to the film’s primary setting of Grana, a rural community of fewer than 1000 people all of about 31 miles east of Turin.

This is the story of friendship formed in boyhood, at around the age of twelve, between Pietro, whose parents are renting a house in Grana for the summer; and Bruno, who is the last child left in this mountain community.

A good chunk of the film, at least the first quarter, follows these two and their relatively carefree exploits, over the first couple of summers they know each other. The boys at this age are played by Lupo Barbiero and Cristiano Sassella, who are both great. After Bruno is forced to start working in town during the summers, the brief portion of the film about their adolescence focuses on a bitter and sullen teenaged Pietro (Andrea Palma), who only sees Bruno once during this period. They then don’t see each other for fifteen years, until they reconnect and resume a close friendship as adults—now played, through the rest of the movie, by Luca Marinelli as Pietro and Alessandro Borghi as Bruno.

Bruno resents the time he was forced to work in town; he loves his mountain life too much, and establishes an ultimately unsustainable milk and cheese farm in Grana. He convinces Pietro to help him rebuild a stone house up there in the mountains, as promised to Pietro’s late father during a long period in which Pietro and his father weren’t speaking.

There follows many years in which Pietro continues going away, but coming back to visit during the summer, even through some of the time he spends abroad in Nepal. In turn, they find spouses; Bruno has a child. The Eight Mountains has a pretty long run time—two hours and 27 minutes—but it has a warm and inviting tone to it, this kind of slow burn narrative of two people who deeply care about each other, what their lives have been like, where their lives are going, and what challenges they face.

It may be a cliché, but there are those who speak of that special friend with whom they can spend a lot of time away from each other, sometimes many years, but once they are together again it’s as though they were never apart. You could say that that kind of friendship is what The Eight Mountains is about. The title is a metaphor that is explained in the film, referring to the ways two very different types of people move through the world. Pietro and Bruno clearly represent the two different types, in a way where their cyclical journeys regularly intersect.

There are no thrills or twists in The Eight Mountains, which is more of a quiet drama, which caresses you like a pleasant summer breeze. Granted, some of it is also set in harsh mountain winters, but the warmth between these two men stays consistent. There is but one brief period of conflict and fairly quick resolution between them; every story must have that, and yet that’s not really what this is about. This is about two people who, in spite of living very different lives, understand each other in a way no one else really does.

Bruno is very obstinate about his perceived place as a resident of the mountains, as though it is his destiny, no matter what the consequences to his livelihood or his family. Still, there are no great tragic moments, only some detours into melancholy. Early on, Pietro contemplates something his father told him, about how every bright period must be followed by a period of gloom. I think a lot about that idea, because it’s really the only way we appreciate the bright periods when they happen. Such is the case with the long, meandering friendship between Pietro and Bruno, two close friends who deeply love each other. Going on that journey with them is a lovely experience.

Pietro and Bruno share one of countless quiet moments together.

Overall: B+

SIFF Advance: FILIP

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

There’s a fascinatingly unusual angle to Filip, a film about Nazi Germany produced by one of its many occupied countries during World War II: Poland. Indeed, the opening sequence focuses on the Jewish people in the “Warsaw ghetto,” handheld camera work following cluelessly joyous young people on their way to see a cabaret act. Even as they all walk around with the Star of David affixed to their sleeves, they are all smiles and joy, Filip (Eryk Kulm) and a fiancé preparing to perform a dance onstage.

It’s obvious very early on that this opening sequence is going somewhere very dark—not because of anything we see onscreen, which would seem fun and carefree in any other context. But, knowing this is Poland in 1941 changes everything about the expectations.

Shortly thereafter, the setting shifts to Frankfurt two years later, where Filip is posing as a Frenchman working among the serving staff of a hotel. And this is where the point of view offers something unusual, in the midst of countless films set during the second World War. Although Filip is himself Jewish, and he is indeed the protagonist of this story, his Jewishness only comes up occasionally. Given the removal of the Jewish community, the Nazis are left to oppress and moralize with the others left on the periphery—namely, the foreign workers in business establishments.

Which is to say: even with Filip successfully posing as someone who isn’t Jewish, he’s still not German. The Nazi obsession with “purity” extends to the French, or Belgian, as in the case of Filip’s roommate and close friend Pierre (Victor Meutelet). There are perpetual dangers even to these people, and in one particularly memorable scene, three different non-German men are hanged for the crime of having had sex with German women.

Director and co-writer Michal Kwiecinski makes much of Filip’s sexual exploits, as he does exactly this, having sex with multiple German women—all part of his plan, to seduce German women, “turn them into whores,” and humiliate them, as his own form of subversive revenge against the Nazis.

This, indeed, is where Filip is a bit disappointing; I have mixed feelings at best about this premise, which threads an undertone of misogyny into the narrative. Eryk Kulm is excellent as the stoic and brooding title character, and every scene is shot with propulsive tension—Filip is a riveting experience, albeit a predictably dispiriting one. His targeting of German women specifically is a strange turn, though, given that the Germans who slaughtered his whole community in Warsaw were all men. And as with any patriarchal society, with Nazis controlling their women’s behaviors and exploits, the women really can’t win—not even with the man who is ostensibly our hero, not even when one of them makes clear she does not support what the Nazis are doing.

That said, everything else about how Filip is made and constructed is excellent, and we do get some narrative turns into things like friendship and loyalty. Spoiler alert, these things also tend to have tragic ends.

The basic gist is that Filip is simply surviving, and existing in some moral gray areas—to put it generously—in order to do so. There are moments in Filip that are truly heartbreaking, especially after witnessing communal joy fatally cut short. It’s clear that Filip, still a young man, will always be damaged. Filip has a fair amount in common with the 2002 film The Pianist, which was also about a Polish Jew surviving the Nazis, albeit in far starker and more desperate circumstances. In this case, Filip is hiding in plain sight.

Filip comes within striking distance of greatness, falling just short due to some unfortunate narrative choices. What is has to recommend it manages to supersede its flaws, however, making it well worth a watch.

Serving the enemy: Eryk Kulm hides in plain sight.

Overall: B+