One. Two. One - One horror can change everything.

Review

Film: One. Two. One

Director: Mania Akbari

Country: Iran

One. Two. One is told through a series of conversations and focuses on the aftermath of an acid attack on the central character Ava by her jealous cousin who had wanted to marry her but has become angry when he sees her with her boyfriend Mani. 

In some ways, the film almost seems uncinematic, being little more than a series of linked talking heads. Each scene focuses in close up on the faces of one or two people, the camera occasonally moving from side to side to scan from face to face but often static. However, although at first thought it almost seems it might be better suited to theatre, you wouldn't be able to get the same focus on the minute expressions on the faces in that medium.

For a film like this to work, it needs a high standard of acting. The central performance from Neda Amiri is incredible and brings Ava to life as a fully rounded character.  There is no wallowing in her fate, but there is a mixture of despair and sadness, as well as determination and humour, pessimisim and optimisim. There is also an incredible humanity to her performance which makes her seem both universal and deeply unique.

Although the central feeling is one of sadness and barely repressed anger, there is also humour on occasion, particularly as the world around the characters intrudes on them, often from off camera.

The film is an excellent character study, and a moving and interesting journey as Ava finds acceptance of what happened to her and a really interesting and successful look at the ongoing knock on effects of a single tragedy.

Unfair World - Is what you get in life ever what you deserve?

Review
Film: Unfair World
Director: Filippos Tsitos
Country: Greece

Unfair World tells the story of a policeman who has decided that the law is not necessarily fair and he might just make a few exceptions to settle the balance of fairness and unfairness in the world.  However, as the consequences of his actions unravel and his life becomes entwined with that of his office cleaner neighbour, things spiral out of control.

The film has really interesting things to say on the nature of fairness and how our perception of this affects the decisions we make and actions we take.  Do we justify the less moral things we do because we feel the world owes us? And what is fair anyway?  It looks at these ideas from many different angles and doesn't come up with any easy answers.  But it is an interesting filter through which to show characters' motivation and behaviour.

The central performances from Antonis Kafetzopoulos and Christos Stergioglou are excellent, and on the whole the characters don't act to stereotype or necessarily as you would expect.  

Unfair World moves at a gentle pace and allows each ongoing consequence to unfold slowly and intriguingly.  It is also an interesting sideways look at the effects of recent financial problems with all the injustice that has gone with it.  

Overall, this is a very interesting film and an intriguing drama.

Girimunho - Grandma knows best

Review

Film: Girimunho

Directors: Clarissa Campolina, Helvécio Marins Jr

Country: Brazil

Girimunho is a beautiful and gentle portrait of an old woman as she adapts to the loss of her husband.  It's shot documentary style with natural and mesmeric performances, especially from the central character played by Maria Sebastiana Martins Alvaro.  It is gorgeously shot, with the story feeling like it is climbing out of the stunning Brazilian scenery. The way it is filmed makes the characters and story feel really organically interwoven with the scenery, so that the scenery is almost a character itself and that the characters are part of their surround and gives a dreamlike sense of the Brazilian town in which it is set. There is also a wonderfully evocative sense of time passing but also perhaps a culture being lost.

The grandmother fills her world with narrative songs and words of wisdom  bringing a sense of how she embodies her town's soul and culture.  The soundtrack is incredible.  She cannot help but have an increasingly important influence on the choices of her grandchildren, pushing them onto their own paths.  

Even though her late husband does not really appear, the film also gives a real sense of a life long relationship that it is hard to let go of, and we see her gradually come to terms with her loss, with defiance and sadness.

This film's glacial place means it won't be for everyone, but I was completely engrossed and moved.

Isn't Anyone Alive? - The world is ending? Meh....

Review
Film: Isn't Anyone Alive?
Director: Gakuryu Ishii
Country: Japan

I'm concerned I may be about to be overly critical about Isn't Anyone Alive? Not because it was a terrible film (I enjoyed quite a lot of it) but if feels liked a really wasted opportunity.

So I will start with the positive aspects.  The central idea is an interesting and original one.  One day, people start dying, not through any plague of zombies, alien invasion or rampaging serial killer, they just start to fit, choke and die.  And the apathetic students that the film focuses on haven't got the energy to react, the empathy to respond emotionally or the wherewithal to respond in any kind of usefully practical way.  This does lead to a lot of very humorous moments - and it is genuinely funny at times, particularly the character of Dr. Fish.

I'm not sure if I can quite put my finger on as to why it doesn't fully work.  There is something about the tone of the film that feels uneven and like the director either didn't have the courage of his convictions or just didn't quite get it right.  Like I mentioned, the film has the ability to be very funny.  But sometimes either the humour falls flat, or the film is perhaps trying to be more dramatic and emotionally real but this comes out of nowhere and doesn't mesh together properly.  The film is almost too cool and cold, when it needs to be more savagely, angrily funny. It is clearly trying to make a point about the almost sociopathic apathy and detachment of a generation living lives filtered by the media and not in the real world.

Possibly one of the problems is the lack of character development, or character realisation.  The characters are all incompetent at dealing with life and the events around them, and there isn't sufficient variety between them, nor anything at all that makes you really care one way or the other what happens.  I suppose this could be deliberate, given that this lack of interest is replicating much of how the characters react to the events around them, but it just leaves the viewer disengaged.  It is also an idea which is stretched out without much new being added as it goes on, so it becomes less interesting as the film progresses, and the only thing that keeps the viewer from giving up are the ongoing bizarre and surreal interactions of the soon to be dead.  Perhaps the abandoning of all the normal clichés and plot drivers of films dealing with this kind of subject matter is just too disorientating.

It is a slightly messy and flat realisation of what could have been a truly original film, but it is redeemed by being just humorous enough, just often enough.  There probably are people out there for whom this film will work, but I wasn't one of them.

Exit Elena - Welcome to the Family

Review

Film: Exit Elena

Director: Nathan Silver

Country: USA

Nathan Silver's Exit Elena is an almost uncomfortably intimate portrait of family life. It was a surprise to find out afterwards that it is a semi-autobiographical piece as the characterisation is raw and honest.  Also a surprise was that only one of the cast was a 'professional' actor as all the performances are utterly believable.

He cleverly places us in a social grey area - Elena, played by Kia Davis, takes up residence in the family home as the carer for Florence, the elderly mother/ mother-in-law of the house's owners.  She's an employee, and sees herself as such, but as a resident should she be treated as family member and friend, with all the lack of privacy and autonomy that entails, or labelled employee and possibly not be made to feel at home?

Silver deliberately chose a camera format that gives the look of a home movie and uses documentary style techniques.  This is what leads to the viewer discomfort (in an effective rather than alienating way) as we are made to feel like we are intruding on the private.  This is not to say that what we are watching is particularly horrific or grotesque.  But we are watching people who's need to be needed causes them to go beyond the usual social boundaries.  

Silver must have an excellent relationship with his mother, as she plays an exaggerated version of herself.  It is a vanity free performance, the created character's desire to include Elena in the family leading to discomfort both on Elena and the viewer's part from the intrusive enthusiasm and manipulation with which she is welcomed. She is trying to be a surrogate mother figure where that role is not desired and is incredibly emotionally manipulative with Elena and her own family and can't read the signals that ask her to back off. And there is little more socially uncomfortable that watching continuous arguing and bickering between a couple that you don't know but are forced to spend time with and Elena is subjected to this again and again.

Elena herself, although the focus of the film, is an altogether more ambiguous character, forced to be evasive in the face of stifling attention. She clearly wants to feel included in something, some kind of family structure, but on her own terms and at her own pace. She doesn't have a map to navigate the situation she finds herself in and seems to find herself more and more lost and making the kinds of choices she probably never would have planned on doing.  It is never explained but there is definitely a sense that she is trying to replace some kind of emptiness in her life.  The ambiguity with which the character is played allows us to project our own unease onto her and also to project how we would react and feel in such a situation.

In many ways, Exit Elena is not much more than a carefully staged home movie but for me it was an interesting look at social boundaries and human emotional needs that was worthwhile viewing.